The Origins of Denial - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 45

for Space Studies (GISS) laboratory now directed by James Hansen, and Nicholas Nierenberg, one-
time director of the Scripps Institution for Oceanography—in supporting and advocating for President
Ronald Reagan's 1980s missile defense program. 20 The Strategic Defense Initiative was
controversial enough that the issue of whether it was wise, let alone efficacious, divided the physics
department faculty at UC Berkeley where I was doing my degree at the time. 21
In 1984, the three scientists joined together to form the George C. Marshall Institute—a
conservative think tank that Newsweek magazine called a “central cog in the denial machine.” 22 Their
chief mission was to combat efforts by Cornell University planetary scientist Carl Sagan and others
who sought to raise awareness about the potential threat of “nuclear winter.” The massive detonation
of nuclear warheads during a thermonuclear war, Sagan and others hypothesized, might produce a
global dust cloud as devastating for humanity as the asteroid-induced global dust storm that ended the
reign of the dinosaurs. The concept had even penetrated into popular culture with the 1983 song
“Walking in Your Footsteps” by the Police. 23 That nuclear winter projections were based on climate
models brought climate modeling onto the radar screen of Seitz, Jastrow, and Nierenberg, and it set
the stage for their later role as key climate change deniers.
Upon retirement from academia in the late 1970s, Seitz worked for the tobacco giant R.J.
Reynolds for roughly a decade. In this capacity, he accepted more than half a million dollars while
lending his scientific credibility to advocacy efforts aimed at downplaying the health threats posed by
the smoking of tobacco. 24 In the early 1990s, Seitz went on to chair the George C. Marshall Institute
full time, where he campaigned against the reality of global warming and the threat CFCs posed to the
ozone layer. 25
In 1998, in conjunction with yet another climate change denial group, the Oregon Institute of
Science and Medicine, Seitz spearheaded a petition drive opposing the Kyoto Protocol to limit
greenhouse emissions, mailing the petition with a cover letter and an article attacking the science of
climate change to a broad list of recipients. He portrayed these materials as having the imprimatur of
the National Academy of Science (NAS) by formatting the article—” Environmental Effects of
Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” by Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon
—as if it had been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
( PNAS ), which it definitely had not been. Seitz even signed the enclosed letter using his past
affiliation as NAS president. The NAS took the extraordinary step of publicly denouncing Seitz's
efforts as a deliberate deception, noting that its official position on the science was the opposite of
that expressed in Seitz's letter. The matter, coincidentally enough, played out just days before the
publication of our 1998 hockey stick article in Nature. 26
The “Oregon petition,” with thirty-one thousand nominal “scientist” signatories, has often been
touted as evidence of widespread scientific opposition to the science underlying human-caused
climate change. However, a subsequent analysis by Scientific American found that few of the
signatories were even scientists (the list included the names Geri Halliwell, one of the Spice Girls;
and B. J. Hunnicutt, a character from the TV series MASH). 27
Questionable petitions, misleading articles, and, as we'll see, even one-sided conferences
constitute key modi operandi in the world of climate change denial. There was indeed a distinct
feeling of déjà vu in fall 2007, when I, and many other scientists and engineers, received a packet in
the mail consisting of an updated “article” by several of the same authors promoting the same myths
and half-truths (e.g., the medieval warm period was warmer than today, the Sun is driving observed