Nierenberg, W

=<div>grist sum MoD</div><div>
</div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility;">The other “merchants of doubt” profiled by Oreskes and Conway traveled a similar path. Physicist William Nierenberg’s work on the Manhattan Project led him in the early 1960s to become NATO’s chief scientist working on developing weapons to use against the Soviets. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow moved from NASA into a leading position supporting Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka, Star Wars) to counter “Soviet hegemony,” which he called the “greatest peril” in U.S. history.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What all these men have in common (aside from their background in physics) is the belief that the Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In their minds, and in the minds of their followers, “real Americans” are still battling socialism, only now the threat comes primarily from within. Grasping that bizarre and paranoid notion is central to understanding their motivations and methods.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the 1950s, Big Tobacco had begun using scientists to sow doubt about links between their product and cancer. As the evidence against them mounted in the 1970s, the tobacco industry realized they needed something more. They found it in Seitz, who was not merely a scientist, but the former president of the Academy of Sciences.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
R. J. Reynolds put Seitz in charge of the company’s biomedical research grant program. The amount of money available was staggering. In 1981, Oreskes and Conway write, the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association together contributed $300,000 to research. In that same year, Big Tobacco directed $6.3 million to researchers who consistently found no evidence conclusively linking tobacco to serious medical problems.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">While Seitz was busy doling out “research” funds for R. J. Reynolds, his colleague, William Nierenberg, was leading the fight in a different arena: to prevent the federal government from taking action on acid rain. Once again, Oreskes and Conway do an excellent job of bringing to life a complex and important environmental battle that is poorly remembered today. In 1982, Nierenberg was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to lead a review of the scientific evidence concerning acid rain. Had the acidity of rain in the northeastern part of the United States really increased? If so, how serious was the problem? And what caused acid rain? Was it naturally occurring, or did humans play a role in creating the problem?<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The questions were valid, or at least they had been when the phenomenon was first examined a decade earlier. A broad scientific consensus had emerged over several years, so that by 1979 it wasn’t news to most scientists in the field when Scientific American published an article explaining to the public that “In recent decades, the acidity of rain and snow has increased sharply over wide areas. The principle cause is the release of sulfur and nitrogen by the burning of fossil fuels” to generate electricity.  What’s more, the National Academy of Sciences had released a report in 1981 with similar conclusions, but going even further. That study concluded that there was “clear evidence of serious hazard to human health and the biosphere” from acid rain, requiring immediate action.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">The Nierenberg Panel produced a report at war with itself, marked by a key internal contradiction. For the most part, the executive summary agreed with the 1981 NAS study. But, write Oreskes and Conway, an appendix was added suggesting that “we really didn’t know enough to move forward with emissions controls.” The confusion bred by the report cast just enough doubt on what was actually known about acid rain to allow the Reagan administration to do exactly what it had wanted to do all along: nothing. The misleading appendix was written by Fred Singer. In the early 1980s, Singer was a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential conservative think tank during the Reagan era. Created with an initial quarter-million dollar grant from beer magnate and right-wing Republican activist Joseph Coors, the group was initially led by Paul Weyrich, who combined absolute allegiance to the Free Market, ultra-nationalism, and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity of the narrowest kind. (Along with Jerry Falwell, Weyrich founded the group Moral Majority.)<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34);">
Nineteen eighty-four marked a key moment in Oreske and Conway’s darkly fascinating history of selling doubt. The issue at the center of events at the time had no obvious relation to climate change. The controversy involved missiles, specifically, Ronald Reagan’s $60 billion program to build an impenetrable “missile shield” over the United States. Most scientists regarded SDI as technologically impossible and almost certainly destabilizing. Over a thousand experts signed a petition stating that they would refuse any government funding of projects that could further SDI. The move enraged Seitz and his colleagues Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. In reaction, the three hawks formed the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank dedicated to selling Star Wars to policy makers and the public. For Seitz and his colleagues, GMI represented a decisive step away from the scientific community — and from science itself. With the fate of the country hanging in the balance, an ideology devoted to the red, white, and blue came before science, which prided itself on being colorless and colorblind.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As the unworkable SDI inevitably faded, GMI turned to other ideological battles, including ozone depletion and global warming. Their adversaries saw these as scientific issues, not clashes of ideology, which gave GMI an advantage. Science recognizes the inevitability of uncertainty. The point isn’t to go for perfection but to continually refine models of how complex phenomena work. Science uses doubt as a tool, a prod to deepen understanding. Seitz and his associates used doubt as a weapon against science. They seized on inevitable uncertainties in scientific models as evidence that the models had no value, or worse. In 1987, for example, Singer, then working at the Department of Transportation, wrote an article published in The Wall Street Journal that was rife with inaccuracies and distortions minimizing the importance of the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, a portion of the lower stratosphere that blocks most harmful ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface of the earth.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It was the beginning of a counternarrative,” write Oreskes and Conway, “that scientists had overreacted before, were overreacting now, and therefore couldn’t be trusted.”<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">That same counternarrative of denial continues today, stronger and more strident than ever, and now focused on creating doubt about all aspects of climate change. The ultimate goal hasn’t changed since the tobacco days — preventing government regulation of industry. In a 2007 <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/32482/page/1" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(191, 115, 64); text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; background: transparent;">article</a>, Newsweek called the George C. Marshall Institute “a central cog in the denial machine.” GMI has received millions of dollars from conservative foundations and corporations. Exactly how much isn’t known because in 2001, tired of facing criticism over the fact that one of the largest corporate donors to its anti-global warming work was oil giant ExxonMobil, GMI made its donor list secret.<p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.125rem; line-height: 1.6; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The denial machine contains a huge number of cogs, and it would take an encyclopedia to list them all. The authors do an excellent job, however, of touching on many of the cogs inside that dreadful box, from clueless writers (<a href="http://grist.org/article/2009-04-27-a-false-choice-from-a-famil" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(191, 115, 64); text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; background: transparent;">Bjorn Lomborg</a>, <a href="http://grist.org/article/Why-does-NYT-keep-Tierney" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(191, 115, 64); text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; background: transparent;">John Tierney</a>, <a href="http://grist.org/article/2009-04-07-post-reporter-calls-out-will" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(191, 115, 64); text-decoration: none; line-height: inherit; background: transparent;">George Will</a>) to odious politicians (Sen. James Inhofe, Vice President Dick Cheney) to the scores of conservative foundations that wrap themselves in the flag that they disgrace by their actions.</div><div>
<div><p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/" target="blank" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Merchants of Doubt</a> is a highly engaging read by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes about the long war on science waged by anti-regulatory forces. Obviously, this extends to the problem of anthropogenic climate change.<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of the “Merchants of Doubt” is William Nierenberg, founder of the anti-regulatory, denialist, <a href="http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/william-happer-wants-to-party-like-its-79999999-bc/" target="blank" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">bullsht hub of disinformation</a>, the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George_C.Marshall_Institute" target="blank" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">George C. Marshall Institute</a>.<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px;">Nierenberg’s son Nicolas has been engaged in an understandable effort to whitewash his father’s legacy in underplaying the risks posed by climate change. In doing so, Nicolas (ironically?) follows virtually the same pattern of doubt-mongering laid out in Oreskes’s and Conway’s book. He relies upon the scientific community’s tendency to dial in on details to the exclusion of all else, and thus tries to argue the minutia in order to distract from and cast doubt on the bigger picture.<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I couldn’t have scripted a better example than the beginning of <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/08/nierenberg_vs_oreskes_round_2.php#comment-2752429" target="blank" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">a recent comment of his</a> over at William Connolley’s: “…Merchants of Doubt (MOD) is highly misleading. As a very specific and critical point…”<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Please don’t get me wrong- I believe that Nicolas is engaging in good faith, and is not deliberately trying to be misleading. I encourage everyone to read his comments in full and discuss the issue with him personally- in my experience he is always prompt and courteous.<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px;">But as I said, Nicolas is depending on our failure to keep the big picture in mind. From a science standpoint, GMI is an inexcusable, disgusting organization. It is the antithesis of what genuine and honest inquiry should be. William Nierenberg’s part in its founding is terrible, and it is simply not credible to pretend that he was not engaged in the same anti-regulatory shenanigans as his organization- no matter how much Nicolas would like us to believe otherwise. No matter what Nicolas says about Oreskes and Conway’s writing, keep that in mind.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSKNR4wfIkc" target="blank" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Listen to what William himself said in his own words</a>. On the likely effects of climate change:[1999?]<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In actual fact- the actual fact is, that calmer [vs. the scientific consensus] analysis has restricted the maximum likely CO2 to- the concentration- to slightly less than double and extended the time for the effects to the year 2150- that’s quite an increase. The global temperature change would be at most 1°[C], and the sea level rise would be barely one foot (or 30cm). The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is nowbelieved to be stable for the foreseeable future. Despite this great relaxation in extremes, the dire predictions remain. [8:15-8:52]<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On the <a href="http://geosci.uchicago.edu/_{archer/reprints/archer.2009.ann_rev_tail.pdf}" target="_blank" sl-processed="1" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">atmospheric residency</a> of CO2:<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 30px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Well you see with [the scientific consensus of long atmospheric residency of CO2] in mind, you have a problem. No matter how sure you are that the effects will be minimal- you see- they are in effect irreversible. If you’ve made a mistake, if you’ve made a bad estimate, you’re stuck and you have a problem- you see- reversing what you’ve done. Now, that’s the problem, but what happened is, the change in our viewpoint- those who take the problem seriously… In fact we now know that the CO2- the excess C02- will not last for a thousand years, but in fact will decay away on the average in about 150 years. Now that alters the entire perspective of the problem. It makes a possibility of correctibility at any stage of the game, if you have made a mistestimate [about the severity of the problem], and so on. So this [atmospheric residency of CO2], however, is the reason that the problem seemed to agonizing to so many of us early, and that reason has completely disappeared today. [12:01-13:08]<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px;">Watch the video in full. There are a legion of strawmen, red herring, appeals to ridicule, and other fallacies intended to persuade an audience rhetorically at the expense of fact and logic. William Neirenberg wasn’t a Morano or Watts-type out and out denialist. He was always an interjector of “reasonable” disagreement and uncertainty to prevent meaningful action on the issue. Nicolas Nierenberg would like you to believe that his father was not a Merchant of Doubt.<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Nicolas is simply wrong.<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">UPDATE: As it’s a particular interest to WC, I wonder how he’ll react to Nierenberg lying about the “coming ice age” bullsht?<p style="border: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; margin: 0px 0px 1.7em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 14px; line-height: 23.7999992370605px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">UPDATE: Per request in the comments, the video I linked to was shot in 1999. I don’t believe that the date substantively excuses many of the lies and half-truths by Nierenberg, but if anyone wants to attempt to justify his claims that’s probably a persuasive place to start. Nierenberg died in 2000- I’m not sure why anyone would expect comments of his to be made much past that time…http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/william-nierenberg-merchant-of-doubt/</div><div>==</div></div>