Lancaster, J

see revelle (wiki link only?) and singer

format messed up see bak

hoover bk:

Cosmos article be dropped.9 Neither the editors nor the publishers consented to the requests (near demands) of Lancaster and Socci. My repeated requests to Dr. Lancaster that he cease his defamation and retract his false accusations failed to get an acceptable response. Only then and encouraged by my wife, Candace Crandall, did I file a libel suit against Dr. Lancaster.

The Libel Suit Against Dr. LancasterThe Center for Individual Rights of Washington, D.C., filed the libel suit on my behalf in April 1993, with the Washington law firm of Kirkland and Ellis serving as pro bono counsel. Dr. Lancaster, an attorney, first handled his own defense but later was represented pro bono by the Boston law firm of Goodwin Procter and Hoar. The discovery process for the suit produced a number of revelations about Dr. Lancaster’s interactions with Senator Gore and the senator’s staff (including Dr. Socci) and about the senator and his staff’s intentions. According to Dr. Lancaster’s deposition, Senator Gore called him after the Easterbrook article appeared. During the phone call, the senator asked Dr. Lancaster about Dr. Revelle’s mental capacity in the months before his death and whether the article accurately reflected his views. In a draft for a letter in reply to the senator’s questions, Dr. Lancaster completely undermined the claims that he later made against me, stating Dr. Revelle was “mentally sharp to the end” and that he was “not casual about his integrity,” Dr. Lancaster also wrote that Dr. Revelle had shown the Cosmos manuscript to him before it was published, with the comment that he “felt it was honest to admit the uncertainties about greenhouse warming, including the idea that our ignorance could be hiding benefits as [9. A. D. Socci, letter to Mr. Robert Grant,CRC Press, October 27, 1992.

The Revelle-Gore Story

eli r

APRIL 26, 2007

If Richard Lindzen shows up at your door, slam it.

UPDATE: Most links have been moved to

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/revelle-gore-singer-lindzen

Also an update from Justin Lancaster

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-note-about-roger-revelle-julian.html

Richard Lindzen is looking to up the ante. In an interview with the Canadian National Post, our Dick said

Q Some suggest that Roger Revelle, Gore's scientific mentor, would not have agreed with the movie?

A Well, he's dead.

Q Yes. So that makes it harder for him to speak out.

A It's a horrible story. Before he died, Roger Revelle co-authored a popular paper saying, 'We know too little to take any action based on global warming. If we take any action it should be an action that we can justify completely without global warming.' And Gore's staffers tried to have his name posthumously removed from that paper claiming he had been senile. And one of the other authors took it to court and won. It's funny how little coverage that got.

This is one of those strange little stories that you find Richard Lindzen crawling about at the bottom of the toilet in. The popular paper is an article in the magazine of the Cosmos Club (a club for movers and shakers in DC) written by Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr that had Roger Revelle's name on it. How Revelle's name got there beyond the fact that Fred Singer put it there is a matter of interest that is explained by Justin Lancaster, Revelle's student and last assistant.

According to Revelle's widow, Revelle and Singer met at a 1990 AAAS meeting and Singer asked Revelle to co-author a paper with him. In 1990, when Revelle was gravely ill, just before his death, Singer kept sending him drafts of an article, which Revelle kept shoving to the bottom of the pile on his desk so he would not have to look at them. We know that because we have the sworn testimony of Revelle's secretary, Christa Beran. Singer also sent drafts to Richard Lindzen and Lindzen communicated with Singer about them according to Singer's sworn testimony as evidently did Balling and Ellsasser. On Feb 16 1991, Singer showed up at Revelle's office, invited himself in and spent ~ four hours going over galley proofs he had brought with him. Revelle at the time was very ill, and 20 min of work tired him out. Singer stayed for four hours. Again, you don't have to depend on Lancaster for this, but you can look at the secretary's testimony, and information from others.

The moral of the story is when a Richard Lindzen or S. Fred show up, throw them out the door. They are only their own friends. They are users.

After that it gets interesting. After Revelle died, Lancaster was asked to serve on an editorial board for a CRC Press volume on Global Warming as well as submit a chapter. It turned out that Singer had submitted the Cosmos paper for publication in the same volume. Reference to the Cosmos article kept turning up, pushed by such characters as Greg Easterbrook and George Will (might be interesting to talk to Easterbrook now about this about who fed him).

Political opponents were using the article as a stick to beat Gore (nothing changes, all die). Gore called Lancaster and asked if Revelle's opinions had changed, Lancaster told Gore that shortly before Revelle's death, Revelle and he had talked about the paper, that Revelle was unhappy about the situation, and hoped that the paper would sink without a trace. From this Lancaster concluded that Revelle was not active in the writing of the paper, although his name appeared as co-author and he had met with Singer at Singer's insistence.

Lancaster reviewed the Cosmos paper in detail with C.D. Keeling, both being at Scripps.

Keeling and I agreed that there were too many misleading and inaccurate statements in the Cosmos article for Roger to have been carefully, attentively and enthusiastically "writing" or "authoring the Cosmos paper

At about the same time another colleague of Revelle at Scripps, Walter Munk and Ed Frieman wrote to the Cosmos Journal that

"S. Fred Singer wrote the paper, and as a courtesy added Roger as a co-author based upon his willingness to review the manuscript and advise on aspects relating to sea level rise."

This was published also in Oceanography 5 (1992) 125. Keeling and Lancaster also wrote the the New Republic, but that letter was not published. Still the Cosmos article continued to be pushed by the denialists. George Will stuck his oar in (easy enough to guess the slime who showed up to this party) trying to show that Revelle had had a deathbed conversion on the issue of global warming. Revelle's daughter wrote back for the family that George should stop smoking those funny cigarettes.

The third party candidate in the 1992 US presidential election, William Stockdale, raised the issue again to Al Gore. Gore replied that the article did not represent Revelle's opinion and that Revelle's family was very disturbed about its use.

At about that time, Lancaster recommended to the CRC press that the article not be reprinted, or if reprinted it should carry some warning language. It was printed anyhow. Singer was disinvited from the Revelle Memorial Symposium. In addition, Lancaster had expressed his opinion about the authorship of the papers in his Revelle Memorial Symposium article. Singer sued. It was a classic SLAPP suit. Lancaster did not have the resources to contest it, serving as his own lawyer. Finally, under the entreaties of his wife, he caved. However, he is still around, and occasionally comments on the matter on various blogs.

Anyone perplexed by this Balling/Revelle/Gore story might want to examine the sworn testimony of one S. Fred Singer at the following site: http://home.att.net/_{espi/Cosmos_myth}.htmlBalling didn't cherrypick Revelle's old views, because Revelle didn't write that Cosmos article to which Balling refers. And Balling knows that Revelle didn't write it, because Balling himself was a participant in S. Fred Singer's ploy to hoodwink Revelle shortly before Revelle's death. It was a nasty, disgusting and secret business. Its purpose was to undermine Gore. It has been incredibly effective, as Singer, Michaels and Balling have successfully fed this story to a plethora of secondary bloggers who are happy to add their echo to the rant.Crandall and Singer's chapter in the Hoover volume, published online is a mass of misinformation. I encourage anyone interested to examine the primary evidence and draw their own conclusions.

and

This shameful manipulation and exploitation of the life and teaching of a great scientist and humanitarian cannot stand. For my friend and colleague, for all those who have been misled by this Cosmos myth, and for the honor of a courageous and committed politician and journalist, it is important that I hereby fully rescind and repudiate my 1994 retraction and make available the evidence that supports my statements.

UPDATE: Eli found this all too depressing. He went and read a tribute to Roger Revelle, by one of his closest friends and collaborators, Walter Munk. Things are a bit better.

https://www.desmogblog.com/the-deniers-the-world-renowned-scientist-who-got-al-gore-started

littlemore 1

“My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways.”

Roger Revelle, in a letter to then Congressman Jim Bates, July 14, 1988

Among the not-very-credible denials of climate change risk, one of Lawrence Solomon's most offensive is his attack on the memory and work of Dr. Roger Revelle.

Solomon, author of:{ *The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and those who are too fearful to do so)*:(style="font-weight:700"):}: , picks on Revelle entirely because of the credit that climate activist, Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore offers to his old Harvard professor. It was Revelle who told Gore about climate change, spawning the passion that now seems to irritate the denial community so greatly.

Isn't it fun, then, for those same deniers to suggest that Revelle didn't really care about climate change - or that he thought it was overblown.

The evidence, as adduced by Solomon in his book and in an earlier column in theNational Post,rests on some old quotes and on a 1991 Cosmosarticle “co-authored” by S. Fred Singer, Chauncey Starr (of the Electric Power Research Institute) and Revelle.

I put “co-authored” in quotes because there is ample evidencethat Singer wrote the article entirely himself and then conned an aging Revelle into signing it. Solomon notes that Revelle's old student, Dr. Justin Lancaster, said as much in 1992, and later retracted the charge, in the face of a lawsuit from the senior and suspiciously well-funded Singer.

Solomon also implies that Lancaster only made the accusation against Singer under pressure from Al Gore.

Well, Justin Lancaster has, as Solomon notes in the book, “retracted his retraction,” the details of which are here. There are arguably two reasons for his change of heart. First, Lancaster is more established now - a personal success who has the resources to stand up to Singer's bullying. And second, there really isn't much left of Singer's reputation to defend.

But here's the bottom line: Revelle told Gore about the greenhouse effect and alerted him to the dangers, and Gore has spread that information around more effectively than any other individual on the planet. Revelle, in the last years of his life, also counseled caution in dealing with the issue - which seems to have been a reasonable, if slightly short-sighted position at the time.

But look again at the quote at the top of this post. Look at the date. Revelle suggested waiting another 10 or 20 years for evidence. Twenty years have passed, during which the world's scientists have grown more certain and more concerned by the day.

I don't know what kind of gotcha game Solomon is trying to play, but proving that Roger Revelle urged caution in 1988, and that he defined caution as adding a $1per-gallon tax on gasoline, doesn't suggest to me that we should, today, side with the deniers on the issue of global warming.

In fact, Solomon should be embarrassed to have invoked the man's name.

https://www.desmogblog.com/national-post-promotes-singers-dubious-attack-on-al-gores-mentor

If there is an opportunity anywhere in the “Cosmos” to deny the science of climate change – the evidence notwithstanding –The National Post’s Lawrence Solomonseems intent upon finding it.

In a 19-part series on climate change “Deniers,” Solomon has canvassed the science world for people whose work challenges the consensus that human-produced CO2 is changing the climate in a potential disastrous way. Fair enough; fringe voices are often interesting. But on several occasions, Solomon has let his enthusiasm get the better of him, identifying as deniers people who are on record as agreeing with the scientific consensus(here, here and especially here).

Now, Solomon has disinterred one of the most infamous attacks not only on climate science but on the reputation of a renowned climate scientist, Dr. Roger Revelle.

Solomon identifies Revelle accurately as “the grandfather of the greenhouse effect,” whose early research and eloquent writing brought the issue to public attention in the late 1950s. Al Gore, once a student of Revelle, credits the professor with inspiring Gore's personal campaign to make climate change better known and understood.

Solomon is also correct is pointing out that Revelle was cautious by nature, arguing against ill-considered action. Solomon quotes a letter to Congress in 1988, in which Revelle says, “My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negativeways The paper in question was entitled What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap, and it appeared in the Cosmos Club Journal. Vaguely skeptical in its content, the paper listed Revelle as a second author. The lead author, Fred Singer, and the third author, Chauncey Starr, Solomon refers to as “two illustrious colleagues.”

It’s true that Starr and Singer had showed well early in their careers, but by 1991, the lustre was coming off in a disappointing way. Both had aligned themselves with industry (Starr with coal, Singer with tobacco) and both were already part of a well-financed campaign to deny climate change.

It is not clear by what means Singer convinced Revelle to allow his name to be listed as a second author, but it has been demonstrated conclusively that Singer wrote it (with editorial assistance from deniers like Pat Michaels, Hugh Ellsaesser and Robert Balling). Indeed, Singer had published the major points of the paper the year before in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. Revelle’s input, elicited months from death from a worsening heart condition, is not reflected in the final product.

When the paper was published, Revelle was embarrassed by the content and optimistic that the small readership of the Cosmos journal would save him further attention. But after Revelle’s death, Singer started quoting the paper widely as Revelle’s work.A former student of Revelle’s, Dr. Justin Lancaster, then challenged the paper’s contents and made disparaging statements of Singer and his tactics.

Singer sued and, facing a court battle he could ill afford, Lancaster backed down, promising not to release the details of a settlement for 10 years. Then Singer spent that decade (and the years since) telling everyone that Revelle was ultimately a climate change skeptic, and using Lancaster’s acquiescence as additional proof.

Well, the 10 years have passed. Now, Lancaster’s detailed chronology and evidence are all available on his website, demonstrating Singer’s role. And that means there is no excuse for Larry Solomon to be touting Revelle’s mythical opposition to climate science as fact. The controversy is well-known. Indeed, others get to it pretty quickly.

If this was Solomon’s first “mistake,” it would be fair to assume that his misreading of this story is a result of inadvertence or inexperience in the field. But there is a pattern here that suggests that he is not learning any lessons as he pursues his agenda.

AGS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Revelle

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Views on climate change distorted

In 1991, Revelle's name appeared as co-author on an article written by physicist S. Fred Singer and electrical engineer Chauncey Starr for the publication Cosmos: A Journal of Emerging Issues, titled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap", which was published in the summer of 1992. The Cosmos article included the statement that "Drastic, precipitous—and, especially, unilateral—steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent economic controls now would be economically devastating particularly for developing countries...".^[9][10] The article concluded: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses."^[9]

These particular statements and the bulk of the article, including the title, had been written and published a year earlier by S. Fred Singer as sole author.^[11] Singer's article stated that "there is every expectation that scientific understanding will be substantially improved within the next decade" and advocated against drastic and "hastily-conceived" action at the time without further scientific evidence. It does not, however, deny climate change or global warming.

Justin Lancaster, Revelle's graduate student and teaching assistant at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1981 until Revelle's death, says that Revelle was "hoodwinked" by Singer into adding his name to the article and that Revelle was "intensely embarrassed that his name was associated" with it.^[12][13] In 1992, Lancaster charged that Singer's actions were "unethical" and specifically designed to undercut then–Senator Al Gore's global warming policy stance; however, to end a lawsuit brought by Singer against Lancaster with support of theCenter for Public Interest in Washington,D.C., Lancaster gave Singer a statement of apology, but refused to admit that anything he said was false. In 2006, prompted by Robert Balling and others continuing to state that Revelle actually wrote the article, Lancaster formally withdrew his retraction and reiterated his charges.^[12][14]

When Gore was running for the vice-presidential nomination in 1992, The New Republic picked up on the contrast between the references to Revelle in Gore's book Earth in the Balance and the views in the Cosmos article that could now be attributed to Revelle. This was followed up by Newsweek and elsewhere in the media. Patrick Michaels boasted that the Cosmos article had been read into the Congressional Record. The issue was even raised by Admiral James Stockdale in the televised vice-presidential debate. Gore's response was to protest that Revelle's views in the article had been taken out of context.

Roger's daughter, Carolyn Revelle, wrote:^[15]

Contrary to George Will's "Al Gore's Green Guilt" Roger Revelle—our father and the "father" of the greenhouse effect—remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991. That same year he wrote: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time." Will and other critics of Sen. Al Gore have seized these words to suggest that Revelle, who was also Gore's professor and mentor, renounced his belief in global warming. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Revelle inveighed against "drastic" action, he was using that adjective in its literal sense—measures that would cost trillions of dollars. Up until his death, he thought that extreme measures were premature. But he continued to recommend immediate prudent steps to mitigate and delay climatic warming. Some of those steps go well beyond anything Gore or other national politicians have yet to advocate. [...] Revelle proposed a range of approaches to address global warming. Inaction was not one of them. He agreed with the adage "look before you leap", but he never said "sit on your hands".

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The Revelle Gore Story

The Cosmos Myth

Did S. Fred Singer trick Revelle into an association to achieve an agenda? When the sequence of events is examined, the intentions seem to implicate his agenda. "The energy companies reportedly began taking steps to prevent the public from believing that humans are warming the planet" ... "as early as the 1980's". It looks like even then, Singer was working with Michaels, Balling, Ellsaesser and Lindzen.

THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT THE REVELLE-GORE STORY

The 1991 Cosmos paper, “What to do about Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap,” is not “Revelle’s article.” That is a myth, perpetuated at first by a few participants and now being spread by the many people they have misled. Revelle did not write it.

Revelle, the grandfather of modern global warming science, former Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and former science adviser to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, was deeply trusted as an objective, careful and honorable scientist. He was worthy of that trust.

Revelle’s belief until his death that global average warming in the 21st Century would probably fall in the range of one to three degrees Celsius

As early as the 1980s, the energy industry began taking steps to prevent the public from believing that humans are warming the planet. Revelle’s belief until his death that global average warming in the 21st Century would probably fall in the range of one to three degrees Celsius, a position well-known to his colleagues, held great sway in science circles and policy bodies. Revelle's student at Harvard, Al Gore, was gaining public attention through the 1980s and he was passionate about what Roger had led him to see.

The Cosmos article states that warming in today’s century will be “well below normal year-to-year variation.” This can only be taken to mean less than about 0.2 degrees Celsius, ten times less than Revelle’s actual belief. How did this happen?

The Cosmos article is S. Fred Singer’s work. Singer may urge that Revelle was a co-author technically, simply because he allowed his name to be used. Since publication of the Cosmos article, however, Singer has been shown to be the sole author of the major points of the paper, including the constantly quoted conclusion, by virtue of prior publication by Singer alone in the journal ES&T. The evidence is found in the linked documents below.

After a series of unsuccessful attempts to get Roger to work on this document, Dr. Singer must have decided that the only way he was going to get this thing done was to come in person.

Revelle’s actual, participatory, authorship cannot be demonstrated beyond a single review of the galley proof, a lengthy session for Roger at a time when his physical ability to pay attention for many minutes was severely eroded. About the article and this session, Revelle's long-time secretary, Ms. Christa Beran,remembers in a 1993 sworn affidavit: "[…] Roger had been very reluctant to be involved in this enterprise. […] I know it was not one of Roger's priorities. [...] I do not remember seeing any review by Roger of any text by Dr. Singer before a day in February 1991 when he came to Roger's office. [...] I am sure that Roger and I together never worked on the article [...] After a series of unsuccessful attempts to get Roger to work on this document, Dr. Singer must have decided that the only way he was going to get this thing done was to come in person.”

Evidence:

THE TRUTH

Revelle did not write the Cosmos article.
S. Fred Singer claimed sole authorship of the major statements of the article in his ES&T paper months before he put the finishing touches on his Cosmos Masterpiece.
If S. Fred Singer is sole author of this material, then Revelle cannot be an author.
If S. Fred Singer is not sole author of this material, then he has admitted in his deposition to ethical concern about one author publishing under his own sole authorship material that was co-authored.
Revelle appears not to have had full information --- not about the ES&T publication and not about the many energy-industry agents who were busy at work here.

As far as it appears, Revelle did not work on the paper prior to the final review session of February 6, 1991 at Scripps. Singer has admitted that he could not recall ever receiving comments from Revelle on any of the three drafts that Singer wrote and distributed leading up to the galley proof version.

drafts were distributed to Michaels, Balling, Ellsaesser and Lindzen

Singer has admitted that it is possible the three successive drafts were distributed to Michaels, Balling, Ellsaesser and Lindzen; further, he describes receiving their comments and incorporating their contributions. No evidence has surfaced that Revelle was ever made aware that such a team was actually writing “Revelle’s article.”

Further, Singer has admitted this would make him the sole author of this material.

Did Roger entered into co-authorship fairly and fully informed? For instance, Singer also has admitted that he cannot recall informing Revelle, during the intervening months that supposedly the Cosmos authors were hard at work together, that he, Singer, published himself, as sole author, a major chunk of the Cosmos article in another journal, including the title, most of the conclusion and the key, most-used quotes: “Look before you leap” and “The scientific basis for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” (see Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 24, No. 8, 1990). Further, Singer has admitted this would make him the sole author of this material. So, in this context, how is one to look at attribution of authorship to Revelle for that same material? Were these co-drafted, co-written, and/or co-authored sections? Where does Revelle’s authorship begin?

My understanding, from conversations with Roger in 1991 and Christa in 1992, was that Roger was pressed and worn down in a single multi-hour session on a single day in February of 1991. This was a time when Christa and I limited our own working sessions with Roger to 15-20 minutes, because he would fatigue so quickly. Apparently the session with Singer was hours long. Shortly after publication of the Cosmos article, Roger showed it to me, saying, with clear embarrassment: "S. Fred is a rather persuasive fellow."

Ms. Beran’s affidavit also says: “[...] In late summer 1990, Roger started coming into the office for short periods of time and often would spend much of the time dozing. [...] Sometimes he would fall asleep while he was dictating [...]. I remember that even as late as November 1990 [...] he was too weak to walk very far. [...] Dr. Singer arrived unannounced one day in February 1991. I was unprepared for his visit, thinking that Roger had other plans for that afternoon. [...] I remember feeling that Roger was cornered, because I thought I understood from the fact that Roger had procrastinated so long that this enterprise was something he didn't really want to be involved with.” (Christa Beran Affidavit, 1992)

Changes to the final galley proofowing to the discussion between Singer and Revelle on February 6, 1991 in Revelle's office comprise less than 1% of the text of the published article. Further, the changes are not wholly consistent or representative of Revelle’s known views,most significantly that the expected warming in the 21st century would be 1-3 degrees Celsius, as opposed to "well below normal year-to-year variation.” This normal year-to-year variation, in a less-pressured moment, Roger would have realized from his own frequently-used lecture materials to be less than about 0.2 degrees Celsius. (Normal yr-to-yr variation)

Revelle was hoodwinked, in my view. Perhaps more severe terms are deserved.

Revelle was hoodwinked, in my view. Perhaps more severe terms are deserved. My personal conversation with Roger shortly after the publication of the Cosmos article gave me the very strong sense that he was intensely embarrassed that his name was associated. He seemed noticeably relieved when we agreed together that perhaps the readership of the Cosmos Club journal would be small and limited. Little did either of us anticipate at that moment what was really going on and what would follow.

One has to ask, given the above circumstances, why is this Cosmos article so widely referenced and so constantly held forth as a "Revelle paper"? Why, for instance, is not this article referred to as the “Singer article”?? After all, Singer really wrote it, with input from his group of contributors. And Singer claimed a good chunk of the article as sole author before Revelle put pen to paper.

This fits into a much larger campaign by the energy industry to discredit scientists and politicians who are trying to warn the public...

From the halls of Congress, to a Vice-Presidential debate and in multiple republications, this Cosmos article has been used by Singer, Balling and Michaels to harrass, embarrass and otherwise discredit Al Gore. This has persisted for more than a decade. This fits into a much larger campaign by the energy industry to discredit scientists and politicians who are trying to warn the public about impending climate change and its consequences.

Admirably, Gore has refused to cease crediting Revelle as the man who gave him knowledge and inspired him to care deeply about climate change, and who led him to pay honest attention to the science. Gore is still seeking to awaken the public to the reality that the globe is warming.

Over ten years ago, I was forced by a SLAPP suit to retract my statements exposing the Cosmos myth described here. Likely to prevail at trial because my statements were true, I regretted deeply that I could not then afford to continue. I had hoped, in settling, that the other side would honorably let the Cosmos paper and this issue slide into obscurity. This did not happen. In 2003, Singer published a book chapter, titled The Revelle-Gore Story::{ Attempted Political Suppression of Science:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, that presented the story the way he'd like it to be known. His story vilifies both me and Al Gore. The editor of that book swallows the story and echoes the condemnations in his own introductory chapter. And the objectionable use of this Cosmos article by the very participants in its creation has not ceased (see Balling, SEPP, May 2006).

This shameful manipulation and exploitation of the life and teaching of a great scientist and humanitarian cannot stand.

J. Justin Lancaster

Source Article

espi@att.net

Last updated 7/6/06.

cosmos-myth

Links

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Revelle/
http://www.sandiegohistory.org/bio/revelle/revelle.htm

Attachments

Document

=='

nutter mccennon and fish

jos G blute

singer dep dl

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/revelle-gore-singer-lindzen/documents/S-F-Singer_Deposition.pdf/view

lancaster depo v Blute

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/revelle-gore-singer-lindzen/cosmos-myth/S-F-Singer_Deposition.pdf

hacksinger ggl doc

Roger Revelle is sometimes referred to as the father of global warming, and Al Gore famously cites his seminal influence when he was at Harvard (also a colleague of Keeling). Revelle, moreover, “ stood against the UC faculty being required to take an anti-communist oath during the Joseph McCarthy period. He served as Science Advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall during the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s, and was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science" wiki).

He participated in nuclear tests, figured out that oceans would absorb CO2 slower than had been predicted, and thus warming would be faster because of burning fossil fuels 1957 with Hans Suess [who lived in La Jolla, so he got mail for Dr Seuss; moreover his papers reside in the Geisel Library at UCSD, which Theodor Seuss Geisel referred to in his commencement address as UC La Jolla].(Keeling joined in 1956).

Revelle went to Harvard for a few years to push for a scientific approach to increase food supplies for a growing population, but returned to UC San Diego [Oreskes also at both].

Singer scam (Oreskes 190-, used against Gore 194 by G Easterbrook in New Republic

revelle talk? suggest mitigation, for example nuclear power, energy conservation, boreal forests could expand, so must have thought a problem ( 191)

The opening sentence of a talk Revelle did at AAAS New Orleans was a bit vague, which gave Singer an opening; immediately after the talk discussed co-authoring a Washington Post article;

Walter Munk, his colleague, says Revelle had a hard time saying no to people, and so may have lept before he looked in agreeing to work with Singer (Oreskes 192).

In any event, on the way home, Revelle suffered a massive heart attack, going from the airport straight into triple bypass surgery. He did not recover well, had additional complications and surgery; his work day was limited to 20-30 minutes even months later.

Three drafts from Singer came in March while Revelle was still in the hospital (unbeknownst to Revelle several other hacks were giving input on the draft, which was mostly a rehash of an earlier Singer article); later? Singer would call, and the draft would be put on top of the to-do pile, but he kept burying it again; asked why, he replied "some people don't think Fred Singer is a very good scientist" in his secretary's affidavit note 185 ( p192).

Finally Singer just showed up at the house unannounced on February 6th; even though Revelle had something else scheduled, Singer kept him working for nearly four hours.

“Changes to the final galley proof owing to the discussion between Singer and Revelle on February 6, 1991 in Revelle's office comprise less than 1% of the text of the published article. Further, the changes are not wholly consistent or representative of Revelle’s known views, most significantly that the expected warming in the 21st century would be 1-3 degrees Celsius, as opposed to "well below normal year-to-year variation.”[as the article states]. This normal year-to-year variation, in a less-pressured moment, Roger would have realized from his own frequently-used lecture materials to be less than about 0.2 degrees Celsius.” (Lancaster) Justin Lancaster had taken Revelle's course so knew that Revelle knew paleoclimate bit bogus?

In July Revelle died of heart attack.

Cosmos Club article (for beltway insiders) embarrassed Revelle, he told his student and assistant Justin Revelle but not peer reviewed and so scientists did not read it, so maybe let drop.

But in 1992 election, Cosmos article (and a following one in The Independent) used to attack Gore/ his book by Greg Easterbrook, claimed before his death Revelle said the science was too uncertain for action [me: (implying gore out of date or biased?] actually quoting not Revelle but Singer 1990 ppr p 194 [those words do not appear in Cosmos article or New O speech?]

George Will picked up Easterbrook attack almost verbatim [end online in google]

Even so, that might have been the end of the matter, but in 2003, Singer published a book chapter, titled The Revelle-Gore Story: Attempted Political Suppression of Science that misrepresented both Lancaster and Revelle. (Lancaster was attempting to convince the editor not to publish and got Singer off the program on a memorial lecture for Revelle (hurt his pride and his “brand”?)

Singer sued Lancaster for libel, then forced him to fold (Oreskes 196). His wife begged him to cave (he had been representing himself, whereas Singer had pro bono high priced (fedsoc) lawyers from National legal __. New engl rw legal foundation spawn of National Legal Center for the Public Interest.

[Joseph G Blute Nutter, mcClennen and fish one int'l place boston: class action litigation, product liability [wrote on PM] products liability, and insurance coverage matters. .. He has tried cases on behalf of Johnson & Johnson, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Ford Motor Company,., and Exxon Corporation, Georgia-Pacific Corp., . ]

Lancaster's settlement/apology had all kinds of caveats and provisos in it (including that in ten years he would be free to tell the truth); had terms/requests that Singer never honored, for example to send copies of Revelle's annotated MS). After the ten years passed, he has corrected the record, including affidavits from Revelle's secretary and several of his colleagues.

===

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-note-about-roger-revelle-julian.html

eli rabett?

:{:{As somebunnies may remember, S. Fred Singer is quite proud of an article in the magazine of the }:Cosmos Club:{ (a club for movers and shakers in DC) written by Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr that had Roger Revelle's name on it. How Revelle's name got there beyond the fact that Fred Singer put it there is a matter of interest that is explained by Justin Lancaster, Revelle's student and last assistant. Lancaster, to put it softly, was quite skeptical that Revelle was in any meaningful sense an author of that paper and said so. Singer SLAPPED and got a statement from Lancaster as a settlement}:

Eli has written about this where you can get up to speed on the whole thing. Of course since Al Gore learned about climate change from Roger Revelle, this has become a stick to beat Gore with.

Today, Justin Lancaster left a note at Rabett Run, that needs to be repeated

----------------------------------------------

I would have skipped weighing in further on this topic, except (1) it seems to never recede into history (it's surfacing in Climate Change discussions on Facebook in September 2014), and (2) my dear cousin Walter, for whom I hold sincere respect, clearly needs an update (I wish he'd contacted me directly before adding to this slog).

So let's be clear:

1. Fred Singer is the most unethical scientist, in my opinion, that I have ever met. I said so in the early 1990s, publicly, and I am still confident in the truth of this statement.

2.The worst decision I ever made in my life was to provide a retraction of my statements in the early 1990s about Singer's nastiness. The retraction was coerced. It was required to stop the SLAPP suit brought against me by a conservative think-tank in Washington that wanted to keep Fred Singer in action.

3. I was 95% certain that I would win my case in court. But my wife was terrified. In fact, she was terrorized by this lawsuit. We had three young children. I was a Harvard postdoc now needing to find a next academic posting. She was a graduate student at Harvard. My wife was worried about that 5% risk. She was scared we could lose our house and all our assets. We new it would be a 2-3 year ordeal that would drain our resources and attention. The folks at NRDC and EDF chose to not step in;we couldn't afford the $100k+ that the lawsuit would cost. Defending for a year took an enormous amount of my time. That is the meanness and force of a SLAPP suit.

4. Singer distorted my words in his legal complaint and then even more so in his publication in the Hoover Institution volume. Singer flat out lied in that text about my role (and his wife, Candace Crandall contributed to this smear campaign). :{:{This chapter is not a sworn statement.}:

5. My testimony about what happened is sworn under oath, under penalty of perjury. I am an officer of the courts of VT, MA, CA and CO}:.

6. Everything I said was true. In my negotiations with the 8 lawyers from two national law firms,in which we scripted the retraction, I refused to state that anything I said was untrue. I never admitted to lying, because I never lied.

7. In the coerced retraction, I allowed that my remarks were "unwarranted," because my mother had commonly used that word when conveying to us that we need not have behaved the way we did. I realized that I could have proceeded more carefully and privately with Singer (which I initially had tried to do) and that I need not have made the issue so public. I also realized that because I was not in Revelle's office during the key session between Singer and Revelle, that I could have let Christa's affidavit and the galley proofs themselves speak the story. (Of course that was already hindsight, as Singer would not provide the galley proofs; I only got them from the Scripps archivist the night before my deposition of Singer).

8. I regret allowing the word "unwarranted" in the coerced retraction, because in fact my charges were fully justified when made. It was a three-hour negotiation, because Singer's lawyers wanted me to admit that I made false statements, but I refused. When my lawyer and I stood to quit the negotiation, saying "We'll be happy to see you in court in MA," there was a flurry of "Wait, wait," across the table. Eventually we settled on the word "unwarranted."

9. I never worked for Al Gore, I was not in any way involved in his political campaign and I had nothing to do with Gore's office other than getting a clip from him for a film on Roger's career that was shown in a film at the Rio Earth Summit. My entire focus was on a wrong being done to Roger Revelle's career and Roger's concern for the Earth environment and for humanity.

10. I had formed, in 1987, a non-profit named: "Environmental Science & Policy Institute (ESPI)," ESPI was the only non-governmental organization presenting scientific results at the 2nd World Climate Conference in Geneva, where I served on the Synthesis Committee. ESPI was an NGO registered at the Earth Summit. I was speaking widely at Dartmouth, Harvard, UC and other fora on the science and policy related to the carbon dioxide problem. I served on the NOAA Citizen Advisory Panel and was the first Chair of the Global Change Working Group within the Society for Risk Assessment.

11. Fred Singer started his "Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)" in the early 1990s, practically in direct opposition to ESPI.

12. Singer was associated with an energy-industry-backed cabal, comprising of at least Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, and loosely coupling Hugh Ellsaesser, Richard Lindzen and some others. I was known to most or all of these folks through face-to-face encounters academically and in governmental meetings.

13. I had hoped that, after having been found with his hand in the cookie jar, Singer would have the good grace to leave this sordid issue in the historical dust bin. Giving him the retraction and apology I hoped would be sufficient. But it was not and he did not put it down. Instead he raised this issue prominently in the public eye, publishing my retraction in newspapers and blatantly misrepresenting the history in the Hoover chapter. And his cabal echoed it all widely to theirkey blogging network. And that has continued to cascade through many blogging layers, for now more than twenty years!

14. In 2006, when Gore has published his "An Inconvenient Truth," this all erupted again, and I determined that enough is enough. I publicly and unequivocally repudiated and retracted the earlier "Retraction" that had been coerced, and I published the court documents and supporting affidavits and documentation so that people could read it for themselves.

15. The documentation is available online at Cosmos Myth

16. Singer and his supporters did not respond to my 2006 publication because they have no case. AGW is an issue of public concern. Singer is a celebrity in this field, perhaps the leading contrarian, skeptic, denier at the head of the pack for almost two decades. There are no objective canons of ethics in science (unlike for lawyers), so my charge of unethical can only mean "in my opinion" and "based on my standards." Not only do I believe my statements to be true, I have substantial evidence backing them up. And, we now have anti-SLAPP legislation in Massachusetts.

17. This entire episode has been investigated by journalists, described in chapters in two books, become the subject of a play and other media. Despite the bloggers who seem to continue to enjoy piling on the smear while ignoring the factual evidence, I'm comfortable with the outcome of the former more careful and thorough inspections.

-------------------------------------

Eli is grateful for Justin Lancaster's courage and setting the record straight. }:

https://yalereview.yale.edu/weaponizing-reputation

Weaponizing Reputation

Cailin O’Connor

James Owen Weatherall

Roger Revelle was one of the most distinguished oceanographers of the twentieth century. During World War II, he served in the navy, eventually rising to the rank of commander and director of the Office of Naval Research–a scientific arm of the navy that Revelle helped create. He oversaw the first tests of atomic bombs following the end of World War II, at Bikini Atoll in 1946. In 1950, Revelle became director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

In 1957, he and his Scripps colleague Hans Suess published what was probably the most influential article of their careers. It concerned the rate at which carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean.

Physicists had recognized since the mid-nineteenth century that carbon dioxide is what we now call a “greenhouse gas”: it absorbs infrared light. This means it can trap heat near the earth’s surface, which in turn raises surface temperatures. You have likely experienced precisely this effect firsthand, if you have ever compared the experience of spending an evening in a dry, desert environment with an evening in a humid environment. In dry places, the temperature drops quickly when the sun goes down, but not in areas of high humidity. Likewise, without greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the earth would be far colder, with average surface temperatures of about 0 degrees Fahrenheit (or −18 degrees Celsius).

When Revelle and Suess were writing, there had already been half a century of work on the hypothesis–originating with the Swedish Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius and the American geologist T. C. Chamberlin–that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was directly correlated with global temperature and that variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide explained climactic shifts such as ice ages. A British steam engineer named Guy Callendar had even proposed that carbon dioxide produced by human activity, emitted in large and exponentially growing quantities since the mid-nineteenth century, was contributing to an increase in the earth’s surface temperature.

But in 1957 most scientists were not worried about global warming. It was widely believed that the carbon dioxide introduced by human activity would be absorbed by the ocean, minimizing the change in atmospheric carbon dioxide–and global temperature. It was this claim that Revelle and Suess refuted in their article.

Using new methods for measuring the amounts of different kinds of carbon in different materials, Revelle and Suess estimated how long it took for carbon dioxide to be absorbed by the oceans. They found that the gas would persist in the atmosphere longer than most other scientists had calculated. They also found that as the ocean absorbed more carbon dioxide, its ability to hold the carbon dioxide would degrade, causing it to evaporate out at higher rates. When they combined these results, they realized that carbon dioxide levels would steadily rise over time, even if rates of emissions stayed constant. Things would only get worse if emissions rates continued to increase–as indeed they have done over the sixty years since the Revelle and Suess article appeared.

This work gave scientists good reasons to doubt their complacency about greenhouse gases. But just as important was Revelle’s activism, beginning around the time he wrote the article. He helped create a program on Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide at Scripps and hired a chemist named Charles David Keeling to lead it. Later, Revelle helped Keeling get funding to collect systematic data concerning atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Keeling showed that average carbon dioxide levels were steadily increasing–just as Revelle and Suess had predicted–and that the rate of increase was strongly correlated with the rate at which carbon dioxide was being released into the atmosphere by human activity.

In 1965, Revelle moved to Harvard. There he encountered a young undergraduate named Al Gore, who took a course from Revelle during his senior year and was inspired to take action on climate change. Gore went on to become a U.S. congressman and later a senator. Following an unsuccessful presidential run in 1988, he wrote a book, Earth in the Balance, in which he attributed to Revelle his conviction that the global climate was deeply sensitive to human activity. The book was published in 1992, a few weeks before Gore accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president.

Gore’s book helped make environmental issues central to the election. And he distinguished himself as an effective and outspoken advocate for better environmental policy. Those who wished to combat Gore’s message could hardly hope to change Gore’s mind, and as a vice presidential candidate, he could not be silenced. Instead, they adopted a different strategy–one that went through Revelle.

In February 1990, Revelle gave a lecture at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. The session in which he spoke was specifically devoted to policy issues related to climate change, and Revelle’s talk was about how the effects of global warming might be mitigated. Afterward, it seems that Fred Singer, a physicist who had served on–and disagreed with the majority findings of–the 1982 Acid Rain Review Panel convened by the Reagan administration, approached Revelle and asked whether he would be interested in coauthoring an article based on the talk.

The details of what happened next are controversial and have been the subject of numerous contradictory op-eds and articles, and at least one libel suit. But this much is clear. In 1991, an article appeared in the inaugural issue of a journal called Cosmos, listing Singer as first author and Revelle as a coauthor. The article asserted (with original emphasis), “We can sum up our conclusions in a simple message: The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” (If this sounds identical to Singer’s message on acid rain, that is because it was.)

What was much less clear was whether Revelle truly endorsed this claim, which in many ways contradicted his life’s work. (Revelle never had a chance to set the record straight: he died on July 15, 1991, shortly after the article appeared in print.)

It is certainly true that Revelle did not write the quoted sentence. What Cosmos published was an expanded version of a paper Singer had previously published, as sole author, in the journal Environmental Science and Technology; whole sentences and paragraphs of the Cosmos article were reproduced nearly word for word from the earlier piece. Among the passages that were lifted verbatim was the one quoted above.

Singer claimed that Revelle had been a full coauthor, contributing ideas to the final manuscript and endorsing the message. But others disagreed. Both Revelle’s personal secretary and his long-term research assistant claimed that Revelle had been reluctant to be involved and that he contributed almost nothing to the text. And they argued that when the article was finalized, Revelle was weak following a recent heart surgery–implying that Singer had taken advantage of him. (Singer sued Revelle’s research assistant, Justin Lancaster, for libel over these statements. The suit was settled in 1994, with Lancaster forced to retract his claim that Revelle was not a coauthor. In 2006, after a ten-year period during which he was not permitted to comment under the settlement, Lancaster retracted his retraction and issued a statement on his personal website in which he “fully rescind[ed] and repudiate[d] [his] 1994 retraction.” Singer told his own version of the story, which disagreed with Lancaster’s in crucial respects, in a 2003 essay titled “The Revelle-Gore Story.”)

Ultimately, though, what Revelle believed did not matter. The fact that his name appeared on the article was enough to undermine Gore’s environmental agenda. In July 1992, New Republic journalist Gregg Easterbrook cited theCosmos article, writing, “Earth in the Balancedoes not mention that before his death last year, Revelle published a paper that concludes: ‘The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.’” A few months later, the conservative commentator George Will wrote essentially the same thing in the Washington Post.

It was a devastating objection: it seemed that Revelle, Gore’s own expert of choice, explicitly disavowed Gore’s position.

Admiral James Stockdale[who am i? what am i doing here?]–running mate of Reform Party candidate Ross Perot–later took up the issue during the vice presidential debate. “I read where Senator Gore’s mentor had disagreed with some of the scientific data that is in his book. How do you respond to those criticisms of that sort?” he asked Gore. Gore tried to respond–first over laughter from the audience, but then, when he claimed Revelle had “had his remarks taken completely out of context just before he died,” to boos and jeers. He was made to look foolish, and his environmental activism naive.

***

What happened to Gore was a weaponization of reputation. The real reason to be concerned about greenhouse gases has nothing to do with Roger Revelle or his opinion. One should be concerned because there is strong evidence that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising in the atmosphere, because increased carbon dioxide leads to dramatic changes in global climate, and because there will be (indeed there already are) enormous human costs if greenhouse gas emissions continue. There is still uncertainty about the details of what will happen or when–but that uncertainty goes in both directions. The chance is just as good that we have grossly underestimated the costs of global warming as that we have overestimated them. (Recall how scientists underestimated the dangers of CFCs.)

More, although the conclusion of theCosmos article was regularly quoted, no evidence to support that conclusion was discussed by Easterbrook or Will in their articles. Indeed, the article offered no novel arguments at all. If Revelle had devastating new evidence that led him to change his mind about global warming, surely that should have been presented. But it was not.

But Gore himself had elevated Revelle’s status by basing his environmentalism on Revelle’s authority. This gave Singer–along with Will, Stockdale, and the many others who subsequently quoted theCosmos article–new grounds for attacking Gore. Indeed, anyone who tended to agree with Gore was particularly vulnerable to this sort of argument, since it is precisely they who would have given special credibility to Revelle’s opinion.

The details of how Singer and others used Revelle’s reputation to amplify their message may seem like a special case. But this extreme case shows most clearly a pattern that has played a persistent role in the history of industrial propaganda in science. It shows that how we change our beliefs in light of evidence depends on the reputation of the evidence’s source.The propagandist’s message is most effective when it comes from voices we think we can trust.

Using the reputations of scientists was an essential part of the Tobacco Strategy.Industry executives sought to staff the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) with eminent scientists. They hired a distinguished geneticist named C. C. Little to run it precisely because his scientific credentials gave their activities stature and credibility. Likewise, they established an “independent” board of scientific advisors that included respected experts. These efforts were intended to make the TIRC look respectable and to make its proindustry message more palatable. This is yet another reason why selective sharing can be more effective than biased production–or even industrial selection. The more independence a researcher has from industry, the more authority he or she seems to have.

Even when would-be propagandists are not independent, there are advantages in presenting themselves as if they were. For instance, in 2009 Fred Singer, in collaboration with the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, established a group called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The NIPCC is Singer’s answer to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2007 the IPCC (with Gore) won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work in systematically reviewing the enormous literature on climate change and establishing a concrete consensus assessment of the science.

The NIPCC produces reports modeled exactly on the IPCC’s reports: the same size and length, the same formatting–and, of course, reaching precisely the opposite conclusions. The IPCC is a distinguished international collaboration that includes the world’s most renowned climate scientists. The NIPCC looks superficially the same, but of course has nothing like the IPCC’s stature. Such efforts surely mislead some people–including journalists who are looking for the “other side” of a story about a politically sensitive topic.

It is not hard to see through something as blatant as the NIPCC. On the other hand, when truly distinguished scientists turn to political advocacy, their reputations give them great power. The founders of the George C. Marshall Institute, for instance, a conservative think tank, included William A. Nierenberg, who had taken over as director of the Scripps Institute after Revelle moved to Harvard; Robert Jastrow, the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Frederick Seitz, the former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University, the premier biomedical research institution in the United States.

These scientists truly had made major contributions to their respective fields, and their reputations rightly put them in positions to exert influence even in areas where they had far less expertise. It was Nierenberg’s status as former director of Scripps and a member of the National Academy of Sciences that qualified him to serve as chair of the Acid Rain Peer Review Panel–and then gave him the opportunity to modify its executive statement.

These men’s reputations also put them in a special position to criticize other scientists. Perhaps the most striking example came in the aftermath of the second Assessment Report of the IPCC (not the NIPCC!), published in 1995. This report included,for the first time, a chapter devoted to what is known as “fingerprinting,” a set of methods for distinguishing climate change caused by human activity from that produced by sources such as sun cycles or volcanic activity. The chapter on this topic was written by a collaboration of distinguished scientists, but the “convening lead author,” responsible for collecting the material together and orchestrating the whole chapter, was an American climate scientist named Ben Santer.

Santer was relatively junior when he took on this position–though he had already made major contributions to fingerprinting methods and in many ways was ideally situated to convene that chapter. After the report was published, however,Seitz and others went on the attack. In an editorial published in the Wall Street Journal, Seitz accused Santer of violating scientific protocol by changing the final report to “deceive policy makers.” But while it is true that Santer orchestrated late revisions to the chapter, they were made at the direction of IPCC chairman Bert Bolin, in response to comments from peer reviewers. Rather than a violation, they were in fact mandated by scientific protocol.

The Seitz letter reads as what it was: one of the most distinguished physicists in the United States publicly taking a much more junior scholar to task for impropriety: “The report’s lead author, Benjamin D. Santer,” Seitz writes, “must presumably take the major responsibility.” Bolin and forty other scientists signed a letter refuting Seitz’s claims and asserting that Santer’s work had been appropriate, to which Seitz and Singer both replied by more or less repeating the original accusations, but now with the implication that the whole IPCC was in on it.

Perhaps the group of forty internationally recognized climate scientists who signed the Bolin response defending Santer were enough to bolster Santer’s reputation. But even if that is right, the end result is a display of authority on both sides, suggesting that there was a real controversy–not only on the facts, but on the scientific method itself–when in fact there was none. As the tobacco industry has shown, merely creating the appearance of controversy is often all the propagandist needs to do.

***

The weaponization of reputation is deeply connected to polarization models in which the key factor is trust. It is the people whose opinions we trust who can exert the most influence over us; and as we come to trust some people more and others less, groups begin to diverge, leading to polarized outcomes.

The proxy we use for trust in these models is difference in belief on the matter at hand. This captures an important part of how polarization comes about–and it also explains some aspects of how reputation can be useful to the propagandist. After all, Revelle was admired by many people precisely because of his influential work on climate change. And it was at least in part because those people tended to agree with him on that topic that they were prepared to take any evidence he offered very seriously. (At least, the fact that Gore agreed with him suggests that Gore himself should take Revelle’s opinion seriously.) When Easterbrook and Will implied that new evidence had influenced Revelle, that suggested it should also influence those who agreed with him.

But trust based on agreement about the topic at hand does not capture some of the other ways reputation can be weaponized. Trust often depends on other qualities–such as past behavior, personal connections, or professional training. Surely a lot of individual psychology is involved, too, in whom we trust and why. Even so, we can use our models to capture some interesting and important aspects of the weaponization of reputation by looking at the relationship between trust, belief, and scientific success.

In some models of polarization, everyone is trying to solve one problem and using credences about that problem to decide whom to trust. But in most real-world cases, we have more to go on than just the problem at hand. Suppose we have a network of scientists who are trying to solve two problems, instead of just one. For one of these problems, they are trying to choose between actions A and B; for the other, unrelated problem, they need to choose between actions Y and Z. Now suppose that for each problem, when deciding whom to trust, they consider their beliefs aboutboth problems. The basic dynamics of the model are the same as before: each scientist uses “Jeffrey’s rule,” after the Princeton philosopher Dick Jeffrey, which specifies how to update beliefs when you are not certain about evidence, but now the uncertainty they assign to a person’s evidence depends on the distance between their beliefs on both topics.

In this model, we find that groups polarize, just as they do when only one problem is at stake. But now, perhaps surprisingly, when they polarize, they tend to form subcommunities whose beliefs on both problems are highly correlated. One finds, say, a subcommunity whose members all hold A and Z and another whose members all hold B and Y. Note that the true beliefs do not necessarily correlate with one another: the model often yields cases in which the two communities each hold one true and one false belief.

These models suggest that one way to influence the opinions of members of a group is to find someone who already agrees with them on other topics and have that person share evidence that supports your preferred position. The idea is that people are relying on scientists’ success on other problems to judge their general reliability. In other words, a scientist might think: “I am not so sure about actions Aand B, but I am certain that actionZ is better than Y. If another scientist shares my opinion on action Z, I will also trust that person’s evidence on actionsA and B.”

These sorts of effects can help to explain how weaponized reputation sometimes works. We look to people who have been successful in solving other problems and trust them more when evaluating their evidence. Established scientists with distinguished careers can presumably point to many past successes in correctly evaluating evidence. More, their peers–other scientists–have evaluated their past work and deemed it strong and reliable. When the established scientists present new evidence and arguments–even on topics that are completely unrelated to the field in which they established their reputations–you have good reason to trust them. In fact, philosophers of science Jeffrey Barrett, Brian Skyrms, and Aydin Mohseni have used network epistemology models to show that paying attention to this sort of past reliability can drastically improve the accuracy of a community’s beliefs, on the assumption, of course, that no one is using reputation as a weapon. These sorts of results can also help explain why someone like Seitz can be influential on a range of issues, including climate change, that are quite far from that person’s previous research.

These issues of trust, on the problem at hand and more generally, surely play an important role in explaining how reputation gives some people outsized influence–at least within parts of a community. But it is not the whole story. Conformity and network structure are also critical to understanding the social role of reputation in propaganda.

singer pro bono revelle justin

404 --> https://web.archive.org/web/20081007051640/http://home.att.net/~espi/S-F-Singer_Deposition.pdf

↑ "In the Matter of S. Fred Singer vs Justin Lancaster", September 24, 2003, page 57.
↑ "In the Matter of S. Fred Singer vs Justin Lancaster", September 24, 2003, page 58.
↑ "In the Matter of S. Fred Singer vs Justin Lancaster", September 24, 2003, page 59.

hoover has book ch?

The Revelle-Gore Story Attempted Political Suppression of Science S. FRED SINGER

This is a personal account linking efforts to suppress scientific publication about climate science and policy by then-Senator (later vice president) Al Gore and his staff.1 In those efforts, an individual working closely with Senator Gore and his staff made false and damaging statements about my behavior as a scientist. I filed a libel suit against the individual. The suit was settled when he issued a retraction and apology to me that included a statement that members of Senator Gore’s staff had made “similar statements and insinuations” to those that he retracted. Vice President Al Gore also tried to influence at least one TV...

1. Candace Crandall played a pivotal role in the author’s lawsuit against Dr. Justin Lancaster and its resolution, and she contributed to the drafting of this chapter

https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817939326_283.pdf

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