Continuing from Part 1 on my line-by-climate-issue-line analysis of Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” documentary movie. She’s on retainer with the Sher Edling law firm handling 17 of the current U.S. “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits and ‘assisting’ in 5 others. In the 2023 European lawsuit, Greenpeace Italy et al. v. ENI S.p.A., et al. against the Italian energy company Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Greenpeace implies “Merchants of Doubt” book author Oreskes is an ‘expert’ on fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns. The accusation seen in that lawsuit about fossil fuel companies running disinformation campaigns is not supported by any evidence in her book. But these assertions arising from her work or coming straight from her continue unabated because nobody challenges them.

To challenge her, you must know where her narratives fall apart.

In Part 2 here, let’s examine the backstory she offers about her role in the climate issue, her tirade against the late atmospheric climate scientist Dr S Fred Singer, and her lack of due diligence concerning a massively faulty talking point accusation about the Oregon Petition Project. As in Part 1, I include time segment links to a video copy of “Merchants of Doubt” to back up my copies of the transcript text of it (the video times here may be a bit off from the official DVD version, since the person who uploaded it may be skirting copyright laws by having the playback speed slightly increased).

The following starts at the 20:59 point, continuing through to the 22:54 point, so I will save a bit of tedious effort and just provide the one link to that section.

Naomi Oreskes: I was always interested in broader questions about scientific knowledge.
… A decade after Hansen had testified in Congress that climate change was happening, the media are still presenting this as a big scientific debate.

I had the same interest, between 1988 and 1998. But by 2001, I was concerned about the sheer lack of debate on a particular news outlet I watched, and perturbed that no questions from reporters were asked regarding the total disappearance of the prior news concern in the ’70s of imminent global cooling.

Oreskes: I had the idea that we could test this question of whether or not there was a consensus among scientists.
… so we got a list of all of the papers that had been published from 1992 to 2002 that had used that key word phrase “global climate change.”
… how many of these papers disagree that most of the observed warming is due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations?
… when we found nothing, then I thought, “Oh, this is a result that needs to be published.”

Her story version here is basically contradicts her other story versions – there are many, including the ‘yet-another-variant-to-add-to-the-pile’ one I detailed in my June 27, 2024 blog post – where she alone set about illustrating what she already knew to be an obvious science consensus, but wanted to quantify it precisely for a solitary slide image within a overall presentation on “Consensus in Science.” She described the slide as an obvious conclusion – no big deal – but her surprise at the audience’s reaction to it is what prompted her to publish it. Her underlying notion, however, is antithetical to the Scientific Method. Science conclusions are not validated by a show of hands, they either stand on their science merits or they don’t.

Oreskes: When my article on the scientific consensus came out, I started getting threatening e-mails, saying that I was a communist, that I should be fired from my job.

Again – elsewhere – she claimed, apparently without substance for it, that it was Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe who called her a communist, and not in an email, either. If at a future time she is placed under oath, it would be wise to compel her to provide those emails, and/or any evidence of threats to fire her. To borrow the popular internet parlance, “show pics, or it did not happen.”

Oreskes: A few people began to say to me: “Other people have also been attacked in a way that seems similar.” People who worked on acid rain, who worked on the ozone hole. I started doing research on the people who were attacking me. And that’s when I discovered a startling fact.They were the same people who had attacked the scientists on all these issues.

Right there, her story appears to be a composite of her otherwise mutually exclusive ‘discovery odyssey stories, the Erik Conway version and the Ben Santer version. In the Conway version, it was he who told her about the ozone hole, and they both began researching the matter. In the Santer version, it was colleagues who told her Santer had experience similar attacks, and in researching the matter, she alone saw the same people who worked with the tobacco industry. How many other inconsistent variants are there? In my just-prior ‘interim’ post, I showed how she claimed to independently arrive at the same discovery that Erik Conway did, and from the way she describes it, she apparently knew who Dr S Fred Singer was before he voiced any concern about her December 2004 study paper in Science magazine.

Oreskes’ narrative about ‘the people attacking her’ then leads to a minute+ imagery / quotes segue setup of Dr Singer at the 22:56 point.

24:12, intermittently afterward to the 24:46 point, Oreskes: A major part of the mystery of this story was to understand the scientists in the story. This whole thing doesn’t work unless there are credible voices.
… Fred Seitz was one of the most important American physicists of the 20th century.
… we see him starting to attack science and scientists, in areas in which he has no expertise.

Psychological projection. The “crooked skeptic scientists” accusation doesn’t work unless there are credible voices. Oreskes’ inconsistent narratives and apparently egregiously false claims – plural – have every appearance of undermining her credibility. On top of that, she attacks climate scientists in an area in which she has no expertise.

25:30, Oreskes: Fred Singer, like Fred Seitz, also worked with the tobacco industry. You can find many documents that attest to his relationship with Philip Morris.

No, you cannot. His sole focus was that, while secondhand cigarette smoke was most certainly harmful, the science behind its effects did not merit it being labeled a Class A carcinogen. It’s no more complicated than that.

25:54, to the 26:58 point, Oreskes: So why did Seitz and Singer do this? Why would they make common cause with the tobacco industry? Most people assume the answer’s money. But it was clear to me early on that that wasn’t the whole story. … Both Seitz and Singer are Cold War scientists.They both worked on Cold War weapons, and rocketry programs. … They also shared a kind of political ideology, deeply, deeply anti-communist.
… I began to realize, none of this is about the science. This is a political debate about the role of government … we found these people saying they see environmentalists as creeping communists …

Oreskes’ documentary movie was touted as exposing fossil fuel industry “liars for hire.” At no point in this movie — not one bit different than her book of the same name failing to do so — does she offer proof that the industry hired Dr Singer or any other skeptic climate scientist to spew disinformation. Just like in her book, she denigrates the scientists because of their political beliefs. I repeat, using Oreskes’ own words elsewhere: their political beliefs.

What reason, then, could there be for her 2007-’08 fixation on an alleged industry disinformation campaign, and again in 2021, and within her Friends of the Court briefs (plural!), and in her retainership with one of the law firms alleging fossil fuel industries ran such campaigns, if she actually holds the position that these scientists aren’t credible because of their political beliefs. If people enrich themselves through embezzlement, theft, extortion, or other fraud, who cares what their political beliefs are?

Nevertheless, the movie continues in this character assassination vein for the next 10+ minutes, including an extended appearance from Michael Shermer, director of The Skeptic Society … who is not the least bit skeptical about Naomi Oreskes’ side of the issue.

31:32, Michael Shermer: I used to be on your side. All I did was look at the data. … So what flipped me was just sort of looking at the data, and all the new data that had come in in the early 2000s. 99% of the world’s glaciers are retreating. Why don’t people change their minds when new data comes in about climate? Because it isn’t about the data. It’s about me being a consistent tribal member, and showing to my fellow tribe members that you can count on me.

Nossir. It is about the data. The Oreskes side wants the public to ignore the skeptic’s data because they say the skeptics are a political tribe.

33:06, Michael Shermer commenting over Heartland Institute James Tayler clip featuring a temperature graph: Whenever I deal with climate deniers, it’s almost like a mirrored reality. I put up the slide showing the Earth getting warmer, and the other guys put up the same slide.

Viewers of this movie are given exactly zero context to what Shermer is referring to. A sleight of hand trick. Arguably outright disinformation by default. Tony Heller, by way of contrast at his RealClimateScience blog, routinely shows graphs that the enviro side claim are proof of global warming … and uses those same graphs to show how they are not what the enviros claim them to be. Same graphs, or portions thereof. Meanwhile, skeptics of catastrophic man-caused global warming do not “deny climate,” it is disinformation to imply they do. Further, the word “denier,” ever since its inception in this issue, is another character assassination effort implying suspect and willful ignorance, no different than calling someone a Holocaust denier.

33:30, Shermer: When you look at climate scientists,we know who they are. They work in science labs. [image shows NASA’s Dr James Hansen]. On the other side, people are not scientists [images of Heartland’s James Taylor, JunkScience’s Steve Milloy]. Or if they are scientists, they’re not climate scientists.They’re a political, ideological group, that just mines the data that somebody else gets and cherry-picks data that fits what they already want to be true.

The lack of self awareness of the filmmakers here is thick enough to cut with a chainsaw. Scientists everywhere mine data from others. It’s what the IPCC reports do. But mere minutes earlier, the film showed Dr S Fred Singer, climate scientist. Meanwhile, the famous-name people on the IPCC side are not climate scientists – Oreskes (history professor with some long ago geology field work experience), Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Leo DiCaprio, the current and prior top administrators of Greenpeace, Desmogblog, etc – who mine data to fit their preconceived conclusions about catastrophic man-caused global warming. Like I said before, psychological projection. Hold that thought until Part 3 in this series – it could be said Oreskes swims in it.

34:02, Michael Shermer: The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it literally consists of thousands of professional climate scientists from all over the world.

That is literally not true. Disinformation. An oft-repeated unsubstantiated embellishment talking point, as I detailed here. One estimate is that there are less than a few hundred climate scientists associated with the IPCC.

That bit essentially became a segue into the next segment, where the movie veers completely off a credibility cliff.

35:18, 2013 PBS Frontline “Climate of Doubt” Correspondent host John Hockenberry, referring not to Naomi Oreskes’ 100% science consensus, but instead to the more widely repeated talking point of a 97% consensus: So it’s 97 percent of them, and one of you.
Dr. Fred Singer: There’s hundreds of us, hundreds, thousands of us. Look, 31,000 scientists and engineers signed a statement to the contrary to what you just read.
John Hockenberry: The Oregon Petition?
Dr. Fred Singer: Yes.

“Climate of Doubt” as I detailed here, was besieged with bias problems. Years back, a Desmogblog person, John Mashey, admitted he fed information to that Frontline program. Desmogblog being the propaganda group built on Ross Gelbspan’s character assassination efforts of skeptic climate scientists. Who did Mashey say was the person who introduced him to Desmogblog? Naomi Oreskes.

35:33, Oreskes: The Oregon Petition claims to be signed by climate scientists …who disagree with the mainstream view of the scientific community. If you actually look at it, what you find is in many cases, they aren’t scientists at all. [music video suddenly blares of a Spice Girls group song]
… Michael Shermer: Somebody put on there the Spice Girls. [Dr. Geraldine Halliwell name spelled out onscreen, a.k.a. “Ginger Spice”]. Somebody else put on there Michael J. Fox. Even Charles Darwin made the list.
… Oreskes: They give the impression that it’s a very big network with lots of scientists. But if you look closely, you see it’s a small number of people, really just a handful.

In her “Merchants of Doubt” book, upon which this movie is based on, she devotes barely over 2 paragraphs to the Oregon Petition, while not saying a single word about fake scientist names. So, where does she get that accusation from? Remember the person I noted in Part 1, John Passacantando? He’s the source, albeit from his time running the Ozone Action group. I detailed that at length in my “Lahsen’s Spice Girls” post, showing how the Spice Girl name was planted by one of Passacantando’s Ozone Action subordinates, and how the other ‘fake names’ in his letter-to-the-editor submitted to the New York Times are not what he said they are. One word describes that situation on Passacantando’s part: disinformation.

36:26, Oreskes: It’s kind of an amazing accomplishment when you think of it that such a small group of people have an enormous impact on public opinion, so that more than half the American people think that the science isn’t settled.

No.

Again, projecting what her side is, as an accusation of what the skeptic side is. What’s truly amazing is how such a small group of people have an enormous impact on public opinion over the ludicrously false notion that ‘majority opinion rules’ as a means of validating science conclusions, and how just a handful of people – perhaps no more than a dozen or so – succeeded at promulgating an accusation that skeptic scientists were paid illicit industry money to reposition global warming as theory … because an apparently complicit mainstream news media never questioned a word of “the science is settled, therefore you do not need to listen to industry-paid shills.”

Except, so far in the movie, Naomi Oreskes has not even said they were paid a dime of industry money, only that they are right-wingers. More on that crippling problem at the end of this blog post series.
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In Part 3: psychological projection – again! / channeling Ross Gelbspan / Passacantando returns … with a friend