Slimed by Naomi Oreskes – In Defense of Dr. Fred Singer

Ron Arnold October 20, 2014

The Oreskes documentary calling Dr. Fred Singer a “Liar for Hire” is a repeat of a nearly identical attack on him twenty years ago. An honorable newsman at that time debunked the attack and my research subsequently uncovered a genuine conspiracy of Big Green money and malice. While we consider legal action against the present vicious attack on Dr. Singer, I submit this short section from my book EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature for your information along with the advice of DeepThroat: Follow The Money.  The excerpt is found in Chapter 5, “Radicals” in the middle of page 183 forward for about 3 pages…..To Read More……

This appeared on October 24 (Australian time) on Jon Ray's Greenie Watch.  Fred Singer has decided not to sue over the grievous libel directed at him by Naomi Oreskes & Co. but he has suggested that his supporters reprint two articles from a few years back wherein both he and another writer have critiqued her work. What she says now is more shrill than in the past but her accusations are basically now old ones so the effort of composing a new reply would be superfluous.The two articles follow the backgrounder below:

Naomi Oreskes, Conspiracy Queen, By Norman Rogers June 7, 2011

 Naomi Oreskes is the environmentalist Noam Chomsky. She thinks that anyone who questions environmentalist doctrine is evil. Her crusade is to expose the presumed ulterior motives of the critics. According to Oreskes, if you question the dubious studies concerning secondhand tobacco smoke, you must be in the pay of tobacco companies. If you question global warming, you must be working for a fossil fuel company. If you question the DDT ban, you must part of a right wing conspiracy to weaken faith in government regulators.  Oreskes is the author of one of the silliest articles ever to appear in the journal Science. She claimed that she analyzed 928 peer-reviewed papers on global warming and 100% agreed with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning global warming. If you go to the website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) you can find hundreds of peer reviewed papers that disagree with the IPCC in one way or another…. Oreskes is a professor and an important administrator at the University of California. Like Chomsky, she cloaks her endless conspiracy theories in the machinery of scholarship. Her 343 page book has 64 pages of notes. A pig with lipstick is still a pig. Neither Oreskes nor her co-author have strong scientific educations and it shows......To Read More…..

 

Science and Smear Merchants, By S. Fred Singer, June 21, 2011

Professor Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California in San Diego, claims to be a science historian. One can readily demonstrate that she is neither a credible scientist nor a credible historian; the best evidence is right there in her recent book, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming," coauthored with Eric Conway. Her science is faulty; her historical procedures are thoroughly unprofessional. She is, however, an accomplished polemicist, who has found time for world lecture tours, promoting her book and her ideological views, while being paid by the citizens of California. Her book tries to smear four senior physicists -- of whom I am the only surviving one. I view it as my obligation to defend the reputations of my late colleagues and good friends against her libelous charges..... We have established so far that Oreskes is neither a scientist of any sort nor a careful professional historian. She is, however, a "pop-psychologist." It seems she has figured out what motivates the four senior physicists she libels in her book; it is "anti-communism." Really! This is not only stated explicitly but she also identifies them throughout as "Cold Warriors." ......To Read More......

 

Editor's Note:  One more thing.  I wish to address this issue that's constantly thrown up to Singer - and others who have spoken up about EPA's minipulation of science regarding second hand tobacco smoke.  The issue wasn't whether or not so these scientists who spoke up support smoking or tobacco companies.  The issue for them was the junk science the EPA used to reach it's conclusions.  There was serious concern was that if this was allowed to stand it would become a serious slippery slope to justify more regulations involving more things the environmental activists at EPA were against.  The tobacco companies sued, but the stakes in the suit were far more reaching than profits for tobacco companies or the rights of smokers.  As Glenn Lammi, chief counsel of the legal studies division at the Washington Legal Foundation, said that amounts to "moving the goal posts during the game." "It's a very definite slippery slope, and we think this is very dangerous for the whole community," he said, noting that a huge number of chemicals have been accused of being cancer-causing on evidence similar to that used in the second-hand smoke analysis. That concern has turned out to be justified.

One more, one more thing.  Fred Singer commented on these attacks against him over this by saying:

 

"I am certainly no expert on lung cancer or on epidemiology. My only 'offense' was to quote an official report by our Congressional Research Service and the extensive documentation by a federal judge that exposed the dubious way in which EPA cooked the data to come up with its claim of 3000 cancer deaths from SHS. I have never smoked and am on the advisory board of ACSH, a well-known anti-smoking organization. Personally, I hate SHS; but that does not affect my science". 

 

Here are two articles by Michael Fumento worth exploring that deal with this issue

• Is EPA Blowing Its Own Smoke? How Much Science Is Behind Its Tobacco Finding?
• EPA'sPseudoscience Goes Up in Smoke