re: #30 Charles

And there’s no doubt in my mind that this is a completely bogus lawsuit, filed by people who are in the pocket of the energy industry.

You may be interested in Eli’s recent post on this:

Venn diagrams

Merchants of Doubt is a forthcoming (May 25, 2010, mark your calendars little girls and guys) book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway about:

how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda.

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is “not settled” denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. “Doubt is our product,” wrote one tobacco executive. These “experts” supplied it.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

Eli prefers his way of putting it, there is a real thin bench over there at denial central, but it can’t be said often enough that their ability to inject doubt and dirt into the public discourse has killed an awful lot of people (tobacco), is killing more today (HIV denial, refusal to provide condom, etc.) and threatens to wipe out a lot more (climate change denial).

As far as Eli knows the denialists have never been on the side of an issue that was not harmful to health, wealth and happiness alone or in the various possible permutations. Climate change is the grand challenge, all three in one go. Several of that loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers have made a rather good career of this (more examples available). […]

As Eli points out, it is not just corporate interests working alone, but a small group of consistently contrarian scientists (mostly physicists, which is why he mentions the APS) who work with the corporate interests to accomplish the goals. This group recently petitioned the APS to get the APS to change its statement on AGW. They didn’t really succeed, though they did get a little bit of what they wanted indirectly.

Some of the contrarians’ motivations are obviously religiously based (Tipler, Spencer), while others are more political/ideological (Jastrow, Happer), and few are probably in it only for the money (Singer.)

The oil/coal axis (Inhofe, Vittner, and to a lesser extent senators from Appalachia) long figured out how to make use of the contrarians to best effect.

Anyway, be on the lookout for Oreskes’ new book.