<div>Note that the response below from the National Academy of Sciences from 1998 employs language that is less emphatic than the language now emerging from major scientific organizations world wide, regarding the seriousness of the problem of anthropogenic climate change, as I will reveal. </div>
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<div>Skepticism is necessary in the pursuit of science to provide a check and balance against bias and fraud in the presentation of evidence and theory. It appears that while those intent on disproving human impacts on global warming that demand radical action, find conspiracy, bias and irrationality in the arguments for this claim, they fail to consider that fraud, bias and junk science might also infect the efforts of the skeptics of anthropogenic climate change. A thoroughgoing and aggressive skeptic would, I am convinced, after surveying all the published peer reviewed work on climate science, not be able, with absolute certainty, to deny or affirm the position that human impacts are changing climate dramatically. Either position might be correct. It's a matter of probability, which the IPCC 2007 report has assessed at 90% plus that human impacts are seriously impacting global climate.</div>
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<div>This is an ongoing process, and as climate science has built its knowledge and theory base, the evidence has increased that human impacts are radically altering climate, as this statement from 2007, signed by representatives of major scientific organizations from around the globe, indicates. A rather far reaching and dark conspiracy to construct a scientific fantasy regarding human impacts on climate would be required to explain a statement such as this, if authentic, as a hoax:</div>
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<div><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8Statement_Energy_07_May.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8Statement_Energy_07_May.pdf</a></div>
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<div>Now the rejection, by the National Academy of Sciences, of the global warming petition organized by Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, who later became an embarrassment:</div>
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<div><a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04201998">http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=s04201998</a></div>
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<p>STATEMENT BY THE COUNCIL <br>OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES<br>REGARDING GLOBAL CHANGE PETITION<br><br><br>April 20, 1998<br><br></p></div><br><br>The Council of the <a href="http://www2.nas.edu/nas/"><font color="#000066">National Academy of Sciences</font></a> (NAS) is concerned about the confusion caused by a petition being circulated via a letter from a former president of this Academy. This petition criticizes the science underlying the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide emissions (the Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change), and it asks scientists to recommend rejection of this treaty by the U.S. Senate. The petition was mailed with an op-ed article from The Wall Street Journal and a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the <a href="http://www.pnas.org/"><i><font color="#000066">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</font></i></a>. The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</i> or in any other peer-reviewed journal.<br>
<br>The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy.<br><br>In particular, the <a href="http://www2.nas.edu/cosepup/"><font color="#000066">Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy</font></a> of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) conducted a major consensus study on this issue, entitled <a href="http://www2.nas.edu/climate-change/"><i><font color="#000066">Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming</font></i></a> (1991,1992). This analysis concluded that " ...even given the considerable uncertainties in our knowledge of the relevant phenomena, greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses. ... Investment in mitigation measures acts as insurance protection against the great uncertainties and the possibility of dramatic surprises." In addition, the <a href="http://www2.nas.edu/bsd/21c2.html"><font color="#000066">Committee on Global Change Research</font></a> of the National Research Council, the operating arm of the NAS and the NAE, will issue a major report later this spring on the research issues that can help to reduce the scientific uncertainties associated with global change phenomena, including climate change.<br>
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<div>Given the statement above from the National Academy of Sciences does not name Frederick Seitz, here is background information on Seitz, including information on the public rejection of Seitz's petition by the NAS, and the questionable scientific work on climate science associated:</div>
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<div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2">http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2</a></div>
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<div>The chairman of a group called the Science and Environmental Policy Project is Frederick Seitz. Seitz is a physicist who in the 1960s was president of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 1998, he wrote a document, known as the Oregon Petition, which has been cited by almost every journalist who claims that climate change is a myth. </div>
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<p>The document reads as follows: "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."</p>
<p>Anyone with a degree was entitled to sign it. It was attached to a letter written by Seitz, entitled Research Review of Global Warming Evidence. The lead author of the "review" that followed Seitz's letter is a Christian fundamentalist called Arthur B Robinson. He is not a professional climate scientist. It was co-published by Robinson's organisation - the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - and an outfit called the George C Marshall Institute, which has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. The other authors were Robinson's 22-year-old son and two employees of the George C Marshall Institute. The chairman of the George C Marshall Institute was Frederick Seitz.</p>
<p>The paper maintained that: "We are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. Our children will enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life than that with which we now are blessed. This is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the Industrial Revolution."</p>
<p>It was printed in the font and format of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: the journal of the organisation of which Seitz - as he had just reminded his correspondents - was once president.</p>
<p>Soon after the petition was published, the National Academy of Sciences released this statement: "The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal. The petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."</p>
<p>But it was too late. Seitz, the Oregon Institute and the George C Marshall Institute had already circulated tens of thousands of copies, and the petition had established a major presence on the internet. Some 17,000 graduates signed it, the majority of whom had no background in climate science. It has been repeatedly cited - by global-warming sceptics such as David Bellamy, Melanie Phillips and others - as a petition by climate scientists.</p>
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<p>For more background information and discussion of these issues, indicating that Arthur B. Robinson, of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, who was associated with Seitz (now deceased), as the article above discusses, is still promoting his anthropogenic climate change skeptic effort, widely debunked in the climate science community, the following discussion at Realclimate is frosty (no pun intended), with skeptics offering their commentary, among the 138 reader responses:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/oregon-institute-of-science-and-malarkey">http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/oregon-institute-of-science-and-malarkey</a></p>
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<p>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett</p></div>