Talk:Climate Change

Understanding how global warming science got scrambled in the last quarter of the 20th century is an interesting tale.

If you've been following the issue, you are already well aware of Exxon-Mobil (among many others) role supporting a web of think tanks Exxxon Secrets that delivered sounds like science attacks.

What this latest article reveals is that the disinformation strategies began during Reagan's tenure, with William Nierenberg playing a vital role.

This recent article led to digging slight deeper, with the following results:

Jason and the secret climate change war
The Sunday Times September 7, 2008

A shadowy scientific elite codenamed Jason warned the US about global warming 30 years ago but was sidelined for political convenience Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf

Shaw - Atlantic CoastWatch 18:25, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge
[http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/hsns.2008.38.1.109?journalCode=hsns UC Press]

Winter 2008, Vol. 38, No. 1, Pages 109–152 Posted online on February 21, 2008.

Naomi Oreskes ‌ University of California, San Diego, History Department and Science Studies Program, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093.

Erik M. Conway ‌ California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Ave., Pasadena, CA 91109.

Matthew Shindell ‌ University of California, San Diego, History Department and Science Studies Program, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093.

In recent decades, historians and sociologists of science have been largely concerned with the social construction of scientific knowledge. This paper examines an important historical episode in the social deconstruction of scientific knowledge. In the early 1980s, a consensus emerged among climate scientists that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels would lead to mean global warming of 2–3°C, probably by the mid-twenty-first century, and would have serious deleterious effects, including sea level rise of at least seventy centimeters. This consensus was challenged, however, by a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, chaired by physicist William A. (Bill) Nierenberg, whose 1983 report arguably launched the climate change "debate." Drawing on perspectives provided by two economists on his committee, Nierenberg reframed the question not as a matter of climate change per se, but as a matter of the human capacity to adapt to change when it came, a capacity, his report asserted, that was very great. Thus, while accepting the scientific conclusion that warming would occur, Nierenberg rejected the interpretation that it would be a problem. In later years, he would play a major role in political challenges to the scientific conclusions themselves. Reframing was Nierenberg's first step on the road to the deconstruction of scientific knowledge of climate change.

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Shaw - Atlantic CoastWatch 18:26, 9 September 2008 (UTC)