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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2011
I am updating my review with this brief note to report important breaking news: Following my complaint to the Law Society of British Columbia, the American Bar Association, and other authorities, the leader of the Sky Dragon Slayer authors, John O'Sullivan, has begun to delete some of the bogus professional credentials he's claimed in his writings and online profiles and bios.
Tonight (11/9/2011), I received permission to publish the confidential summary sent to me by the Law Society of British Columbia, showing that Mr. O'Sullivan has been lying in his bios about working as a "legal consultant" for the Victoria law firm, Pearlman Lindholm and that he is an attorney representing fellow Slayer Tim Ball in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. I've uploaded the letter to my web site:
[...]
Mr. O'Sullivan has begun deleting some of the false claims from his bios. In addition, he says he was fired by Suite101.com, where he had contributed more than 60 articles over the past 2 years. Almost all of those articles have been deleted.
Over the next week, I will be uploading additional documentation to my web site that shows virtually none of the Sky Dragon Slayer leader's academic and professional credentials are real.
--------------------------------------
By attacking the scientific community for perpetrating the global warming "hoax," the authors of Slaying the Sky Dragon are doing what psychologists call "projection." For a clue why, one only has to examine the academic and professional credentials the authors claim.
Timothy Ball, for example, has repeatedly been caught padding his resume with false and misleading claims -- such as being the first Canadian to have earned a PhD in climatology and having been a professor at the University of Winnipeg for 32 years. His PhD was in geography and he was only a professor for 8 years.
Even more troubling is John O'Sullivan's claims of being a "highly successful litigator" in NY and federal courts and being "a member of the American Bar Association" -- which if true would mean he is licensed to practice law in the United States. According to the ABA's membership office, Mr. O'Sullivan is NOT a member. He recently joined as an associate, which anybody who wants to support the association can do. He is not licensed to practice law in NY (or possibly anywhere else). He claims to be an attorney "representing Dr. Tim Ball-v-Dr. Michael Mann in the Vancouver Supreme Court." There is no "Vancouver Supreme Court" and there is no case titled Ball v Mann. Ball is NOT suing Mann. Prof. Mann is suing Ball in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada. And, according to the British Columbia Law Society, Mr. O'Sullivan is not licensed to practice law in British Columbia. On top of all that, the humbug claims to have published "more than 150 major articles" around the world including the National Review and Forbes magazine when he has not.
The authors do not publish their global warming-denial theories and attacks in peer-review publications. Instead they self-publish, as they did in this book. They then try to persuade the scientifically-naive public the reason they self-publish is that there's a world-wide conspiracy of scientists who are trying to keep the truth from them. In doing so, they have earned a place in history's rogue's gallery of pseudoscientists and kooks who have argued that their failure to convince the science community is proof that their crackpottery must be true. Why else would there be a conspiracy to keep their ideas from being published?
The credibility of researchers and authorities in the scientific community -- as well as reporters who write about science -- depends on their unflinching commitment to telling the truth. Whenever they abandon that commitment, it's time to toss their work into the dustbin of history, alongside the blather of phrenologists, flat earthers, and eugenicists.
For a better understanding how a small cabal of fringe scientists and their mud-throwing accomplices can gain so much news attention and create so much confusion among the public, I highly recommend an astonishingly important new book written by Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and science studies at UC-San Diego, and science writer Erik M. Conway.
The book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, is a virtual genealogy of denialism.
Oreskes and Conway trace the origins of today's powerfully-effective disinformation machines back to three leading, government scientists, Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer, who as scientific advisers to the U.S. government pushed for ever-increasing stockpiles of nuclear weapons. When the nuclear arms race ended with the signing of the nuclear arms treaty, these "Cold War Warriors" found themselves, to put it succinctly, underemployed. So they turned their talents and powerful connections in Washington, Wall St., and the major news media to set up a highly effective disinformation machine to serve corporations by attacking scientists and their research in order to block any regulatory action that would lower the profits of their corporate allies. The quality, safety, or social worth of the products being sold was irrelevant. What counted to them was the uncompromising defense of liberty and free enterprise.
These were the Fathers of False Doubt who helped to establish right-wing "think tanks" through which corporations could launder money to support a small number of scientists, who churn out "data" and editorials promoting the interests of their corporate customers. First it was in defense of the tobacco industry and the Strategic Defense ("Star Wars") Initiative. Then they worked to block restrictions on acid rain pollution, ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons emissions, environmentally deadly DDT, and passive smoking -- which was sickening and killing tens of thousands of men, women, children, and babies every year.
They also employed journalists, often under the table, to help sow the seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. These hired guns greatly helped to cast aspersions on the science and on the scientists who produced it and to fool the public into believing there is no scientific consensus.
One of their first customers was the tobacco industry and one of the fake front groups created to turn public opinion against calls for government regulation based on science consensus was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). The industry-funded front group sought to link fear over passive smoking with other popular concerns, including damage to the environment from human activities, and to relabel scientific consensus as "junk science" in the public's mind.
Indeed, one poignant tobacco industry document that came to light after years of litigation clearly identifies what the industry-funded front groups were really selling. As Clive Hamilton reported in "Requiem for a Species":
"As one tobacco company memo noted: 'Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.' As the 1990s progressed ... TASSC began receiving donations from Exxon (among other oil companies) and its 'junk science' website began to carry material attacking climate change science."
In his review of Merchants of Doubt, Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University, says:
"There can be no science without doubt: brute dogma leaves no room for inquiry. But over the last half century, a tiny minority of scientists have wielded doubt as a political weapon to halt what they did not want said: that tobacco kills or that the climate is warming because of what we humans are doing. `Doubt is our product' read a tobacco memo--and indeed, millions of dollars have gone into creating the impression of scientific controversy where there has not been one. This book about the politics of doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway explores the long, connected, and intentional obfuscation of science by manufactured controversy. It is clear, scientifically responsible, and historically compelling--it is an essential and passionate book about our times."
Today, thanks to the Internet, the merchant of doubt disinformation machine is now able to recruit armies of barely literate no-nothings from libertarian and other anti-government groups to set up "blogs," self-publish "books," and pose as legal and scientific experts. They are flooding the Internet making it difficult for the public to search for and read information that passed inspection by the scientific community. Slaying the Dragon, is a perfect example of such work produced for the sole purpose of confusing the public with scientific-sounding mumble-jumbo like this babble from co-author Claes Johnson:
"A cold body can heat up by eating/absorbing high-frequency high temperature coherent waves in a catabolic process of destruction of coherent waves into incoherent heat energy. A warm body cannot heat up by eating/absorbing low-frequency low-temperature waves, because catabolism involves destruction of structure. Anabolism builds structure, but a blackbody is only capable of destructive catabolism (the metabolism of a living cell consists of destructive catabolism and constructive anabolism)."
Stripping away the babble, Johnson is basically arguing that you can't heat something up to a high temperature by bombarding it with low-frequency/low energy radiation. Anyone who has made the mistake of microwaving a food container with metal foil attached has learned what nonsense this is. Microwave ovens heat food with electromagnetic waves in the range used by radar. These wavelengths are more energetic than radio waves but far, far less energetic than visible light waves - or even invisible infrared light. Yet, if you accidentally microwave a bit of metal foil in your oven, in a few seconds you'll see the foil glow white hot - giving off light rays hundreds of times more energetic than the microwave rays heating it.
Not surprisingly, readers who are able to get past two chapters of Johnson's math-strewn mush will find no relief in the rest of Slaying the Sky Dragon. If they'd like to get a better understanding of the science involved in greenhouse warming, they should check this wonderful animation video of a carbon dioxide molecule intercepting infrared radiation emitted by the sun-warmed ground and re-emitting it back to the earth's surface: [...]
Even more wonderful was the Mythbusters television program's test of greenhouse warming. The myth they busted this time is the myth perpetrated by the fossil-fuel industry-financed global warming deniers. The Mythbusters set up three large transparent boxes -- one filled with air plus carbon dioxide at current atmospheric levels, one filled with air with methane at current levels, and one with air without either of those greenhouse gasses. Everything else was identical. After 4 hours, the boxes with C02 and with methane were substantially hotter than the box with air free of greenhouse gasses. [...]
Tonight (11/9/2011), I received permission to publish the confidential summary sent to me by the Law Society of British Columbia, showing that Mr. O'Sullivan has been lying in his bios about working as a "legal consultant" for the Victoria law firm, Pearlman Lindholm and that he is an attorney representing fellow Slayer Tim Ball in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. I've uploaded the letter to my web site:
[...]
Mr. O'Sullivan has begun deleting some of the false claims from his bios. In addition, he says he was fired by Suite101.com, where he had contributed more than 60 articles over the past 2 years. Almost all of those articles have been deleted.
Over the next week, I will be uploading additional documentation to my web site that shows virtually none of the Sky Dragon Slayer leader's academic and professional credentials are real.
--------------------------------------
By attacking the scientific community for perpetrating the global warming "hoax," the authors of Slaying the Sky Dragon are doing what psychologists call "projection." For a clue why, one only has to examine the academic and professional credentials the authors claim.
Timothy Ball, for example, has repeatedly been caught padding his resume with false and misleading claims -- such as being the first Canadian to have earned a PhD in climatology and having been a professor at the University of Winnipeg for 32 years. His PhD was in geography and he was only a professor for 8 years.
Even more troubling is John O'Sullivan's claims of being a "highly successful litigator" in NY and federal courts and being "a member of the American Bar Association" -- which if true would mean he is licensed to practice law in the United States. According to the ABA's membership office, Mr. O'Sullivan is NOT a member. He recently joined as an associate, which anybody who wants to support the association can do. He is not licensed to practice law in NY (or possibly anywhere else). He claims to be an attorney "representing Dr. Tim Ball-v-Dr. Michael Mann in the Vancouver Supreme Court." There is no "Vancouver Supreme Court" and there is no case titled Ball v Mann. Ball is NOT suing Mann. Prof. Mann is suing Ball in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada. And, according to the British Columbia Law Society, Mr. O'Sullivan is not licensed to practice law in British Columbia. On top of all that, the humbug claims to have published "more than 150 major articles" around the world including the National Review and Forbes magazine when he has not.
The authors do not publish their global warming-denial theories and attacks in peer-review publications. Instead they self-publish, as they did in this book. They then try to persuade the scientifically-naive public the reason they self-publish is that there's a world-wide conspiracy of scientists who are trying to keep the truth from them. In doing so, they have earned a place in history's rogue's gallery of pseudoscientists and kooks who have argued that their failure to convince the science community is proof that their crackpottery must be true. Why else would there be a conspiracy to keep their ideas from being published?
The credibility of researchers and authorities in the scientific community -- as well as reporters who write about science -- depends on their unflinching commitment to telling the truth. Whenever they abandon that commitment, it's time to toss their work into the dustbin of history, alongside the blather of phrenologists, flat earthers, and eugenicists.
For a better understanding how a small cabal of fringe scientists and their mud-throwing accomplices can gain so much news attention and create so much confusion among the public, I highly recommend an astonishingly important new book written by Naomi Oreskes, professor of history and science studies at UC-San Diego, and science writer Erik M. Conway.
The book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, is a virtual genealogy of denialism.
Oreskes and Conway trace the origins of today's powerfully-effective disinformation machines back to three leading, government scientists, Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer, who as scientific advisers to the U.S. government pushed for ever-increasing stockpiles of nuclear weapons. When the nuclear arms race ended with the signing of the nuclear arms treaty, these "Cold War Warriors" found themselves, to put it succinctly, underemployed. So they turned their talents and powerful connections in Washington, Wall St., and the major news media to set up a highly effective disinformation machine to serve corporations by attacking scientists and their research in order to block any regulatory action that would lower the profits of their corporate allies. The quality, safety, or social worth of the products being sold was irrelevant. What counted to them was the uncompromising defense of liberty and free enterprise.
These were the Fathers of False Doubt who helped to establish right-wing "think tanks" through which corporations could launder money to support a small number of scientists, who churn out "data" and editorials promoting the interests of their corporate customers. First it was in defense of the tobacco industry and the Strategic Defense ("Star Wars") Initiative. Then they worked to block restrictions on acid rain pollution, ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons emissions, environmentally deadly DDT, and passive smoking -- which was sickening and killing tens of thousands of men, women, children, and babies every year.
They also employed journalists, often under the table, to help sow the seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. These hired guns greatly helped to cast aspersions on the science and on the scientists who produced it and to fool the public into believing there is no scientific consensus.
One of their first customers was the tobacco industry and one of the fake front groups created to turn public opinion against calls for government regulation based on science consensus was the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC). The industry-funded front group sought to link fear over passive smoking with other popular concerns, including damage to the environment from human activities, and to relabel scientific consensus as "junk science" in the public's mind.
Indeed, one poignant tobacco industry document that came to light after years of litigation clearly identifies what the industry-funded front groups were really selling. As Clive Hamilton reported in "Requiem for a Species":
"As one tobacco company memo noted: 'Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.' As the 1990s progressed ... TASSC began receiving donations from Exxon (among other oil companies) and its 'junk science' website began to carry material attacking climate change science."
In his review of Merchants of Doubt, Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University, says:
"There can be no science without doubt: brute dogma leaves no room for inquiry. But over the last half century, a tiny minority of scientists have wielded doubt as a political weapon to halt what they did not want said: that tobacco kills or that the climate is warming because of what we humans are doing. `Doubt is our product' read a tobacco memo--and indeed, millions of dollars have gone into creating the impression of scientific controversy where there has not been one. This book about the politics of doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway explores the long, connected, and intentional obfuscation of science by manufactured controversy. It is clear, scientifically responsible, and historically compelling--it is an essential and passionate book about our times."
Today, thanks to the Internet, the merchant of doubt disinformation machine is now able to recruit armies of barely literate no-nothings from libertarian and other anti-government groups to set up "blogs," self-publish "books," and pose as legal and scientific experts. They are flooding the Internet making it difficult for the public to search for and read information that passed inspection by the scientific community. Slaying the Dragon, is a perfect example of such work produced for the sole purpose of confusing the public with scientific-sounding mumble-jumbo like this babble from co-author Claes Johnson:
"A cold body can heat up by eating/absorbing high-frequency high temperature coherent waves in a catabolic process of destruction of coherent waves into incoherent heat energy. A warm body cannot heat up by eating/absorbing low-frequency low-temperature waves, because catabolism involves destruction of structure. Anabolism builds structure, but a blackbody is only capable of destructive catabolism (the metabolism of a living cell consists of destructive catabolism and constructive anabolism)."
Stripping away the babble, Johnson is basically arguing that you can't heat something up to a high temperature by bombarding it with low-frequency/low energy radiation. Anyone who has made the mistake of microwaving a food container with metal foil attached has learned what nonsense this is. Microwave ovens heat food with electromagnetic waves in the range used by radar. These wavelengths are more energetic than radio waves but far, far less energetic than visible light waves - or even invisible infrared light. Yet, if you accidentally microwave a bit of metal foil in your oven, in a few seconds you'll see the foil glow white hot - giving off light rays hundreds of times more energetic than the microwave rays heating it.
Not surprisingly, readers who are able to get past two chapters of Johnson's math-strewn mush will find no relief in the rest of Slaying the Sky Dragon. If they'd like to get a better understanding of the science involved in greenhouse warming, they should check this wonderful animation video of a carbon dioxide molecule intercepting infrared radiation emitted by the sun-warmed ground and re-emitting it back to the earth's surface: [...]
Even more wonderful was the Mythbusters television program's test of greenhouse warming. The myth they busted this time is the myth perpetrated by the fossil-fuel industry-financed global warming deniers. The Mythbusters set up three large transparent boxes -- one filled with air plus carbon dioxide at current atmospheric levels, one filled with air with methane at current levels, and one with air without either of those greenhouse gasses. Everything else was identical. After 4 hours, the boxes with C02 and with methane were substantially hotter than the box with air free of greenhouse gasses. [...]
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