Frederick Seitz
From Logical Science



        Frederick Seitz  was born on  July 4, 1911 which makes him about a hundred years old.  Seitz is an accomplished scienctist.  He graduated from Princeton University in 1934 and served as president of the National Academy of sciences from 1962 to 1969.  In 1979 Seitz began working as a paid permanent consultant for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.  Ten years later in 1989, the CEO of R.J. Reynolds, William Hobbs, concluded that "Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice." [2]     Dr. Seitz was 78 years old at the time.  Five years later, Seitz authored a report published by the industry funded George C. Marshall Institute, of which he was a founder and chairman of the board, entitled "Global warming and ozone hole controversies. A challenge to scientific judgment."  In a broader discussion of environmental toxins, he concluded "there is no good scientific evidence that passive inhalation is truly dangerous under normal circumstances." [3][4]   Seitz is also critical of the view that CFCs are damaging to the ozone layer [5].  He has actively attacked the mainstream stance on CFC even though the mechanism in which CFC's destroy ozone is well documented and CFC's have been banned nearly world wide.  Seitz continues to question whether global warming is was being caused by fossil fuel use. [4].   Seitz also signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration.  The revised 2005 version of the Leipzig declaration claims "many climate specialists now agree that actual observations from weather satellites show no global warming whatsoever" which is at odds with data collected from NASA, NOAA. the Met Office and every major weather/climate organization on the planet.  In the 70s and 80s Seitz was responsible for organising $45 million dollars worth of health studies paid by tobacco companies.  These studies were referenced  in tobacco advertisements in newspapers and magazines which claimed that the evidence on the dangers of smoking was mixed.1  Seitz recieves annual six figure sums from front organisations of Exxon Mobil and features extensively in corporate memoes as a friendly scientist who can "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact." he even published a petition saying that global warming wasn't happening with what was flaunted as 17,000 signature list of scientists claiming global warming was nothing to worry about.  Turns out that petition is rather controversial for a wide variety of reasons.  A synopsis of the situation can be read below:

The Oregon Deception Project

The "Oregan Deception Project", as Professor Eli Rabet calls it, was an effort to get scientists to sign document that claimed human driven climate change wasn't going to be "catastrophic".  This document had a format that was very similar to the National Academy of Sciences.  In an open letter Seitz, the former president of the NAS, invited scientists to sign the OISM's global warming petition.  This petition asked it's signatories whether or not they believed:

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate."
A review paper from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a privately funded think tank that does not disclose it's funding, was attached to the petition that appeared to be from the National Academy of Sciences.  This review claimed that temperatures were falling despite the fact that CO2 levels were increasing:
"The empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth’s temperature shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly."
The data they used to support this claim was from satellites.  The problem with satellites is that their orbit around the earth is not perfectly stable.  Over time the satellites fall toward the earth.  This orbital decay, among other things, caused sensor problems that needed to be corrected for.  Once the corrections were in place the satellites did in fact show warming.  The report did not address this issue.  The report also dismissed the much more extensive surface data because it had “substantial uncertainties”.  The only uncertainty mentioned is the urban heat island effect and the report fails to mention that NASA's Goddard Institute corrects for this effect.  Typically papers that refer themselves as a research review are called reviews because they cover all of the published research relevant to the topic at hand.  Many scientist depend on reviews to bring them up to speed on the current state of the science in a particular field.  Even though this report was called a review, it left out a lot of relevant research.

The petition was also worded to give the impression and even and formated in a way that looked like an official statement from the national National Academy of Sciences.  So much so the National Academy of Sciences felt the need to release the following 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."
Other scientists also complained about how the petition presented itself:
"The mailing is clearly designed to be deceptive by giving people the impression that the article, which is full of half-truths, is a reprint and has passed peer review,” complained Raymond Pierrehumbert, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Chicago. NAS foreign secretary F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist, said researchers “are wondering if someone is trying to hoodwink them.”
Today, Seitz admits that "it was stupid" for the Oregon activists to copy the National Academy of Science's format.

The Mass Mailings to Amnestic, Duplicate, or Anonymous Signatories

The petition, which gave many people the impression it was an official NAS document and had an incomplete and selective review paper attached to it, was e-mailed to a large quantity of people.  
“Virtually every scientist in every field got it,” says Robert Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and spokesman for the American Physical Society. “That’s a big mailing.” According to the National Science Foundation, there are more than half a million science or engineering PhDs in the United States, and ten million individuals with first degrees in science or engineering.  Arthur Robinson, president of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the small, privately funded institute that circulated the petition, declines to say how many copies were sent out. “We’re not willing to have our opponents attack us with that number, and say that the rest of the recipients are against us,” he says, adding that the response was “outstanding” for a direct mail shot."
Dr. Steve Reuland responded to this information:
In other words, they won’t release their petition methodology for fear that it would diminish the petition’s effectiveness as a propaganda tool. Pathetic.
But other people did try to analyze Seitz's methodoloy.  In 2005, Scientific American reported: [8]
"Scientific American took a sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition —- one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages. Crudely extrapolating, the petition supporters include a core of about 200 climate researchers – a respectable number, though rather a small fraction of the climatological community."

Just for reference there are 20,000 members of the American Geophysical Union and an unknown number of climate researchers world wide.  200 climate researchers is only 1% of the AGU.  In 2005 a newspaper reported::[9]

"In less than 10 minutes of casual scanning, I found duplicate names (Did two Joe R. Eaglemans and two David Tompkins sign the petition, or were some individuals counted twice?), single names without even an initial (Biolchini), corporate names (Graybeal & Sayre, Inc. How does a business sign a petition?), and an apparently phony single name (Redwine, Ph.D.). These examples underscore a major weakness of the list: there is no way to check the authenticity of the names. Names are given, but no identifying information (e.g., institutional affiliation) is provided. Why the lack of transparency?"

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