Guest post by Russell Cook, blogger at GelbspanFiles.com

We all deplore Oreskes for the ridiculousness of her 100% scientific consensus paper and despise her “Merchants of Doubt” book for its unsupportable insinuation that skeptic climate scientists are corrupt. But if I may humbly suggest it, she has one more huge and basically completely overlooked problem: As she tells it, the sequence of events which led her to write “Merchants of Doubt” with co-author Erik Conway literally cannot have happened the way she claims it did. Her narrative actually falls apart in the same pathetic manner seen in old TV detective shows, where the supposedly sophisticated murderer is exposed via an elemental mistake made in the effort to cover up the crime.

So the next critical question is, why would Oreskes seemingly need to invent a cover story about how she was inspired to write the book?

Excerpt:

Naomi Oreskes has on one occasion shortened her narrative about her discovery of corrupted skeptic climate scientist ‘doubt merchants’ to a single sentence:

After the 2004 paper came out, I started getting attacked, and, well, one thing led to another and I ended up putting aside oceanography and writing, with Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

The “paper” she refers to is her December 3, 2004 Science journal paper concerning a 100% consensus of scientific papers over the matter of human-induced global warming.Another interview of Oreskes expands the story, with some short details about her “Merchants of Doubt” book co-author:

We wrote the book because we stumbled across the story, we didn’t set out to write a story about climate change denial.

Oreskes’ says she was attacked for her December 2004 Science paper after it was published, and at a subsequent conference where she mentioned the name of one of her attackers, Erik Conway approached her during its Q&A session to detail a similar prior attack.

But the conference took place in July 2004.

There’s no graceful recovery here. If the truth is that Erik Conway and/or others told Oreskes about ‘corrupted skeptic scientists’ such as Dr S Fred Singer in mid-summer 2004, then she simply looks like she was waiting for an excuse to launch the kind of personal attack she despises. If she was informed about ‘corrupted’ skeptics after the publication of her paper, her narrative about the Germany conference and Conway’s “tip” looks like a cover story for where, when, and how she actually got the information. If she backpedals about being mixed up on the sequence of events, it’ll undermine a recent announcement that she “will be awarded the sixth annual Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication.”

Continue reading at GelbspanFiles: “To be Credible, you must Keep Your Story Straight, Pt 2: Oreskes’ timeline problem“

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