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Over 30,000 Scientists Declare Climate Change a Hoax? A claim has been floating around since 1998 that thousands of scientists have rejected the concept of climate change, ever since since a self-described research group by the name of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine solicited signatures for a petition (known now as the Oregon Petition) to have the United States reject the Kyoto Protocol to set internationally binding emission reduction targets. This petition reads, in its entirety: According to petitionproject.org, the official website of the effort, the petition bore 31,487 signatures as of October 2016: These numbers are provided with little means of verification (an issue discussed in more detail below), but the most important takeaway is that the only requirement to sign this petition is an undergraduate degree in any science or science-related field. Here is how the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine describes their requirements: It is therefore misleading for the signatories to be considered climate scientists or even top researchers in their field, as some suggest. In fact, based on the group's own numbers, only 12% of the signers have degrees (of any kind) in earth, environmental, or atmospheric science. Further, the petition and its creators are not neutral parties, and the major entities supporting it can easily be described as politically motivated. The petition was organized by Arthur B. Robinson, a conservative politician who founded the aforementioned Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and who holds a PhD in biochemistry from the University of San Diego. Along with the petition itself, the document was sent out with a cover letter written by Frederick Seitz, a National Medal of Science Medal winner and a former president of the National Academy of Science who later went on to be an influential yet controversial tobacco lobbyist and who founded the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank that has since morphed into one more focused on the climate, with a long history of promoting environmental skepticism. In 1994, Seitz authored a paper (external download archived by GreenPeace USA here) titled Global warming and ozone hole controversies: A challenge to scientific judgment, which simultaneously made the two demonstrably false claims that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were not a threat to the ozone layer, and that second-hand tobacco smoke inhalation was not a threat to health. Seitz’s participation in the circulation of this petition raises another line of issues for the petition — that its original iteration intentionally misled its signers into thinking it was a document officially supported by the National Academy of Sciences. Seitz, a former president of the Academy, used its official letterhead to draft a letter of support and manufactured a non-peer-reviewed study formatted to look as if it were published in an Academy journal, as reported by the Washington Post in 2006: In addition to the political motivations behind the Oregon Petition and the deceptive ways in which those motivations were masked, there is also the problem of accountability regarding the validity of the names that appear on the list. In 2001, Scientific American attempted to verify a random sample of 30 names on the list who claimed to have a Ph.D. in climate science: Critics of the lax accountability about those who allegedly signed the document were even able at one point to add a variety of humorously fictional or otherwise absurd names, as University of Colorado researcher Myanna Lahsen discussed in a 2005 paper published in the journal Science, Technology, and Human Values: Aside from the potential political motivations behind the petition, the misleading tactics employed to gather signatures, and the lack of verification regarding those signatures, the fact remains that the petition is open to anyone with an undergraduate background in science to sign, and a vast majority of the signatories are not climate scientists.
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