Letter of the day: Zombies of science

Re: Jim Komenda's letter Science still unsettled (Feb. 5).

I thought the Oregon Petition and OISM had been exposed as unscientific and unreliable, but like zombies they rise from the dead to infect other unsuspecting victims. Komenda seems to have fallen prey to them.

First, Climategate: As noted in a review from the Pew Centre for Global Climate Change, "the vast majority of the 1000+ emails are routine and unsuspicious. Perhaps one or two dozen of the email exchanges give the appearance of controversy, though no unethical behaviour has yet been documented." The University of East Anglia is, quite properly, investigating. So much for the claim of "disappearance of mounds of raw-weather station data" -- all of which remains in the hands of the institutions that generated it in the first place.

Komenda refers to "the European Foundation, a scientific body." The European Foundation is not a scientific body. It is a political pressure group opposed to the European Union. Komenda may have found a paper by Jim McConalogue of the EF entitled Climate Change Is Natural: 100 Reasons Why. This is in no way a scientific or even logical argument, but a collection of statements and assertions, many of them rehashed arguments from the same tired stable of professional denialists. It has been thoroughly dissected by New Scientist magazine, among others.

The third piece of misinformation is the justly infamous "Oregon Petition" and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM).

The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is, basically, a small family-owned business operating on a farm in rural Oregon. Its main business, apart from the Petition Project, is selling home-schooling kits and material on civil defence. It lists eight faculty members. Two are deceased. One lives and works in Boise, Idaho and another in Tucson, Ariz. One appears to be based in California. Another two are the sons of the founder and owner of the business. It holds no classes and does no research.

The "Oregon Petition" has been circulating since 1998 and is not worth the paper it is written on. To take just one point: Komenda is very impressed that "more than 31,000 scientists, including 9,021 PhDs, signed a petition." There is, however, no way to verify who these individuals are, how many of them are active researchers, or how many simply have an undergraduate degree. Anyone who self-declared a degree at any level in virtually any scientific field was considered qualified to sign. In any case, it is still a mere 1.2 per cent of an estimated 2,685,000 scientists in the United States alone, and just .005 per cent of the approximately 63 million scientists worldwide.

I also note that scientific questions are not decided by petitions or surveys or opinion polls, but by research, such as the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study undertaken by researchers on the CCGS Amundsen as part of the International Polar Year.

I wonder if anyone at the Free Press noticed the irony of publishing Komenda's letter the day before the article Arctic ice melt alarms scientists (Feb. 6) reporting the results of that study?

Ardythe Basham

Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 13, 2010 A15