I read a lot of books written by climate deniers. It’s useful to understand their arguments, half-truths, and lies. In one such book, there was a claim that 30,000 scientists had signed a petition claiming global warming wasn’t really happening. So, I went to the footnotes and checked the source. I found the Oregon Petition Project.
The Oregon Petition Project might be the most ridiculous organized challenge to global warming science I have ever witnessed. The website asks that signatories of the petition to self-identify themselves as being a scientist, and then sign the petition. So, anyone can sign the petition as long as they check the box claiming that they are a scientist. Better yet, you can give yourself a Ph.D if you’d like. Or say you are a climatologist.
The Oregon Petition website claims: “31,486 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs.” Among the signatories are: Perry Mason (TV detective), John Grisham (author of The Firm and The Client), and, my personal favorite, Dr. Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice, Ph.D).
In 2001, Scientific American wrote:
Many conservatives regard the “scientific consensus” about global warming as a media concoction. After all, didn’t 17,100 skeptical scientists sign a petition circulated in 1998 by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine?
Scientific American took a random 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.
For nearly 13 years, the Oregon Petition has collected unverified signatures. This would all be a big joke, except climate deniers use the Oregon Project as source material. When a book claims that 30,000 scientists have signed a petition, it sounds like legitimate proof. Like most of the deniers’ claims, other deniers will believe them without further inspection. As with the rest of global warming, the devil is in the details—or in this case, the footnotes.