Profile: Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM)

Frederick Seitz, a former tobacco company scientist and former National Academy of Sciences president, writes and circulates a letter asking scientists to sign a petition calling upon the US government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was authored by an obscure group by the name of “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.” [Seitz, 1998] Seitz includes in his letter a report arguing that carbon dioxide emissions do not pose a threat to the global climate. The report—which is not peer reviewed—is formatted to look like an article from the esteemed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The organizers of the petition will claim that some 17,000 scientists signed the petition. But it is subsequently discovered that few credentialed climate scientists added their signature to the list. Moreover, the petition contains the names of several fictional characters. The magazine Scientific American analyzes a random sampling of the signers and concludes that only about one percent of the petition signatories claiming to have a Ph.D. in a climate-related field actually do. And in a highly unusual move, the National Academy of Sciences issues a statement disavowing Seitz’s petition and disassociating the academy from the PNAS-formatted paper. [Union of Concerned Scientists, 2007, pp. 16 ]

Entity Tags: Frederick Seitz, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine

Timeline Tags: Global Warming