A Note About Roger Revelle, Justin Lancaster and Fred Singer

As somebunnies may remember, S. Fred Singer is quite proud of an article in the magazine of the Cosmos Club (a club for movers and shakers in DC) written by Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr that had Roger Revelle's name on it. How Revelle's name got there beyond the fact that Fred Singer put it there is a matter of interest that is explained by Justin Lancaster, Revelle's student and last assistant. Lancaster, to put it softly, was quite skeptical that Revelle was in any meaningful sense an author of that paper and said so.  Singer SLAPPED and got a statement from Lancaster as a settlement

Eli has written about this where you can get up to speed on the whole thing. Of course since Al Gore learned about climate change from Roger Revelle, this has become a stick to beat Gore with. 

Today, Justin Lancaster left a note at Rabett Run, that needs to be repeated
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I would have skipped weighing in further on this topic, except (1) it seems to never recede into history (it's surfacing in Climate Change discussions on Facebook in September 2014), and (2) my dear cousin Walter, for whom I hold sincere respect, clearly needs an update (I wish he'd contacted me directly before adding to this slog).

So let's be clear:

1. Fred Singer is the most unethical scientist, in my opinion, that I have ever met. I said so in the early 1990s, publicly, and I am still confident in the truth of this statement.

2. The worst decision I ever made in my life was to provide a retraction of my statements in the early 1990s about Singer's nastiness. The retraction was coerced. It was required to stop the SLAPP suit brought against me by a conservative think-tank in Washington that wanted to keep Fred Singer in action.

3. I was 95% certain that I would win my case in court. But my wife was terrified. In fact, she was terrorized by this lawsuit. We had three young children. I was a Harvard postdoc now needing to find a next academic posting. She was a graduate student at Harvard. My wife was worried about that 5% risk. She was scared we could lose our house and all our assets. We new it would be a 2-3 year ordeal that would drain our resources and attention. The folks at NRDC and EDF chose to not step in; we couldn't afford the $100k+ that the lawsuit would cost. Defending for a year took an enormous amount of my time. That is the meanness and force of a SLAPP suit.

4. Singer distorted my words in his legal complaint and then even more so in his publication in the Hoover Institution volume. Singer flat out lied in that text about my role (and his wife, Candace Crandall contributed to this smear campaign). This chapter is not a sworn statement.

5. My testimony about what happened is sworn under oath, under penalty of perjury. I am an officer of the courts of VT, MA, CA and CO.

6. Everything I said was true. In my negotiations with the 8 lawyers from two national law firms, in which we scripted the retraction, I refused to state that anything I said was untrue. I never admitted to lying, because I never lied.

7. In the coerced retraction, I allowed that my remarks were "unwarranted," because my mother had commonly used that word when conveying to us that we need not have behaved the way we did. I realized that I could have proceeded more carefully and privately with Singer (which I initially had tried to do) and that I need not have made the issue so public. I also realized that because I was not in Revelle's office during the key session between Singer and Revelle, that I could have let Christa's affidavit and the galley proofs themselves speak the story. (Of course that was already hindsight, as Singer would not provide the galley proofs; I only got them from the Scripps archivist the night before my deposition of Singer).

8. I regret allowing the word "unwarranted" in the coerced retraction, because in fact my charges were fully justified when made. It was a three-hour negotiation, because Singer's lawyers wanted me to admit that I made false statements, but I refused. When my lawyer and I stood to quit the negotiation, saying "We'll be happy to see you in court in MA," there was a flurry of "Wait, wait," across the table. Eventually we settled on the word "unwarranted."

9. I never worked for Al Gore, I was not in any way involved in his political campaign and I had nothing to do with Gore's office other than getting a clip from him for a film on Roger's career that was shown in a film at the Rio Earth Summit. My entire focus was on a wrong being done to Roger Revelle's career and Roger's concern for the Earth environment and for humanity.

10. I had formed, in 1987, a non-profit named: "Environmental Science & Policy Institute (ESPI)," ESPI was the only non-governmental organization presenting scientific results at the 2nd World Climate Conference in Geneva, where I served on the Synthesis Committee. ESPI was an NGO registered at the Earth Summit. I was speaking widely at Dartmouth, Harvard, UC and other fora on the science and policy related to the carbon dioxide problem. I served on the NOAA Citizen Advisory Panel and was the first Chair of the Global Change Working Group within the Society for Risk Assessment.

11. Fred Singer started his "Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)" in the early 1990s, practically in direct opposition to ESPI.

12. Singer was associated with an energy-industry-backed cabal, comprising of at least Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling, and loosely coupling Hugh Ellsaesser, Richard Lindzen and some others. I was known to most or all of these folks through face-to-face encounters academically and in governmental meetings.

13. I had hoped that, after having been found with his hand in the cookie jar, Singer would have the good grace to leave this sordid issue in the historical dust bin. Giving him the retraction and apology I hoped would be sufficient. But it was not and he did not put it down. Instead he raised this issue prominently in the public eye, publishing my retraction in newspapers and blatantly misrepresenting the history in the Hoover chapter. And his cabal echoed it all widely to their key blogging network. And that has continued to cascade through many blogging layers, for now more than twenty years!

14. In 2006, when Gore has published his "An Inconvenient Truth," this all erupted again, and I determined that enough is enough. I publicly and unequivocally repudiated and retracted the earlier "Retraction" that had been coerced, and I published the court documents and supporting affidavits and documentation so that people could read it for themselves.

15. The documentation is available online at Cosmos Myth

16. Singer and his supporters did not respond to my 2006 publication because they have no case. AGW is an issue of public concern. Singer is a celebrity in this field, perhaps the leading contrarian, skeptic, denier at the head of the pack for almost two decades. There are no objective canons of ethics in science (unlike for lawyers), so my charge of unethical can only mean "in my opinion" and "based on my standards." Not only do I believe my statements to be true, I have substantial evidence backing them up. And, we now have anti-SLAPP legislation in Massachusetts.

17. This entire episode has been investigated by journalists, described in chapters in two books, become the subject of a play and other media. Despite the bloggers who seem to continue to enjoy piling on the smear while ignoring the factual evidence, I'm comfortable with the outcome of the former more careful and thorough inspections.
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Eli is grateful for Justin Lancaster's courage and setting the record straight.