In a May 19 Newsmax article, Phil Brennan joins Noel Sheppard as an unpaid (or maybe not) press agent for the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in promoting the group’s petition claiming, in Brennan’s words, “[a]n incredible 31,072 Americans with university degrees in science, including 9,021 Ph.D.s, have signed a petition that flatly denies Al Gore’s claims that human-caused global warming is a settled scientific fact.”
Brennan not only treats the OISM’s claims as an undisputed fact that doesn’t require verification, he fawns over the group, asserting that “These 31,072 scientists do not believe the world is flat, and they say there is no convincing scientific evidence that so-called greenhouse gasses are causing catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate” and calling petition organizer Frederick Seitz “a towering figure in the world of science.”
Like Sheppard, Brennan asks no questions about how the OISM is so certain all of these petition signers are “scientists” or even hold “
These 31,072 scientists do not believe the world is flat, and they say there is no convincing scientific evidence that so-called greenhouse gasses are causing catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate.” According to the group’s website, it appears to be based on self-reporting with no apparent verification mechanism.
Further, judging by a letter from Seitz on the group’s website, it appears that OISM gamed things a bit by sending out information packets to scientists containing only information attacking the idea of global warming. As SourceWatch points out, the 12-page article purporting to be a “review article about the human-caused global warming hypothesis” that had the appearance of a scientific paper but never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal at the time it was sent out. The paper prominently promoted Seitz’s ties to the National Academy of Sciences, forcing the NAS to publicly disassociate itself from it. Also, according to SourceWatch, OISM has refused to release information on the number of these mailings that were sent out.
WND jumped on the bandwagon as well with a May 19 article by Bob Unruh, who also showed no evidence of skepticism toward the OISM’s claims. Unruh asserted that “between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign” — even though Brennan reported that “In 2001, OISM circulated what was known as the Oregon Petition,” an effort that “gathered an astounding 17,800 signatures.”
The level of metaphysical certainty that Sheppard won’t report anything that dares to contradict the OISM may reasonably be extended to Brennan and Unruh as well.