Global Warming: Fear and Fickle in Rapid City

Perry Rahn from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology wrote a letter to the editor of the Rapid City Journal which was printed in Sunday’s newspaper.  In that letter, Rahn implied that a petition cited in a previous letter to the editor from District 35 Rep. Don Kopp was fraudulent.  Rahn said when he checked the website, his name was on the petition.

“But I never signed this form,” Rahn declared in his letter to the editor.

Rahn also mentioned that Dale Rognlie, who is now deceased, was listed on the website (Rognlie has been dead for eight years but the petition has been around for 11 years).

But over the past few days, it seems Kevin Woster at the Rapid City Journal has done what we rarely see from the “mainstream” media these days: investigative journalism.

Woster talked to Dr. Art Robinson, one of the key scientists who compiled the petition of 31,486 American scientists who disagree with the theory of anthropogenic global warming.  Robinson has a PhD in chemistry from CalTech.

From today’s Rapid City Journal:

Most petition signatures were obtained by first-class mail and from individual scientists identified to be solicited for the list, he said.

“You take a list of people with scientific degrees and mail the petition card to their known addresses,” he said. “The only way to be wrong on that is if someone was receiving first-class mail at that address, forging a signature and sending it back by first-class mail.”

Some signatures come on the petitions available through the project’s Web site at www.petitionproject.org. But those are verified by volunteers who contact those who sign directly, Robinson said.

I contacted Dr. Robinson myself on Monday to discuss this and was told essentially the same thing Robinson says in the paper today.  Typically, a scientist who had not already received a petition form but who wants to put their name on the petition downloads the form from the website.  They fill in the appropriate information, sign it and mail it in.  The Petition Project then mails a confirmation to the signer.

The Oregon Petition has been out there since 1998, and was updated again in 2007, so it is definitely not something that sprang up overnight.  The effort is something Robinson and some other like-minded scientists organized themselves, with little funding other than their own and some non-tax-exempt donations which have been made by private individuals.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Rapid City Journal last night based on my conversation with Robinson and sent it off this morning before seeing this article in the paper.  Hopefully it will be published soon.

Also from today’s RCJ article:

Robinson said Rahn and Janice Rognlie need to contact the project or him directly to request removal of the names. They’ll also have to make the request in writing, he said.

“If people want to be taken off, we can do that,” he said. “But we have a rule: They have to write us and make the request.”

It’ll be interesting to see the outcome, if Rahn actually does this. Robinson told me that among the handful of scientists who have actually done so, the addresses and signatures matched the petition signature they had on file.

So why did this handful of scientists want their name off the petition? Was it a genuine change of heart based on the “evidence“? Did they sign it, then forget about it (I’ve done that before)? Did their boss give them a hard time? Was it peer pressure from their AGW Koolaid-drinking peers? Was their apostasy interfering with a grant application?

As for deceased Dale Rognlie, the Petition Project doesn’t remove someone’s signature from the petition, Robinson told me, just because they died. After all, why should their death indicate they’ve changed their mind about anthropogenic global warming? Did the men who signed the Declaration of Independence change their mind about independence from England when they died? Did their deaths invalidate their signatures on the Declaration of Independence?

It’s interesting to note, too, how Rahn went from “I wouldn’t sign such a dumb thing like that” at the beginning of this article to “I think it’s a very low probability that I ever signed this thing and forgot” once the stringent requirements for both getting on and getting off the list became known.

Very interesting indeed…

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