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Sustainability critics
But he says there may be more to the NAS’s conference than that. “They use the findings from these areas to downplay climate change, which kind of shows that they have a specific agenda when writing their reports,” says Schmid.
The NAS has published reports attacking sustainability initiatives, including campaigns seeking to persuade universities to divest their fossil fuel investments. A 2018 NAS report on reproducibility said that climate scientists seek to “demonize carbon dioxide”.
NAS president Peter Wood says the world is warming, but “whether that is caused by human activity is a matter of significant dispute”. In fact, 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that human activity is responsible.
Responding to the accusations about the conference, Wood said: “We have been critics of the sustainability movement, which is not the same thing as climate science by a long stretch. The science and politics can and should be distinguished.”
The NAS’s focus on reproducibility is significant, says Sven Ove Hansson at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. “It seems to me to be a new tactic. The idea is to say, ‘Look here, the behavioural sciences have sometimes been wrong, therefore the climate scientists are wrong just now in what they are saying’,” he says.
Climate change hasn’t been implicated in the reproducibility crisis, says Schmid.