“Arthur Robinson Is a Good Scientist”—Arthur Robinson
297 “what we did to the Indians”: Myanna Lahsen, “Anatomy of Dissent: A Cultural Analysis of Climate Skepticism,” American Behavioral Scientist, January 2013 57: 732.
297 “You do not need to assault me”: Layton Ehmke, “Protesters Disrupt Al Gore Book Signing,” We Are Change Chicago | Confrontations, Street Actions, November, 24, 2009.
Accessed 7-1-22.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150529004550/http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ccf_1259285870
Accessed 7-1-22.
“Al Gore confronted on Climategate in Chicago,” WAC Chicago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJQEPXbi3bE
Accessed 7-1-22.
297 the BBC audience-and-argument show: “Any Questions,” BBC Radio 4, August 21, 2009.
“The panelists are writer Kate Mosse, environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt, writer and broadcaster James Delingpole and lawyer Mark Stephens . . .”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m45d0
Accessed 7-1-22.
298 I was watching Sean Hannity: Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, February 7, 2007.
298 “Consensus is not a scientific fact”: Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, March 5, 2007.
298 At the University of Winnipeg: Dan Johnson, “Vital Statistics,” The Calgary Herald, April 23, 2006.
Johnson—who authored this letter to the editor—is an Environmental Science professor at Canada’s University of Lethbridge. Where he holds the Canada Research Chair in sustainable grassland ecosystems. Johnson had been responding to an editorial by Tim Ball.
Donna Royton, “AIBS Secretary Dan Johnson Gains High Honor as Canada Research Chair,” BioScience, January 2004, Volume 54 Issue 1.
Tim Ball, “Aussies’ Suzuki Heavier on Rhetoric Than on Science,” The Calgary Herald, April 19, 2006.
298 Ball eventually sued: James Powell writes very entertainingly about this episode in Chapter Seven (“Tobacco Tactics | The Scientist Deniers”) of his The Inquisition of Climate Science, Columbia University Press, 2011.
Here Dr. Powell is on Tim Ball the person. The section has the mini-title “Foot Soldier.”
The deniers have their generals, some quite celebrated, but any army must have its GIs who do the actual fighting and who do not wind up on the cover of national magazines. An example is Dr. Timothy Ball, a Canadian and “renowned environmental consultant and former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg.” In the last decade, Ball has given over 600 public talks on science and the environment. Between 2002 and 2007, he published thirty-nine opinion pieces and thirty-two letters to the editor in twenty-four Canadian newspapers. He appeared in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle and in Glenn Beck’s Fox News special, “Exposed: The Climate of Fear.”
Ball was a member of the Calgary-based Friends of Science, which the Toronto Globe and Mail exposed as funded by oil and gas companies. He left Friends of Science to chair the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. Two of its three directors are executives of a public relations and lobbying company that works for energy industry clients. The project’s first campaign “is focused on dispelling the notion that Canada needs CO2 reduction plans,” claiming that “CO2 is very unlikely to be a substantial driver of climate change and is not a pollutant. Climate change is primarily a natural phenomenon.” Ball also writes for Tech Central Station, an industry-funded denier website.
Desmog.com has a nice entry about Dr. Ball. Including the smart detail that Dr. Ball was invited to meet with the Trump transition team in late fall 2016.
https://www.desmog.com/tim-ball/
Accessed 7-5-22.
National Geographic’s ScienceBlogs also has a neat entry about Ball and the Calgary Herald. Starting from its sharp comic title, “Dear Tim Ball: Sue Me.”
https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/06/23/dear-tim-ball-sue-me
Accessed 7-5-22.
298 Places where he did publish: Statement of Defence; Dr. Timothy Ball, Plaintiff and The Calgary Herald, Dan Johnson, et al, Defendants, December 6, 2006. Action No. 0601-10387.
The statement notes that Ball’s activities include “conducting speeches before groups of citizens across Canada; publishing newspaper articles.” And specifies that the “Plaintiff has never published any research in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which addressed the topic of human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming,” and that the “Plaintiff has published no papers on climatology in academically recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals since his retirement as a professor in 1996.” (Also that “defendants assert that ‘rarely published’ and ‘the few papers he has published’ means and was understood to mean papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”) And most woundingly, “the Plaintiff never held a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority.”
History and Social Science Teacher and Manitoba Social Science Teachers Journal are from Timothy Ball’s CV.
Curriculum Vitae: Dr. Timothy F Ball.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160905213046/http://drtimball.com/_files/dr-tim-ball-CV.pdf
Accessed 7-6-22.
299 “his reputation in ruins”: John Farley, “Petroleum and Propaganda: The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry,” Monthly Review, May 2012.
299 “This is a petition”: Steve Coll, Private Empire, Chapter Three, “Is the Earth Really Warming?”, Penguin Press, 2012. 88-9.
The meeting is discussed in David Koenig, “Exxon Mobil Shareholders Reject Environmental, Benefits Proposals,” Associated Press, May 31, 2000. The piece notes that Exxon earnings over the preceding year had doubled.
299 “Like many noted scientists”: The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, September 17, 2008.
James Powell in The Inquisition of Climate Science (Chapter 13, “The Greatest Hoax in History,” 149) also has Lutz calling climate change “a total crock.” Lutz was General Motors head of product development — which meant developments like electric cars.
299 “Representative of 17,000 skeptics”: Science and Environmental Policy Project, “Representative Of 17,000 Skeptics Testifies On Climate Change To the U.S. Senate,” News Release, July 18, 2000.
299 “Nearly all of these 15,000 scientists”: Al Kamen, “A Chair For the Fallen,” Washington Post, May 1, 1998.
299 “almost every journalist”: George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, Penguin, 2006. 29.
299 “one of the pillars”: Jeff Goodell, Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, Chapter Eleven, “Reversal of Fortune,” Houghton Mifflin 2006. 195.
299 You heard tell of it: WSJ—James Schlesinger, “The Theology of Global Warming,” The Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2005. NPR—“Talk of the Nation,” NPR, October 14, 2011. WaPo—Al Kamen, Washington Post, May 1, 1998.
300 “Global Warming—It’s Not Just Me Anymore”: “Global Warming — It’s Not Just Me Anymore!”, AZBilliards.com, May 30, 2008.
https://forums.azbilliards.com/showthread.php?p=1222708
Accessed 7-1-22.
300 “More than 31,000 U.S. scientists”: Press Briefing by Dana Perino,” The American Presidency Project, University of California Santa Barbara, James S. Brady Briefing Room, May 20, 2008.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/278054
Accessed 7-1-22.
300 “He’s a man who runs something”: Arthur Robinson, interviewed by Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, October 8, 2010.
300 “a hypothesis that is unproven”: Goodell, Big Coal, 196.
300 “pseudo-science” and “pornography”: Arthur Robinson, “Objective Immorality,” Access to Energy, April, 2006.
300 “a unique breed of scientist”: Goodell, Big Coal, 195.
301 “walking god”: Farooq Hussain, “The Linus Pauling Institute: An Investigation,” New Scientist, July 28, 1977.
301 These aren’t the words: The same magazine, a year later, would rank Pauling with Marie Curie and Albert Einstein among “the 20 most important scientists of all time.” Linus Pauling was a heady person to walk around being.
Lidia Wasowicz, “Linus Pauling at 84: Maverick in the Lab,” The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1985.
301 “I don’t know which is more fun”: Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel, Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics, Chapter Eight, “Orthomolecular Legend,” Basic Books, 1995. 200.
302 A tight grader: James Grant, “Of Mice and Men: The Linus Pauling Institute Is Plunged Into Controversy,” Barron’s, June 11, 1979.
302 “My principal and most valued”: Tom Bethell, “A Scientist Finds Independence,” The American Spectator, February 2001.
Arthur Robinson, “Letter To the Editor,” Antioch Review, Summer 1981. Vol. 39, No. 3, 383-5, 396.
302 a position on the faculty: Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel, Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics. 200.
302 Here’s how dashing a figure: James Grant’s Barron’s piece contains the New Yorker repackaging of a wonderful epigram that’s worth passing along: For a sense of both who Pauling was and what science is.
Pauling, as a writer in The New Yorker observed, “was born to exemplify the advice of Sir Peter Medawar to his fellow scientists: Humility is not a state of mind conducive to the advancement of learning.”
302 an afternoon picketing the White House: Lidia Wasowicz, “Linus Pauling at 84: Maverick in the Lab,” The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1985.
302 “What has daddy done now?”: Time, “The Capital: Far from the Briar Patch,” May 11, 1962.
302 Arthur Robinson, surrogate son: Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel, Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics. Index, 298.
302 Vitamin C and the Common Cold: A tireless self-enthusiast, Pauling in 1985 told the Los Angeles Times he’d sat down on the first of August and finished his book before the first of September.
Nobody’s perfect—not even one of history’s 20 scientists. Pauling remembered this as 1970, not 1969.
Lidia Wasowicz, “Linus Pauling at 84: Maverick in the Lab,” The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1985.
302 “Sales doubled”: Thomas Hager, Linus Pauling and the Chemistry of Life, Oxford University Press, 1998. Chapter Seven, “Vitamin C,” 126.
The doubling, tripling, quadrupling occurred over months.
303 nearly a quarter of Americans: Hager, Chemistry of Life, 127.
Prior to the advent of Linus Pauling—per Barry Commoner in The New Yorker and The Closing Circle—the supplement’s popularity had measurably declined: between 11 and 20 percent, in the quarter century that followed World War II. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology, Alfred A. Knopf 1971. Chapter Nine, “The Technological Flaw,” 144.
303 granting interviews everywhere: Kas Thomas, “A Plowboy Interview with Linus Pauling About Nutrition, Vitamin C, and the Medical Establishment,” Mother Earth News, January/February 1978.
“Claims Massive Doses of Vitamins Can Improve the Mental Health of 20 Million Americans,” National Enquirer, April 22, 1973.
“Dr. Linus Pauling’s Latest Discovery Can Add Years To Your Life,’ Midnight, September 3, 1973.
Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Chapter 23, “Vitamin C.”
Barbara Marinacci, Ed., Linus Pauling In His Own Words, Touchstone, 1995. 301.
303 ten daily grams of Vitamin C: Linus: Goertzel, Linus Pauling — A Life in Science and Politics, 238; Ava Helen: Hager, Force of Nature, Chapter 23. The Paulings: Goertzel and Goertzel, A Life in Science and Politics, 201, 225. (“Ten grams of vitamin C per day . . . This is the dosage that Pauling recommended for most adults, and that he and Ava Helen routinely took.
Ten grams is about 150 times the standard recommended daily allowance, which is between 60 and 90 milligrams.
303 “Both Mama and I”: Linus Pauling to Dr. Peter J. Pauling, January 9, 1969. Linus Pauling Day-by-Day, Oregon State University, Special Collections and Archives.
http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/calendar/1969/01/index.html
Accessed 7-7-22.
303 he walked tall and dry-nosed: When the Pauling nose did run, he chalked it up to allergies. Goertzel and Goertzel, A Life in Science and Politics, 238.
303 “In fact, I no longer”: Orlando Sentinel, “Vitamin C Breeds A Healthy Controversy,” November 25, 1985.
303 paving over shortfalls: Ted Goertzel, Mildred George Goertzel, Victor Goertzel, “Linus Pauling: The Scientist As Crusader,” Antioch Review, Summer 1980. Volume 38, Issue 3. Hager, Force of Nature, Chapter 23, “Vitamin C,” 593; the two scientists “donating portions of their salaries.”
303 turned out not to be the sort of person: Hussain, New Scientist, 1977.
An Institute engineer was pretty blunt. “Robinson does not make changes; he just fires people. Anyone who works at the Institute for six months comes to blows with Robinson; he is the type of executive who brings out the worst in people.”
In Force of Nature, Hager offers, “As it turned out, Robinson was not the right man for the job.” Chapter 23, “Vitamin C,” 593. He offered “poor administrative skills.” Also Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 604; per a fellow scientist, the younger man was an “authoritarian.”
303 “in order to retain the respect”: Lee Dye, “The Deeply Personal War of Linus Pauling: Nobel Prize-Winning Chemist Still Battles for His Controversial Vitamin Theory,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1985.
303 the first political speech of his life at the libertarian Cato Institute: Grant, Barron’s, 1977.
Arthur Robinson, “Tax Financed Research: Is it Ethical? Is It Effective?”, Talk presented at the Cato Institute, San Francisco, 13 May 1978.
303 “everything that Linus”: Anthony Serafini, Foreword by Isaac Asimov, Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, Paragon House 1989. Chapter 19, “Break With Arthur Robinson,” 257.
304 fatalities could be reduced: Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 598.
304 the rodent equivalent of ten grams: Grant, Barron’s.
304 “Unfortunately,” he told PBS: Oregon Public Broadcasting, “Forecast Cloudy,” June 12, 2008.
Robinson expanded on this to a journalist from the political site FiveThirtyEight. The piece’s title leaves Robinson this story’s third named grandfather.
Robinson’s elfin face perks up whenever the subject turns to science, and he likes to punctuate his stories with a wheezy, blurted exclamation of delight. It wasn’t just that poor nutrition stopped the cancers’ growth, he said; according to his research, a wholesome diet seemed to make the mouse tumors more robust. “Take a gram of vitamin C per day, and it improves your health, but it’ll make your cancer grow faster, too. Heeeh!”
This alarming result — that eating well can feed the thing that kills you — all but wrecked Robinson’s career, he said: “I worked with Linus Pauling for 15 years, and then he and I got in a fight over those mice.” Pauling had been insisting that a daily mega-dose of vitamin C could prevent or cure three-quarters of all cancers; now Robinson had data that pointed in the opposite direction. “That experiment was the end of our collaboration. The 15 years were over.”
Daniel Engber, “The Grandfather Of Alt-Science,” October 12, 2017.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-grandfather-of-alt-science/
Accessed 7-4-22.
304 Ava had been diagnosed: Ava Helen Pauling was diagnosed in 1975. Serafini, Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, 255.
304 “More than scientific”: Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 598.
Ava Helen’s illness made the question of the use of vitamin C in the treatment of cancer more than scientific; it was a personal cause . . . Pauling gave a presentation to the Royal Society in London. Instead of a moderate call for further research, Pauling now stated, “It is my opinion that ascorbic acid may turn out to be the most effective and most important substance in the control of cancer.” Proper use of the vitamin could, he estimated, lead to a 75 percent reduction in incidence and mortality from the disease.
This was, Hager specifies, a “blue-sky estimate,” from “little data.”
304 The adopted son telling: In Force of Nature, Thomas Hager goes full-on Freud:
There may have been deeper reasons as well. The institute was Robinson’s life and his future. As he was seizing the reins of the institute, he was taking control of his life, breaking free of Pauling’s influence and defining himself in terms other than simply Pauling’s second in command. If he had been a son to Pauling, he had now also become a rival. It was almost Oedipal, with Robinson pushing his father figure aside in order to take command of what they both loved: the institute.
Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 604–605.
The Goertzels in A Life in Science and Politics (224) point out the disturbing nature of Robinson’s results.
In one experiment, Robinson found that mice given the human equivalent of 10 grams of vitamin C per day while eating a conventional diet actually had more lesions than the untreated controls. This is the dosage that Pauling recommended for most adults, and that he and Ava Helen routinely took.
304 must turn over his building pass: Anthony Serafini, Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science. Chapter 19, “Break with Arthur Robinson,” 257–258.
304 Pauling himself would be taking charge: Hager, Force of Nature, Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 604. “Pauling informed Robinson that he was taking over control of the mouse study.”
304 The animals, with whatever: Serafini, Linus Pauling: A Man and His Science, 259.
Goertzels, A Life in Science and Politics, 227–288.
304 “Magazines will write bad articles”: Ted Goertzel and Ben Goertzel, Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics. 226–227.
304 Pauling was the name on the door: Grant, Barron’s. “Then as now, the Institute’s chief asset was its most distinguished scientist, Linus Pauling.”
304 “ruining his academic and professional career”: Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, Simon & Schuster, 1995. Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 605.
304 “He views you as an ungrateful son”: Arthur Robinson, “Letter To the Editor,” Antioch Review, Summer 1981. Vol. 39, No. 3, 383–385, 396.
305 “incalculable damage to the Institute’s reputation”: Hager, Force Of Nature, Chapter 24, “Resurrection,” 605. For the Institute it was “a disaster.”
305 “callously demolished”: Ted Goertzel, Mildred George Goertzel, Victor Goertzel, “Linus Pauling: The Scientist As Crusader,” Antioch Review, Summer 1980. Volume 38, Issue 3.
305 Arthur accepted $575,000: Nature, “Pauling Institute: Lawsuit Settled Out of Court,” May 12, 1983.
For re-readers, the previous story, typeset on the same Nature page, is about Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer, their appearance at Rev. Moon’s science convention. So the first time Arthur Robinson and Seitz (who would soon collaborate to devastating effect) were in print together was on this page; just as the first time for all three future denial progenitors. As earlier, coincidence is an eerie thing.
305 “three employees and hope”: Nature, “Pauling Institute: Lawsuit Settled Out of Court,” May 12, 1983.
