Talk:Leipzig Declaration

Old comments
Thanks, turns out we worked in parallel on the article. Your version is better, so I'll just dump mine. (Note to copyright hawks: Sheldon Rampton is the author both of the cited book and the Wikipedia article.) --Eloquence 09:43 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

Sheldon Rampton's "PR Watch" is not objective but only looks for people that disagree with his environmentalist views. His view of the Leipzig Declaration is one-sided. --Uncle Ed


 * I disagree. The article presents both sides of the debate accurately. All you did was insert a couple of headlines, which doesn't add any more or less neutrality to the article than previously. If there is a response from the creators of the Declaration about the findings reported on here, I'd like to hear about it. It is, however, typical in the case of such PR stunts that they are ignored once their purpose is fulfilled. Also, why did you remove the "S. Fred Singer's" before SEPP? It is important in this debate to identify organizations with individuals, especially if the same heads keep popping up again and again .. I'll therefore add this back in. Also, where did Sheldon express "environmentalist views"? Did you read the referenced books? --Eloquence 21:21 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)


 * His website, which I have read, is devoted exclusively to environmentalist views. You might want to take a look at it. --Uncle Ed


 * You mean like this, the featured link of the day? DanKeshet


 * I'm familiar with PR Watch and his other projects. You completely misunderstand the purpose of the site, however. It is not "devoted to environmentalist views", it is devoted to documenting the deceptive use of public relations campaigns by corporations. This frequently involves environmental issues, but Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber have also reported about the use of PR in wars, by dictators, by tobacco companies, by tech companies like Microsoft and so on. I really recommend reading both books for getting a better understanding of the subject in question. --Eloquence 21:29 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)


 * I stand corrected. His website is primarily devoted to environmentalist views. Nevertheless, it is not a general media watch site, but only points out PR that disagrees with his own views (not all of which are environmentalist). --Uncle Ed


 * Well, if they (the Center for Media and Democracy is not just S.R.) do not find the PR deceptive, what would be the point in documenting it? There's plenty of completely harmless advertising and there are actually magazines devoted to it. How do you determine what's deceptive and what's not? Of course by using your best judgment about the available facts and trying to document them. I fail to see how this is "one-sided". Wikipedia is NPOV, people are not. If there's an NPOV violation, correct it. But don't use deceptive tactics yourself -- or should we talk a while about your extreme views? --Eloquence 21:36 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

I'm impressed at how a 1997 declaration can emerge from a 1995 conference... Martin

This is what the article previously said about David Olinger's report.


 * David Olinger of the St. Petersburg Times investigated the Leipzig Declaration, reporting that most of its signers have not dealt with climate issues at all and asserting that none of them is an acknowledged leading expert. Twenty-five of the signers were TV weather presenters - a profession that requires no in-depth knowledge of climate research. Some did not even have a college degree. Other signers included a dentist, a medical laboratory researcher, a civil engineer, and an amateur meteorologist. Some were not even found to reside at the addresses they had given.

Now, Olinger's report was written in 1996, so it must have been referring to the 1995 declaration. Here's a post where someone has helpfully reproduced it for us:. Where's the mention of 25 meterologists? Where's the mention of dentists? I'm guessing that Olinger's report was conflated with the Danish TV report and/or Jenson's letter? Martin


 * Good catch on the dentists. However, it wasn't taken from the Danish TV report. In a November 14, 1998 commentary in the International Herald Tribune, George M. Woodwell of the Woods Hole Research Center and John P. Holdren of Harvard University characterized the declaration's signers as " an odd assortment of television weather persons, dentists,  lab assistants, civil engineers and others who, despite their names' appearing on the list, say they have never heard of it. We hope that such disinformation will not fool many members of either the public or the U.S. Senate, which eventually must ratify the Kyoto Protocol and measures going beyond it if the challenge of climatic change is to be met and mastered." However, this passage really adds nothing of substance to the article as it already stands, and it isn't clear whether Woodwell and Holdren were referring to specific "dentists" and "lab assistants" based on their own knowledge or whether they were merely making a loose characterization based on sources such as Olinger's report (and Ozone Action, with which they were apparently in contact when they wrote the commentary). Sheldon Rampton

A secondary question - do we need to say that Fred Singer supports the declaration? It seems pretty obvious that he would, given that he wrote it... Martin

A key criticism of the Declaration is that it is supported by self-proclaimed and self-educated experts that are either woefully mistaken or masking a hidden agenda. Citations in criticism of the Declaration based on the same appeal seem hypocritical, don't they? Let's leave them out; we can find many similar examples if we try. --taganov

There seems to be a lot of back and forth propagada on this issue. Someone should do a little digging and find out how many of the signers actually have done reputable climate researches themselves and presented contradictory conclusions as a result. Hawflake - There is a little problem here: While articles are, polemic discussions is maybe not the aim of Wikipedia. I understand the concern but still this is not stand-alone-fact but a statement against an other statement. I hope discussions can find another places on internet. It doesn´t really matter if there already is somthing misleading about Leipzig or Oregon Declarations on Wikipedia or not, this still remains discussion.Jarmopalomaa (talk) 04:20, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Claimed signers

 * Intro: The Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change is a statement made in 1995, issued in an updated form 1997 and revised in 2005 [3], claimed to have been signed by 80 Scientists and 25 Television News Meteorologists
 * Further down: The signatures to the 1995 declaration were disputed by David Olinger of the St. Petersburg Times. In an article on July 29, 1996, he revealed that many signers, including Chauncey Starr, Robert Balling, and Patrick Michaels, have received funding from the oil industry.

This article is one-sided, as well as confusing. It openly questions the signatures, calling them "claimed". It also "disputes" the signatures by charging that signers took oil money.

This is original research, and pretty slipshod at that.

There are really two issues:
 * 1) Did the people whose names appear on the declaration ever actually sign it? That is, were their signatures authentic?
 * 2) *A minor related point is, did any of them withdraw their signatures later?
 * 3) Were the actual signers biased in some way?
 * 4) *Which raises the question of, who says they were biased?

If one side in the global warming controversy is using the declaration as evidence that a significant number of scientists have challenged the mainstream view, and another side is saying the opposite, then I don't see why Wikipedia should endorse one of these sides. Rather, it should describe the dispute fairly. --Uncle Ed (talk) 19:39, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Moving criticism to a Criticism & Controversy section - Proposed Deletion of unattributed claim
This article is about the Leipzig Declaration. First and foremost, it needs to be about its subject matter. I don't object to having a proportionate section about controveries, in a separate section. The article as it stands looks like an argument. Many article topics on Wikipedia have people who disagree, look at articles on any U.S. President. Such articles are always written so that the subject matter can be read, and having a section which shows controversies. This article needs the same rewrite an organization. And also Just providing advance notice that the following claim will be deleted a reference from a reliable source is not provided. The latter statement was broadly accurate at the time, but with additional data and correction of errors, all analyses of satellite temperature measurements now show statistically-significant warming. --Knowsetfree (talk) 19:27, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
 * In fact controversy sections are discouraged, it is much better to incorporate criticism into the text. (and much more difficult) --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 05:44, 18 December 2009 (UTC)