The American Museum of Natural History is risking its reputation as long as Rebekah Mercer, funder of Trump, Breitbart and climate denial, sits on its board. That’s the argument over 400 scientists has put in front of the museum, sending an open letter to museum officials last month and publishing an op-ed in the New York Times detailing their concerns this week.
The scientists did not go unnoticed from Mercer’s benefactees. James Delingpole at Mercer-funded Breitbart went on a tirade about the letter this week. Delingpole’s screed was given prominent, colored and multi-line billing on the site --and, conveniently, only acknowledges that the Mercers have a significant stake in Breitbart in an excerpt from the original letter.
Delingpole wrote that those who are concerned of the Museum’s reputational risk by keeping Mercer on the board are “thicker than a pickled cuttlefish in a jar of surgical spirit; dumber than a lobotomized mollusk; more basic than an amoeba with severe learning difficulties.” Delingpole (who has admitted he doesn’t read peer-reviewed papers) calls the journal Nature “an organ notorious for disseminating parti-pris studies pal-reviewed by climate alarmists on the scaremongering global warming gravy train,” and slams the letter as “a political hit job co-ordinated by a bunch of malicious, embittered second-raters.”
Speaking of a political hit job, a group of climate science deniers and Mercer money recipients sent their own letter this week supporting her involvement in the museum. A quick scan of that list reveals a number of names of random people with no scientific qualifications at all, much less relevant climate expertise, and does not disclose that around a dozen of the signers are either employed by or affiliated with Mercer-funded climate denial organizations. The signers are overwhelmingly male, skewed heavily to older retired or emeritus professors.
The very first name on the list is J. Scott Armstrong, a marketing professor who lists a “Lifetime Achievement Award in Climate Science” next to his name. This is a made-up award from Mercer-funded Heartland Institute. When Armstrong accepted the award, he compared deniers to 9/11 first responders.
Other signers include anti-vaxxer Jane Orient whose organization claims, among other things, that abortions cause breast cancer but HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; Mercer-funded Arthur B. Robinson, who in addition to being a long-time climate change denier has a collection of 50,000 urine samples; and Ruairi Weldon, whose expertise is listed as “ Writer of 600+ skeptical climate related limericks and hundreds of other anti-alarmist lines of poetry on the Jo Nova blog.”
In essence, it’s a list of people who mostly wouldn’t even qualify as “second-raters,” though they certainly seem “embittered.”
