Update: Does skeptic smearer Naomi Oreskes have a conflict-of-interest disclosure problem?

I’ve received a lame-o reply from the journal in question.

I complained to the journal Global Environmental Change that Harvard-based ‘science historian’ and skeptic smearer Naomi Oreskes failed to disclose a financial conflict of interest in a recent publication.

In brief, under the journal’s own conflict of interest disclosure requirements, a “self-serving stake” or “personal belief” warrants disclosure. Long-time skeptic smearer Oreskes has been profiting from her book and eponymous movie “Merchants of Doubt.” Her recent GEC study made no such disclosure — or did it?

Here is the e-mail I received from GEC’s editors:

Dear Steve Milloy,

Regarding your enquiry about the paper recently published in GEC (Naomi Oreskes ‘Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community’ [Global Environmental Change 33 (2015) 1–13]​). We have discussed the case with Elsevier and we do not perceive there is a financial conflict of interest – the author has cited the book that your web piece refers to within the article. It is not usual practice for authors to disclose royalty income from books unless this income has been used to directly fund the research being published.

Yours,
GEC Editors

Did you catch that? Oreskes satisfied the disclosure requirement merely by obliquely referencing her book in an endnote. Here is the reference in the paper:

Here is the endnote:

The GEC journal editors actually consider that adequate disclosure of a financial conflict of interest.

Yes, they do say in their e-mail that they do not “perceive” Oreskes’ profiteering off skeptics to be a conflict of interest, yet they simultaneously assert that a mere reference to a footnote is adequate disclosure.

Dishonesty is a theme running through global warming. This is yet another example of that theme.