[nl]

Wow, I hadn't realized. How insidiously dangerous. Funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.

Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at MIT and former member of NAS, says he was initially drawn to the organization because he was worried about what he saw as a growing relativism in the academy, evident in the work of deconstructionist philosophers like Jacques Derrida. NAS seemed to be taking a stand against those intellectual currents, Emanuel said — though he adds that he eventually became concerned about the organization’s stances on climate change, especially during a much-publicized incident in which hackers stole thousands of emails from a group of climate scientists and accused them of misusing data.

In a 2010 article published on the NAS website, Emanuel described the event as “a scandal” — but he didn’t see it as a challenge to the scientific consensus on climate change. The National Association of Scholars, on the other hand, sought to extrapolate the Climategate incident “into a universal condemnation of the field,” Emanuel told me. “It was just patently disingenuous.”

He left the organization soon afterward.

“It sort of revealed them not to be what they claimed to be — people who stood for scientific truth and scientific integrity. It was just another organization that used that as a front,” Emanuel said. “They’re basically a political organization posing as an organization dedicated to free inquiry,” he added.

https://undark.org/2018/04/18/national-association-of-schola...