I didn't read that:
STATEMENT BY THE COUNCIL OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES REGARDING GLOBAL CHANGE PETITION
April 20, 1998
The Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is concerned about the confusion caused by a petition being circulated via a letter from a former president of this Academy. This petition criticizes the science underlying the Kyoto treaty on carbon dioxide emissions (the Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change), and it asks scientists to recommend rejection of this treaty by the U.S. Senate. The petition was mailed with an op-ed article from The Wall Street Journal and a manuscript in a format that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS Council would like to make it clear that this petition has nothing to do with the National Academy of Sciences and that the manuscript was not published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or in any other peer-reviewed journal.
They wished to distance themselves from the article enclosed with the OISM petition.
Some had falsely associated the article with NAS, and the NAS Council wanted to clear up the confusion.
As for "dated press release", it refers to the OISM petition, cited in this thread's article.
The link is dated 1998.
They were "killing the messenger" by discrediting the petition's circulator which merely takes attention away from the skepticism that should always follow policy recommendations where the science isn't settled yet.
It wouldn't matter if every scientist agreed on what might happen in the future if even one dissenter proved to be right later on.
Cogitator would have us believe that we are doomed unless we act now; I say, if some of what is being forecast by the loudest among them is halfway likely, then it is already too late to stop it and we should work on living with it.