What a complete load of crap.
OISM never claimed that it had anything to do with NAS. But the point of your sad "rebuttal" is that they wrote an article that LOOKED like an NAS article.
Then it goes on to state that thousands of people who have technical training and advanced degrees in science and engineering are simply too stupid to notice the difference and were fooled by clever packaging. No mention of the substance of the article, just what it looked like!
Then it gives credibility to those who tried to hijack the petition!
You're a long standing Freeper. Don't you know how to recognize a hit piece yet???
That's only part of it. It looked sufficiently like PNAS style (and it was associated in a letter with NAS because the letter was authored by a past NAS President) that NAS felt it necessary to disavow any possible mis-association.
Furthermore, the number "17,000" signers has been repeated over and over and over and over ... and over and over... and over and over... again by skeptical sources as something significant, skeptics who frequently don't note the lack of QC on who signed. As clearly noted, very few of the signers had any indication of expertise to judge the issue on scientific merit. Thus, they may have felt the accompanying article was authoritative, rather than a skewed view of the issue (which it undeniably is).
The Petition itself also cleverly conflates opposition to the Kyoto Protocol (I would have signed that!) with uncertainties about the scientific understanding of climate change (and with the use of "catastrophic" also grabs a few people who might otherwise admit that something is certaintly happening). So to quote the "17,000" number as an entire group uncertain about the science of global warming is erroneous in the extreme. A lot of the signers may have just read the first paragraph and signed it.
THOSE are the main reasons I have a problem with the OISM petition and any op-ed that quotes it as a resource.