While today’s blog post – which also serves as an entry into a writing contest titled “You are Enough” – is not my usual focus on particular details which implode the notion that the fossil fuel industry ‘pays skeptic climate scientists inject misleading lies into the settled science certainty of man-caused catastrophic global warming,’ it will nevertheless illustrate one of the core problems with that particular political angle of the issue. Specifically, writers who believe in themselves and their ability to write effectively enough… or the lack thereof … to successfully promulgate Al Gore’s side of the issue. Continue reading
Author Archives: Russell Cook
My Funding Update — the “Paypal Donate” Button Addition
Regarding the Donate button now prominently displayed at the top right of my Home page (which takes donors to Paypal where they can contribute whatever amount they wish to me), the following is a message not only for friends, it’s also a challenge aimed directly at my fiercest critics along with anyone else who firmly believes that prominent opponents of Al Gore’s version of man-caused global warming are industry shills who are paid to lie. My challenge right here is a golden opportunity for Gore’s followers to put that accusation to the ultimate test. Continue reading
Background: The WORTHLESS “reposition global warming as theory” ‘leaked memos’
Al Gore and the people supporting and following him all but plead with the public to have total trust in this: the only opposition to the idea of harmful man-caused global warming is a handful of shill ‘experts’ who receive fossil fuel money in exchange for lies downplaying that harm. The industry corruption accusation sounds plausible enough all by itself, but if anyone innocently asks what evidence exists proving it true, they are often met with sweeping generalized references to reports of ‘Exxon knowing’ about the harm, or to books such as Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt.” But when inquisitive people point out that no such evidence of pay-for-performance arrangements are seen in those writings, Gore & crew might go one step further to say “journalists and academics” show how a deliberate sinister misinformation effort was exposed in leaked memos, where the strategy goal was to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” which targeted “older less-educated men and young low-income women”. For the benefit of newly arriving readers here, and for those who haven’t yet comprehended just how damaging those worthless memos are to Al Gore and others who push them, allow me to explain: Continue reading
Using Fake News to Criticize the Label of “Fake News Media”
Today’s the day, 8/16/18, for the big pushback by newspaper editorialists led by the Boston Globe against U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called label of them as “the enemy of the people.” Of all things to use in their conclusion, they chose a line from George Orwell’s “1984” book, followed by an utterly misplaced line about how lies are antithetical to an informed citizenry (click image to enlarge).
Oh really? Isn’t failing to tell the whole truth while engaging in alleged ‘journalism’ even more antithetical? Continue reading
The Long Reach of Naomi Oreskes’ Fingerprints
My primary focus at this blog is to illustrate myriad ways the ‘skeptic climate scientists are paid fossil fuel money to lie’ accusation falls apart, while the secondary implied point is that the mainstream news media has done essentially nothing when it comes to checking the veracity of any claim made within the global warming issue, whether it’s pure science claims or political analysis claims. Today’s topic is a case in point about one of the political angles. Continue reading
Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. BP P.L.C., et al.
In my May 17, 2018 post on the King County v. BP lawsuit, I noted how I could have taken a shortcut to simply refer readers back to my earlier blog posts regarding identically worded lawsuits in different communities led by the same lawyer, Matt Pawa … but I instead offered additional troubling details about how he might be connected to dubious ‘evidence’ within that set of cases. Basically the same situation applies here with this latest City of Baltimore filing, regarding the eight global warming lawsuits under the Sher Edling law firm banner. My July 13, 2018 post on the Rhode Island variant noted the identical wording of them, and went into details of what I call “the fingerprints of Naomi Oreskes.” This Baltimore case suffers from the same affliction — it repeats the worthless set of supposedly Western Fuels “reposition global warming” memos on its PDF page 80 (printout’s pg 75), and Oreskes’ more than decade-old disingenuous portrayal of President Johnson’s speech is on its PDF page 56 (printout’s pg 51). But among my prior dissections of the Sher Edling cases, I haven’t mentioned anything about Vic Sher or Matt Edling. Continue reading
“Trust us: our leaked memo is the same thing as that leaked smoking gun memo”
Here’s a simple exercise – do a basic internet search (which excludes my own writings) of key words from a thoroughly documented leaked tobacco industry memo combined with those from an alleged leaked fossil fuel industry memo, and see how many anti-tobacco activists crow about the way cigarette company activities compares to what’s implied in the other memo. What’s hard to miss in the search results is the appearance of the use of the tobacco memo as a talking point to lend unquestioned credibility to the alleged fossil fuel memo. If we had a responsible mainstream media, objective investigative reporters would delve into that problem, ask simple questions, and dig deeper if they spotted details leading to more problems. Continue reading
State of Rhode Island v. Chevron et al.
This latest global warming lawsuit has two major problems. First, it’s essentially pure “boilerplate copy ’n paste” from six other current California global warming lawsuits being run by the same Sher Edling law firm. I already covered that problem – their enslavement to Ross Gelbspan’s worthless ‘leaked memos’ accusation about ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ – in my dissections of the Santa Cruz City/County / City of Richmond v. Chevron trio, and the San Mateo / Marin Counties / City of Imperial Beach v. Chevron trio. But I found another problem I’d overlooked in those filings. Call it “The Fingerprints of Naomi Oreskes,” a situation which only further opens a window into just how disingenuous the overall “evidence” is that’s used to indict skeptic climate scientists of industry-paid corruption. Continue reading
Defeated — but still Unscathed
The alternative title description here, as applied to the ‘brains’ behind the now-dismissed pair of Oakland and San Francisco global warming lawsuits, might just as well be “Bullet Dodged.” That’s Matt Pawa, and this isn’t the first time one of his global warming lawsuits was dismissed. Look back to his 2008 Kivalina v. Exxon case. Continue reading
Al Gore’s 1994 ABC News Nightline ‘Crooked Skeptics’ Name-Calling Failure
You couldn’t ask for a more damaging report to reappear against Al Gore and enviro-activists’ collective notion that ‘skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of Big Coal and Oil’ — inexplicably posted to Youtube just weeks ago by Kert Davies, one of the main promulgators of that accusation. Quoting Nightline host Ted Koppel in this February 24, 1994 “Is Science for Sale?” program, starting at the 1:06 point,
A number of years ago, I ran into then-Senator Al Gore at LaGuardia Airport … Senator Gore used the occasion to sketch out on a napkin one of his chief ecological concerns, depletion of the ozone layer. Ever the environmental activist, Senator Gore was proposing a Nightline program on the subject. He’s the Vice President now, of course, but he is still proposing. A few weeks ago, Mr Gore called to draw our attention to some of the forces, political and economic, behind what he would regard as the anti-environmental movement. The Vice President suggested that we might want to look into connections between scientists who scoff at the so-called greenhouse effect, for example, and the coal industry.
Things go downhill from there. Continue reading