Author Archives: Russell Cook

About Russell Cook

Russell Cook is a semi-retired graphic artist. His collection of articles and blogs about the Gelbspan/Gore/Ozone Action/Greenpeace accusation can be seen here: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?page_id=86

“… and the Dan Rather Medal for News and Guts Award goes to …”

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Dan Rather, for those who aren’t familiar with him, is a veteran U.S. TV news anchor who had a fairly good career right up to the point where he apparently overlooked the importance of checking the veracity of clearly fabricated documents when he reported how they appeared to undercut the integrity of 2004 U.S. presidential re-election candidate George W. Bush. It’s a Rather Shameful tale of self-inflicted tragedy where he appears to have never accepted the reality of his journalism blunder. Making matters far worse, Dan Rather later essentially said President Bush would be proven guilty when evidence is found to support that. So, either the concept of innocence before being proven guilty is out the window, or the basic tenets of bulletproof journalism is out the window. Neither situation looks good for his legacy.

When I first heard the announcement of the new “Dan Rather Medals for News and Guts Award,” I guessed it was simply Babylon Bee-style headline satire, a dry humor jab at how badly mainstream media reporting has devolved lately. This sort of satire is easy to make up: The Gina McCarthy Prize for Preserving Natural Beauty, the BP Most Effective Construction Cost Savings award, the Mike Bloomberg Savvy Spending Trophy. Continue reading →

“The Capitol Riot and Climate Disinformation” — John Schwartz, New York Times

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“They’re more closely related than you might think” is Schwartz’s subhead for his January 13, 2021 New York Times article. The subtle implication is that if any person doesn’t accept the settled science of the 2020 U.S. presidential election or the settled science of catastrophic man-caused global warming, that person should be vilified and shunned from society.

Obey, accept news media narratives without question about ‘global warming science,’ or else, and obey mandates to, shall we say, not speak of preventing the theft of the 2020 election, lest it incite more violence ….. or else. OR ELSE! But when Schwartz chose “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes as his go-to source for the history of disinformation efforts in his article, he inadvertently amplified how the actual threat to the well-being of the country is not some right-wing conspiracy to subvert democracy and protect corporate profits, it’s disinformation from the mainstream media itself.

Continue reading →

Throw One More Global Warming Lawsuit on the Sher Edling Pile

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Specifically, the Minnesota vs. API, et al. global warming lawsuit filed on 6/24/20 which I had previously labeled as an “independently-led” lawsuit in my list of all the “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits that allege fossil fuel company executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists to spread disinformation designed to undercut Al Gore’s ‘settled global warming science.’ In my June 26, 2020 dissection of this lawsuit, I noted how it rather predictably followed what appears to be an almost standard template for such lawsuits, where it dutifully offered both the worthless “reposition global warming” memo set (PDF file page 32) and the similarly worthless “victory will be achieved” memo set (PDF file page 34) as evidence to prove industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns misled the public. The usage of both memo sets is a hallmark of what I term the ‘boilerplate-identical’ lawsuits being handled by the Sher Edling law firm. It seems Sher Edling never learned that both sets were unsolicited by the groups they were proposed to, and that neither set was ever implemented in any fashion by any industry people as goals to achieve or guidelines to follow.

At the end of my dissection, after noting many other troubling connections between the lawsuit and longtime promulgators of those worthless memo sets, I asked a basic question: was this lawsuit an entirely independent effort undertaken by the Minnesota Attorney General’s office, or is there some kind of larger multi-state / municipality coordinated prosecution effort going on? A bit over a week ago, a new complication to the question appeared which doesn’t look especially helpful to the Minnesota AG’s office, or for any of the others filing such lawsuits. Continue reading →

How Effective is the “Reposition Global Warming as Theory” Leaked Memos Line? Let me show the ways …

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As I detailed before in my various blog posts, the supposedly leaked “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” memo strategy is worthless-as-evidence to prove Big Oil & Coal executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists to deceive the public about the certainty of man-caused global warming, quite simply because it was an unsolicited proposal to a tiny and very short-lived public relations campaign, and nothing in that proposal was ever implemented within that PR campaign. Or outside of it, for that matter; I have it directly from one of the administrators in that campaign that their copy of the proposal was literally thrown away. Yet somebody else in the circle of people in that campaign thought their own personal copy of the rejected proposal with its awkwardly worded strategy goal attributed to the never-used name proposed to the campaign and its basically illogical audience targeting goals was not only worth saving, but also worth leaking to enviro-activists in 1991, namely the Sierra Club (which otherwise never breathed a word of it to anyone), and to Senator Al Gore.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen individuals (described elsewhere less politely) unquestioningly repeat the “reposition global warming” accusation in religious devotional blog posts and vegetarian blog posts, or as a core part of PhD dissertations; and I’ve seen it casually slipped it into ‘the shipping news,’ and prominently featured on the U.S. Senate floor. The latest regurgitation of it popped up just a couple of weeks ago, Continue reading →

Has the “Our Next Economy LLC” company fallen on hard times?

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This requires two setup points. First, in my February 13, 2020 blog post titled “Joke: ‘Why did the Greenpeace USA Executive Director cross the Road?’,” I covered how the founder of the long forgotten environmental group Ozone Action subsequently merged his little group into Greenpeace USA and took over there as Executive Director, only to inexplicably step down eight years later into what looked like the oblivion of an utterly inconsequential, one-man operation apparently pointlessly named “Our Next Economy LLC” which had practically no internet presence outside of his rather bland blog page ….. while getting, as late as what’s seen in a 2017 IRS 990 form, at least $2 million in income. The main question arising out of all the details in that post is whether his long-term promulgation of a worthless set of leaked industry memos, which gained their first major ongoing media traction in his dinky Ozone Action group as a go-to source for indicting skeptic climate scientists of industry corruption, is being facilitated into the latest set of global warming lawsuits, e.g. the two month-old Maui v Sunoco one, via millions of dark money dollars poured into his mystery Our Next Economy LLC operation.

The second setup point is that the U.S. Government’s “Paycheck Protection Program” was created to help shuttered small businesses to keep their workers employed during the current virus pandemic situation.

So now, I could have actually titled this post as “Joke: What do you get when you cross a small business bailout loan with a one-man operation swimming in millions in cash?” The thing that investigators need to ask is, what on Earth is going on here? Continue reading →

“We found no evidence of bias in our news outlet,” declares biased news outlet

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While this looks like a headline befitting publication at the satirical website The Babylon Bee in its collection that already contains gems like “Quick Google Search Confirms Google Not Rigged,” it is the actual real-world conclusion coming from promoters of the PBS NewsHour, a news outlet that has never once over the last 20+ years permitted a PhD-level climatologist / atmospheric physicist to appear on its news program to debate the global warming issue with comparable scientists endorsing the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. Continue reading →

The Big Ben Santer Problem, Pt 6: When Were His Eyes Opened on the Tobacco Angle?

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The “tobacco angle” being the notion that the fossil fuel industry allegedly fully knows their products cause catastrophic global warming harm in a manner no different that the tobacco industry knowing full well about the cancer-causing harm of cigarette smoking, and how both industries are accused of creating disinformation campaigns to deceive the public about the harm of their products. Within the global warming disinformation accusation is the claim that some of the same people supposedly spewing climate disinformation also did so for the tobacco industry. “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes gained heroic – no, make that “supernova” / “living legend” – status from revealing this claim to the world, partly praised on that latter accolade by no less than the person she credits with being the first to steer her toward that ‘tobacco industry connection,’ Lawrence Livermore atmospheric scientist Ben Santer.

Examine Oreskes’ particular narrative about …

1) being personally attacked after she wrote a paper about the scientific consensus for man-caused global warming; 2) advised to talk to Ben Santer, a victim of a similar attack; and 3) how Santer “started telling this whole story about how he had been attacked by Fred Seitz and how it was just like the tobacco industry…”

…. at a superficial level, and sounds quite plausible. Go deeper on that last bit, and various problems start to arise. Continue reading →

The Big Ben Santer Problem, Pt 5: “Santer didn’t tell anybody …”

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I’ve said it before elsewhere, it bears repeating here: I’m jealous how the collective 30 years of the global warming issue still boils down to the simplest set of talking points: “settled science” / “industry-paid shill skeptic scientists” / “reporters, policymakers, and basically everybody may ignore those skeptics because of points 1 & 2.” Meanwhile, in order to provide bulletproof evidence that the central talking point implodes under hard, impartial scrutiny, it takes me multi-thousands of words to detail how each angle of that central point falls apart, including details within the narratives of the core promulgators of that central talking point.

“Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes is one of those central promulgators, a heroine receiving massive praise for exposing ‘liars-for-hire’ skeptic climate scientists, after having it revealed to her by Erik Conway (…. oh, wait, that’s a different / a different / a different story) revealed to her by Ben Santer that people attacking her for her paper on 100% settled global warming science consensus were the same people who attacked him (as opposed to her different story of her attacker being the same person who ‘attacked’ chemistry scientist Sherwood Rowland).

As it concerns her ‘Santer story versions,’ Oreskes arguably would never have seen her new career path of exposing who those “merchants of climate doubt’ were without being first advised to talk to Dr Santer. However, what she says about that specific situation aren’t clear-cut narratives, the problems within them prompt more questions about them than answers regarding the skeptic climate scientists’ so-called ‘corruption.’ Continue reading →

County of Maui v. Sunoco LP, et al.

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Just three weeks ago, enviro-activists applauded the October 12, 2020 filing of the Maui v. Sunoco lawsuit. No doubt the residents there would see the logic of sharing pretty much all of the lawsuit details with the neighboring Honolulu v. Sunoco one — same Table of Contents format, same Introduction wording, same accusatory section, etc. Makes sense, Maui and Honolulu are neighbors supposedly suffering the same catastrophic man-caused global warming harm. But wouldn’t the residents of Maui be a little disappointed to find out their lawsuit appears to be little more than a pure hand-me-down copy of Delaware v. BP which is also handled by the same law firm handling their case? After all, Delaware has nearly the same accusatory section, nearly the same Introduction wording, and nearly the same Table of Contents. Continue reading →