We’re researching mis- and disinformation!!” Says a Research Group Unquestioningly Regurgitating Mis- and Disinformation

Just sayin’ – anytime a person or group with a significant amount of prominence in the climate issue regurgitates ye olde “reposition global warming” memo set as ‘smoking gun’ evidence to supposedly prove the existence of industry-orchestrated disinformation campaigns, it’s an instance that should trigger other prominent people with a significant amount of investigative authority to look deeply into the instance and what or who prompted it. Why? Because those supposedly ‘leaked industry memos’ were actually an unsolicited subset proposal comprised of operations goals and alternative names that were never used – I’ll reiterate that a little farther down in this blog post. The memo subset is literally worthless as evidence of energy company disinformation campaigns.

By this late date in the history of pro-global warming people citing those memos, this specific accusation tactic looks like nothing more than a one-trick pony that’s perhaps made available somewhere in a prepackaged template for influential accusers to hurl.

Witness the latest two separate examples of really clumsy regurgitations of that memo set within just this current month of September, falsely said to be the operating instructions for the 1991 “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) public relations campaign.

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Part 3: Can You Argue with Outright Fiction ….

…. within a presentation that’s clearly titled “You Can Argue with the Facts,” and get away with it indefinitely, without ever being held accountable for all the harm coming out of such a presentation? When you are Naomi Oreskes, and you’ve built your second career is built on that presentation in such a way that it leads you onto becoming a documentary movie star, a go-to source for the news media (or not) and a star congressional witness for the Democrats while putting you on a first-name basis with luminaries such as Al Gore, you can cross your fingers that this whole situation will never sink.

Myself, I wouldn’t advise her to hold her breath on that or bet the ranch on it, in the face of the looming November U.S. House mid-term elections, where a complete reversal of the controlling majority might lead to a wave of congressional oversight investigations in the next two years that may quite likely include deep examinations of where the real disinformation is apparently found in abundance within the global warming issue. Continue reading

Brief Of Amici Curiae, Brulle .. Oreskes .. & Supran” Redux 3 — the Hawaii version

As much as “Merchants of Doubt”documentary movie star/book author Naomi Oreskes wishes to be a “Friend of Various Courts” and a friend to plaintiffs Honolulu and Maui County in particular, her fourth filing of one of these only points a giant arrow once again at the way enviro-activists across the board really only have one viable weapon in their arsenal when it comes to supporting their notion that fossil fuel companies engaged in disinformation campaigns. Continue reading

The Real ICE ads, Part 5: How long has this disinformation been going on?

Enviro-activists say that not only did Exxon and the rest of the fossil fuel industry know the science of man-caused global warming was settled as far back as the 1970s, they paid ‘shill’ expert climate scientists to say it was not settled in deliberate disinformation campaigns. Enviro-activists, however, are loathe to engage in any direct science discussions with those skeptic scientists because, well …, quite simply they do not have expert level climate science experience or knowledge to match the expertise of those skeptics. How do enviro-activists circumvent that fatal problem? They need a shell game diversion. They have one in the claim that smoking gun proof for those corrupt disinformation efforts was revealed in ‘leaked industry documents’ in which – I’m paraphrasing here – industry executives declared ‘victory will be achieved when we reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’ No joke on the literal words there, anyone can undertake an extensive internet search to see just how widespread the primary “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” memo strategy phrase is (along with its directly related audience targeting phrases “older, less-educated males” and “younger, low-income women”), and then do the same deep search for the secondary “victory will be achieved” memo set. Both memo sets are worthless as evidence because neither were ever implemented anywhere by any fossil fuel industry executive. It is disinformation, whether accidental or deliberate, on the part of any enviro-activist to say any fossil fuel company operated under the directives of either memo set.

The most plausibly sinister-sounding of the two sets was used by Al Gore in his 2006 movie in an accusation comparison of its strategy to a tobacco industry memo strategy, and he first quoted the set’s audience targeting phrase in his 1992 book; yet the rejected “reposition global warming” set’s key strategy was so obtusely worded that it was rejected outright by the people it was presented to. One of the officials in the “Information Council for the Environment” (“ICE”) PR campaign told me firsthand that their official copy was ultimately tossed into the trash, while the head of the campaign implied elsewhere that its too-narrow audience targeting suggestion was idiotic.

But someone else apparently thought the memo set copy they had, including its worthless discarded unused bits, could be turned into a weapon to use against the fossil fuel industry. Who ‘leaked’ it and when, and how did they portray the set to the recipients back then? What did the recipients know about the validity of the set, and did they undertake any due diligence to find out anything about the set? Continue reading

The Real ICE ads, Part 4: what the public actually saw in Flagstaff Arizona & Bowling Green, Kentucky

And now, the actual publicly seen Western Fuels Association “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) newspaper ads that were printed in the Flagstaff Arizona and Bowling Green, Kentucky newspapers, which I suggested at the end of my October 8, 2021 Part 1 blog post that I needed to find. As usual, what I actually found within this latest exercise does not resolve and solidify widespread accusations that these newspaper ads are definitive proof of coal/oil industry-led disinformation campaigns, what I’ve found instead raises significantly more questions about the core clique of enviro-activists who’ve long promulgated the accusations. Continue reading

The Real ICE ads, Part 3 – what’s real and what isn’t

Slight change in plans, where previously at the end of Part 2 I had planned next to show what the genuine “Information Council for the Environment” public relations campaign newspaper ads looked like in their actual publication pages at the Kentucky Bowling Green Daily News and Flagstaff Arizona Daily Sun. However, that will have to wait for Part 4. After I put Part 2 online, I spotted a new big problem that really undercuts the credibility of the people who say these ads prove the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns in order to deceive the public about the ‘seriousness’ of man-caused global warming. Continue reading

The Real ICE ads, Part 2

I could have just as easily titled this post “The First, the Last, and the Only Accusation Against Global Warming Skeptics, redux” or “Put all your Eggs in the ‘Reposition Global Warming as Theory’ Memos Basket, redux,” since what’s going on lately is pretty much exactly that. Give Naomi Oreskes credit for her most recent co-authored effort at the UK Guardian to infuse the ‘fossil fuel industry-led disinformation campaigns’ accusation with a new shot of ye olde “reposition global warming” memos, complete with a pair of never-used ads with the unsolicited, never-used “Informed Citizens for the Environment” labels. Her credibility suffers just that much more every time she attempts to incorrectly glue that name over the actual “Information Council for the Environment” (ICE) public relations campaign. Incrementally worse now, her Guardian article’s citation of Kert Davies’ Climate Files website as her source for the two never-used ads only ends up digging a deeper hole for herself and Davies, along with any others who keep making the mistake of drawing attention to those alleged ‘disinformation’ ICE ads as smoking gun evidence of fossil fuel deception efforts.

My latest screencapture links illustrate how these folks don’t provide tidy answer on whether the fossil fuel industry deceived the public about the ‘harm’ of man-caused global warming; their clumsy inconsistent narratives seem to point a giant arrow in the other direction on where all the disinformation is in the political accusation side of the issue.

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The Real ICE newspaper ads

Information Council FOR the Environment. For, not on.

What does it tell you when the most prominent promulgators of the accusation about ‘fossil fuel industry executives colluding with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns’ — either people supposedly closest to very specific details of it, or entities which need to be above reproach when they repeat its specific details — proclaim that one glaring example of industry-orchestrated disinformation was the ‘misleading newspaper ads’ in the Western Fuels Association’s “Information Council on the Environment” public relations campaign? Continue reading

Brief Of Amici Curiae, Brulle .. Oreskes .. & Supran” Redux 2 — the Minnesota version

Just askin’ — if it can be argued that …

  • the overall issue of catastrophic man-caused global warming is a case study of how far-left enviro-activists would rather resort to character assassination (which the mainstream media never questions) of their critics rather than support their declarations about the ‘settled science’ with superior science-based evidence, …
  • and if the outright majority of the 25+ “Exxon Knew”-style / boilerplate-repeated lawsuits are a case study of how the character assassination efforts are enslaved to only two sets of never-implemented ‘leaked memos’ evidence to support the accusation that crooked industry executives and crooked skeptic climate scientist ‘shills’ colluded to deceive the public that the ‘settled science’ wasn’t settled, …
  • then is a Friend of the Court brief intended to support one of those lawsuits, apparently ineptly copied from two nearly identical prior briefs which repeated that worthless ‘memo sets’ evidence, a case study on how hand all of those potentially fatal problems to the energy company defendant lawyers on a silver platter? Continue reading