The first peer-reviewed publication to survey the industry’s messaging specifically” … showcases the worthlessness of “peer review”

[Author’s note: Unlike prior instances where WUWT reproduced some of my blog posts here as guest posts there, this one is the opposite – I submitted it straight to them first, and it now appears there as “Peer Reviewed Science Journal Report: ‘Electric Utility Industry’s Role in Promoting Climate Denial, Doubt, And Delay.’” I reproduce it here from WUWT.]

Enviro-activists who claim human-induced catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is happening, is harmful, and should be stopped, also say evidence to support their claim is found in peer reviewed, recognized science journals. It’s their gold standard for validating the credibility of scholarly papers on the topic. They admonish anyone offering criticism outside this system — if it is not peer reviewed and published in a science journal, it has no credibility and is likely corrupted by dubious outside influences.

They would say that another term for peer reviewers is “fact checkers,” outside experts not associated with the paper’s author(s) who ascertain whether there are errors in the paper prior to publication in a climate science journal, on any area related to the issue. Peer reviewed approval = no errors. Continue reading

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

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 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.

Continue reading

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

BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh: “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” Episode 6 “Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact”

If I sound like a broken record endlessly repeating the faults of prominent accusers relying on those worthless “reposition global warming theory” ‘leaked memos’ to indict skeptic climate scientists of corruptly colluding with fossil fuel industry people in alleged disinformation campaigns, it’s because the Al Gore side of this issue continually relies on them as the cornerstone ‘smoking gun evidence’ supporting that accusation. For example: in Gore’s 2006 movie; in the latest global warming lawsuits; in the latest online ‘news’ articles; in recent college student ‘journalism’ reporting efforts that are reported about at left-wing organizations; in recent ‘journalism’ podcasts highly resembling this current BBC podcast that rely on the same source person; in recent tweets by people directly associated with those accusers (tweets / prominent accusers, plural); on and on and on. Don’t get me started on how far back this enslavement is seen to those worthless memos.

The latest regurgitation of the story is the podcast in my title above, where the BBC makes the blunder of trying to tie mega-famous conservative U.S. radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh into the story. Episode 6 is available online right now for listening while being scheduled for on-air radio broadcast this coming Monday, August 3, 2020. I submitted a formal complaint with the BBC to pull the podcast from its schedule because of four major factual errors within the presentation, namely two unfounded claims made about two sets of ‘leaked industry memos’, an unfounded insinuation about the reach of an infomercial read by Rush Limbaugh, and the egregious insertion of an ethnicity word into a quote from one of those never-used memos that is not actually in the memos. Continue reading

Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact

Want to see something troubling? In today’s post I offer a pile of screencaptures which collectively prompt two basic questions: How many masters and doctorate degrees should be revoked out there because the degree recipients presented faulty, unsupported evidence for the idea that the fossil fuel industry orchestrated sinister disinformation campaigns to undercut the certainty of man-caused global warming in collusion with skeptic climate scientists? How much wider is this overall problem within the university system, where thesis writers and thesis evaluators fail to do elemental due diligence on authoritative assertions and accusations within those papers? Continue reading

Naomi “no evidence” Oreskes – careful for what you wish for, Pt 2

Naomi Oreskes’ appearance at a 10/23/19 House hearing on the topic of “the oil industry’s climate denial campaign” wasn’t a one-time event. She reappeared six days later at a Senate “hearing,” where her Prepared Written Testimony contained the identical blunders I detailed in Part 1 of this two-part blog post. Unlike the House hearing, she and the others at this “hearing” offered truly bizarre and comically self-damaging statements without fear of anyone questioning them. Continue reading