State of Delaware v. BP America Inc, et al.

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The Washington Free Beacon has an ongoing series of “I forced a bot to …” parodies making fun of predictable robot-like reactions from biased journalists or far-left activists to particular hot topics. Seriously, however, it might be worthy of genuine speculation as to whether the Sher Edling law firm has a bot writer program to punch out boilerplate-similar global warming lawsuits. I actually speculated about that back when I wrote my dissection of their second round of simultaneously-filed lawsuits, where I detailed the fatal fault of their lawsuits’ enslavement to the worthless “reposition global warming” memos. The repeats galore continue in their latest Delaware v. BP filing.

In this post, I’ll detail the major fault with a repeated item that I haven’t shown before, but first ………

……… let’s have a look at what else is repeated. In my September 25 dissection of the Charleston v Brabham Oil filing, I already noted how a dubious graph and/or assertion from the Exxon-sourced “James Black Memo” in all the other filings is also in this Delaware filing. The worthless 1998 API “victory will be achieved” memo set makes its appearance on page 122 in this Delaware filing, using the same suspect unnamed weblink that I illustrated in my Honolulu v. Sunoco dissection, which showed how that unnamed source is actually Kert Davies’ old 2013 document upload when he worked at Greenpeace.

Then there’s ye olde “reposition global warming” memos. Here is that repetition enslavement in this Delaware filing, page 112, complete with its basically disingenuous ‘UCS dossier source’ …

… and for emphasis, here’s that same repetition in the prior eleven Sher Edling filings all the way to the beginning, via screencapture photo links:

This gets really old after a while. But hey! When that’s the most damaging evidence there is, well, you stick with it and hope nobody asks anything about it. Where it originally came from, why it wasn’t stashed where people say it was, that sort of thing.

Now, lets have a look at an item that was brought to the attention of many, including me, in the WUWT guest post titled “State of Delaware Lies About Willie Soon (as a scientist).” It concerns the corruption accusation directed at Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr Willie Soon. First, starting from the beginning of these Sher Edling lawsuits, this is what the 2017 San Mateo v Exxon says on its print page 58, along with the footnote sources:

A key strategy in Defendants’ efforts to discredit scientific consensus on climate change and the IPCC was to bankroll scientists who, although accredited, held fringe opinions that were even more questionable given the sources of their research funding. These scientists obtained part or all of their research budget from Defendants directly or through Defendant-funded organizations like API,130 but they frequently failed to disclose their fossil fuel industry underwriters.131
130 Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years, Climate Research 23, 88-110 (January 31, 2003), http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf.
131 Newsdesk, Smithsonian Statement: Dr. Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon, Smithsonian (February 26, 2015), http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-statement-dr-wei-hock-willie-soon

Evil Defendants, who sneer about how this effort to “discredit scientific consensus on climate change and the IPCC” victory will be achieved, while the evil scientists hid who the suppliers of their megabucks were. Oh, wait, Exxon couldn’t even figure out the status of that victory plan and API had no indication it was ever implemented. And did Dr Soon actually hide who his funders were? Hold that thought for a few moments.

Meanwhile, Sher Edling’s implication of corruption against Dr Soon was repeated identically in:

Identical wording each time about “bankrolling scientists” having “fringe opinions” that were “questionable given the sources of their research funding”, along with source links to Dr Soon’s co-authored paper in the journal Climate Research and something from “Newsdesk, Smithsonian” (try clicking on that link). Since it’s tedious to screencapture and color-highlight these court filings, I’ll just direct readers to the individual pages for these repetitions in the complete online files for #7 Rhode Island v. Chevron PDF file page 86, #8 Baltimore v. BP PDF file page 88, #9 PCFFA v. Chevron PDF file pages 63-64, #10 Honolulu v. Sunoco PDF file page 76, and #11 Charleston v Brabham Oil PDF file pages 101-102.

This unbroken repetition streak came to a – somewhat – end with Sher Edling’s month-old Delaware v. BP lawsuit, which was filed only literally one day after Sher Edling’s #11 lawsuit’s 9/9/20 filing date. It’s all still nearly identical, but notice what I highlight in orange in the screencapture of its PDF file page 131:

Web.archive.org is where people go to see web pages that have been taken offline, it’s called “The Internet Archive” or “Internet Way-back Machine.” In the time between the last online capture the Internet Archive was able to get on March 4, 2020 and its next capture on September 1, 2020, the Smithsonian Institute restricted public access to their Newsdesk statement about Dr Soon. Why? As seen from a system-wide search of The Smithsonian’s website, no explanation is not offered anywhere within their system regarding that restriction. The most that pops up specifically for Dr Soon’s name are three grabs of the times when the now-missing page was previously captured, and a June 2015 Newsdesk statement about the controversial ‘undisclosed funding’ situation in general. What are all these Sher Edling lawsuits relying on within that missing S.I. Newsdesk statement?

The Smithsonian is conducting inquiries to address the allegations that Dr. Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon failed to disclose to journals the funding sources for his climate change research.

What was the June 2015 Smithsonian Newsdesk statement referring to regarding “recent allegations,” and what corresponds more directly to the now-missing February 26, 2015 Smithsonian Statement about “addressing allegations”?

The February 21-23, 2015 Boston Globe / New York Times / Washington Post newspapers blitz against Dr Soon – best represented by the NYT – containing a particular name that shouldn’t surprise anybody who is familiar with the smear of skeptic climate scientists:

… newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.
He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. …
The documents were obtained by Greenpeace … Greenpeace and an allied group, the Climate Investigations Center, shared them with several news organizations last week. …
What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.

At the time in February 2015, after the strange and unexplained departure of Kert Davies from Greenpeace, his sudden reemergence in the media blitz was a surprise enough to me that I wrote a GelbspanFiles blog post titled “Kert Davies is Back. Again.” The startup of his Climate Investigations Center website made no sense to me in 2014, but my view changed upon my discovery of his related “Climate Files” website and how that could apparently be used as a vehicle to supply global warming lawsuits with material under a name that looks much more benign than one plagued with anti-fossil fuel industry bias like “Greenpeace.”

What is the major fault with the “$1.2 million” that all these Sher Edling lawsuits so desperately seem to allude to via their beloved “newsdesk.si.edu/releases/smithsonian-statement” link? Fundamentally, it prompts the overarching question of whether there’s any merit to the Kert Davies-sourced implication that such funding automatically equals a corrupt pay-for-performance, where Dr Soon spews disinformation meeting the approval of his funders. The overarching question arises from:

  • $1.2 million would be a huge amount for a single person to receive. However, the NYT said in 2015 it was “over the last decade“ which simple math division breaks down to $120,000 per year. Did he alone receive that each year, or did it get further subdivided among research assistants?
  • Was all of the $1.2 million actually directed straight to Dr Soon? Lord Christopher Monckton, in his March 3, 2015 WUWT guest post rebuttal to the days-earlier multi-newspaper hits against Dr Soon, noted as follows: 1) the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics “deducts 30-40% of any external grant to cover its own overhead costs“; 2) “Dr Soon has no authority to sign any research contract to receive any grant, let alone to decide or to dictate the terms of such contracts. Those matters are reserved to the Center.”; and 3) “[i[Given that external contracts are signed and held by the Observatory … claims that he has failed to disclose information about who has funded his past research are manifestly false.” Dr Soon corroborated how the Smithsonian was the receiver of all grant money at that time, and just in a months-old response to a media inquiry, he noted how his employer didn’t shower him with that big Exxon donation.
  • Dr Soon – in some way or another – was funded $1.2 million ……….. to do what, exactly? Knowingly spread disinformation meeting Exxon’s approval? If the only evidence for that is two sets of supposedly measuring when “victory will be achieved after repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact” which turn out to be unsolicited proposals that were never implemented in any fossil fuel industry effort at any time, is that not a fatal problem for this whole accusation effort aimed at Dr Soon?
  • [11/4/22 Author’s addition: One more thing: Why was it likely that the Smithsonian felt a need to disappear their “Newsdesk” announcement about investigating Dr Soon? Dr Soon offers an explanation in this Oct 2022 video clip – the result of the 5 year Smithsonian investigation is that he committed no wrongdoings. ]

If the whole accusation effort aimed at Dr Soon was bulletproof, criticisms would be obviously desperate attempts to distract people away from the sight of clear-cut corruption, instead of offering detail points that can be either exposed as outright lies or not.

If those critical points cannot be disputed, and thus decimate the accusation against Dr Soon, several more critical question arise: Did the Sher Edling law firm undertake basic due diligence to find out if the accusation was bulletproof? If the attorneys did not, are they qualified at all to be leading these global warming lawsuits? If they did, are they fully aware of how faulty the accusation really is, and how questionable the principal source for the accusation is, and is this knowledge being withheld from the plaintiffs in these lawsuits?