Just askin.’ That’s what I do at this blog, I detail myriad inconsistencies and other problems with the widespread, multi-decade accusation about the fossil fuel industry allegedly paying skeptic climate scientists to participate in sinister misinformation efforts designed to undercut the supposedly ‘settled’ understanding about catastrophic human-induced global warming. Examining troublesome situations and asking why forthright explanations for them aren’t seemingly readily available isn’t a crime, and knee-jerk reactions to label such examinations as “misinformation” (i.e., violations worthy of censorship which should also be forwarded to organizations undertaking relentless unethical, extremist regime-style persecution) would be foolishly embarrassing for anyone labeling them that way;  if troublesome-looking situations can be ultimately cleared up, then it is in everyone’s best interest that the questions be fully answered.

Regarding the “reposition global warming” memo set, that’s the one dating famously all the way back to 1991 on up to the present day in 20+ current global warming lawsuits — for example, the state of Minnesota’s, as Rolling Stone reports. The memo set is supposed to be “smoking gun” evidence of ‘Big Coal & Oil’ executives colluding with skeptic scientists in disinformation campaigns created to deliberately deceive the public. Technical arguments about where these lawsuits can be held can’t drag on indefinitely, and it’s highly doubtful that any of the defendants are just going to declare defeat and roll over straight into gigantic cash settlements to the plaintiffs. Judges and juries will ultimately have to listen to whether the claims about science observations are sound, and whether claims about corrupt industry actions are supported by solid evidence.

The “reposition global warming” memo set is absolutely the most viable-looking evidence the Al Gore side of the issue has to prove the existence of a industry executives / science expert ‘shills’ misinformation conspiracy, otherwise Gore himself would not have used it as his sole evidence slide in his “An Inconvenient Truth” movie, nor would the set’s alleged ‘discoverer,’ Ross Gelbspan rely solely on it in his own “The Heat is On” book, and Naomi Oreskes wouldn’t have used it as the central feature in a Powerpoint presentation that gained her fame before her big “Merchants of Doubt” book came out.

It’s the best they’ve got. If you want to win in the court of public opinion in your case to incriminate evil-doers, it would be self-destructive to hold your best evidence in reserve while leading with weak material. The same would apply in filing a lawsuit.

But just as I was able to find out, the defendant lawyers in these global warming lawsuits can also find out that the “reposition global warming” memo set was an unsolicited, rejected proposal to an organization that never used it.

The elementally fatal problem there is self-evident, as I’ve pointed out before in this blog: Regardless of what any given proposal concerns, valid or otherwise, if it is thrown out and nobody of any consequence sees it, it therefore is not evidence proving it was a set of guideline people operated under, or that the “operation in question,” exists at all.

When the credibility of the core “leaked” evidence is called into question, one of the next questions to ask is why anyone in the tiny public relations campaign would leak the memo set in the first place, when they knew it was a rejected proposal they were not actually working under … which would lead to an even more basic question: was the memo set actually leaked, period?

Since far-left people have been caught planting evidence in order to crow about it as ‘evidence’ of nefarious situations, that’s a fair question to ask in this specific situation. “What planted evidence?” you ask. Let’s go through some, where essentially the same initial questions could have asked whether public outrage over the situation occurred naturally or if it had to be induced via planted “evidence.”

• Back in early 2010, conservative pundit Michelle Malkin tells the story of how a far-leftist infiltrated one of the first Tea Party rally events with a sign that had – shall we say – an offensive political symbol on it that he kept hidden until a fleeting opportune moment happened for him to reveal it. Voilà! Conservatives are neo-fascists. Question is, if they are overwhelmingly so where their rallies are awash with such imagery, why would there be any need at all to plant such a symbol?
• Conservative blogger Bob Parks maintains an ongoing count of extensive instances of fake hate crimes being committed. But if the U.S. is overwhelmingly awash with systemic racism where hate crimes happen in abundance, why would there ever be any necessity to stage a fake one?
• ( nothing to see here, move along now, lest ye be punished for daring to question anything – anything – remotely associated with all of that. Don’t even try looking for it. )
• The Al Gore side of the global warming issue wants the public to believe that ordinary citizens who are skeptical about claims of man-caused global warming have been deceived by disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, and when enlightened about the truth, they switch sides. Back in 2012 in connection with promotions of the “Chasing Ice” movie’s theater run, a Youtube video was widely shared at sites such as Business Insider featuring a tearful woman who was so moved by the movie’s terrifying images that she ceased being an ardent fan of Fox News Channel conservative show host / climate change denier Bill O’Reilly. As I pointed out in my dissection of that particular little mess, the woman was clearly not a daily watcher of O’Reilly’s program at all. If Fox News viewers are so easily swayed to abandon all they know about the global warming issue by one movie like that, why would there be any need to stage a dramatic scene using a fake conservative?
• For a couple of decades now, the Al Gore side of the global warming issue wants the public to believe that no genuine scientist or person with extensive science knowledge would endorse what skeptic climate scientists have to say. It’s long been insinuated, including recently at a much-lauded ‘fact-check site,’ that the Oregon Petition Project, with its 31,000+ signatories of such skeptics is awash with fake names. Problem is, as I detailed here in considerable length, there was only one single fake name in the petition, and the administrators of the petition say it was planted by the old Ozone Action environmentalist group. If so many fakes are so easily found in it, why would there ever be any need to plant one more in there?
• And even closer to home in this exercise, Greenpeace has long said that ‘shill scientist experts are paid fossil fuel industry-sourced money to spread disinformation that undercuts the established science of catastrophic man-caused global warming.’ But as I pointed out in my dissection of their 2015 stunt involving skeptic climate scientist Dr Will Happer, if so much evidence already exists to prove skeptic climate scientists are paid to fabricate corporate-approved falsehoods, why would there be any need to stage a sting operation that illustrates such corruption – especially when the inept Greenpeace operatives forget to tell the victim to fabricate false reports?

Meanwhile, back to the elemental question here: was the “reposition global warming” memo set actually leaked, period, or was it planted in order for Al Gore and enviro-activists to have a mainstream media story to distract the public away from taking climate assessment reports from skeptic climate scientists seriously?

The specific memo set, with its distinctly different font style from the other documents out of the genuine “Information Council for the Environment” public relations campaign, is seen at Greenpeace’s archive scans (or alternatively at my downloaded PDF file copy of them), pages 9 through 11, and 17 through 25. In my opinion, the whole thrust of the rejected memo proposal is out-of-character for people who genuinely wanted to inform the greater public about details in an issue that biased policymakers and biased advocates deliberately leave out.

Isn’t that what any given effort to inform people strives to do? Inform everyone, not just some narrow population slice? In this case, inform the entire public about an angle of the issue that Al Gore didn’t want to acknowledge and that the mainstream media was not reporting. According to Ross Gelbspan himself, the top administrator of the ICE campaign affirmed that all-inclusive goal. That’s why the rejected proposal’s bit about targeting “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women” is as suspect as it is.

If one or more of the global warming lawsuits ever makes it into a courtroom where juries or judges hear this main evidence for the existence of fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns, and it is revealed that the memo set proposal was rejected and never used, that suspect problem about illogically targeting two small slices of the public looms as a larger problem. Whose idea was it to propose that, and where did the idea come from? One of the insiders of the ICE campaign – I’ll withhold the name – told me that the otherwise ridiculous “older, less-educated males” / “younger, lower-income women” pair of phrases looked like something revealed in newspaper reports just a little earlier in that early 1990s time frame, likely out of the tobacco industry.

Researchers with greater newspaper archive search skills than I have will need to find out if that memory is accurate.

If it’s ultimately revealed how enviro-activists exploited an opportunity long ago to plant a marketing tactic from the tobacco industry into a sincere information campaign in order to falsely claim the campaign used deceptive tobacco industry tactics, wouldn’t that be devastating to the overall global warming issue?

Just askin.’