If you say another person is a liar and can’t keep their personal stories straight, no matter what the topic is, you can’t hurl this as a drive-by shot, you must extensively prove it, because your own reputation now depends on it. People might regret demanding proof if it then sends them into extensive reading, but that’s the price they pay to become fully informed. If they dismiss the mountain of evidence as “too deep into the weeds,” individuals like “Merchants of Doubt” documentary movie star/book author Naomi Oreskes pray for this kind of dismissal — ceding the moral high ground to her.

So, first, a brief number lineup, followed by more details for each, with screencapture image links to back up my specific points, and blog post links which back up what I point out in deep detail:

1. Oreskes’ science consensus  2. Ties to Al Gore  3. False accusation about the “reposition global warming memos”  4. Fatal problems with her “Merchants of Doubt” documentary  5. Her two mutually exclusive ‘discovery’ of who the doubt merchants were  6. Oreskes – the communist .. or something  7. Why would lawyers hire her?  8. Her clumsy amici curiae efforts & global warming/cooling inconsistency  9. The Fred Singer email chain problem  10. The 3 little words she omitted from LBJ’s 1965 speech  11.  RICO-Teering, Oreskes-Style

Many people don’t give much thought to Naomi Oreskes beyond understanding her as someone who supposedly quantified the “man-caused global warming science consensus” and then gained notoriety as a so-called expert about ‘fossil fuel industry disinformation efforts.’ It’s a mistake to simply stop at the truism of how her volumes of material on the climate issue boils down to just a two-part talking point: “the science is settled, and the fossil fuel industry colluded with skeptic scientists manufacture doubt to undercut that settled science.”

What she does there is the riskiest possible high-wire act, fervently hoping with seemingly reckless abandon that nobody questions what she says at any depth regarding ‘science consensus’ and industry disinformation campaigns. Her assertions have massive, fatal faults, while her narratives around them inexplicably don’t lineup right. Once you – and policymakers / litigators / objective reporters – comprehend the extent of these faults, you then begin to see how answers forced from Oreskes could reveal much bigger faults which may imperil the collective global warming issue.

When she – as a ‘historian’ – apparently never verified if her key assertions were based on facts, the question must be asked why she is even involved in the climate issue at all. Tough cross examination of her claims may expose how there never was a conspiracy by the fossil fuel industry to deceive the public, but instead that a core clique of enviros, herself included, have conspired to deceive the public about the credibility of the scientists/science experts who entirely dispute the IPCC climate reports. It’s useful that U.S. House representatives caught Oreskes on a significant bit of bias, and on not knowing a small bit of corporate merger history, and notable how a major U.S. Senator had her admit she’s on retainer with a law firm handling “ExxonKnew” lawsuits … but that’s it. Future questioners cannot stop short like that. What are her fatal narratives faults? Let me count the ways:

1) “A scientific consensus.” Atmospheric physicist Dr S Fred Singer stood a good chance of telling the public that Al Gore’s ‘science consensus’ idea had no merit in the early 1990s. Gore saw that Dr Singer needed to be stopped by any means possible.… except by debunking his science-based assessments, of course – Gore is not a climate scientist. Neither is Oreskes, while it sure seems that Dr Singer had the potential of derailing her upcoming fame from getting her 100% science consensus published in December 2004, with his declaration that “science is not about consensus.”

Before her first known foray into the climate issue, her major claim to fame, arising out of her geology interest, was the April 1999 publication of a book not titled with “Understanding the Science of Continental Drift” or “The Acceptance of Continental Drift as Science Fact,” it was “The Rejection of Continental Drift.” The word “consensus” appears within it at least nine times. Her idea is that science consensus evolves. Think about it – one day the surveyed ratio might be 50.1% in favor of the continents being unmovable to 49.9% saying they move, then one day a single scientist switches places to make it now a 50.1% consensus favoring movable continents. Majority rules, the science is settled. But the next week, another scientist switches from moving continents to fixed in place. Again, majority rules, the science is settled, the continents do not move.

That line of reasoning is ludicrous. Science assessment conclusions have never been validated by consensus in the entire history of the Scientific Method. It’s not how it works.

Regarding her ‘consensus study,’ she distinctly said one time her sample of a thousand papers was “no big deal,” a single “kind of cross check” effort undertaken entirely on her own. Al Gore said a team assisted her in that effort. At the end of her published paper, she thanks just two assistants. The question for investigators to ask here is why is that one simple event beset with inconsistent narratives?

2) She’s on a first-name basis with Al Gore – so she claims. Why? All he did was take barely over a half minute to mention her 100% consensus figure within a movie filled with numerous other science study outcomes. But he used her study as a segue point to imply seconds later that a ‘handful’ of skeptic scientists were paid to “reposition global warming as theory.” He’s not the only person to do that, others have done so similarly within just a couple of sentences – one wonders if this is some kind of shared talking point template among enviro-activists. One more thing here, in connection with litigation lawfare efforts: Gore name-dropped her in his press conference appearance with several state Attorneys General. The question for investigators to ask here is exactly when and how did Al Gore learn learn about Oreskes’ Dec 2004 study, and is his answer something he’d swear to in front of congress or in a courtroom, under the threat of being charged with perjury if it is not the truth?

3) In a series of slideshow presentations in 2007-2008, Naomi Oreskes accused the Western Fuels Association of running a disinformation campaign. This was two years+ prior to gaining fame from her “Merchants of Doubt” book. Her cornerstone ‘evidence’ is the “reposition global warming” memo set, along with ‘key’ newspaper advertorials which were never published, which she claims are in an archive file they were never in, and that these documents and other legitimate items are collected in a Western Fuels / Greening Earth file which she was alerted to by a man named Anthony Socci … who turns out to be a former Senate staffer directly associated with then-Senator Al Gore. The question for investigators to ask is why did Socci alert her to supposedly “smoking gun” memos instead of alerting news outlets to them … and when exactly did he do that? Plus, where did Socci get that material?

4) My 4-part series analyzing her 2015 “Merchants of Doubt” movie shows that while the movie was promoted as exposing propaganda put out in ‘industry disinformation campaigns,’ it was instead projecting what its own intent apparently was. The question for investigators to ask – why neither this movie of hers nor her book of the same name never mentions her beloved “reposition global warming” memos? Or was the one very brief image of the “Citizens For the Environment” placard a veiled reference to the never-used, unsolicited “Informed Citizens for the Environment” that Oreskes refers to elsewhere?

5) Naomi Oreskes tells two mutually exclusive tales of how she was led to ‘discover’ who the ‘merchants of doubt’ – or more accurately, who the person was that she vilifies the most, Dr S Fred Singer. One angle, which I covered in a series of blog posts, concerns how she met her future book co-author Eric Conway … which would need the feat of time travel to be possible from the various ways she tells that story. The other angle involves the climate scientist Dr Ben Santer, in which particular details do not line up right. Question: if she is the heroine she’s portrayed to be exposing who the ‘doubt merchants’ are . . . why would there be any need to embellish her discovery odyssey to so much of an extent that it all looks like a complete fabrication?

6) Don’t call Naomi Oreskes a communist. When you look at her avatar photos for her Twitter / X account, or at the top of her Harvard resumé, or for her Amazon-available books, or see how she flew all the way across the country just to meet another particular woman in person, or when you see that her “Climate Accountability” Institute is located in a particular Colorado mountain community, or you see what she does when she visits Davos, Switzerland — a common recreation pursuit connection becomes obvious: she’s a ski bunny. In the ‘redistribution of wealth’ world of communism, nobody has the extra wealth to waste on such frivolous pursuits. Thus, she might instead qualify for the “communism / bare-level carbon footprint” for Thee, but not for Me” label. But she claimed that a reporter (at what turned out to be a nonexistent newspaper) contacted her to say Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe was calling her a communist, an act that has no appearance of ever happening the way Oreskes describes it. Question: why does that story appear to be a composite of several unrelated events?

7) Question: Why would Naomi Oreskes be on retainer with any law firm? She is a self-proclaimed expert on fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns, and to back this up, she cites a memo directive that was never implemented, a PR campaign name that was never used, and a pair of ‘advertorials’ that were never published.

8) Question: Why is Oreskes filing Friends of the Court briefs in favor of the plaintiffs in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits? Particularly when she needs to spin the never-used “reposition global warming” memo directive into being something it never was in the first place? In those court briefs, Oreskes asserts the memo proves the industry knew global warming was an established fact. She asserts the industry knew as far back as the ’60s and ’70s . . . . except prior to her foray into the climate issue, she flat contradicted that statement. As a science historian, she would have known back at that time how the reports of an imminent ice age were so widespread that they even found their way comically into a 1977 episode of the “Barney Miller” sitcom. Additional question: why did Oreskes switch her narrative?

9) Naomi Oreskes claimed Dr S Fred Singer sent out a letter “after the movie version of “Merchants of Doubt” came out, to see whether they could sue me for defamation.” — no part of that story lines up right, either. Question: was that another fabricated story on her part, an effort to portray herself as a heroine victims and Dr Singer as a villain?

10) Not only did Oreskes’ lecture presentations feature a portion of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 pollution speech as evidence that even he knew of the global warming back then, several of the ExxonKnew” lawsuits were also using this as evidence, as I noted in my dissection of the Rhode Island v Chevron lawsuit. Then they stopped. Questions: why? And why would Oreskes feel compelled to place an ellipsis in the sentence she quotes which would otherwise indicate many words, many sentences, or even irrelevant paragraph is omitted, when all that’s missing are three words which undermine her contention that LBJ’s main concern was ‘CO2 pollution’?

11) Municipalities of Puerto Rico v Exxon is the first case “to include RICO claims” – as I implied in my dissection of that lawsuit, with many references to blogger Shub Niggurath’s “RICO-teering: How climate activists ‘knew’ they were going to pin the blame on Exxon” regarding Naomi Oreskes’ 2012 La Jolla California workshop, the question for investigators to ask is … is she one the main architects of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits?

See the problem here? All of this is what can be found in the public internet record. Imagine what investigators can find – or lawyers may have already found – in private correspondence and private documents. Harsh assessment, but it is what it is — a hallmark of far-leftists is their psychological projection. When Naomi Oreskes claims the fossil fuel industry and skeptic climate scientists secretly colluded to deceive the public, she’s apparently pointing an arrow the size of Texas at herself and her associates … unless she is able to miraculously explain her way under oath out of all her narrative inconsistencies.

If she has gone so far as to succeed in having some influence with Pope Francis, then it’s a sure bet she is serious about finding a way to influence U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ clerks, especially since that court is taking up the discussion of whether one of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits belongs in state or Federal court.

If Naomi Oreskes is exposed as the tip of the iceberg about the origins of false accusation surrounding the (worthless!) “reposition global warming memos,” the collective “ExxonKnew” lawsuits lawfare effort and the overall smear of skeptic climate scientists is at risk of total collapse — the public learning that we instead have every appearance instead of a core clique of enviro-activists deceiving the public about the credibility of skeptic climate scientists. But people with the power and influence at the SCOTUS level and congressional level must be aware of where all of Oreskes’ faulty narratives are.