Emphasizing for the benefit of congressional investigators / law firms representing defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / genuinely objective journalists: It does not matter where you drop into the collective accusation about the fossil fuel industry employing skeptic climate shills to spread disinformation — you’ll never find tidy answers tying up situations, you’ll find problems that only lead you onto a path of finding endless related problems. It never ends, no matter where you start. The example in this blog post concerns an item within Roland C “Kert” Davies’ 2011 version of his false accusation that Harvard Center for Astrophysics’ Dr Willie Soon was supposedly paid by Exxon to lie. I showed in my prior blog post the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits in which Davies 2015 rehashed accusation is their source – but while compiling that list and the brief timeline of prior accusations leading to the 2015 rehash, I spotted how Davies tangentially said something in his announcement of the 2011 version which essentially undermines one of the other of the four central accusation elements at the heart of most of these lawsuits.

Davies’ June 28, 2011 Greenpeace announcement concerned his very first “Exxon $1.2 million” accusation effort. He should have stuck to that attack exclusively, but he could not resist inserting one of the other accusation elements into his announcement, namely the meritless one (I have a whole tag category on it) about the 1998 American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” memo set. Observe:

In 1998, the API, ExxonMobil and the Southern Company sat round a table with other oil companies and think tanks they plotted and funded a Global Climate Science Communications Plan to undermine the climate science and support for the Kyoto Protocol that had just been agreed. “Victory will be achieved when… average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science“… read the plan. “Uncertainty” was also their objective for the media. The detail funding sources from corporate purses going to think tanks and front groups who will coach scientists with messages counter to the rising consensus on the global warming crisis. Even though this ‘scandal’ was front page news at the New York Times, our assumption is they did it anyway.

His setup prior to this paragraph was to claim an assortment of fossil fuel companies were funding Dr Soon. After the paragraph, he resumed his attack. The paragraph, in addition to being oddly and poorly written, has problems on several levels.

• There was never a plan to undermine climate science. The single-day meeting was nothing more than a session on how to counter the Kyoto Protocol, but the brainstorming ultimately became a moot point because everyone involved figured out that there was no way the U.S. Senate would cede any power to authorities outside the U.S. The ‘plan’ was never implemented in any form, there was no need for Kyoto Treaty countermeasures.
• It would be a victory for anybody to achieve if they could break through to the public on how particular policy suggestions are deceptive when critical details are withheld from the public. The global warming issue withholds viewpoints from skeptic scientists who say the whole issue is massively overblown.
• Yes, the NYT reported about the leak of the API memo in its April 26, 1998 “Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty” article — read through the whole article, however, and you’ll won’t see a single word quoting the specific “victory will be achieved” ‘smoking gun’ phrases which are the key identifiers of this memo set. Nobody would know that memo phrase belonged to that memo set from reading that article.

The last two sentences of Kert Davies’ above paragraph are where the fatal problems are, one at a basic level concerning Davies’ lack of understanding how science works, and the other which illustrates how outright defamation happens.

Let’s start with the first basic problem — he contends the fossil fuel industry pays think tanks / front groups to “coach scientists with messages counter to the rising consensus on the global warming crisis.”

• Think tanks / front groups do not coach PhD-level skeptic scientists what to say. That notion is beyond ludicrous. Science conclusions are not validated by “a show of hands,” it is not how the Scientific Method works. If any dumb think tank operative said “the scientific consensus is not trending our way, so we need to tilt it back to our favor,” he’d be read the riot act by the scientists. Skeptic scientists coach the people at think tanks who don’t have science expertise on what the facts are, and where the blatant mistakes are in IPCC climate assessment reports.
• Skeptic scientists and other related experts who’ve signed the declaration that there is no climate crisis can explain why they hold that position in so much fine detail that it would give average citizens migraine headaches from trying to absorb it all.

So, how do you steer average citizens and supposedly objective journalists away from any effort to absorb those details? You say the skeptics were paid to lie, and the proof of this treachery was a memo shared among a huge array of fossil fuel execs saying they’d achieve a sinister victory if they misled the public into thinking there’s no science consensus on the matter.

That’s where the fatal fault in Kert Davies’ above paragraph comes in.

When worded in a way easier to understand: ‘Fossil fuel execs were caught red-handed by the NYT coaching the skeptics they paid to lie; rather than stop this scandalous act, our assumption is they did it anyway.”

See that? Kert Davies’ entire accusation about the “victory will be achieved” memos being a template for the entire fossil fuel industry to follow is based . . . . . . . . . on his assumption.

The accepted definition of defamation is that a person may not make a false statement against someone knowing it is false, and they cannot make an accusatory statement against someone with reckless regard to whether it is true or not. It would be hard to make the case that what Kert Davies said there was just an innocent unintentional falsehood.

Further along in his 2011 Greenpeace announcement, Davies says “Together with his colleague at the SAO, Sallie Baliunas, they brought in $1,153,000 since 2001.” Well, wait a minute now. That wipes out the accusation hurled by accusers that Dr Soon alone got the rounded-up $1.2 million figure. What’s the money split between the two scientists? Dr Soon got an even million and Dr Baliunas got $153 grand? He got $576,500 and she got the other half? She got $700 grand and he only got $453 grand? Kert Davies only mentions Dr Baliunas one more time in his 2011 announcement, and only in a parenthetical way, too.

The full 2011 Greenpeace report (archived with irrelevant html code gibberish on top) mentions Dr Baliunas’ name 16 times, as does the more readable updated Greenpeace 2013 version (the screen search feature shows 17 there because there is one extra in the archive’s header area). The title of Davies’ Greenpeace announcement, however, is not “Dr Willie Soon & Dr Sallie Baliunas: Two Careers Fueled by Koch, Big Oil and Coal.” In the UK Guardian newspaper’s same-day June 28, 2011 article about Davies’ report, Davies himself does not say “Scientists like Dr Soon and Dr Baliunas … are pawns,” nor does the article headline say “Climate sceptics Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas received $1m.” It only mentions Dr Baliunas’ name once, and not in any connection to funding.

See the problem there? Was it an unintentional falsehood by Kert Davies and the Guardian to only name Dr Soon as an industry-paid pawn and exclude Dr Baliunas?

Carry this through all the way to the present day into the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, the bulk of which are handled by the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling (other law firms seem to plagiarize their accusations from Sher Edling filings). As I showed in my Oct 2020 dissection of Sher Edling’s Delaware v BP filing and re-emphasized in my Jan 10 post, their pattern was to accuse 1) the fossil fuel industry of “bankrolling” ‘fringe’ scientists; 2) say ‘fringe scientists’ go funding from fossil fuel companies; and 3) say these scientists failed to disclose the funding. What’s Sher Edling’s cited source for the ‘fringe scientists’ slur? A 2003 paper by Soon and Baliunas. What’s Sher Edling’s cited source for the ‘failure to disclose’ accusation? The Smithsonian Institution’s 2015 press release (taken offline at some point after March 4 2020) which only notes that it was beginning its inquiry into Dr Soon’s funding disclosures situation ….. and which never mentions Dr Baliunas’ name at all.

Why did the Smithsonian not also say it was investigating Dr Baliunas’ funding disclosures?

Is it a pure coincidence that in the summer of 2011 within a Seattle KXEP public radio interview of Naomi Oreskes, she spoke of Dr Soon as being the replacement for the ‘old generation’ of ‘industry-paid climate deniers’ and then said – without skipping a beat – “just a couple of days ago a big report was released by Greenpeace about his funding and evidently according to Greenpeace, he’s received over a million dollars of funding from the fossil fuel industry…”

No mention there whatsoever that Davies’ own report said – irrespective of who received whatever funding – that it was across the time span of a decade … and no mention of Dr Baliunas at all.

What’s up with her failure to tell the whole story there? What’s up with other law firms – plural – deciding to substitute alternative citation sources for the 2015 Smithsonian press release?

See the overarching problem here? No tidy answers, no smoking gun proof that a supposedly sinister-sounding memo plan was ever actually implemented (I have it firsthand that it was not), and no smoking gun proof at all from the Smithsonian Institution itself that their 2015-2020 inquiry proved Dr Soon acted in any improper way.