It’s a propagandist’s dream when an utterly false accusation dating back to mid 1991 is the mainstay evidence in the ongoing series of “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, including the latest Nov 2024-filed Maine v BP one. How is the “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” memo set utterly false, with its otherwise sinister-sounding directive telling skeptic climate scientist ‘shills’ what to do in a public relations campaign targeting gullible “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women”? Easy. It was a rejected proposal, never implemented in any form, tossed into the trash by the people it was proposed to. Its ludicrous idea for the genuine PR campaign to aim messaging at particular people was not only debunked in a congressional hearing at the time when questions about that first erupted in 1991, the namesake of my GelbspanFiles blog strangely corroborated that in one of his last acts of fair and balanced journalism …. albeit with the spin that the person he quoted wasn’t being truthful. Why did he continue on that line? Because this accusation is literally the absolute best the enviro-activists have in their arsenal to indict the skeptic scientists who have the potential to convince the public that the ‘climate crisis’ is not a crisis at all.
But as the old saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” Let me offer two examples of how this kind of propaganda works, and how an investigation of its origins can potentially torpedo the entire global warming issue. A very large part of the population has heard something to the effect that the fossil fuel industry ‘hid the truth about the harm of global warming.’ But the public is unaware of how that whole accusation implodes around the core clique of people who’ve promulgated it since the 1990s. Nobody, including the true believers in the environmentalist movement, likes being conned.
Just a few days back, I alerted a reporter at The Daily Caller to my work, and noted how I had written a single piece for that outlet back in 2010, “Is the ‘Columbo of climate change’ someone who would rather avoid Columbo-like questions?” Within that piece was my clickable link for readers to see for themselves just how widespread the “reposition global warming” memos accusation was. The link had no time constraints, and when I clicked on it for laugh’s sake two days ago, it turned up two results I hadn’t seen in the interim 14+ years. Both are classic examples of pure disinformation, a pair of educators compounding the problem by guessing about who it was that wrote the memo and teaching that to their students rather than questioning anything about the memo.
The first traces to a Fall 2014 class curriculum page (hold that thought on how this is over a decade ago) for the Torrance, California El Camino College Architecture Program titled “Environmental Technology 102 Sustainable Energy and Renewable Building Sciences and Technologies,” which featured Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” as its opening lesson on “Climatology Basics & Global Warming.” The actual search result I turned up was that opening lesson’s 5-page “Responses to Preparing for the Film.” Evidently, the professor was telling students what to think before they watched the movie, and then what to reflect on after watching it. Under its “Responses to Reflecting on the Film” page 4 Item #11, it says this:
In an analysis of 928 articles on global warning written by scientists, Gore reports zero cases of disagreement about what is happening to the environment and why it is happening. Gore also reports a leaked government administrative memo that directs: “Reposition global warning as theory rather than fact.” Hence, a misconception has been deliberately perpetrated by a small group of people to produce doubt and create confusion about a problem that the members of the scientific community hold in agreement.
Again, the worthless “reposition” memos were a rejected proposal written by an association of shareholder-owned electric utility companies. If a student in that architecture class wanted to be assured of getting an “A” in the class, he or she would not …
• question the professor’s guess on who wrote the memo.
• suggest that science conclusions are not validated by ‘consensus opinion’ but instead the notion is a logical fallacy, or point out that there are really dicey problems surrounding the author of that 928-to-zero ‘consensus study.’
• ask if it is plausible that the professor was inadvertently projecting that instead it was a small group of enviro-activists producing doubt and creating confusion about the scientific credibility of skeptic climate scientists in order to prevent the public from comparing what those skeptics say to what Al Gore says.
Meanwhile, the second Google search result I turned up traces to another university lesson, seen within a student contribution post for the City University of New York’s 6-week summer 2020 class “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change.” The actual search result I turned up was the student’s “Losing Glaciers, Losing Steam,” essentially a review/opinion piece of Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” and his 2017 “An Inconvenient Sequel.” Within the student’s piece is this:
Although the scientific community is in “100 percent agreement” on climate change and its dangers, a small group of world leaders has sought to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact to perpetuate the reign of big oil business. The political corruption goes even as far as coercing scientists to alter reports.
Basically the same thing 6 years later, just significantly more disinforming. A “small group of world leaders” – heckuva step up from “government administrative memo.” And again, if the student in that class wanted to be assured of getting an “A,” she would not … well, say anything different than what she wrote. Could the student provide evidence proving fossil fuel executives – or world leaders – coerced skeptic scientists to alter reports? Don’t bet the ranch on it. At the end of my August 21, 2020 blog post, I had additional reading links about the situation where an IPCC-associated scientist did exactly what the student described.
The common thread here, from what I pointed out in 2010, to these two regurgitations of blatantly false accusations . . . is Al Gore’s 2006 movie.
That angle perpetuates right into the present day, in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Al Gore is not the source of the memos, but he handed potentially his own head on a silver platter to investigators on how this whole accusation got started. As I described in my “Summary for Policy Makers” concerning the main law firm filing the bulk of these lawfare lawsuits, the question to ask is whether the memo copies this firm was provided are the identical copies Gore had in his 1991-’92 Senate office — long before the other promulgators of the accusation about the memos had them. Since the zealot political left is not above planting evidence to perpetuate agendas, it would not be out-of-bounds for investigators to ask if the “reposition” memos were planted for enviro-activists to ‘discover.’
If that core evidence within these lawsuits implodes, the lawsuits themselves collapse, one after another. They argue that the industry knew of the planetary harm of fossil fuel emissions, but misled the public, the primary ‘evidence’ of this deception being particular efforts to ‘reposition global warming theory,’ thus the industry should pay for that crime. When plaintiffs ‘evidence’ is worthless to prove what they claim happened, a judge can rule the lawsuit dead for that reason.
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Speaking of the “reposition” memos accusation origins questions investigators should explore, up next: “Naomi Oreskes has a Socci Problem.”