The public loves a tale of personal heroism. What kills a person’s hero story is when someone interrupts the tale and asks a point-blank question, “How is it possible that the thing you just described happened the way it did? It doesn’t seem to be readily obvious.” The storyteller can either dig their way out of the hole they just opened up, or not, and if that killer problem is left dangling in mid air for everyone to see, it’s an open invite to see what else in the tale falls apart.

Naomi Oreskes’ tale of personal heroism is not a tightly-knit fabric, it has loose ends everywhere. It’s hard to tell what level of intellect she has, but if she has any smarts at all, she should be petrified that if various major Federal / legal system investigators pull on any one of her loose threads, they’ll end up pointing a virtual gun in her face to explain her collective role in the climate issue. One way for it to all unravel is for an investigator to ask – who’d already know the answer – “Who is Anthony Socci?“

Separate from all else, Anthony Socci is still working at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International and Tribal Affairs, according to the George Mason University bio page for him, and according to his current-as-of-this-blog-post-date LinkedIn resumé (probably not for much longer; he’s basically a deep state pro-global warming person – Oct 2022 example here ). Both the late Dr S Fred Singer and the still very much alive Dr Richard Lindzen have described Socci as a direct associate of Al Gore. I have it directly from a former Western Fuels Association administrator that when Socci called WFA in the early 1990s to ask for copies of WFA’s annual reports and other publicly available docs, the administrator asked Socci upon his arrival at the WFA office if he was a staffer for then-Senator Gore, and Socci denied it in a hostile manner. What is absolutely clear – courtesy of our good friends at “Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action” – Socci was seen in direct association with Senator Al Gore’s 1992 hearing in which Gore grilled skeptic climate scientist Dr Sherwood Idso over the scientist’s funding received from Western Fuels. In 1994, Gore presented Western Fuels docs to ABC News Nightline’s Ted Koppel, in an attempt to portray skeptic climate scientists as industry-corrupted. Later on, Socci went to work for the American Meteorological Society.

Let me emphasize: “… for the American Meteorological Society.” Here’s where the Naomi Oreskes problem comes in.

She was essentially a latecomer to the climate issue in late 2003 / 2004, Ross Gelbspan’s hardcover / paperback books had already been out for 7 / 6 years accusing Dr Singer / Dr Idso of being paid to “reposition global warming” in an ‘industry disinfo public relations campaign’ targeting “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women.” While many know of her post-2010 rise to fame from her “Merchants of Doubt” book, which never mentions that notorious memo set at all, few are aware that she initiated a traveling lecture series in 2007 that continued into 2008 titled “You Can Argue With The Facts” in which she accused the Western Fuels Association of operating under that exact memo set. As I’ve showed many times here at GelbspanFiles, the memo set’s directive / PR audience targeting goals were never implemented and the actual Western Fuels “ICE” campaign never operated under the “Informed Citizens” name. The entire premise for Oreskes’ lecture series – as I detailed in my line-by-line analysis of one of her 2008 versions – is that the memo set was what the Western Fuels campaign operated under. She offered one brief – and giggly – hint of her source for the memos in her 2008 lecture presentation, but offered no further explanation about it.

… So, in documents preserved in American Meteorological Society, and were leaked to them by someone good, …

See that? A really loose thread to pull on. An investigator could ask, “What do you mean, ‘leaked to AMS by someone good??” AMS is not a news outlet, they analyze weather conditions, past and present.

Her lecture series ultimately culminated in her Chapter 5 book contribution to the otherwise obscure multi-authored “How Well Do Facts Travel?” 2010 book.

That’s where she could not keep her mouth shut about Anthony Socci.

She didn’t discover the “reposition global warming” memos and other such documents – either accurately for falsely – attributed to the Western Fuels Association. Anthony Socci told her about them, supposedly kept in AMS’ Washington D.C. office archives in a non-standard manner. She went out of her way in that Chapter 5 contribution to describe how Socci himself had written “a memo to the file” regarding one of the ICE campaign advertorials, while she also prominently mentioned another of the advertorials in that same “AMS archive” collection, namely the “Chicken Little” ad. Oh, right, the never-published “Chicken Little” ad. Oreskes’ book chapter footnote #18 for that ‘memo to file’ situation was for Socci’s “email to self” which he’d sent in 2000. He’d composed it “Re: The Heat is Online – The Industry’s “ICE” Campaign.” That happens to be Ross Gelbspan’s old blog page.

Investigator: Ms Oreskes, did Anthony Socci tell you why he felt a need to email himself over an ad you say is archived in the AMS DC office with a note about what Ross Gelbspan had written?
Naomi Oreskes: Uhhhhhh …..
Investigator: Also, were you aware that the archivist at AMS’ Boston office told us there is no such archive at their DC office? Were you speaking of documents which Socci personally kept? And did he tell you how he came to possess these documents?
Oreskes: Uhhhhhh …..

But I suggest here’s the killer question, the one that may unravel more than the fabric of just Oreskes’ own ‘personal heroine’ story: I mentioned it before in my above-noted 2022 analysis of her 2008 lecture presentation, and I emphasize it again now, since many more of the stars seem to be aligning as it concerns “ExxonKnew” lawsuits on the verge of going into the discovery process before trial, and/or congressional inquiries / FBI and/or Department of Justice inquiries:

If these ‘Western Fuels Association’ documents were absolute smoking gun proof of the fossil fuel industry paying skeptic scientist ‘shills’ to reposition global warming . . . . . . . why on Earth would Anthony Socci not exploit his stature to get this breaking news into the biggest possible news outlets, and instead choose to alert some obscure history professor about them, who would be able to do nothing more than speak about them to sparsely-attended college campus lectures afterward?

Oh, wait … she’s managed to spread this identical accusation worldwide, plus she’s on retainer with the main law firm regurgitating the same accusations, and is regurgitating this in her own Friends of the Court briefs on behalf of plaintiffs in those lawsuits, and she bragged in congressional testimony of having “a great deal of documentary evidence on this.”

Right. But was it just Anthony Socci who specifically sought her out as a good person to run with these docs, or was it someone bigger than Socci?

Just askin’. It’s not implausible that people much more influential than me may be askin’ soon, too.