Does the Disappearance of Phil Radford’s, John Passacantando’s and Kert Davies’ Facebook Friends Mean Anything? [4/18/16 Update]

Just askin’. Key points to remember: global warming alarmists always spiral back to a single bit of evidence to support their notion that skeptic climate scientists are ‘paid industry shills’, namely the “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” phrase that garnered Ross Gelbspan a second career (a phrase he never established to be a top-down industry directive), and that phrase was ‘obtained by Ozone Action and by Ross Gelbspan’ – Ozone Action being manned back then by the two most recently departed executive directors of Greenpeace USA, Radford and Passacantando, and by Greenpeace’s recently departed head of its ExxonSecrets wing, Davies.

The path leading me to today’s blog post stems from my previous post, which noted how handy The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) was for finding such long-lost items as one of the earliest articles about the leak of coal association memos which are the basis of Ross Gelbspan’s second career. Turns out the LTDL is also handy for confirming certain people were associated with Ozone Action, as in Sarah Meginness. Anytime I’ve run across such associations, I routinely dropped the names into the search feature at Gelbspan’s Facebook Friends page or at Passacantando’s, first to see if there was any kind of association with Gelbspan lately, and then to see if I could spot some kind of current web site reference to these people. I assume that if any reporters wanted to look deeper into this overall situation, it would be a helpful time-saver for finding these people.

From the hits I got at Passacantando’s Friends list, I rounded up almost 50 connections to all that I have in my mega-notes pile on the smear of skeptics. But when I tried to access Passacantando’s Facebook page just a couple of days ago to see if Ms Meginness was one of his Friends, I was greeted with “Sorry, this page isn’t available”. Strange, it was there less than two weeks ago. His whole account, 1200 or so Friends, poof, gone in a flash. But not forgotten, as seen in this screencapture of the Friends list of the guy I wrote about in my 1/16/14 blog post.

Hmmm. I used to be able to browse among Phil Radford’s Facebook Friends, not at his ‘public figure’ page having the “https://www.facebook.com/Radford.Phil” url which doesn’t show Friends, but likely at the one with the “http://www.facebook.com/philradford” shown here….. which now does not work when you click on it at that Greenpeace “Quit Coal” web site.**[See author’s 4/18/16 addition at bottom] If I remember right, Radford’s avatar that appeared in other people’s Friends sections was a green and white icon, maybe a Greenpeace logo. This, I should mention, being the same Phil Radford having a Greenpeace bio that had a disappearing Ozone Action reference a few years ago.

Kert Davies’ page apparently switched off public viewing of his Friends recently. But he does show up in Gelbspan’s Friends list, though.

Passacantando stepped down from Greenpeace in 2009 for reasons I haven’t seen, handing over the executive director position to Radford. Radford departed, for reasons not specified, just a couple of months ago. Davies left Greenpeace in September 2013…. for reasons unspecified, starting a web site having the same accusatory stance as his former Greenpeace ExxonSecrets site, but his current site’s Twitter page has less Twitter followers than my own for GelbspanFiles. The man is no less than a major figure from one of the most well recognized environmentalist organizations there is, having been featured on a national TV news discussion, and for the continuation of his research work he can only dredge up 22 followers as of today?

September 2013 coincides with the date that 30 Greenpeace people were detained by Russian authorities for their boarding of a Russian Arctic oil drilling rig, an ‘Arctic ice melting from global warming’ protest stunt which didn’t work out too well for Greenpeace, perhaps made worse by the Arctic failing to be ice-free on cue. Could that have anything to do with Radford’s ultimate departure?

But does the quite recent departure of the Facebook Friends of the Ozone Action trio Passacantando-Radford-Davies have anything to do with my new Desmogblog profile? As near as I can tell, I hadn’t registered on the radar of the people I criticize in any public way until Media Matters attempted to guess what I was up to for my then-upcoming ICCC9 presentation. I would think this old Ozone Action trio and their friends might be more likely to get alerts from Desmogblog – which was founded by Gelbspan, remember, as he says 8 seconds into this audio interview – than they would from Media Matters.

Could be pure coincidence…. Of course, it is unwise to read much into folks’ Facebook Friends, some of my own are tenuous at best, actor Jon Voight and Fox News reporter Jim Angle for example. But in the case of particular enviro-activists, it makes a person wonder why publicly accessible Friends lists seem to be disappearing. I’ll be happy to defend my Friends list any day of the week. Can enviro-activists defend theirs or the need to hide them? And will we be seeing more of their Friends lists disappearing from public view?

Just askin’.

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[** 4/18/16 author’s note: Now, the entire Greenpeace “QuitCoal” web site has vanished. Understandable how Radford’s QuitCoal bio page would be taken down, since he is no longer at Greenpeace, but when you plop the quitcoal.org web address into an internet browser, it reverts in the blink of an eye to a generic Greenpeace global warming page. But not to worry, the Internet Archive has saved those pages and I made my own specific archive of Phil Radford’s QuitCoal bio page. And his prior Facebook page still does not work when you click in the link in my archive page creation.