Regarding the Donate button now prominently displayed at the top right of my Home page (which takes donors to Paypal where they can contribute whatever amount they wish to me), the following is a message not only for friends, it’s also a challenge aimed directly at my fiercest critics along with anyone else who firmly believes that prominent opponents of Al Gore’s version of man-caused global warming are industry shills who are paid to lie. My challenge right here is a golden opportunity for Gore’s followers to put that accusation to the ultimate test.

Put your money once and for all where your mouth is, in other words. If it’s said that I …

• “work for the Heartland Institute”
• am “a shill hired by the Heartland Institute”
• am “a paid representative of the Heartland Institute” who ‘earns my pay’
• am “paid to peddle falsehoods”
• ‘lie for money’ and am deserving of the label “prostitute”

… the implication is that I also have highly detailed inside information on how my benefactors operate under orchestration by the fossil fuel industry to deliberately spread lies. By default, it follows that I say what I do because my current benefactors pay me a lucrative enough amount to do so. If this is so, then also by default, a larger and more lucrative amount from wealthy believers in man-caused global warming – Tom Steyer, George Soros, Greenpeace International, (342 million Euros = $397 million) / Greenpeace USA, for example – would set me free to rat on my benefactors and the fossil fuel industry. Lowly online global warming alarmist commenters might justify how they couldn’t personally donate here, but how could they collectively justify failing to move heaven and earth to prompt the Steyers/Soroses/Greenpeaces of the world to guess what my salary is, and then put one hugely prominent donation that’s double, triple, or otherwise of an “impossible to resist size” into my Donate Button account?

You literally believe there really is a fossil fuel industry/skeptics conspiracy to spread lies? Then go ahead, make my day. I’ll post the announcement of the donation here at GelbspanFiles, you can trumpet it across the internet, then you can sit back and watch what happens. If you know the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation is absolutely true, what do you have to lose by taking this gamble?

Meanwhile, why should friends who are skeptical about the whole idea of catastrophic man-caused global warming donate? First, as I said in my About page, I’ve already sacrificed. Around $67,500, if you figure for a half year in 2008 immersing myself full time into the basic science issue, and full time+ for 2009 through 2012, at a spending rate of $15,000 for basic-level living. Now, compare this: one of my Facebook Friends griped about how his latest smartphone was not synchronizing with all the rest of his phone-controlled devices – car, home thermostats, computers, etc. I can’t personally afford a smartphone (the one I have was bought by my family’s extended trust account to enable me to access all available help at any time for a family member in declining health; the account takes care of the monthly bill), or a home, or even a new computer, let alone new computers plural. Simply put, if any of you appreciate my own sacrifice toward what I do and can amply afford luxuries I cannot, I’d be indebted to your generosity.

Finally, friends and foes alike might justifiably wonder, for all my disclosures of how little I receive as strings-free grants from the Heartland Institute (relative to what my critics wildly speculate about) why I didn’t have a Donate Button here any earlier than the end of August 2018, a little more than five years after this blog began.

Two reasons:

1) Heartland set up the bare bones virtual structure of this blog and has allowed me to have unrestricted control over its content ever since. When I suggested the use of a Donate button, they were opposed to it, essentially because of the burden of sorting donations intended for me from a pile that otherwise goes into their entire collection. That sounded understandable to me, and since they mused that my 2013 initial grant might be subsequently increased in 2014, which it was, I saw no pressing need for a Paypal Donate button. But with both my 2017 grant and my current-year grant being only $12,000 for the entire year to live on, I again suggested the idea of it. In January of this year, they said I could probably install one that would send donations straight into my personal account, skipping their system altogether. The reasoning was “Supporters wouldn’t get a tax-deductible contribution for supporting your work, but that’s a lot less important these days than it used to be (thanks to the Trump tax plan), and people who are giving $5 or $10 to support a website aren’t doing that for the tax deduction anyway.”

2) I’ve been really busy. It takes a boatload of time to research all the material I put out in most every blog, and time really got away from me after January this year. I dreaded that it would interrupt my routine to set up the thing, and I guessed right. It required a free upgrade to my own Paypal account, and then the account became half locked up because Paypal was interpreting that I had a non-profit business, which I do not. The block of time spent resolving that glitch is time I would have preferred to spend on other projects.

Overall, the situation is elemental. For any sympathizers who are now reasonably more than comfortable in material wealth but who can also remember what it was like to live on a razor-thin budget, feel free to donate whatever you wish that would make my living a little bit better, knowing that I’ll pay the favor forward when I’m doing better financially.

For those of you who think the climate change issue is stalled because the settled science is being thwarted by oil-paid obstructionists who are getting rich in a sinful way by misleading the public, this is your prove it or lose it moment on that talking point, because this corruption accusation is the cornerstone of your whole position to support the idea that there is no valid opposition to the notion of ‘man-caused global warming settled science.’

Don’t just stop with me — stand and deliver on what you believe. If Dr Willie Soon is hopelessly tainted by a $1.2 million ‘bribe given to him by Exxon,’ then drop $2.4 million worth of pocket change from Steyer/Soros/Greenpeace billions on him and watch what happens.