What’s particularly maddening about this problem is the simplicity of its flip side, a crystal-clear snapshot of the way Naomi Oreskes, with her Merchants of Doubt co-author Erik Conway, supposedly exposed how public confusion over climate science results from organized campaigns designed to create confusion and delay political action, a tactic previously employed in efforts to deny the reality of acid rain, ozone depletion, and the link between tobacco and cancer, tactics now used in some cases by the same people who deny the reality of global warming. But in my November 18, 2017 blog post, I used Conway’s own words to show how the timeline of Oreskes’ so-called discovery of her ‘tobacco industry-connected’ critics fell apart, and the problems don’t stop there. Conway’s account of his collaboration with Oreskes on this ‘tobacco industry-connected climate scientists’ matter doesn’t offer a clearer picture of why atmospheric physicist Dr S Fred Singer was seemingly “the most dangerous man on the planet”, it begs for deeper investigation of why and how this portrayal of him coalesced in the first place. Continue reading
Tag Archives: S. Fred Singer
Oreskes’ Inability to Keep Her Mouth Shut & the Big Erik Conway Problem
In telling the tale of inadvertently discovering how skeptic climate scientists are corrupted, a person might be viewed as a hero or heroine, and it is understandably forgivable if the hero/heroine has a memory lapse about exactly when this event happened, or about minor narrative details surrounding it. But when the tale takes on an increasing appearance of being a fabrication designed to make the person look like a hero/heroine, unbiased objective thinkers will start to wonder why there would be any necessity for that kind of embellishment, and they might also wonder if there is something inherently wrong with the core of the tale. Continue reading
People of the State of California v. BP P.L.C., et al.
If you are an enviro-activist with access to lawyers and mega-money who believes catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is caused by evil fossil fuel industries who ignore this harm to humanity to protect their profits, you don’t simply whine about this problem, you file giant lawsuits against those industries. Continue reading
We Have to Stop These People …. somehow
From an October 10, 1993 Newsweek magazine article by Sharon Begley, there is this first item: Continue reading
2nd Hand Smoke kills (or so we’re told) pt. 2
Using absurdity to illustrate absurdity – one more example of how the claim that ‘climate change deniers are untrustworthy because they also deny the harm of cigarette smoking’ implodes under hard scrutiny. Continue reading
2nd Hand Smoke kills (or so we’re told), pt 1
What does that have to do with climate science? Absolutely nothing, and by God, any idiot knows breathing second-hand cigarette smoke can’t be good for you. So if anyone or any organization even remotely denies that it is at least harmful in some way, then those people are folks you want to avoid mentioning at all costs, so as not look like a fool yourself. This includes situations where those same folks dare to question the settled science of catastrophic man-caused global warming. It’s all a brilliant setup ….. but there is one eensy-beensy fatal problem here. Continue reading
What’s the Deal with that Other Book?
I dissect myriad angles of the accusation about skeptic climate scientists ‘being paid by Big Coal & Oil to lie to the public’ for basically for one reason: to amass bulletproof information for journalists who want to objectively tell the story of how character assassination has been used as a tactic to steer the public away from taking those skeptics’ science assessments seriously, and/or for attorneys or congressional investigators who might want to hold people accountable who may have engaged in either libel/slander against skeptic climate scientists, or who may have engaged in some form of racketeering to prevent their global warming gravy train from derailing. Regarding the following problem, envision a TV courtroom drama scene, where the prosecuting attorney raises some action the defendant made, the defense attorney objects, and the prosecutor replies with, “goes to motive!” Continue reading
To be Credible, you must Keep Your Story Straight, Pt 2: “Oreskes’ timeline problem”
I’ll repeat with what I concluded in Part 1, but more succinctly: for an authoritative storyteller to mesmerize an audience, the story must never contain an element where the audience blurts out, “wait a minute, what you just said can’t be right,” otherwise whatever point there was to the story disappears at the exact same moment when the storyteller’s credibility implodes.
If the storyteller’s credibility implodes, it will not matter how good the story is. As a storyteller, one might have written a good manuscript; maybe the person would have even hired proofreading services in London or at their place to get the manuscript ready; talked to publishing houses or even contacted editors. But all this might just go in vain if the credibility of the storyteller implodes. It will just have a negative impact on the story and the one who is writing it to mesmerize the audience.
Now, see how Harvard History of Science professor Naomi Oreskes‘ inadvertently elicits that exact response from her audience, via her tale of the events which led her to explore the notion that skeptic climate scientists operate in a manner parallel to what ‘expert shills’ did for the tobacco industry. Continue reading
The Connolley Problem, pt 7: Cancerous Greenpeace / Desmogblog / Gelbspan Stuff
In my prior post linking to my 4/22 American Thinker article about the very current efforts to use racketeering laws to prosecute Exxon for misinforming people about the certainty of man-caused global warming, I spoke of finding the ‘usual suspects’ behind the accusation. One of those names is seen again in this post. Basically, Dave Rado’s 2007 complaint over the UK Channel Four Television Corporation video “The Great Global Warming Swindle” is plagued with exactly the same fatal fault as any other past or present narrative about the certainty of catastrophic man-caused global warming: its authors offer little more than science claims contradicting material expressed by skeptic climate scientists, and they abysmally fail to provide evidence that those skeptics knowingly lie about their positions under a monetary arrangement with industry people. Worse, the Ofcom complaint’s reliance on highly suspect sources to make the latter insinuation only undermines the overall intent of the complaint. Today, an examination of those sources for the accusation. Continue reading
The Connolley Problem, pt 5: The Redundant Gelbspan/Lancaster Reference
Citing irrelevant material as a means to question the credibility of an global warming expert’s science viewpoints is fundamentally unwise, particularly when the individual making the citation commits an inexcusable error in the process. But the credibility problem worsens when that person takes on the appearance of trying to inflate the number of sources for the irrelevant material, with a pair of ‘corroborations’ where one of them only cites the identical original source while the other only opens up a Pandora’s Box about the entire situation surrounding the – let me emphasize – irrelevant material. Continue reading