“Merchant of Disinformation” – the movie. Part 3

Not only is Naomi Oreskes the author of the 2010 “Merchants of Doubt” book / star of the 2015 same-name documentary movie, she is also now apparently trying to make some kind of inroads into influencing SCOTUS clerks, if this August 15, 2024 “Interview: Science historian Naomi Oreskes schools the Supreme Court on climate change” article from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is to be believed. There’s no indication in the article that she’s ‘schooled’ anybody there yet, but she evidently has ‘schooled’ global warming lawfare lawyers – she’s on retainer with the law firm directly handling / assisting with 22 (at the time of this blog publication) of the current U.S. “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits. She has apparently also had some kind of influence with no less than Pope Francis.

She’s been skating on thin ice ever since her foray into the issue, but via sheer blind luck of never facing anyone questioning a word she says, she hasn’t yet fallen right through. When major high-level discussions occur regarding how, where, and why the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits should proceed, her name as an ‘expert’ on the topic is certain to be mentioned in some form. This actually already happened once, where her “Merchants” movie was brought up within the 2015-era NY state Attorney General’s office. That’s why it’s crucial for any clerks for the ruling majority of the Supreme Court to be aware, along with any other people involved in the court system – law firms for the defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits especially – or people involved in the Republican side of the U.S. congress, of how massively vulnerable she is on her assertions about the climate issue and what she terms ‘industry-led disinformation campaigns.’

Continue reading

Merchant of Disinformation – the movie. Part 2

Continuing from Part 1 on my line-by-climate-issue-line analysis of Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” documentary movie. She’s on retainer with the Sher Edling law firm handling 17 of the current U.S. “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuits and ‘assisting’ in 5 others. In the 2023 European lawsuit, Greenpeace Italy et al. v. ENI S.p.A., et al. against the Italian energy company Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, Greenpeace implies “Merchants of Doubt” book author Oreskes is an ‘expert’ on fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns. The accusation seen in that lawsuit about fossil fuel companies running disinformation campaigns is not supported by any evidence in her book. But these assertions arising from her work or coming straight from her continue unabated because nobody challenges them.

To challenge her, you must know where her narratives fall apart. Continue reading

Piling on – Naomi Oreskes knew who her attackers were before her attackers attacked?

The woman has every appearance of being unable to keep her stories straight on what led her to ‘discover’ who the ‘merchants of doubt’ were in the global warming issue.

This is an interim post between my Parts 1 and 2 of my line-by-climate-issue-line analysis of Naomi Oreskes’ 2015 “Merchants of Doubt” documentary movie. I need to detail what she said in a 2011 podcast interview here before continuing on to Part 2, because what she said below contradicts a key detail she unequivocally stated in her movie. Continue reading

Al Gore: “You Always Hurt the One You Love”

The whole accusation about the fossil fuel industry running disinformation campaigns employing skeptic scientist ‘shills’ to deceive the public about the certainty of man-caused catastrophic global warming is enslaved to a pair of literally worthless, never-implemented ‘industry memo sets.’ It’s been the best the enviro-activists have ever had in their accusation arsenal, going all the way back to the 1990s. The accusation is unsustainable, it will ultimately sink. It’s a mathematical certainty.

Choose any one of myriad questionable situations surrounding the apparently interconnected people who promulgated the narratives about the memos, and you have the tip of the proverbial iceberg that can sink this whole thing. Investigators with more power and influence that I have will be seeking answers about those questionable situations. For quite some time, I wondered if there was no connection at all between Naomi Oreskes and Kert Davies, but as I briefly showed in my May 21, 2020 blog post, there certainly is a questionable situation involving those to together.

Investigators will be asking why Davies was lurking in the doorway of Oreskes’ appearance at a pretend House hearing.

They’ll be asking about Al Gore’s connection to the others. Why would Oreskes say she’s on a first-name basis with Gore, when all he did was cite a single ‘100% science consensus’ figure of hers in his 2006 movie? Why would Gore say Ross Gelbspan discovered the “reposition global warming” memos – the set that gained their first ongoing media traction via Gelbspan and John Passacantando’s Ozone Action publicity about them, when Gore quoted from the set years before Gelbspan ever mentioned them?

And what did Gore mean, in the situation reported by the LA Times, where …..  Continue reading

County of Multnomah v. Exxon Mobil, et al.

When the news of this Oregon County lawsuit, filed on June 22, 2023 happened, I was in the midst of a complicated, distracting, time-consuming switch of residences. In my rapid first screensearch into the filing for ye olde “reposition global warming” memos ‘evidence,’ which is the cornerstone ‘evidence’ hallmark (worthless as that memo set is) of these mindlessly repetitive “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits, I initially thought a dissection of this latest lawsuit would be just a quick checklist comparison to my Puerto Rico v Exxon lawsuit dissection — they both contained identical wording and identical errors concerning the “reposition global warming” memos.

It would be a simply matter to then point out that this identical lawsuit blunder was committed by a law firm 3700 miles away from Puerto Rico, thus the plain overarching question implied by deep examination and comparison of all these lawsuits is elemental: who actually are the dummies writing this “Global Warming / #ExxonKnew Show”?

However, when I finally had time to sift deeper through this Oregon filing, it turns out the same question obviously applies, but the blunders within this one pointing to the Puerto Rico filing and other lawsuits in a key way are … well … not quite that simple. Continue reading

The Irony of The Mann

During this interim inconvenient time where I must downsize to a much smaller residence, which includes selling off unneeded books at the HalfPrice Bookstore, almost no time is available for in-depth blogging. But while I was at that bookstore today, I had the opportunity to look through a used and perhaps not especially cherished copy of Dr Michael Mann’s “The New Climate War” book, which allows me to at least minimally offer the following for future investigators to consider: Ironic that Dr Mann, who filed a defamation lawsuit which he ultimately lost and is forced to pay lawyers fees to at least one of the people he falsely accused of defamation, apparently commits the very same giant act himself, while recklessly pointing an arrow the size of Texas at the people he relies on for his accusations. Remember, the definition of the term is that a person knowingly tells a falsehood, or recklessly doesn’t make sure the accusation has merit.

(Don’t get me started on James Hoggan’s enslavement to Ross Gelbspan for the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation. Plus, back in Feb 2022, I covered Dr Mann’s inexplicable blunder in this same book concerning ye olde “reposition global warming memo.”)

 

Municipalities of Puerto Rico v. Exxon Mobil, et al. Part 2: RICO-teering

(see Author’s July 2, 2024 addition at the bottom of this post)

Bad enough that this lawsuit filing from the Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman LLC law firm has a no-win appearance of being either a mismanaged effort guided by the Sher Edling law firm without any disclosure of that partnership, or it appears to be a spectacularly inept and possibly unethical plagiarizing of the accusation content and other bits from the 16 boilerplate copy Sher Edling lawsuits. I detailed all of that in my Part 1 blog post (handily reproduced at WUWT, enabling me to reach a wider reading audience).

Exponentially worse for Milberg Coleman is the widespread news assertions that their lawsuit filing “is unique” because it is “the first climate case against fossil fuel companies alleging harms against cities as a class of plaintiffs, and the first climate case to include Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) claims” as if this tactic is some kind of new idea. Many ‘news’ outlets belched out this RICO idea without questioning anything about it. It seems this mob is oblivious to the central hallmark of far-leftists, namely how they project what they do as accusations of what their political opposites do.

Why is all of this bad for Milberg Coleman? Because their RICO tactic doesn’t point to anything done by ‘Big Coal & Oil’ and skeptic climate scientists, it instead points an arrow the size of Texas at one of the core promulgators of the “crooked skeptic scientists” accusation. Continue reading

Tom Nelson Podcast, #39: “Russell Cook: On climate change, ‘the mainstream media has not done its job’”

Questions …….. I have questions. We all should have questions regarding the “Clima-Change™” issue, because the issue itself demands unquestioned belief in its orthodoxy. So, in Tom’s 53 minute interview of me, I describe the questions that landed me in the issue, starting out with just the simplest question I had as a little kid, and then the questions I have now of why the traditional news media is not asking questions they should pose as a matter of basic investigative journalism. The elemental point I wish to drive home in this interview is that the questions end up being larger than just the science, where the ultimate implication is that if we are pressured in any way not to ask questions on any controversial issue, that’s where democracy dies in darkness.

Here, let me add a few details about the visuals that accompanied my telephone interview, along with some other info bits. Continue reading

More Problems in PBS Frontline’s Part 2 “The Power of Big Oil”

In the race to the bottom for the distinction having no self-awareness of how ridiculous a person or organization appears as they denounce “disinformation” while putting out essentially non-stop disinformation, it looks like Frontline and the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee and the steady, plodding plow horse of the PBS NewsHour just got massively outpaced by the 4/28/22 news of songstress (no joke!) Nina Jankowicz as executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board.” If Ms Jankowicz actually makes it to Day 1 of her new job without being forced to resign in shame, certainly the first of her potential targets should be the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee, and PBS, since a case could be made that their out-of-context, intellectually dishonest, less than transparent, false premise narratives have led to actual preventable death.

Meanwhile, Frontline continued on in its 4/26/22 “The Power of Big Oil, Part 2,” beginning straightaway Continue reading

The Power of the Li’l Green Group in PBS Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil”

On Easter Sunday, CBS News spectacularly reinforced how the collective enviro-activist community has only one primary go-to source of viable-looking evidence to indict the fossil fuel industry of running disinformation campaigns designed to undercut the ‘certainty’ of catastrophic man-caused global warming. With Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil” broadcast on Tuesday April 19, the Public Broadcasting Service began its spectacular reinforcement of exactly where the tiny source is for that unsupportable accusation, and how it dates all the way back to the mid-, late-1990s with two key promulgators. But before anyone examines the faults in this latest mainstream media journalism malfeasance, they should never lose sight of what the two central hallmarks are for extreme political leftists:

Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil” is a case study on how this all comes together in one presentation, Continue reading