Author Archives: Russell Cook

About Russell Cook

Russell Cook is a semi-retired graphic artist. His collection of articles and blogs about the Gelbspan/Gore/Ozone Action/Greenpeace accusation can be seen here: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?page_id=86

Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. BP P.L.C., et al.

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[July 12-17, 2024 Author’s updates: Case dismissed … because a judge who agrees man-caused global warming is a concern, but for the Federal government, not state courts. Ironically, as of July 17th, a week after the dismissal, the website administrator at the law firm had still not gotten the memo about this wipeout concerning a case example they think exemplifies their work. By the way, more on the backstory of this law firm here. ]

In my May 17, 2018 post on the King County v. BP lawsuit, I noted how I could have taken a shortcut to simply refer readers back to my earlier blog posts regarding identically worded lawsuits in different communities led by the same lawyer, Matt Pawa … but I instead offered additional troubling details about how he might be connected to dubious ‘evidence’ within that set of cases. Basically the same situation applies here with this latest City of Baltimore filing, regarding the eight global warming lawsuits under the Sher Edling law firm banner. My July 13, 2018 post on the Rhode Island variant noted the identical wording of them, and went into details of what I call “the fingerprints of Naomi Oreskes.” This Baltimore case suffers from the same affliction — it repeats the worthless set of supposedly Western Fuels “reposition global warming” memos on its PDF page 80 (printout’s pg 75), and Oreskes’ more than decade-old disingenuous portrayal of President Johnson’s speech is on its PDF page 56 (printout’s pg 51). But among my prior dissections of the Sher Edling cases, I haven’t mentioned anything about Vic Sher or Matt Edling. Continue reading →

“Trust us: our leaked memo is the same thing as that leaked smoking gun memo”

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Here’s a simple exercise – do a basic internet search (which excludes my own writings) of key words from a thoroughly documented leaked tobacco industry memo combined with those from an alleged leaked fossil fuel industry memo, and see how many anti-tobacco activists crow about the way cigarette company activities compares to what’s implied in the other memo. What’s hard to miss in the search results is the appearance of the use of the tobacco memo as a talking point to lend unquestioned credibility to the alleged fossil fuel memo. If we had a responsible mainstream media, objective investigative reporters would delve into that problem, ask simple questions, and dig deeper if they spotted details leading to more problems. Continue reading →

State of Rhode Island v. Chevron, et al.

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This latest global warming lawsuit has two major problems. First, it’s essentially pure “boilerplate copy ’n paste” from six other current California global warming lawsuits being run by the same Sher Edling law firm. I already covered that problem – their enslavement to Ross Gelbspan’s worthless ‘leaked memos’ accusation about ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ – in my dissections of the Santa Cruz City/County / City of Richmond v. Chevron trio, and the San Mateo / Marin Counties / City of Imperial Beach v. Chevron trio. But I found another problem I’d overlooked in those filings. Call it “The Fingerprints of Naomi Oreskes,” a situation which only further opens a window into just how disingenuous the overall “evidence” is that’s used to indict skeptic climate scientists of industry-paid corruption. Continue reading →

Al Gore’s 1994 ABC News Nightline ‘Crooked Skeptics’ Name-Calling Failure

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You couldn’t ask for a more damaging report to reappear against Al Gore and enviro-activists’ collective notion that ‘skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of Big Coal and Oil’ — inexplicably posted to Youtube just weeks ago by Kert Davies, one of the main promulgators of that accusation. Quoting Nightline host Ted Koppel in this February 24, 1994 “Is Science for Sale?” program, starting at the 1:06 point,

A number of years ago, I ran into then-Senator Al Gore at LaGuardia Airport … Senator Gore used the occasion to sketch out on a napkin one of his chief ecological concerns, depletion of the ozone layer. Ever the environmental activist, Senator Gore was proposing a Nightline program on the subject. He’s the Vice President now, of course, but he is still proposing. A few weeks ago, Mr Gore called to draw our attention to some of the forces, political and economic, behind what he would regard as the anti-environmental movement. The Vice President suggested that we might want to look into connections between scientists who scoff at the so-called greenhouse effect, for example, and the coal industry.

Things go downhill from there. Continue reading →

“An Ingenious Feat of Investigative Reporting” … that was not.

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Matt Pawa, a leading lawyer in four current global warming lawsuits aimed at fossil fuel companies, described elsewhere as the main motivator behind such action, has already been admonished for attempting to push ‘evidence’ in one of his lawsuits which wasn’t what it was insinuated to be. I also covered this problem in detail in my March 30, 2018 post, and briefly noted in my prior blog post how Pawa’s 2008 Kivalina v. Exxon global warming lawsuit indicated how he was apparently impressed enough with Ross Gelbspan’s work to cite a prominent article of his directly in the lawsuit which supported the idea of fossil fuel industry funding and orchestrating ‘shill scientist experts.’

Like so many other facets of the ‘corrupted skeptic climate scientists’ accusation which enviro-activists hope nobody explores in any depth, Pawa’s citation of Gelbspan’s article doesn’t lead to a tidy explanation of the ‘corruption,’ it prompts the question of whether Pawa has once again been caught citing ‘evidence’ that isn’t what it professes to be. Continue reading →

Pawa’s pro-/anti-Gelbspan Weirdness

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That’s Matt Pawa, who’s increasingly gaining fame as the leader of four current global warming lawsuits, and who was described in a December 2017 Huffington Post article as the main driver behind such legal action. “Wierdness”, because there is much about Pawa’s manner of establishing how ‘fossil fuel companies conspired with skeptic climate scientists to hide the harm of man-caused global warming’ in his landmark 2008 Kivalina v. Exxon lawsuit which makes no sense. And “Gelbspan” is the person who’s self-described as the first one to reveal that conspiracy.

What’s weird here is how Pawa can’t bring himself to give Gelbspan that direct accolade to this day, regarding Gelbspan’s evidence which appears plausible enough to nail fossil fuel companies to the wall for the whole world to see. Continue reading →

King County v. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch and ConocoPhillips

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Here we go again, with yet another lawsuit attempt to say ‘the science of global warming is settled, the fossil fuel industry knew this all along but paid skeptic climate scientists to say otherwise, thus victims can sue that industry to recover the costs associated of dealing with this settled science.’ The otherwise uninformed general public expects – rightly so – such lawsuit accusations to stand on their merits beyond any shadow of a doubt. They’re supposed to be open-and-shut cases, welcoming independent corroboration and never having the remotest appearance of hoping nobody checks the veracity of the accusation evidence, or look like they’re using shell game tricks to obscure the origins of a highly questionable solitary evidence source, or give any impression, however slight, that the so-called evidence is actually part of an orchestrated long-term effort to advance a political agenda by marginalizing critics through baseless character assassination.

This latest case not only fails on all those points ….. Continue reading →

The Unending Finite Connections of the Skeptic-Trashing Enviro-Activist Clique

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“Unending,” because it seems there’s no limit to repetitions of the idea that policymakers fail to act against catastrophic man-caused global warming because its settled science is undermined by the fossil fuel industry’s orchestrated efforts which use shill scientists to spread disinformation. “Finite,” because it seems whenever this accusation is heard, it’s always connected to a limited number of people who attained the first major media traction for the accusation. Continue reading →

City of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County v. Suncor Energy, ExxonMobil

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Here we go again. This could be the point in time, though, when these lawsuits are one or two steps less directly connected* with the core clique of people who’ve long been pushing the ‘industry-paid skeptic climate scientists’ accusation, compared to the other recent lawsuits. [*9/10/23 author’s revision: Not quite – I’ve relabeled this one as a Sher Edling assistance filing, as explained here]. Continue reading →