…. stop and look around. If discover you are in a hole, for goodness sake, stop digging. Such is the advice I would have given to the Union of Concerned Scientists before they plunged off a credibility cliff with this wipeout.
Category Archives: Ozone Action
Association Taints! (ignore the man behind the curtain)
Mention the existence of skeptic climate scientists to any enviro-activist, and they dismiss anything those scientists say out-of-hand as an industry-corrupted conflict of interest. After all, hardcore believers in man-caused global warming have stacks of sources saying such skeptics are industry shills (clueless to how they only actually have one highly suspect source) But are enviro-activist groups shills of government regulators and/or government office-holders, or vice versa?
The Energy and Environment Legal Institute’s Chis Horner pointed to just such a situation yesterday in his WUWT guest post, complete with screencaptures of emails between an EPA official and the Sierra Club (shorter summary here). It is a situation apparently encompassing a government agency proceeding on Sierra Club approval in a manner neither organization is proud enough to share with the public. But I exposed a situation a bit rougher, in which an environmental organization was apparently working with a White House official to quash favorable opinion of skeptic scientists across the board. Continue reading
Trust the New York Times; Source says Skeptic Climate Scientists are Crooks (ignore NYT’s burden-of-proof wipeout)
While attending the 10th International Conference on Climate Change in Washington D.C. late last week, Dr S. Fred Singer asked me to send him material he could forward to New York Times reporter Justin Gillis, in response to Gillis contacting him about an article he was writing on Naomi Oreskes, ‘star’ of the “Merchants of Doubt” documentary movie. Dr Singer was not only aware of my recent prominent review of the movie, I was one of the names seen in the leaked October 2014 email chain in which Dr Singer pondered suing Oreskes. Dr Singer values my work work because I do what reporters such as Justin Gillis do not do. Continue reading
Three Degrees of Separation or Less, Part VI: The ‘Conflicts of Interest’ Notification Idea
In the global warming issue, when it comes to the idea of skeptics being ‘corrupted by industry funding’, basically any variant of that notion inadvertently points to the core promoter of that accusation, Ross Gelbspan. Take the March 9 article in Energy & Environment’s ClimateWire by Evan Lehmann, for example (archived version here). Continue reading
“Regurgitate Unsupportable Accusations, We Much?” Kert Davies is Back. Again.
A brief word of explanation about the first part of that title, it’s a variation of the “Resist, we much” teleprompter reading gaffe by the Reverend Al Sharpton, where he meant to say “Resist, we must” on his TV show. It lends itself to a variety of other overblown political situations which beg for a “Sharptonism” parody. The latest instances where Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post articles cited Kert Davies’ supposedly damaging documents (screencaptures here, here and here), in an effort to trash skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, invites exactly that kind of parody. Continue reading
Worried about Global Warming or Ozone Depletion? Then Destroy Critics Who Say Those aren’t Problems.
Think about that line of reasoning for a moment. If you are fearful of climate catastrophe, wouldn’t you welcome the critics’ good news? Enviro-activists don’t, and I don’t try to analyze why. What I can do is tell how particular people reveal a one-and-the-same character assassination effort against critics of global warming and ozone depletion. Continue reading
The Company You Keep: Greenpeace USA (née Ozone Action) Executive Director Phil Radford; Vapor as Smoke
The about-to-retire Executive Director of Greenpeace USA, Phil Radford, unabashedly points to Ross Gelbspan as “the lone voice, the moral compass, the beacon that has inspired countless people, me included, to demand our country and our future back from the coal and oil interests behind global warming” (full text here). Gelbspan, as I’ve pointed out at this blog and in my prior online articles, has a rough time keeping any of his narratives straight about the ‘coal and oil interests behind global warming’, or more specifically, just how those ‘interests’ directed skeptic climate scientists to lie to the public. Is Radford any better at straight talk and full disclosure on this matter? Hardly. Continue reading
Greenpeace Loves Ross Gelbspan, Pt 2. Funny How They Don’t Mention his Name Early On
In Al Gore’s NY Times review of Gelbspan’s 2004 “Boiling Point” book, he said “Gelbspan’s first book, ‘The Heat Is On’ (1997), remains the best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists“. The executive director of Greenpeace said in 2009 that Gelbspan was a ‘lone voice‘ who uncovered the corrupt influences of the fossil fuel industry. But in a 1996 midyear summary of their accomplishments, Greenpeace International claimed this particular accolade for themselves….. without a solitary mention of Gelbspan. Continue reading
‘Skeptic Climate Scientists are Inconsistent on what They Say.’ Spread This Line Widely; NEVER Check its Veracity.
It’s a simple narrative to grasp. You say ‘Skeptic scientists first claimed global warming is not happening, then they said it is happening but is not man-made, then they caved in and said it is man-made and is either good for plants, or too expensive and too late to fix’. This makes them look foolish, and you look like a really smart, reasoned person with full knowledge of the topic. Mention those skeptics are funded by ‘big coal & oil’, and you’ll gain more adoration as someone who exposes sinister hidden truths. However, you better hope nobody notices how the skeptics have consistently said this entire time that the IPCC has not conclusively proved human-induced CO2, an otherwise harmless greenhouse gas, is the main driver of what little global warming we’ve seen over the last century. Continue reading
On James Hoggan / James McCarthy, et al. There’s More, Always More.
At my 10/18/13 piece at JunkScience, I detailed how Desmogblog’s James Hoggan essentially named IPCC scientist James J. McCarthy as the person who prompted Ross Gelbspan into an ‘investigation’ of the funding of skeptic climate scientists, and I concluded by questioning why a trained scientist like McCarthy would focus on a funding point that is irrelevant to scientific inquiry. But his problems on that don’t end there. Continue reading