Category Archives: Citation Cascade

The Political Suicide of Pushing “Climate Homicide” … & muscling in on someone else’s “ExxonKnew” lawsuits territory?

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On June 26th just a little over a week ago, David “climate homicide” Arkush and co-authors at his Public Citizen group put out a press release titled “New Memo Details Legal Case for Prosecuting Big Oil for Extreme Heat Deaths,” containing a link to a 51 page proposal for prosecutors in the state of Arizona (Democrat ones, of course including the state’s Attorney General), noting:

Though this memo asks a particular question — how officials in Maricopa County could pursue reckless manslaughter or second degree murder prosecutions for deaths caused by the July 2023 heat wave — its analysis is relevant in most jurisdictions where prosecutors might seek justice for climate victims.

I already had a tag category at GelbspanFiles dating back over a year concerning Arkush’s ludicrous ultra-lawfare fixation. He’s now taken that fixation likely beyond its breaking point. It’s one thing to push the bizarre “charge fossil fuel companies with climate homicide” idea in ‘scholarly papers,’ but it’s quite another to propose the idea straight to state prosecutors. That’s what he’s presenting in the above press release. Forgive the rather morbid visual analogy here – the man virtually points a loaded revolver at his head and the heads of his co-authors and practically asks law firms defending energy companies in “ExxonKnew” lawsuits to pull the triggers for him.

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Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact — the Climate Homicide Litigation version

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In David Arkush’s March 10, 2024 The New Republic article “The Case for Prosecuting Fossil Fuel Companies for Homicide,” he stated,

Fossil fuel companies have long understood—with shocking accuracy—that their fossil fuel products would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate change. Instead of shifting their business model or at least alerting the public to this threat, the companies concealed what they knew and executed a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to spread doubt about climate science.

I’ve covered ‘scholarly homicide paper’ article author Arkush twice before, here and here, concerning his one-trick pony sources for his accusation. His paper should be yanked from publication due to being devoid of evidence proving fossil fuel company executives committed climate homicide by carrying out disinformation campaigns. No different – I suggested here – than how Masters / PhD degrees should be yanked when they are devoid of the same basic evidence for the same basic accusation. Arkush is back again, and this time he inadvertently handed one more major gift on a silver platter to congressional investigators and/or the law firms representing the defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits. Continue reading →

Dr Michael E. Mann & his Errant “reposition global warming as theory” Luntz Memo Oops

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Dr Mann placed himself in a world of hurt on February 2 when he rather thoughtlessly hurled a very thinly veiled accusation on Twitter that a sitting U.S. Senator is an outright racist (hat tip to Tony Heller for that situation). Just that blunder alone might be a crippling credibility problem for Dr Mann to explain when he appears as a witness before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform on February 8, if the GOP Committee members are aware of it. But that’s not the only recent declaration that Dr Mann couldn’t prove to be true if his reputation depended on it. He might try deleting his Tweet and hope nobody notices, but his other declaration would require quite a large book burning effort …. of his own 2021 “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” book.

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Reposition Graduate Degrees as Theory rather than Fact

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Want to see something troubling? In today’s post I offer a pile of screencaptures which collectively prompt two basic questions: How many masters and doctorate degrees should be revoked out there because the degree recipients presented faulty, unsupported evidence for the idea that the fossil fuel industry orchestrated sinister disinformation campaigns to undercut the certainty of man-caused global warming in collusion with skeptic climate scientists? How much wider is this overall problem within the university system, where thesis writers and thesis evaluators fail to do elemental due diligence on authoritative assertions and accusations within those papers? Continue reading →

Making Climate Denialism Illegal

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Similar to the suggestion at the end of my prior blog post on Psychological Projection, the title of this post is another Texas-sized arrow pointing out where a form of criminal speech may actually be found — but there’s a bit of an ironic twist to this. First, however, let’s see where the wild suggestion to criminalize ‘climate denial’ comes from, and what justification the person has for proposing that. Continue reading →

“If nobody spots our fatal problem, we should be just fine.”

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Enviro-activists put all their faith in the notion that their superficial, repetitive fear mongering narratives about man-caused catastrophic global warming will never be questioned by the greater public. A fun video from Anthony Watts’ WUWT blog marvelously shows how the folly of such blind faith surfaces after careful scrutiny of those collective narratives. “The Arctic is warming twice as rapidly as anywhere else …”? Oops. The ‘double-the-rate’ seems to be happening literally everywhere. Back in 2012, blogger Tom Nelson illustrated how the places hardest hit by global warming — ground zero, according to screaming headlines — is, well … literally everywhere. Oops. Over just the last year, headlines naming myriad different locations still scream the same way.

Same thing applies to fear mongering narratives implying energy company industry executives pay ‘shill scientists’ in a conspiracy to spread disinformation undercutting the supposedly settled science about CO2 pollution from burning fossil fuels. Continue reading →

No matter where you go, there he is

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He, being Ross Gelbspan, with regard to any prominent person regurgitating the accusation about skeptic climate scientists being paid by the fossil fuel industry to spread lies undercutting the so-called ‘settled science’ of human-induced global warming. In this case, I already covered a particular journalistic due diligence problem within Nathanial Rich’s promotion of his epic New York Times story “Losing Earth” in my August 9, 2018 blog post. Rich’s blunder there was to repeat a hugely troubling talking point from Naomi Oreskes, a person who’s plagued with a variety of credibility problems as it pertains to her alleged entry into the topic of ‘industry-corrupted skeptics’ and the stories she tells surrounding that situation.

I figured that would be the end of it regarding Nathanial Rich. I should know better about such things by now; Oreskes is never the end of the line in these kinds of situations. Continue reading →

‘Prominent Global Warming Deniers are Funded by Fossil Fuel Companies.’ Spread This Line Widely; NEVER Check its Veracity.

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And there’s really no necessity to tell anybody exactly what that accusation means. Al Gore and the top-most promulgators of the ‘climate scientist liars-for-hire’ accusation know what it means …. they simply haven’t proven that any such corruption actually exists anywhere. Continue reading →

The Roll Call of a Single Source Wipeout, Part 2

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In the middle of the summer of 2016, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse participated with his comrades in a U.S. Senate floor speech stunt decrying the hazards of man-caused global warming. His speech contained a roll call of people who supposedly exposed the complicity of skeptic climate scientists in a fossil fuel industry-funded disinformation campaign. I’ll note why this older event is still relevant today at the end of this post, and for the newer readers arriving here, please do click on my links, as many are quick-glance screencaptures of text details I refer to, or are fuller context posts about my references. Continue reading →

The Mythological Hydra: Many Heads, Same Beast. Part 1

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The prominent people promulgating the notion of catastrophic man-caused global warming seem to be oblivious to how some of their statements are totally unfettered psychological projection of what their side is actually enslaved to, when it comes to protecting their position with multi-pronged attacks against their ‘fossil fuel industry-paid corrupt critics.’ Continue reading →