Emphasizing for the benefit of congressional investigators / law firms representing defendants in the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits / genuinely objective journalists: It does not matter where you drop into the collective accusation about the fossil fuel industry employing skeptic climate shills to spread disinformation — you’ll never find tidy answers tying up situations, you’ll find problems that only lead you onto a path of finding endless related problems. It never ends, no matter where you start. The example in this blog post concerns an item within Roland C “Kert” Davies’ 2011 version of his false accusation that Harvard Center for Astrophysics’ Dr Willie Soon was supposedly paid by Exxon to lie. I showed in my prior blog post the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits in which Davies 2015 rehashed accusation is their source – but while compiling that list and the brief timeline of prior accusations leading to the 2015 rehash, I spotted how Davies tangentially said something in his announcement of the 2011 version which essentially undermines one of the other of the four central accusation elements at the heart of most of these lawsuits. Continue reading
Category Archives: Character assassination
Brief Of Amici Curiae, Brulle .. Oreskes .. & Supran Redux 4 — the Washington DC version
Seems Oreskes et al. are not figuring out what the lesson is to be learned here. They continue to file Friends of the Court blunders in boilerplate copy fashion supporting various “Exxon Knew”-style cases, repeating their same blunders they had in their first one, e.g., what I term ye olde “reposition global warming” leaked industry memos evidence, which are the same worthless, never implemented memos the lawsuits themselves are enslaved to – in boilerplate copy fashion, e.g. the Hawaiian pair – as cornerstone evidence of “fossil fuel industry-led public disinformation campaigns. So, I’ve created a new tag category just for these situations, “Oreskes et al. amici filings.” Continue reading
Bernie wuvs Kert – and shows why any Federal prosecution of Big Oil should be aimed 180° the other way
The climate issue only has two legs to stand on, the claim that the science is settled, and the accusation that fossil fuel company executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists via disinformation campaigns to undercut the ‘settled science.’ Give a round of applause to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and three of his closer Senate friends whose attempt to shore up that second leg on July 31st demonstrated that no matter who you are as a prominent public figure hurling the accusation, there you are: enslaved to either both or just one set of literally worthless ‘leaked industry memos’ as proof for your accusation, basically traceable back to a fellow named Kert Davies who currently runs the Climate Files website, and who dates back in his highly suspect long-term promulgation of the two ‘memos’ sets to the 1990s. But this dicey enslavement situation doesn’t stop there. Via recently released Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”) documents out of the New York State Attorney General’s office, that ‘love affair’ apparently applied to AG Eric Schneiderman’s office back in 2015 while further corroborating the interconnectedness of Kert Davies with other suspicious character assassination efforts against Exxon and scientists who are skeptical about catastrophic man-caused global warming.
Allow me, at the end of this post, to throw in a zinger about Hunter Biden’s connection to the Clima-Change™ issue as a counterpoint to the Senator Sanders situation. First, though, watch this: 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.”)
Desmog: “Ross-who??” (Bury the Inconvenient Truths)
First, hat-tip to Marcel Crok at Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) for bringing an 8/23/22 Inside Climate News article to my attention, “Experts Debunk Viral Post Claiming 1,100 Scientists Say ‘There’s No Climate Emergency’” which trashed CLINTEL’s 1100+ signatories World Climate Declaration. Mr Crok drew my particular attention to ICN’s labeling of the ol’ Desmogblog group as “an investigative climate research organization” and their supposed revelation of how CLINTEL “rehashes several well-known ‘climate denial’ tropes” and has “strong political, professional and financial connections to the fossil fuel industry.”
That’s rich, in more ways than one. As I noted in a GelbspanFiles blog post earlier this spring, one hallmark of enviro-activists is their phenomenon of psychologically projecting what they are as accusations of what skeptics of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) are. The only ‘rehashing of old tropes’ going on here is ICN’s rehash of an essentially 30 year-old accusation that any industry connections whatsoever completely taints what CAGW skeptics say. Their rehash was apparently fed to them by the disingenuously repackaged “Desmog” outfit, an organization self-described as a pure public relations people having no expertise in climate science, which was also self-described by one of its co-founders as being created entirely to expose CAGW skeptic scientists as industry-paid liars. Continue reading
Just sayin’.
The line of defense that “well, the evidence I have looks valid enough to use as a means to ensure nobody takes skeptic climate scientists’ reports and viewpoints seriously” is one that may not actually convince judges to let you off the defamation hook.
Dr. Patrick J. Michaels and the Ordinary Citizen
In my April 17, 2020 blog post about the death of Dr S. Fred Singer and my experiences with him, I began by noting how readily accessible he was to even ordinary citizens like me who genuinely expressed uncritical interest in the overall global warming issue. Dr Michaels, whose death unfortunately was just last week, (more memorials here, here, here, and here), was no different that way. Regarding Dr Singer, I first began emailing with him simply because I wanted to let him know that I was exchanging emails with the Seattle mayor’s office on the global warming issue, but I also wanted to know if I had it right about my Viking ancestors being able to farm in Greenland. With Dr Michaels, my first inquiry to him was at the beginning of my efforts to undertake a due diligence job which the mainstream media should have done, concerning the troubling accusation that he, Dr Singer, and others were paid and directed by fossil fuel executives to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” Back in 2009-2010, that accusation was all over the internet, but not a single person or group on the Al Gore side of the issue had the guts to show the full context of the ‘leaked industry memos’ containing that awkwardly-worded ‘directive.’
Dr. Michaels ultimately ended up providing some specific bits about that, under a broader examination, which look quite damaging to his accusers. Continue reading
Ross Gelbspan & his seemingly larger Ozone Action connection
First, some elemental background info on this: folks might wonder why I focus so narrowly on the one set of supposedly ‘leaked fossil fuel industry memos’ which enviro-activists say are smoking gun evidence proving disinformation campaigns (and other alleged attacks against ‘settled global warming science’) operated under the widely adopted directive to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
My reason is elemental. It’s because the enviro-activists are so focused on that specific phrase and the worthless accusation surrounding it. It’s the most damaging weapon they have to use in their relentless effort to steer the world away seeing whether the science-based climate assessments from skeptic climate scientists are worthy of serious consideration.
If the sole excuse – ‘industry-paid skeptic scientists’ – implodes as the reason the public and policymakers and journalists have for ignoring skeptics’ climate assessments, then the ‘man-caused global warming’ issue is imperiled, perhaps to the point of imminent collapse. For influential investigators/prosecutors to begin to realize how vulnerable the egregiously false ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ accusation itself is to total collapse, they will need to fully comprehend why repetitions of accusations surrounding that memo set looks like an ongoing deliberate conspiracy, and they need to know exactly who the core people are in that situation, and how that core group apparently steered those memo phrases into the way that’s still exploited today. Continue reading
Headline: “U.S. House Panel Commits Political Suicide; Expands Inquiry into Climate Disinformation by ‘Big Oil’”
That was the widespread news headline, in one form or another (minus the ‘political suicide’ bit, of course) on Thursday, September 16th, 2021. The main news item was that Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, and sophomore-term House member Ro Khanna, D-Ca, sent letters hours earlier to four major fossil fuel companies and two lobbying groups, demanding that they appear in front of the Oversight Committee on October 28, and that they bring documents with them showing how they were engaged in — no joke! — “in a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.” Those were the actual words in the nearly identical letters, which can be viewed in their entirety at the links within the Oversight Committees website page’s press release.
How could this House Oversight Committee stunt be revealed to be act of political suicide? If the ‘defense witnesses’ at the October 28 hearing decide to seize the leadership opportunity on this, they could show how the ‘industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns‘ accusation only points a huge arrow at where the real disinformation efforts are apparently seen in this issue, a core clique of enviro-activists who’ve pushed a pair of never-implemented, ‘leaked industry memo sets’ that are worthless to prove any “industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation” exists anywhere. Plus, the sheer lack of viable evidence behind the accusation points an even bigger arrow at the basic journalistic malfeasance on the part of mainstream media news reporters, when it comes to their decades-long failure to ask probing questions about the basic accusation, which dates back to the 1990s. Continue reading
Naomi Oreskes, the Golden Opportunity
Naomi Oreskes can do no wrong in the eyes of her supporters with her Merchants of Doubt book / documentary movie efforts that supposedly exposed the corporate-bought corruption of climate scientists skeptical about the idea of catastrophic man-caused global warming. In the eyes of people she accuses and people who see through her smear tactics and clumsy science pronouncements, she can’t seem to do anything right. Mere discussion of her antics accomplishes very little — she is emboldened to continue her accusations in the most reckless way because she’s met with practically no significant public opposition. The golden opportunity to hold her accountable, however, is arguably in the hands of the public hearing officials she faces, who might be able to do something about this problem. Making false statements in congressional hearings is actually a crime. Continue reading