Category Archives: Three degrees of Separation or Less

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 →

“We’re banning misinformation & conspiracy theories!!” Says a Company Citing Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

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If there is one irrefutable hallmark of the extreme far-left political community in the U.S., it is their seemingly endless propensity to psychologically project their beliefs, attitudes, and actions onto opponents as accusations of what their opponents are. I’ve covered this topic before, and I prominently mentioned the projection angle near at the top of my April 26 dissection of Frontline’s latest “Big Oil” program. At the top of my May 2nd Frontline follow-up post, I further emphasized the irony of wacko Department of Homeland Security “disinformation reduction” efforts coming from people who should really look in the mirror* about where actual disinformation is found. (* thankfully, one DHS person now has more free time to do so)

To illustrate just how insidiously pervasive the idiotic problem of the enviro-left projecting their own disinformation onto others, let’s have a look at one other news item that occurred back in early April, Continue reading →

“YPCCC Helps Facebook Debunk Climate Change Myths”

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The situation concerning the cavalry-style arrival of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) to save us all from global warming disinformation on Facebook begs for a comparison to a comical scene from a famous old movie, where the man held at gunpoint dejectedly notes the unexpected arrival of the totally corrupt police commissioner.

The highlights from the February 24, 2021 announcement are as follows ……………….. Continue reading →

The Big Ben Santer Problem, Pt 2: The Gelbspan Connection

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Near the middle of my June 17, 2020 Part 1 blog post about the Oreskes / Santer problem, I showed a screencapture of Ross Gelbspan’s connection with the tale concerning atmospheric scientist Ben Santer’s questionable alterations of an IPCC report, and then showed featured another screencapture of a different tale in a major in a major national magazine article which had Gelbspan’s favorite ‘leaked memos’ accusation separated only sentences away from the ‘Santer attack.’

That wasn’t the only major article written at that time in that particular manner. Continue reading →

‘Skeptic Climate Scientists Do Not Deserve Fair Media Balance.’ Redux, part 2

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You’d think the main people behind the effort to keep the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) alive would have figured out by now that it’s a waste of time to float the notion that skeptic climate scientists receive too much undeserved attention from journalists. The danger is that rather than anyone, CAGW skeptic or outright believer, being able to point to any CAGW skeptic scientist/speaker given fair coverage any time in the just last decade at a mainstream media broadcast or newspaper outlet, the counter-opposite might be revealed, such as what’s been seen over the last two decades at the PBS NewsHour. “But – but -but – Pat Michaels and Willie Soon have been on CNN and in the New York Times!”, CAGW believers might exclaim. Right. Each castigated as shills of the fossil fuel industry. When has anyone ever seen CAGW scientists like Michael Oppenheimer* insinuated as shills of Big Green operatives by mainstream media reporters?

Yet, only two weeks ago, a supposedly peer-reviewed paper titled “Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians” published at Nature Communications attempted to float that exact ‘too much media balance’ notion. One of the paper’s blunders was to attempt to compare 386 ‘pro-CAGW’ people to an equal number of opposite “prominent contrarians.” Willis Eschenbach at WUWT goes into much deeper detail on how the comparison’s methodology is suspect, as does Larry Kummer at Fabius Maximus. I think I showed fairly well in item #2 of my Part 1 blog post how the “prominent” bit collapses when the list includes people like me.

The far bigger error in the paper, however, was to classify their other data source, the Desmogblog organization, as a benign-sounding ‘project’ objectively documenting known promulgators of CAGW disinformation. Intentional, or inadvertent due to sheer ignorance, that portrayal itself is disinformation. Continue reading →

Reposition Global Warming as Theory Rather than Fact Redux, 22 Apr 2019

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A strange pair of same-day appearances barely over a month ago of that supposedly ‘leaked industry strategy memo phrase’ are an indicator of how people who can’t stop repeating it seem blissfully ignorant regarding the way its less-than-three-degree separation from Ross Gelbspan — and all the related fatal problems surrounding that — could potentially torpedo the legacies of the prominent people who’ve long promulgated it as evidence of the fossil fuel industry conspiring with skeptic climate scientists to undercut the alleged ‘certainty’ of man-caused global warming. Watch this. 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 →

Put all your Eggs in the “Reposition Global Warming as Theory Rather than Fact” Memos Basket

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Accusers who push the idea that fossil fuel industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists to spread lies undermining public belief in man-caused global warming repeatedly reveal they only have one bit of so-called ‘viable evidence’ in their arsenal — a particular set of supposedly leaked internal fossil fuel industry memos. Their latest effort to keep the accusation afloat contains an unforced error where they felt compelled to repeat a specific line about the ‘discovery’ of the memos which they haven’t spoken of since 1996.

Continue reading →

The Citation Cascade Fatal Problem

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You can either accept what reporters say without question, or you can look more deeply into what they say to see if it all lines up in a nice straight problem-free line, or if it ultimately takes on the unavoidable appearance of being an agenda-driven narrative based on disingenuous false premises. The following illustrates how this kind of examination works, on an article which purports to be a criticism of another article but actually turns out to be complementary to it in a rather suspicious way. 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 →