Back in the early spring of 2007, believers of catastrophic man-caused global warming were no doubt quite happy with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie, Ross Gelbspan’s books, prominent pro-global warming blogs, mainstream media outlets, and others who gave essentially no fair play to the presentation of detailed climate assessments from skeptic climate scientists. But then came the announcement in the UK about a video to be broadcast March 8, 2007 on their Channel 4 called “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, which was met with UK media scorn before it was seen, not once (full text here) but twice in the same manner (full text here). But unlike the arenas where the other material was presented (Gore’s movie encountered a UK lawsuit), the opportunity to inflict a major hit against the video existed via the UK’s communications regulator (Ofcom), but only if you called in the cavalry to do so. Not to inflict a scientific wound, however, but one via character assassination. One that ends up being a case study of how any given corruption accusation lodged against skeptic climate scientists is separated from Ross Gelbspan by three degrees or less. Continue reading
Category Archives: Three degrees of Separation or Less
ABC News’ Bill Blakemore: “The only thing I am an activist for is rigorous journalism”
Former ABC News reporter, I should add. But I’ll get to that small problem later. First, in regard to Ross Gelbspan, it appears Blakemore has a backpedal situation that most people would agree a reporter should never be caught doing, then there is a problem with a particular line in Blakemore’s ABC News bio, and finally there is the larger problem of how the global warming issue seems to owe its life to the sheer lack of rigorous journalism about it. Continue reading
Green Corps, part 3: Flipping Senator John McCain
So, in part one of this series, I detailed just how valued Ross Gelbspan was and arguably still is to Green Corps. In part two, I detailed the blur of influential people across Ozone Action, Greenpeace and Green Corps. Now, let’s see what that combination is actually capable of influencing, by revisiting that pair of key sentences from the National Journal article I started parts 1 and 2 with: Continue reading
Three Degrees of Separation or Less, Part VII: To Green Corps… and Beyond
If the public saw scientists from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) engaged in heated debate with skeptic climate scientists, it would be deadly to the notion of catastrophic man-caused global warming. They’d shrug their shoulders at complicated science terms, dismissing both sides with, “come back and tell us what you know when you really know what you’re talking about.” Do ordinary environmentalists with no climate science expertise kill that situation with carefully memorized citations of superior IPCC arguments? No, they say there are multi-thousands of scientists comprising a scientific consensus against a handful of skeptics who are ‘paid industry money to manufacture doubt’. But how exactly do you get that idea out to everybody? Continue reading
All Paths Lead to Gelbspan
Over the weekend, the PBS NewsHour had a news discussion segment about how an Oregon-based environmental group, Our Children’s Trust, and its creator Julia Olson are using teenage students to ‘stop climate change’. Can you guess where the path leads? 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
Three Degrees of Separation or Less, Part V: Ross Gelbspan and Global Warming Nuisance Lawsuits
Not long ago, lawsuits were filed against cigarette companies for all the suffering caused by smoking, saying tobacco executives fully knew their product was a killer when they hired shill experts to testify and report that there wasn’t a clear connection between smoking and lung cancer. A leaked tobacco company memo pushing “Doubt is our Product” was a key bit of evidence in those complaints, but industry efforts to hoodwink the general public were arguably ineffective since a slang term for cigarettes had been “coffin nails” for multiple decades. Meanwhile, someone in the enviro-activist community decided to apply that same kind of complaint to high-level global warming nuisance lawsuits. Guess who and what is connected in a questionable manner to those cases? 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
Naomi Oreskes’ Problems, pt 2
A brief set of questions and answers illustrates how any sort of examination of the ‘skeptic climate scientists are industry-corrupted’ accusation doesn’t reveal a nice, tidy, open-and-shut case against such skeptics, all that’s seen is something begging for a deeper investigation of why the accusation exists at all. Continue reading
James Hoggan’s Monster Error of Assumption
“Climate Cover-Up” book author James Hoggan offers a bold pair of statements on pages 164 and 230, “If someone tells you to be skeptical, be skeptical of them. For that matter, be skeptical of me,” and “… survey a variety of sources just to help confirm – or challenge – what you have read in this book. I am confident that it will stand up to scrutiny…” However, such bravado is odd, Continue reading