Category Archives: Desmogblog

Desmog: “Ross-who??” (Bury the Inconvenient Truths)

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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 →

‘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 →

The First, Last, and Only Accusation Against Skeptics, Redux

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I’m not kidding. Forget the #ExxonKnew effort to re-invigorate the otherwise 25 year-old accusation that skeptic climate scientists are paid corrupting money by fossil fuel companies to lie to the public about the certainty of catastrophic man-caused global warming. Revisit my first post on this and then look at what popped up only late last week, and the appearance that there’s only one bit of  supposedly “smoking gun” evidence supporting this accusation is impossible to miss. Continue reading →

Science magazine Plunges off the Single-Source Cliff (“allied sites” meaning Desmogblog)

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It isn’t hard to find criticisms of how the famous and supposedly non-political Science magazine has succumbed to a partisan anti-science position on catastrophic man-caused global warming (e.g. here and here), but since I have stated on several occasions, that I have no science expertise at all (which was twisted by my critics, e.g. here and what used to be here), I leave those criticisms to other experts. Today, however, I can use my own expertise to show how Science ran off the rails in 2011 regarding the single-source notion that skeptic climate scientists are paid industry money to lie…. and how this old situation has a direct tie to enviro-activists’ current efforts to use racketeering laws to persecute people who criticize the notion of catastrophic man-caused global warming. Continue reading →

James Hoggan’s Monster Journalistic Due Diligence Lapse

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Bad enough that Desmogblog co-founder James Hoggan makes one if not more monster errors of assumption, but he recently (and in an almost comical inadvertent way) showed the world what not to do when an alleged news item isn’t getting the attention people believe it deserves. His lapse was a classic example of beliefs overriding elemental due diligence. Continue reading →

James Hoggan’s Monster Error of Assumption

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“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 →

On James Hoggan / James McCarthy, et al. There’s More, Always More.

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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 →

James Hoggan’s Desmogblog has Inexplicable Problems with Ross Gelbspan. Why?

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Weird. Ross Gelbspan founded the global warming anti-skeptic web site Desmogblog, he said so directly just eight seconds into this audio interview. James Hoggan credits Gelbspan as “a big part of the inspiration for starting the DeSmogBlog” (4th paragraph here). Gelbspan was a frequent blogger there, 50 pages’ worth of 10 pieces per page, from January 2006 to November 2010. So, from that level of familiarity, why would Hoggan go flying off a cliff over a central detail about Gelbspan? Continue reading →