Al Gore’s 1994 ABC News Nightline ‘Crooked Skeptics’ Name-Calling Failure

You couldn’t ask for a more damaging report to reappear against Al Gore and enviro-activists’ collective notion that ‘skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of Big Coal and Oil’ — inexplicably posted to Youtube just weeks ago by Kert Davies, one of the main promulgators of that accusation. Quoting Nightline host Ted Koppel in this February 24, 1994 “Is Science for Sale?” program, starting at the 1:06 point,

A number of years ago, I ran into then-Senator Al Gore at LaGuardia Airport … Senator Gore used the occasion to sketch out on a napkin one of his chief ecological concerns, depletion of the ozone layer. Ever the environmental activist, Senator Gore was proposing a Nightline program on the subject. He’s the Vice President now, of course, but he is still proposing. A few weeks ago, Mr Gore called to draw our attention to some of the forces, political and economic, behind what he would regard as the anti-environmental movement. The Vice President suggested that we might want to look into connections between scientists who scoff at the so-called greenhouse effect, for example, and the coal industry.

Things go downhill from there. Continue reading

Is Blood thicker than Objective Reporting?

If anyone had engaged in a one-word internet search of the name “Oreskes” prior to October 31st, 2017, the results would have largely been for Naomi Oreskes, famed ‘exposer of corporate-corrupted skeptic climate scientists,’ with a sprinkling of other references to National Public Radio Chief Editor Michael Oreskes. After October 31st, albeit largely buried by news of the Manhattan terrorist attack, the news about Michael Oreskes’ alleged indiscretions was hard to miss. Continue reading

Gelbspan & Trump’s EPA Transition Team leader

For over two decades, both the overall enviro-activist community and the mainstream media have had what amounts to nearly absolute control over framing the public narrative about the global warming issue. “It’s a settled science with a 97% consensus to back it up, and the critics who pop up are bribed to lie by the fossil fuel industry,” they say. But they were too complacent in their belief expectations about the 2016 US presidential race, and were blindsided by the election results. Now, while they still have control over the situation, the long knives are out for Donald Trump and anyone he chooses for resolving the global warming problem. But these efforts are political suicide to an absolutely embarrassing extent. Continue reading

‘Just mention his name in a casual way’

In my December 31, 2014 post, I hinted at how an utterly casual drop-in of Ross Gelbspan’s central bit of evidence indicting skeptic climate scientists of industry corruption ends up looking like a pre-scripted propaganda tactic. In my just-prior post, I hinted at how fluff pieces which only casually dropped his name and book title arguably take on the same appearance. Today, from my mega-pile of notes on the overall smear of skeptic climate scientists and anybody connected to the effort, a situation involving a seemingly casual mention of Ross Gelbspan instead makes better-informed readers go “hmmmmm.” Continue reading

“Regurgitate Unsupportable Accusations, We Much?” Kert Davies is Back. Again.

A brief word of explanation about the first part of that title, it’s a variation of the “Resist, we much” teleprompter reading gaffe by the Reverend Al Sharpton, where he meant to say “Resist, we must” on his TV show. It lends itself to a variety of other overblown political situations which beg for a “Sharptonism” parody. The latest instances where Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post articles cited Kert Davies’ supposedly damaging documents (screencaptures here, here and here), in an effort to trash skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, invites exactly that kind of parody. Continue reading

What Dr S. Fred Singer said about Ross Gelbspan, circa 1997

Ever since Gelbspan’s “The Heat is On” book came out in 1997, he’s been lauded as a ‘journalist exposing the corruption of skeptic climate scientists’ in one form or another. But there’s a problem with that ‘journalist’ label itself, and there’s a bigger problem concerning the contradiction of what professional journalists should do, compared with what Gelbspan failed to do, a detail pointed out by atmospheric physicist Dr Singer back in 1997. Continue reading