Enviro-activists say that not only did Exxon and the rest of the fossil fuel industry know the science of man-caused global warming was settled as far back as the 1970s, they paid ‘shill’ expert climate scientists to say it was not settled in deliberate disinformation campaigns. Enviro-activists, however, are loathe to engage in any direct science discussions with those skeptic scientists because, well …, quite simply they do not have expert level climate science experience or knowledge to match the expertise of those skeptics. How do enviro-activists circumvent that fatal problem? They need a shell game diversion. They have one in the claim that smoking gun proof for those corrupt disinformation efforts was revealed in ‘leaked industry documents’ in which – I’m paraphrasing here – industry executives declared ‘victory will be achieved when we reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’ No joke on the literal words there, anyone can undertake an extensive internet search to see just how widespread the primary “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” memo strategy phrase is (along with its directly related audience targeting phrases “older, less-educated males” and “younger, low-income women”), and then do the same deep search for the secondary “victory will be achieved” memo set. Both memo sets are worthless as evidence because neither were ever implemented anywhere by any fossil fuel industry executive. It is disinformation, whether accidental or deliberate, on the part of any enviro-activist to say any fossil fuel company operated under the directives of either memo set.

The most plausibly sinister-sounding of the two sets was used by Al Gore in his 2006 movie in an accusation comparison of its strategy to a tobacco industry memo strategy, and he first quoted the set’s audience targeting phrase in his 1992 book; yet the rejected “reposition global warming” set’s key strategy was so obtusely worded that it was rejected outright by the people it was presented to. One of the officials in the “Information Council for the Environment” (“ICE”) PR campaign told me firsthand that their official copy was ultimately tossed into the trash, while the head of the campaign implied elsewhere that its too-narrow audience targeting suggestion was idiotic.

But someone else apparently thought the memo set copy they had, including its worthless discarded unused bits, could be turned into a weapon to use against the fossil fuel industry. Who ‘leaked’ it and when, and how did they portray the set to the recipients back then? What did the recipients know about the validity of the set, and did they undertake any due diligence to find out anything about the set? Continue reading →