I’m talking about the lights going out at two websites, Ross Gelbspan’s beloved “The Heat is Online” and Greenpeace USA’s beloved “Greenpeace Investigations.”
Somebody forgot to pay the electric bill? Just askin.’ Continue reading
Category Archives: Global Climate Coalition
The Big Ben Santer Problem, Pt 3: When is an “Attack” Not Actually an Attack?
When a person claims to have been innocently speaking on a specific topic, only to be horrified by sudden, personal, vicious attacks over it, to the point of becoming sick, then learns soon afterward how this isn’t a unique situation but is instead part of a larger orchestrated plot run by sinister forces to attack other scientists the same way, the person takes on a heroic status by exposing the organizations and actors behind the attacks.
What happens when there were no personal attacks in the supposedly comparable situation, though, and most of what this person says about the tangential details of the comparison is strangely inconsistent? Continue reading
FreeBeacon: “Calif. Cities Suing Exxon Forced to Walk Back Key Claim”
From Todd Shepherd’s April 5, 2018 Washington Free Beacon article:
California cities suing Exxon and four other oil companies have reworded a portion of their original complaint after being rebuked by the presiding judge. …
… The cities had initially pointed to a 1996 internal memo from an industry group, the Global Climate Coalition (funded by the America Petroleum Institute), which said that, “a doubling of carbon dioxide levels over pre-industrial concentrations would occur by 2100 and cause ‘an average rate of warming [that] would probably be greater than any seen in the past 10,000 years.'”
… However, the memo was referencing an assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and was not the independent findings of the GCC’s work.
The Free Beacon shows the backpedal rewording in their own photo link above, and I reproduce it here for good measure (click image to enlarge):
That specific paragraph section’s wording in its original form is what prompted the title of my prior March 30, 2018 blog post, “If California v. BP Implodes via Insufficient Evidence, so can New York City v. BP.” Read all the way through my blog post, and you’ll see how this ‘lack of evidence to prove a fossil fuel industry conspiracy’ problem with the twin California global warming lawsuits and the NYC one doesn’t end there, it ultimately points a giant red flashing arrow at the clique of people who have tried for 20+ years to say there is ‘a fossil fuel industry misinformation conspiracy to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.’
The California lawsuits’ reworded paragraph section loses all its teeth as “smoking gun” evidence proving oil companies knew man-caused global warming was settled science. It shouldn’t be reworded, it should be stripped entirely out of the lawsuits, and the main lawyer behind the use of it in both the California and New York lawsuits – Matt Pawa – should be compelled to explain why he didn’t know the evidence was totally worthless ….. or whether he knew it was worthless the entire time. But as I showed in my prior blog post, that same paragraph section appears in Matt Pawa’s 2008 Kivalina v. Exxon lawsuit, as does the supposedly leaked memo subset insinuating skeptic climate scientist shills were paid and instructed under an industry strategy directive to “reposition global warming” which targeted “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.”
No such targets or strategy was ever used by anybody anywhere.
The effort to prove the fossil fuel industry conspired to misinform the public about the certainty of man-caused global warming is demonstrably beginning to fall apart. The focus on where the real conspiracy is to be found should be turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction, to a particular small group people who’ve apparently conspired for years to misinform the public about the certainty of corporate-corrupted skeptic climate scientists.
If California v. BP Implodes via Insufficient Evidence, so can New York City v. BP
With regard to the most recent series of municipalities suing energy companies to recover the ‘costs of man-caused global warming,’ never forget that these lawsuits are built on two premises: 1) “settled science facts” and 2) “industry-paid shill scientists following an industry-created conspiracy goal to cynically reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” In a sinister way, no less. The presiding judge in the CA v. BP Oakland version of twin California lawsuits just indicated that there is no evidence for the conspiracy accusation. This spells doom for the other People of the State of California v. BP P.L.C., et al. San Francisco Superior Court Case and for the City of New York v. BP case. In this post, I’ll explain how that is. Continue reading
The Hertsgaard Error, pt II: Not a Case of Poor Wording
In a curiosity venture to see if the Union of Concerned Scientists regurgitation of the “reposition global warming” accusation narrative was getting any media traction, I instead stumbled across an unexpected example of outright either deliberate misinformation, or one of otherwise incompetent reporting from someone who is supposed to be an authority on the topic of ‘industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists’. Continue reading
“Whenever There is Any Doubt, There is No Doubt”
That’s a line from the 1998 movie “Ronin”, where the CIA agent character played by Robert De Niro explained the reasoning for his apprehension over a bungled situation which didn’t look right from its inception. This simple analysis lends itself perfectly to the accusation about skeptic climate scientists being paid industry money to lie and misinform. If there’s no doubt the accusation is irrefutable, it would be consistently repeated by all. Dig into any part of the accusation, however, and its inconsistencies pile up to the point where there’s no doubt something is seriously wrong with everything and everyone connected to the accusation. Continue reading
There’s always more – the Schneider/Hertsgaard error
Around halfway down the page at my previous blog post, I briefly noted that the late IPCC scientist Dr Stephen Schneider seemed to make an error about the Global Climate Coalition’s efforts to “reposition the debate onto the issue of uncertainty.” Much like any other examination into facets of the accusation that skeptic climate scientists are paid fossil fuel industry shills, a look into this error only reveals more problems with the basic overall accusation and the people who push the accusation. Continue reading
The ‘television editor told me “We did. Once.”’ Problem
My 11/8 blog piece recapped six problems seen with a single paragraph written by Ross Gelbspan in a 2005 Mother Jones article, and went on to tell about another of his major narrative derailments. But I mentioned there was one more big problem that needed a separate blog piece to examine it. That’s what this piece will cover. Continue reading