The latest news about efforts of Attorneys General using racketeering laws to prosecute “climate change deniers” is that their subpoena list of people and entities corresponding with Exxon matches a list of people and entities found at Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets web site. Since I’ve spent the last 6+ years digging into the smear of skeptic climate scientists and who is behind the smear, I’m not surprised at all. Today I offer this post as a “Summary for Policymakers” regarding my series of seven prior blog posts about a smear effort which took place back in 2007 that is a case study for examining other prior and current industry corruption accusations against skeptic climate scientists. Continue reading
Category Archives: accusation repetition
Flipping Gore’s RICO-style Prosecution of Global Warming Skeptics
For new readers arriving at this blog, you probably already have a passing familiarity with the current news item about state-level Attorneys General efforts to prosecute “climate change deniers.” What you may not know is that, while this latest legal tactic is relatively new, the core accusation behind it is more than 20 years old. My article at American Thinker today will hopefully serve as a primer on that problem, and will hopefully also prompt many to go back through my blog here and my other online articles in order to see just how much more there is to this problem.
Those who push using RICO laws against “corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change” (‘other organizations’ meaning conservative think tanks and any skeptic climate scientist having any association with such entities) are likely emboldened because they’ve never before encountered push-back on the very core of their accusation. But when increasing numbers of the public become aware of how NY state AG Schneiderman and Al Gore handed their heads on a silver platter two weeks ago to investigators, journalists, and wavering global warming believers, the more likely this entire witch hunt collapses.
The Repeaters vs the Pushers
I’ve said it many times, the entire global warming crisis can be boiled down to a three point mantra, “the science is settled” / “skeptics are industry-corrupted” / “everyone may ignore skeptic material because of points 1 & 2.” With the latest fixation on using racketeering laws to persecute companies and organization siding with skeptic climate scientists, a fourth talking point could be added, “when deniers persist with their industry-bought and orchestrated lies, they should be charged with crimes against humanity.” But the entire notion hinges on the insinuation that scientists who had even the most tenuous financial tie to industry donations were corrupted – paid to lie in a manner no different than shill ‘experts’ working for the tobacco industry who said smoking didn’t cause lung cancer. An insinuation so memorably compelling that ordinary citizen enviro-activists can regurgitate it with ease. Continue reading
If You are Unaware You are in a Hole…..
…. stop and look around. If discover you are in a hole, for goodness sake, stop digging. Such is the advice I would have given to the Union of Concerned Scientists before they plunged off a credibility cliff with this wipeout.
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
“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
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
Drop the “reposition global warming” phrase casually into a sentence…..
….. without having it look like propaganda at its finest. I say it can’t be done. Continue reading
“Oops, didn’t think that one all the way through…”
Such is the sheepish statement we should be hearing from enviro-activists accusing MIT’s Dr Richard Lindzen of being an “oil industry paid shill.” 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