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
Category Archives: accusation repetition
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
On James Hoggan / James McCarthy, et al. There’s More, Always More.
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
The First, the Last, and the Only Accusation Against Skeptics. Repeat it Often, Inexplicable Errors are Optional
To quash the notion that no valid scientific criticism exists against the idea of man-caused global warming, enviro-activists often say “denier scientists” are paid by the fossil fuel industry to lie about the issue, insinuating a parallel to expert ‘shills’ who did the same for ‘big tobacco’. But the accusation has no punch without some kind of authoritative-sounding citation, so they inevitably invoke Ross Gelbspan’s narrative. Now, lets examine just how far and wide the successful spread of this accusation has been after Gelbspan’s first mention of it. Continue reading