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.
My JunkScience piece linked to Donna Laframboise’s blog about McCarthy’s role in the ‘Trenberth/Lansea hurricane intensity’ controversy, but I didn’t note what her blog said about McCarthy’s association with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). So I’ll mention it here, to point out once again how there typically is less than 3 degrees of separation between any prominent person who insinuates skeptic climate scientists are crooks, and Ross Gelbspan.
Regarding the UCS, my August 26, 2010 AmericanThinker article detailed a 1998 effort by that organization to spread talking points intended to marginalize Art Robinson’s Oregon Petition Project. Within my piece was a link to a copy of the UCS’ actual talking points memo, and a key clue to the suspect manner of their effort was the note they had near the bottom of the memo which concerned a letter trashing the Oregon Petition (originally intended for publication in the Wall Street Journal) which was being circulated among other scientists via “an effort organized by Ozone Action“.
Click the above thumbnail to enlarge it – and notice the one particular name just above that phrase: Kevin Trenberth. Plus, there are the two names in the sentence after that phrase, John Holdren and George Woodwell, the latter individual I described in a 2011 article who was working directly through Ozone Action and with a person at the White House to entice Holdren into co-authoring a 1998 op-ed trashing the Oregon Petition (photo link of that gem here). Then there is a third name alongside Woodwell’s and Holdren’s, Jane Lubchenco. In a 2010 article, I detailed how she and Holdren were tied into Ozone Action’s effort to smear the Oregon Petition.
And as I’ve noted on several times, Ozone Action and Ross Gelbspan sure appear to be the epicenter of the fossil fuel industry corruption accusation against skeptic climate scientists. Small world.
It seems James McCarthy, currently the UCS Chair, couldn’t get much closer in 2007 to Gelbspan’s favorite “reposition global warming” phrase. At that time he was testifying before a U.S. House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight hearing as a UCS Board member. McCarthy’s fellow hearing witness was Sheldon Rampton, who could not resist entering Gelbspan’s favorite phrase into the Congressional Record.
Who did Rampton cite at the bottom of a 1997 article he co-authored with Bob Burton while repeating that same exact phrase? (full text here) Ross Gelbspan and two others who cited Ozone Action for it – the Environmental Working Group’s CLEAR report, and Sharon Beder.
An amusing closing disclosure to mention at this point. I got into this exploration not as an exercise to pin damaging items onto Gelbspan, but instead just the opposite, to corroborate what was told to me in October 2009 about others who “document payments by industry to a small group of scientists“. Three paragraphs from the end of another of my 2010 articles, I described Rampton’s testimony at the ironically titled “Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science: Media Strategies to Influence Public Policy” 2007 House hearing, but not McCarthy’s. The reason is because I didn’t recognize McCarthy’s name and had no clue at the time what association he had with Gelbspan.
Just weeks ago, I discover his association appears to be as close as it can get.
Once again, it’s all that much harder for anyone to avoid seeing how all paths lead to Ross Gelbspan, from the present time when anybody repeats his accusation, back to when he first mentioned it in 1995.