Can’t emphasize this enough, a particular set of literally worthless, unsolicited, never implemented (never implemented!) set of ‘leaked industry memos’ is so pervasive among enviro-activists that it came up as recently as two weeks ago as a false premise setup at a so-called ‘news’ post about sustainable biodiversity.
What follows is my comment suggestion I sent to the alleged ‘reporter’ at that site.
Will she publish it as a guest post rebuttal, or will she take the advice I suggested at the end of my comment submission? We’ll see. I’ll include any responses I receive as an update to this post at the bottom. What she inadvertently illustrates is a far larger problem which I’ll detail in an upcoming blog post.
…(since her online form is simple text-only, my all-caps highlighting and spelled-out website addresses are what I directly submitted. The embedded website addresses are additionally added here for additional info reading)
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I periodically do internet searches to see where the “reposition global warming as theory” memos are repeated. Today’s search turned up your 2 week-old “Sustainability Claims Ripped To Shreds” post in which that memo phrase is seen no later than the second sentence there. Since I was not familiar with who you are in the ‘news’ business, I went straight to your About page. The acute irony there is your opening quote from Albert Einstein: “You Don’t Have to Know Everything. You Just Have to Know Where to Find It.”
What you stated in your above blog post about the “reposition global warming” memos and the “advertorials” alleged to be associated with those memos is understandable and predictable. You repeated what you read about them in Naomi Oreskes’ UK Guardian article, but you did not know everything about those memos / advertorials simply because you did not know where to find more information about them.
Back in 2008-’09, I read the awkwardly-worded memo directive which headlined those memos, and didn’t know anything about them. However, I wanted to see them in their full context before accepting them as “smoking gun evidence” of industry-funded disinformation campaigns employing shill skeptic scientists. Long story short, I found as much as the earliest recipients of the memos cared to share about them, and I kept right on digging when it concerned people like Naomi Oreskes, a staunch repeater of the memos back in 2008.
This may shock you: that memo set with its ‘sinister’ public relations campaign suggestion to target an audience of “older, less educated men” and “younger, low-income women: ………… was an unsolicited proposal sent to the managers of the PR campaign which was REJECTED OUTRIGHT. The proposal copy sent to the managers of the campaign went into the trash. I went further on this, just to be sure, and asked the top four skeptic climate scientists who were routinely accused of participating in the campaign to find out if they were specifically directed to “reposition global warming.” Three of them said they never saw any such memo. The fourth said he had literally never heard of the campaign, and thus had zero association with it.
I went further – I found out that Naomi Oreskes gained her copies from a US Senate staffer who had a direct association with Al Gore. Gore said a “Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist” named Ross Gelbspan discovered the “reposition global warming” memo, and by implication, that means the rest of the memo set since Gelbspan quoted the PR campaign’s audience targeting phrases as early as December 1995 in a National Public Radio interview. But Gelbspan NEVER WON a Pulitzer, and Al Gore quoted the audience targeting phrases in his 1992 “Earth in the Balance” book, YEARS before Gelbspan ever mentioned them.
I wondered why Oreskes was quoting the memo set’s most famous phrase and how she got into the issue in the first place, and what she said about the memos and the “advertorials.” It turns out that the Chicken Little / Doomsday Canceled newspaper ads she showed in her 2007-’08 “You Can Argue With the Facts” PPT presentations and in her Nov 2021 UK Guardian article were NEVER PUBLISHED anywhere, and worse, the story she tells of being alerted by Erik Conway of who the ‘merchants of doubt’ were would have required Conway to travel back in time via a time machine to tell her what he did. I covered that massively troubling problem here: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=5917 . Her story about Conway is mutually exclusive to the alternate story she tells about Dr Ben Santer informing her of who her critics were: http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=10283
All of the above are irrefutable facts that you can corroborate for yourself.You simply did not know were to start looking for them.
No need to rely on my GelbspanFiles.com blog; in fact, I openly invite to do your own entirely independent deep dive into what you know about those memos and “advertorials” that were the opening premise that you based the rest of your post on. Pretend you never heard of my or my blog. I’d be willing to wager that if you cast aside all emotional response to this and instead utilize traditional hard-nosed reporter investigation skepticism about all you know, you will come to the same inescapable conclusion that I did.
If I may politely suggest it, you need to re-examine all you think you know about the climate issue. I posit that the entire issue has only two legs to stand on, “settled science” and “crooked skeptics paid to spew industry-concocted disinformation.” If that second leg implodes due to a total lack of evidence to support it, the first leg is not enough to keep the whole issue standing, in the face of science-based material from skeptic scientists disputing the collective claim that any sort of unprecedented human-caused climate calamities are happening. I further posit that if the core clique of people promulgating the “crooked skeptics” knew their cornerstone ‘leaked memos evidence’ was worthless but pushed the accusation with malice anyway or with reckless disregard to whether the memos and the accusations tied to them had any merit or not, these people may have committed one of the biggest acts of defamation in history.
Now you know more about something you did not perhaps know to look for in the first place. What you choose to do with this is up to you, as it is with anyone who reports the “news” of those old memos. I term them “ye olde” ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Ye-olde-explanatione.jpg ) memos because, over the last two+ decades, they are the literal best that enviro-activists have in their arsenal as ‘evidence’ that disinformation campaigns happened that deceived the public in the wrong direction about the climate issue.
Stop and think about it: when the only thing environmentalists have to keep their issue afloat is unsupportable character assassination efforts, what does that tell you about the sustainability of their entire so-called “science-based” issue, where they bend themselves into pretzel shapes to prevent the public from knowing ( http://gelbspanfiles.com/?page_id=3834 ) the other half of the science?
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One of the hallmarks of politically driven liberal enviro-activists is their intellectual dishonesty, such that they aren’t merely dishonest on what they offer as authoritative public statements, they also deceive themselves on what they say. Note that Ms Johnson’s website is a “.news” internet address – a domain extension that can be bought – which essentially implies she is a reporter reporting news. Rummage far enough through her website, and it because all too obvious that she reports no such thing, it’s an environmentalism advocacy site. Which, in the above instance, happened to use what has every appearance of being outright disinformation as a launching point for one of her particular enviro-advocacy efforts.
In addition to the bit I spoke of concerning the irony of her not knowing where to find pertinent information about Naomi Oreskes’ false particular accusations against the fossil fuel industry, Ms Johnson asks “what am I missing?“ in connection to her supposed understanding of environmental issues. As I implied in my last sentence in my comment submission to her … how about the entire other half of the climate science issue?
Therein lies the much bigger question as it relates to the collective legacy news reporting media. Ms Johnson’s website is not a news reporting site, she’s just someone who believed what she was told and didn’t look any farther into the matter. She can plead ignorance, so she’s fine; organizations such as the BBC, ABC News / NBC / CBS / the PBS NewsHour … not so much. They are news reporting sites, certainly also having the ability to find information. How are these organizations going to explain their way out of the hole they dug for themselves on their journalism malfeasance of not telling the public half the story of the climate issue, and their more egregious malfeasance of never questioning the ‘industry-corrupted liars-for-hire skeptic climate scientists‘ accusation?
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Next in what is technically Part 2 to the above situation overall: “Was It All One Big ‘Oopsy’?”