Just askin’. But perhaps part of the answer is found in the critical necessity of the man-caused global warming issue to say a parallel exists between the paid tobacco industry expert shills who said there was no cigarette smoking / lung cancer tie, and alleged ‘industry-paid shill scientists’ who supposedly lie about the harm of man-caused global warming. Imagine what happens if the larger public has no faith that any such parallel exists.
Clear as a bell, we have this report from Paul Thacker at the Fall 2005 edition of SEJournal (pg 4, screencaptured here for posterity):
…the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, an online archive of millions of papers that were found during discovery motions by lawyers suing the tobacco companies in the late 1990s. As part of the master settlement, tobacco companies were forced to put all these documents on an online library maintained by the University of California, San Francisco.
You’d think that would be nothing but internal memos from the tobacco industry. So what is a scan of a brochure (screencaptured for posterity) from the Bracy Williams & Company doing there, having not a thing to do with ‘big tobacco’? The appearance of it there bothers me, considering what I wrote about regarding the appearance of Ross Gelbspan’s infamous “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” at Wikipedia. Hard to miss its reference to Bracy Williams & Company in its second paragraph there.
Not to diminish the work of those advocating truth in science observations and exposing any kind of industry distortion/misinformation about cigarette smoking, but the elemental goal in attempts to create any sort of parallel here is that it must be established that skeptic climate scientists knowingly lie about the issue as a direct result of being paid to do so. Fall short of that, and what you have instead is every appearance of anti-science, anti-intellectual tactics to manufacture doubt about the credibility of skeptic climate scientists because perhaps the core merits of IPCC climate assessments cannot stand up to withering science-based criticisms…… and such a problem is exactly what enviro-activists do not want the public to see.
Hat tip to commenter “TheHealthPhysicist” at the YouTube version of my ICCC9 presentation for drawing my attention once again to The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. I’d known about the Bracy Williams & Company brochure being there for some time, but I had spaced out why I knew the Union of Concerned Scientists knew about this scan – I only had a partial note about that and I need to confirm why I know they knew about it. But, funny thing about doing a search for the combination of those words, it inadvertently led me to a search result for excerpted text from Mary O’Driscoll’s June 24, 1991 The Energy Daily “Greenhouse ads target ‘low income’ women, ‘less educated’ men” article (item #3 down this page here) that I’ve never found before today.
O’Driscoll’s article is now the earliest I’ve found where I can confirm it quotes from the leaked ICE memos which contain the “reposition global warming” phrase, and the bit within the article about the memos being “circulated around Washington D.C., by environmental groups and others” is particularly damaging since the Eco Geneva Inc Newsletter reproducing the article quoted the “reposition global warming” phrase directly in its item #2 right above the article.
Love it when enviro-activists inadvertently point me straight to material that only further undermines the notion that skeptics are paid shills. Let’s just say the timeline for the leakage of the ICE memos compared to how quickly and extensively they were covered in May-June 1991 is now even more highly suspect. Remember, I noted in my ICCC9 presentation and elsewhere that Al Gore claims Gelbspan discovered the “reposition global warming”, and yet Gore himself was quoting from those memos back in 1992, years before Gelbspan first mentioned them.
…. oh, look, yet another non-tobacco item (PDF’s page 29) in the The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, no less than a brief write-up of the ICE campaign having the “reposition global warming” phrase right in the middle of it.
…. one more thing, would anybody be surprised if I showed that the SEJ writer I mentioned at the start, Paul Thacker, is one of Gelbspan’s Facebook Friends?