Pinned post-if you’re a long-ago reader returning here, please reacquaint yourself with my work via my “Background” posts. If you’re entirely new here…==>

The entire climate issue, even after 30 years of it, still can be boiled down to just two talking points: 1) “the science of human-cased global warming is settled.” 2) “anything reference you hear to skeptic climate scientists is irrelevant; they are paid by the fossil fuel industry to deceive the public.” When I asked a Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) board member in late 2009 what specifically proved that latter point, he said numerous journalists had documented the accusation. However, the only journalist he could name was Ross Gelbspan, and indeed, virtually every instance of the accusation appearing in print or online, one way or another, seems to be traceable to Gelbspan. The more I studied the matter after my initial inquiry, the more problems and contradictions I found. To best appreciate what I found, I highly advise that GelbspanFiles readers click on the links I provide, which are screencaptures of particular items, or are links to the full context pages I show in my screencaptures, or are links to further reading which back up what I say. The core problems are:

• Although he is often referred to as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, including his own self-references as detailed in my post here, the Pulitzer organization does not name Gelbspan as a Pulitzer winner.
• The “memos” that Gelbspan began citing in 1995 are not a “smoking gun” at all, but merely a rejected proposal (including unsolicited alternative name suggestions) of interoffice guidelines for conducting a pilot ad campaign with the acronym “ICE” which only ever stood for one name, “The Information Council for the Environment.” It was seen by the public for less than a month from mid-May 1991 to the first week of June, run by the Western Fuels Association, a non-profit group, and the PR campaign name always had the “for” word in “ICE,” but never “on” – when anyone uses the “on” word, it is a tell-tale indication that they have never actually seen the official ICE documents or know anything in depth about them, leaked copies of which (including never-implemented audience targeting goals) were otherwise long hidden in Greenpeace scans archives. There is no evidence that the particular subsection in the campaign memos which Gelbspan frequently referred to was ever implemented into the actual campaign or that this subsection was any kind of central industry directive given to skeptic climate scientists.
• Al Gore wrote about the “secret memos” around four years before Ross Gelbspan first mentioned them, but later said Gelbspan had discovered them, which suggests a critical need to nail down the real source of the memos and the motivations for the subsequent spin about it.
• Gelbspan’s “reposition global warming” accusation is cited in uncounted numbers of times by newspaper reporters, activist groups, politicians, sociologists, lawsuit filings, and others – ad nauseam – as proof that skeptic climate scientists are basically stooges of the fossil fuel industry … but none of them has tried to confirm or independently corroborate Gelbspan’s claims.
• There is simply no evidence that skeptical scientists were ever paid by any industry to lie about the causes or consequences of global warming. Corrupted, in other words.

I brought up these problems and other related items in numerous of articles I’ve written on the subject since 2009, continued now in greater depth here in this GelbspanFiles blog. My previous writing can be found by going to my archives tab (when some links in those old articles stop functioning, you may have to drop the webpage addresses into the Internet Archive to read the pieces).

Follow along and feel free to see if you can contradict my work. New posts appear regularly on the GelbspanFiles homepage, around three per month. For alerts to the latest blog pieces here, follow me on Twitter @GelbspanFiles. Follow me @questionAGW, and at my corresponding Facebook page* (* or not, as of 8/27/23) for my other closely related items.

Finally, if you are a brand-new reader, let me end this introductory page by paraphrasing from a scene in a famous recent movie:

If you’re reading this, you’ve gotten out of Al Gore’s global warming echo chamber. And if you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to read a little further. You remember the memo strategy line Gore and Gelbspan use to indict skeptic climate scientists, don’t you?

I could use good people to help me get my project on wheels. More of the public needs to know about a facet of the political side of the global warming issue that the mainstream media hides. Remember, Truth is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this page finds you, and finds you well.