Part 1 of this 2-part post was little more than my illustration of what I do when I’m not composing material for this blog, using a ‘guest post’ at Christopher Keating’s “Dialogs on Global Warming” blog. Today, I’ll illustrate how Keating’s subsequent diatribe against me is little more than a microcosm of the larger problem plaguing the political side of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) issue.

The elemental exercise here is to dissect assertions made by Keating as a case study to show how similar-minded AGW believers across the board are enslaved to propagandistic-like talking points that they literally have no hopes of proving.

“…the deniers…” Nowhere in my body of work have I ever said I deny climate change/global warming. Lord Monckton illustrated the hilarity of this false talking point in this video, after the 13:39 point. The late William Gray pointed out this non-denial back in 2000. “Deniers” has been a false premise label talking point from its inception.

“… climate science harasser Russell Cook. He’s a hatchet man for the Heartland Institute…” / “… Mr. Cook tried to intimidate me with the threat of a lawsuit. When I stood up to him he quickly backed down and claimed he wasn’t threatening me…” As I described in part 1, I chanced upon Keating’s blog entirely as a result of a Google email alert, and all I did is ask him what his proof was for the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation in my first comment there. Since his ‘sounds like a threat’ was so bizarre, I rephrased the challenge in an entirely different way. Keating could have posed this to himself as a “pics, or it didn’t happen” challenge, and if he had, he’d understand why any astute reader would not see my challenge as any form of harassment or lawsuit threat. And as I pointed out in more than one of my funding disclosure posts, nobody tells me what to say, do, or think, therefore I cannot possibly be anybody’s hatchet man. But consider how this notion is the same one voiced by AGW scientists feeling harassed by skeptic scientists, or by FOIA requests. When the basic request ‘show us what you know’ is met by ‘I don’t have to show you anything,’ the reflex question is ‘what’s being hidden here?’

“… You don’t have physical evidence…etc. … don’t count as ‘physical evidence.’” Plain as day, my very first challenge to Keating was for him to provide irrefutable evidence proving skeptic scientists were paid industry money to lie and fabricate false material. Tedious as it may be, objective readers and investigators can go though all the jousts I’ve had with Keating (a site search of my name there is the best way to find all my comments) and see for themselves whether Keating ever offered anything beyond the first half of the challenge, namely that skeptics received money. Without the corruption intent on full display indirect connection to the payments, neither Keating nor any other accuser has any physical evidence that corruption has taken place.

“… a leaked memo from the American Institute of Petroleum which revealed detailed plans to “recruit, train, and pay willing scientists to sow doubt about climate change among the media and the public. Cook would have you believe this isn’t evidence…” The correct name, of course, is the American Petroleum Institute. I say this is not evidence because there is no such statement within that set of API memos. Search the verbatim memos for yourselves. What Keating attempts to do is pass off Popular Science Magazine’s assessment of those memos as being something in the memos. However, what PopSci does quote from the memos isn’t a sinister industry directive, it is a basic truism. And of course, any astute reader of the API memos overall will see them as nothing more then an elemental effort to tell the public a side of the AGW story that the mainstream media couldn’t bring itself to tell. Nothing within the API memos is a directive to fabricate false material.

“… I screen grabbed his confession before he had a chance to remove it….” This, coming from a person who felt compelled to delete the last comment I left at his blog before banning me altogether for ‘sins’ he has yet to prove I committed. Funny thing here is how I made and kept the promise that material would not be deleted from my blog, while what Keating speaks of is little more than psychological projection of what he has already done, and what others on his side of the issue are already famous for – as in recent incidents of disappearing newspaper assertions, cover-ups of inconvenient news items, and more infamous instances, such as hidden information at EPA and NOAA, deleted comments at highly touted sites, deleted emails, and hidden declines of temperatures, on and on.

See the direction this is headed? People like Keating believe what they say is true, yet under tough examination, their assertions fall apart. (For those interested, I’ve turned Keating’s post into a PDF file with the errors highlighted in yellow and additional mouse-over notes attached to them.)

But this whole thing boils down to a central faulty notion, both in the microcosm of my situation and in the far larger global warming issue:

“… Russell, your logic is a major failure. … That’s what happens when you’re paid to lie about climate change. And, yes, he’s paid to lie about climate change. By his own admission, he has been receiving yearly grants…” This illustrates the depth of desperation people, ranging from mere bloggers on up to famous journalists and Al Gore, have when it comes to prompting the greater public to dismiss skeptics of AGW out-of-hand. I’ve made no such admission of wrongdoing, my February 17, 2017 blog post was nothing more than a full disclosure about gift money I receive and how it does not corrupt my viewpoints. If I hold the same viewpoints now as I did in 2009 years before receiving Heartland grants or any other money from anybody else, how does it follow that am paid to lie? Dr Patrick Michaels, climate scientist, disclosed that he received some industry money, but since he held his same viewpoints – which I mentioned here – prior to receiving any donations from the organization which supposedly corrupted him, how does it follow he is paid to lie?

The question cannot be any more simple than that, and it is quite obvious where the real failure of logic resides. But Keating’s embarrassing weakness illustrates what might happen if an objective investigator or objective journalist goes much farther up the food chain to see what happens when statements like this in these kinds of reports are challenged in the most brutal possible way:

…Myron, let me start with you. You’re someone that thinks that climate science in some ways is alarmist. And we’re not here to debate that tonight.…

… one of the concerns has been Mr. Pruitt’s record. The Competitive Enterprise Institute is in some ways funded by the fossil fuel industry, but Scott Pruitt was a friend to the fossil fuel industry, to put it mildly, in Oklahoma.…

No matter where you go in the global warming issue, there you are: AGW believers predominantly do not have the climate science expertise to refute what skeptic climate scientists say, college professors ban debate on the topic, as do state agencies, pro-AGW climate scientists flee from face-to-face debate with skeptic climate scientists, and people on the pro-AGW side routinely dismiss skeptics who are ‘shills on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.’

There just isn’t a shred of evidence to prove that last bit. Far from me having a ‘pattern of threatening people with lawsuits,’ the pattern I’ve encountered is people bending over backwards to find excuses to dismiss skeptic climate scientists’ climate assessments, and how they twist themselves into pretzels to avoid showing anyone evidence that skeptics are paid to lie.

It’s only a matter of time before some major mainstream media journalist smells blood in the water over those ‘patterns of behavior’ that Keating inadvertently personifies.