For those I personally met at the conference, or who learned about my work via my Heartland “Merchants of Smear” Policy Brief which was included in each attendee’s bag of literature, welcome to my blog.

For those of you who briefly listened to my explanation of the fatal narrative point from Naomi Oreskes on exactly how she learned that her attackers were the same ‘people’ who had ‘attacked Sherwood Rowland’ and were otherwise what led Oreskes to have her “Erin Brockovich” moment about those ‘people’ being associated with Big Tobacco, the longer story is here. Click on the links within that piece, and you will soon see the entire notion that skeptic climate scientists are paid industry money to deceive the public is anything but a nice, tidy accusation with no loose ends.

If you attended the conference, or even if you simply are looking into the skeptic climate scientist side of the issue, one overriding appearance should be readily obvious: the people opposing Al Gore and the IPCC “are not boogeymen or paid shills who are in it for the money” (to quote directly from an otherwise pro-Gore/IPCC reporter I’ve been corresponding with), and they absolutely do not have just some simplistic nauseatingly repeated one-paragraph “climate change is a hoax” mantra. Even if you do not follow particular climate science details closely, skeptics’ material certainly does not look like fabrications planned, orchestrated, and dispatched out of the boardrooms of Exxon or the Koch Brothers.

The science is complicated, and skeptic scientists / expert speakers present a plausible case about their side. Allow that material to pile up against what the IPCC/Al Gore side has to offer, and the result is what was classically described by the focus of my blog, Ross Gelbspan, when he said the public would react by saying “Come back and tell us what you know when you really know what you’re talking about.”

How do you distract the public from looking too deeply at skeptic material? Call skeptics crooks, paid to lie by the fossil fuel industry. That accusation appears to be every bit as plausible as really complicated skeptic science material, but it is far more effective, because it gives the public an excuse to ignore all that complicated material. “It looks just like the ‘science gobbledygook’ the Tobacco Industry was putting out about how cigarettes weren’t harmful or addictive,” as some Greenpeace people would say, and “look at all that money paid to skeptics that Greenpeace and others unearthed. They’re in a conspiracy to keep the industry alive and protect industry profits.” End of the road for filthy, lying, greedy skeptics, right?

Not so fast, if you just consider two basic questions: who at Greenpeace or any other enviro-activist place has ever clearly shown that any particular skeptic science assessment is absolutely a lie? And who at Greenpeace or any other enviro-activist place has ever shown anybody absolute indisputable proof that industry money was paid in exchange for specific lies and fabricated reports?

I let the scientists dispute each other’s science assessments. I’m here to say with authority that the compete ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation is baseless, fatally undercut with core problems surrounding its central so-called evidence and the clique of people surrounding it. It doesn’t really matter where you dive into the overall accusation, each facet of it crumbles apart under hard scrutiny.

Let that sink in deeply. If we don’t actually have an industry conspiring with skeptic scientists in order to hoodwink the public into ignoring the certainty of the ‘global warming crisis’ for the express purpose of keeping their profits, do we instead have an enviro-activist industry trying to hoodwink the public into believing the certainty of ‘industry-corrupted skeptics’ for the express purpose of preventing their environmentalist gravy train from derailing?

I’m routinely told not to speak about the climate issue because I have no climate science expertise. Fine, but a person does not have to be a climatologist or even a rocket scientist to do elemental fact-checking on whether a person accused of wrongdoing is deserving of the accusation. That is why I’m in this issue, and why common citizens and objective journalists need to be involved in this issue.

If there’s zero evidence that skeptic scientists / speakers are industry-paid liars, then there is no need for common citizens and journalists to ignore the work of the skeptics. And from my limited ability to see, skeptics’ material destroys the Al Gore/IPCC side, and the failure of top people and journalists to see the faults in the political accusation side of the issue exposes a far bigger problem.

So, I welcome new arrivals to follow along right here, or to watch the blog’s Twitter announcements for new posts, or to keep a wider eye on what I’m doing at either my main Twitter page or my Facebook page.