Make no mistake about it, the mantra repeated by enviro-activists everywhere is that there is no doubt about the certainty of catastrophic man-caused global warming, and nobody should bother to listen to skeptic climate scientists because what few skeptics there are were paid industry money to lie, just the same way ‘shill experts’ lied on behalf of ‘big tobacco’ years ago. Naomi Oreskes accuses them as being “Merchants of Doubt” in her book of the same name, but neither she nor any other prominent accuser ranging from Al Gore to Ross Gelbspan ever offers a scintilla of evidence proving skeptic climate scientists are in any such conspiracy. Worse, the overall accusation is beset with inconsistencies all the way back to its murky beginnings. That is what my “Merchants of Smear” Heartland Policy Brief is all about, outlining myriad ways the accusation falls apart under hard scrutiny.

For a nice press release about “Merchants of Smear”, please see “Exposing the ‘Merchants of Smear’; Media’s Smear of Global Warming Skeptics Traces Back to ‘Paper-Thin’ Evidence Peddled by Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan.” [12/24/23 author’s note: The web link to the “Merchants of Smear” Heartland Policy Brief PDF file has subsequently gone inoperative nearly a decade later, but it is archived here. ]

For any critic who’s arrived at this page and have read this far down, believing my Policy Brief is a Heartland-conceived and directed fabrication, think again: I tell how it was an entirely independent creation of my own here.

But I’ve only really just begun. Even with all of the additional info seen here within my GelbspanFiles blog posts, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the problems surrounding the accusation against skeptics. Check back in at this page for further updates. An 18 page outline of the “Merchants of Smear” is not sufficient to tell the whole story of the accusation tactic and the people who promoted it.