Ross Gelbspan, June 1, 1939 – January 27, 2024

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I am truly sad abut the death of the namesake for my GelbspanFiles blog, and I must first explain why, when some – critics especially – might guess I’d be dancing on his grave. That’s not the way I view life. I don’t just simply want to have a nice day myself, I want everyone to have a nice day, to be happy, and to do good not only for personal betterment but also for the benefit of everyone. If we make very unwise decisions which harm or mislead others, we all should be held accountable, myself included, and be allowed opportunities to atone for our mistakes. We all learn from these teachable moments and become better when forgiveness is sincerely asked. It makes us all better as a result.

Death is final. When ordinary people lived a life filled with dishonest choices apparently for no other reason than personal gain and did nothing to atone for this, they’re now a permanent embarrassment to family members, “someone never to be named” among former associates and former admirers. If they were duped into making supremely unwise choices, well, it’s sad that they were such a dunce. If they deliberately chose to be dishonest, their legacy is far worse. When this involves prominent public figures, their legacies become little more than teachable lessons: “you don’t want the public to learn about you this way.”

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A. – somewhat lacking in – I. “Exposing the Influence: Skeptic Climate Scientists and Fossil Fuel Funding”

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As I’ve said many times here at GelbspanFiles, no matter where you go in the angles of narratives from prominent people about ‘liars-for-hire scientists on the payroll of Big Coal & Oil’ you’ll see the accusations are only separated by three degrees or less from Ross Gelbspan’s beloved accusation which launched his second career. Add “Artificial Intelligence” to that list of prominent accusers. At the end of this post, I’ll point out a bigger problem with this development. Continue reading →

Makah Indian Tribe v. Exxon / Shoalwater Indian Tribe v. Exxon

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No rest for the weary. Back on December 21st, I thought the little-publicized news of the fisherman’s trade association plaintiffs’ self-withdrawal of their PCFFA v Chevron global warming lawsuit was a Christmas gift to the skeptic side of the climate issue. Maybe the plaintiffs fully comprehended the futility of their lawsuit while also finding out how their choice of lawsuit handlers, the San Francisco Sher Edling law firm, was perhaps not qualified to handle the case. However, the situation is instead one step forward and two steps back when, it comes to being done with this climate lawfare litigation war. It turns out Sher Edling had filed a pair of brand-new lawsuits on Dec 20 for two Native American communities in Washington state, Makah Tribe v. Exxon and Shoalwater Tribe v. Exxon.

The news of this latest pair of filings was also oddly little-publicized in minor news outlets, compared to widespread news of the prior-most-recent one, the ‘watershed moment’ California v Exxon sensation ( ahem – keep an eye on the apparent grand unifying theme). But these two lawsuits might be also be considered a ‘Christmas gift’ that’ll keep on giving, not only to the defendants’ law firms, but also to objective journalists and potentially GOP House investigators. Continue reading →

I Stand More Informed, Part 2 — and it doesn’t help Ross Gelbspan’s climate issue legacy at all

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I’ve implied it on several occasions relating to several people; it bears repeating in this situation — when a person tells the tale of a particular significantly noteworthy personal history event which is consistent in every retelling, notwithstanding minor errors about minor details, it’s a good indicator the event actually happened. When significant details are noticeably inconsistent from one telling to the next, we’re left to wonder if the event never actually happened at all the way the person describes it. Was the narrative instead just a script handed to the person to read, where he or she is ineptly acting out the tale?

My Part 1 post was a look into Ross Gelbspan’s earliest mentions of ye olde “reposition global warming” memos – the memos that, from late 1995 to just over a week ago (stay tuned here for more about that latest blunder) – are the literal best that enviro-activists have in their arsenal to accuse skeptic climate scientists of being paid fossil fuel industry money to spread ‘disinformation which causes the public to doubt the certainty of catastrophic man-caused global warming.’ No. Joke.

I’ve already written how Gelbspan is seemingly unable to keep his narratives straight about his discovery odyssey of ‘industry-paid skeptic climate scientists.’ What he additionally said in the November 1995 C-SPAN interview I covered in Part 1 didn’t clarify any of the problems in his subsequent retellings of his discovery story. It added one more major angle of inconsistency to them all. Continue reading →

I Stand Corrected — and it doesn’t benefit the ‘corrupt skeptic climate scientists’ accusers at all

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The setup here is elemental. In the movie companion book for Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth,” he said outright that the namesake of my blog, Ross Gelbspan, had discovered the notorious ‘leaked fossil fuel industry memo’ “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” one page in an extended set attributed to a coal industry public relations campaign which allegedly had sinisterly targeted (Gelbspan’s words, in a 1997 radio show interview) their ‘disinformation’ very narrowly at “older, less-educated men” and “young, low-income women.” It turns out that the PR campaign never operated under a directive to ‘reposition’ anything, and in one obscure instance, Gelbspan himself revealed that an official of the PR campaign said their climate issue information was directed at everyone within their audience.

On many occasions here at GelbspanFiles when I’ve said Al Gore’s story doesn’t line up right (e.g. the screencapture example below) about Gelbspan’s ‘discovery,’ I’ve pointed out that Gelbpsan’s earliest-seen quotes of those memo set phrases trace back as early as his December 5th, 1995 National Public Radio interview.

I’m not wrong at all about Gore quoting the never-implemented audience targeting phrases from that memo set years before Gelbspan ever said a word about them. The unanswered problem remains: how could Gelbspan discover memos which Gore already had? What I need to correct is when Gelbspan’s earliest mention of those phrases happened. Continue reading →

Why Would the NY AG Office Care about a Particular Movie Trailer Video?

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The Nov 29, 2023 “Amicus Brief Details Climate Litigation Campaign’s Political Origins” at the Climate Litigation Watch website described the situation surrounding the most recent release of docs out of the New York Attorney General’s office that were demanded by the Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO) watchdog group. The docs – 129 pages of emails – surround Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF)’s Lee Wasserman lobbying the NY AG office to launch basically an “ExxonKnew”-style lawsuit holding fossil fuel producers accountable for causing global warming, where among other efforts, Wasserman arranged a meeting at the AG office for ex-Ozone Action / ex-Greenpeacers John Passacantando and Roland “Kert” Davies. The teaser from Wasserman to the attorneys was that the duo were about to launch a supposedly devastating news event in which skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon would be portrayed as an oil industry shill.

Among the (redundantly copied in some cases) Wasserman/ AG office email exchanges were several in which the correspondents were trying to locate a person named David Brown, who somehow factored into all the efforts. RFF Director Lee Wasserman thought this was a great idea. It turns out he was formerly the head of prior-NY AG Elliot Spitzer’s Investment Protection Bureau office, and ultimately, he was located and had a phone conversation with at least one of the attorneys. The potential problem here is how he later chimed in via email with a seemingly out-of-the-blue reference to a “movie trailer” link, which he must have mentioned in the phone conversation. Why mention that among efforts to nail ‘Big Oil’ to the wall? Well, click on the link the fellow provided, and you’ll see a hint of how that factors in:

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ii9zGFDtc”

There’s more, of course. There always is. Continue reading →

Where is Ross Gelbspan these days? 2023 Edition

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Back on November 30, 2022, I wrote a blog post about Ross Gelbspan’s most visible recent activity at his Facebook page, which concerned a couple of less-than-well-ought-out Facebook comments on his part. For the purposes of this blog post as it concerns his activities that may interest investigators sometime in the near future, I created a new blog category tag just for these specific posts. All part of a larger pattern on his part, you see. Time for another update, albeit on a different angle: money. Continue reading →

Beware These 6 Outright Clima-Disinformation™ bits when you’re told to “Beware These 10 Climate Myths”

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As ever, one of the hallmarks of far-left enviro-activists is their psychological projection, where they ought to just wear a huge sign saying “what I accuse others of doing is exactly what I do myself.” I’ve covered Mark Hertsgaard here at GelbspanFiles before, so I shouldn’t be surprised that he and his Covering Climate Now (CCN) efforts continue to be a one-trick pony show where he is enslaved to repeating “Pulitzer-Winning journalist” Ross Gelbspan’s decades-old attack about skeptic climate scientists being paid fossil fuel industry money to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” – Hertsgaard began his current career track doing exactly that back in 1997. It was a myth back then that Gelbspan had won a Pulitzer and was an even bigger myth concerning Gelbspan’s outright false accusation that skeptic climate scientists were paid and/or instructed to reposition anything. But Hertsgaard persists in keeping the glory of Gelbspan’s fake news alive to this day. Witness the following Continue reading →

Al Gore: “You Always Hurt the One You Love”

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The whole accusation about the fossil fuel industry running disinformation campaigns employing skeptic scientist ‘shills’ to deceive the public about the certainty of man-caused catastrophic global warming is enslaved to a pair of literally worthless, never-implemented ‘industry memo sets.’ It’s been the best the enviro-activists have ever had in their accusation arsenal, going all the way back to the 1990s. The accusation is unsustainable, it will ultimately sink. It’s a mathematical certainty.

Choose any one of myriad questionable situations surrounding the apparently interconnected people who promulgated the narratives about the memos, and you have the tip of the proverbial iceberg that can sink this whole thing. Investigators with more power and influence that I have will be seeking answers about those questionable situations. For quite some time, I wondered if there was no connection at all between Naomi Oreskes and Kert Davies, but as I briefly showed in my May 21, 2020 blog post, there certainly is a questionable situation involving those to together.

Investigators will be asking why Davies was lurking in the doorway of Oreskes’ appearance at a pretend House hearing.

They’ll be asking about Al Gore’s connection to the others. Why would Oreskes say she’s on a first-name basis with Gore, when all he did was cite a single ‘100% science consensus’ figure of hers in his 2006 movie? Why would Gore say Ross Gelbspan discovered the “reposition global warming” memos – the set that gained their first ongoing media traction via Gelbspan and John Passacantando’s Ozone Action publicity about them, when Gore quoted from the set years before Gelbspan ever mentioned them?

And what did Gore mean, in the situation reported by the LA Times, where …..  Continue reading →