Pt. 2: Victory Will Be Achieved when …

… we can keep the inconvenient truths buried. In digging further into this situation, I see an entertaining irony concerning one of the latest global warming lawsuits and the old worthless 1998 American Petroleum Institute (API) “Victory will be achieved …” leaked memo, and I now see something in my work that needed to be corrected (sort of – it isn’t helpful to the people’s actions I dissect). Continue reading

Put all your Eggs in the “Reposition Global Warming as Theory Rather than Fact” Memos Basket

Accusers who push the idea that fossil fuel industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists to spread lies undermining public belief in man-caused global warming repeatedly reveal they only have one bit of so-called ‘viable evidence’ in their arsenal — a particular set of supposedly leaked internal fossil fuel industry memos. Their latest effort to keep the accusation afloat contains an unforced error where they felt compelled to repeat a specific line about the ‘discovery’ of the memos which they haven’t spoken of since 1996.

Continue reading

Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations Inc. v. Chevron Corp., et al.

News of this PCFFA lawsuit filing [10/12/20 Author’s addition: the PDF file name changed from “Crab-complaint” to “PCFFA-Complaint”, necessitating a new weblink] came up two weeks ago at Energy in Depth: “Latest Sher Edling Climate Lawsuit Further Exposes Anti-Energy Activist Network.” Others, such as Climate Liability News (CLN: “Commercial Fishermen Sue Fossil Fuel Industry for Climate Impacts“) covered it differently without mentioning any questionable items about the situation. What are the problems with this particular boilerplate lawsuit? Let me count the ways: Continue reading

Al Gore’s 1994 ABC News Nightline ‘Crooked Skeptics’ Name-Calling Failure

You couldn’t ask for a more damaging report to reappear against Al Gore and enviro-activists’ collective notion that ‘skeptic climate scientists are on the payroll of Big Coal and Oil’ — inexplicably posted to Youtube just weeks ago by Kert Davies, one of the main promulgators of that accusation. Quoting Nightline host Ted Koppel in this February 24, 1994 “Is Science for Sale?” program, starting at the 1:06 point,

A number of years ago, I ran into then-Senator Al Gore at LaGuardia Airport … Senator Gore used the occasion to sketch out on a napkin one of his chief ecological concerns, depletion of the ozone layer. Ever the environmental activist, Senator Gore was proposing a Nightline program on the subject. He’s the Vice President now, of course, but he is still proposing. A few weeks ago, Mr Gore called to draw our attention to some of the forces, political and economic, behind what he would regard as the anti-environmental movement. The Vice President suggested that we might want to look into connections between scientists who scoff at the so-called greenhouse effect, for example, and the coal industry.

Things go downhill from there. Continue reading

City of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County v. Suncor Energy, ExxonMobil

Here we go again. This could be the point in time, though, when these lawsuits are one or two steps less directly connected* with the core clique of people who’ve long been pushing the ‘industry-paid skeptic climate scientists’ accusation, compared to the other recent lawsuits. [*9/10/23 author’s revision: Not quite – I’ve relabeled this one as a Sher Edling assistance filing, as explained here]. Continue reading

Flipping Daubert: Putting Climate Change Defendants in the Hot Seat

A student lawyer wrote a prize winning essay about how to get testimony from skeptic experts excluded from such cases. When you see what evidence this essay is based on, the question arises on whether the prize should be revoked and the writer reprimanded for not undertaking basic due diligence to find out if the “evidence” he cited was actually reliable. Continue reading

City of New York v. BP PLC, et al.

Regarding this particular January 9, 2018 lawsuit filing*,[3/13/18 Author’s edit: that link now doesn’t function, but the archive of it does] I will say I am mildly surprised on how tame it is compared to others regarding citations of evidence which supposedly prove skeptic climate scientists and organizations associated with them are paid fossil fuel industry money to lie to the public. But when it concerns this lawsuit’s ties to the same old people surrounding that accusation, what’s found within this lawsuit is no surprise at all. Continue reading

County of San Mateo v. Chevron Corp., et al.
County of Marin v. Chevron Corp., et al.
City of Imperial Beach v. Chevron Corp., et al.

It’s one thing for assorted article writers, amateur private bloggers, prominent professional bloggers, reporters, and political advocacy groups to regurgitate the unsupportable insinuation that skeptic climate scientists are paid by Big Coal & Oil to lie to the public while working the old “leaked memo phrase” reposition global warming as theory rather than fact into the narrative, but it’s much more serious when this comes up in major global warming “costs” court cases. Continue reading

People of the State of California v. BP P.L.C., et al.

If you are an enviro-activist with access to lawyers and mega-money who believes catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is caused by evil fossil fuel industries who ignore this harm to humanity to protect their profits, you don’t simply whine about this problem, you file giant lawsuits against those industries. Continue reading