Part 3: Can You Argue with Outright Fiction ….

…. within a presentation that’s clearly titled “You Can Argue with the Facts,” and get away with it indefinitely, without ever being held accountable for all the harm coming out of such a presentation? When you are Naomi Oreskes, and you’ve built your second career is built on that presentation in such a way that it leads you onto becoming a documentary movie star, a go-to source for the news media (or not) and a star congressional witness for the Democrats while putting you on a first-name basis with luminaries such as Al Gore, you can cross your fingers that this whole situation will never sink.

Myself, I wouldn’t advise her to hold her breath on that or bet the ranch on it, in the face of the looming November U.S. House mid-term elections, where a complete reversal of the controlling majority might lead to a wave of congressional oversight investigations in the next two years that may quite likely include deep examinations of where the real disinformation is apparently found in abundance within the global warming issue. Continue reading

Headline: “U.S. House Panel Commits Political Suicide; Expands Inquiry into Climate Disinformation by ‘Big Oil’”

That was the widespread news headline, in one form or another (minus the ‘political suicide’ bit, of course) on Thursday, September 16th, 2021. The main news item was that Oversight Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, and sophomore-term House member Ro Khanna, D-Ca, sent letters hours earlier to four major fossil fuel companies and two lobbying groups, demanding that they appear in front of the Oversight Committee on October 28, and that they bring documents with them showing how they were engaged in — no joke! — “in a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.” Those were the actual words in the nearly identical letters, which can be viewed in their entirety at the links within the Oversight Committees website page’s press release.

How could this House Oversight Committee stunt be revealed to be act of political suicide? If the ‘defense witnesses’ at the October 28 hearing decide to seize the leadership opportunity on this, they could show how the ‘industry executives colluded with skeptic climate scientists in disinformation campaigns‘ accusation only points a huge arrow at where the real disinformation efforts are apparently seen in this issue, a core clique of enviro-activists who’ve pushed a pair of never-implemented, ‘leaked industry memo sets’ that are worthless to prove any “industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation” exists anywhere. Plus, the sheer lack of viable evidence behind the accusation points an even bigger arrow at the basic journalistic malfeasance on the part of mainstream media news reporters, when it comes to their decades-long failure to ask probing questions about the basic accusation, which dates back to the 1990s. Continue reading

Al — I’m on first name basis with him

Regarding Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” co-author also being on a similar first-name, or any-name basis with Gore ….. not so much, it seems.

I pointed to Oreskes’ little name-drop in only fleeting fashion in my June 17, 2020 blog post. Time now to explore it further as yet another example of a widespread problem with the entire ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ accusation: pull on even the smallest of loose threads in that accusation, and the fabric of the overall accusation starts to unravel in multiple directions instead of cinch together more tightly. Continue reading

The Repeaters vs the Pushers

I’ve said it many times, the entire global warming crisis can be boiled down to a three point mantra, “the science is settled” / “skeptics are industry-corrupted” / “everyone may ignore skeptic material because of points 1 & 2.” With the latest fixation on using racketeering laws to persecute companies and organization siding with skeptic climate scientists, a fourth talking point could be added, “when deniers persist with their industry-bought and orchestrated lies, they should be charged with crimes against humanity.” But the entire notion hinges on the insinuation that scientists who had even the most tenuous financial tie to industry donations were corrupted – paid to lie in a manner no different than shill ‘experts’ working for the tobacco industry who said smoking didn’t cause lung cancer. An insinuation so memorably compelling that ordinary citizen enviro-activists can regurgitate it with ease. Continue reading