DailyKos didn’t like my 9/26/22 WUWT guest post — and only possibly further aided in my intended goal

Filed under my “Can’t make this stuff up” category. First, the setup behind all of this:

I was alerted to the allegedly peer reviewed “Electric Utility Industry’s Role in Promoting Climate Denial, Doubt, And Delay” paper at the Environmental Research Letters science journal by a prominent scientist on the skeptic side of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) issue. When I immediately spotted big errors in the paper and suggested it was ripe for retraction, the scientist told me the effort would be difficult if not impossible to accomplish considering the apparent bias of the ERL editor. At that point, I could have simply tossed the paper into my giant notes file as the latest example to unquestioningly regurgitate ye olde “reposition global warming” memo set as [false] ‘evidence’ of fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns. However, I reasoned that if enough people were to see my dissection of the paper at WattsUpWithThat (the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change) such that some of them would afterward decide to contact ERL or the authors on their own, the pressure might then prompt voluntary removal of the paper from publication, selfcensorship in other words, out of sheer embarrassment about the errors. Arguably a long shot goal to accomplish, but still worth a try, nevertheless.

In a brilliant bit of not thinking their action all the way through, the leftist DailyKos website made my goal one more increment possible of achieving. It’s one of those instances where if there are any DailyKos readers who harbor even just small amounts of doubt about the “crooked skeptics” accusation, the readers might react to that piece with, “Dude, you didn’t actually dispute the guy’s main argument that there is a fatal fault with the ‘smoking gun’ leaked memos. What’s up with that?Continue reading

When ‘Reporting’ looks more like Propagandizing

“Ok, student reporters — here’s everything you need to know about the fossil fuel industry’s sinister disinformation campaign to spread lies undercutting the certainty of man-caused global warming which employed shill skeptic scientists, and here’s the professional researcher who can assist you with writing a report about that very conspiracy.”

Anybody spot the main problem there? Yes, we might wonder about the fate of the student reporters/researchers or the postdoctoral researchers/faculty members if they dared to question anything presented to them, but a bigger question remains at the end of this excise concerning the ‘professional researcher,’ and the nature of his involvement in the work these reporters/researchers undertook. Continue reading