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
Tag Archives: Mark Hertsgaard
Covering Climate Now, 3/2/23: ‘Fox News Lies About Elections & Repositions Global Warming as Theory (Not Fact).’
For any of the folks at last week’s Heartland Institute climate conference (and any others I’ve contacted recently) who heard me say the worthless “reposition global warming” ‘leaked industry memos’ is the literal best ammunition that enviro-activist accusers have in their arsenal as evidence that the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns, that was no exaggeration. And as we all know, the primary hallmark of far leftists is the way they project their mindset onto the people they accuse of treachery, so when we see the Covering Climate Now group, a supplier of biased, one-sided climate info to 500+ news media outlets, publish a March 2 “FOX Doesn’t Just Lie About Elections” hit piece castigating the Fox News network with a subheadline that reads ….
The network is part of a climate disinformation ecosystem that journalism has to confront.
…. it is an arrow the size of Texas pointing to who it actually is who spews disinformation and who should be exposed for exactly what they are doing. Especially when Covering Climate Now feels totally compelled to support their accusation with ye olde “reposition global warming” memos that date all the way back to when the co-founder of CCNow first used them in a pure disinformation effort back in 1997. That’s how old this pathetic effort is, and why I put the comical “ye olde” modifying noun in front of those memos’ notorious name.
Mark Hertsgaard is Back. Again. “Covering Climate Now.”
Similar to the February 2015 resurgence of Kert Davies, a long-time promulgator of the ‘industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists’ accusation, enviro-activist writer Mark Hertsgaard has returned in zombie-like fashion, once again illustrating his very old one-trick pony narrative about ‘Big Oil financing a disinformation campaign to undercut the certainty of man-caused global warming.’
Continue reading
Reposition Global Warming as Theory Rather than Fact Redux, 22 Apr 2019
A strange pair of same-day appearances barely over a month ago of that supposedly ‘leaked industry strategy memo phrase’ are an indicator of how people who can’t stop repeating it seem blissfully ignorant regarding the way its less-than-three-degree separation from Ross Gelbspan — and all the related fatal problems surrounding that — could potentially torpedo the legacies of the prominent people who’ve long promulgated it as evidence of the fossil fuel industry conspiring with skeptic climate scientists to undercut the alleged ‘certainty’ of man-caused global warming. Watch this. Continue reading
The Hertsgaard Error, pt II: Not a Case of Poor Wording
In a curiosity venture to see if the Union of Concerned Scientists regurgitation of the “reposition global warming” accusation narrative was getting any media traction, I instead stumbled across an unexpected example of outright either deliberate misinformation, or one of otherwise incompetent reporting from someone who is supposed to be an authority on the topic of ‘industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists’. Continue reading
There’s always more – the Schneider/Hertsgaard error
Around halfway down the page at my previous blog post, I briefly noted that the late IPCC scientist Dr Stephen Schneider seemed to make an error about the Global Climate Coalition’s efforts to “reposition the debate onto the issue of uncertainty.” Much like any other examination into facets of the accusation that skeptic climate scientists are paid fossil fuel industry shills, a look into this error only reveals more problems with the basic overall accusation and the people who push the accusation. Continue reading
Timeline History and Inconvenient Truths of Ross Gelbspan’s and Al Gore’s “reposition global warming” Phrase
The idea of man-caused global warming is especially effective because it can be pounded into practically everybody’s head via three easily memorized talking points. Global warming believers need only to counter dry recitations of skeptic science material with:
- assertions that the sheer numbers of ‘climate scientists’ on the IPCC side indicates this to be the overwhelming consensus opinion
- claims about leaked memo evidence proving skeptics are paid industry money to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” – dupe the public, in other words
- the obvious conclusion that reporters aren’t obligated to give fair balance to skeptics because of the previous two points.
In a nutshell, settled science, crooked skeptics, reporters may ignore skeptics — bam, bam, bam.
A timeline of where, how and when that “reposition global warming” phrase first appeared and where it prominently pops up afterward is something global warming believers would hate, since it might prompt a total loss of faith in the validity of that central accusation point. The loss could cascade into questions of whether the science actually is settled in the face of skeptics’ science-based criticisms, and people may also start to wonder about the ‘fair media balance’ idea, since they might not readily recall instances where skeptics actually received that from mainstream media reporters. Continue reading