County of Multnomah v. Exxon Mobil, et al.

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Russell Cook

When the news of this Oregon County lawsuit, filed on June 22, 2023 happened, I was in the midst of a complicated, distracting, time-consuming switch of residences. In my rapid first screensearch into the filing for ye olde “reposition global warming” memos ‘evidence,’ which is the cornerstone ‘evidence’ hallmark (worthless as that memo set is) of these mindlessly repetitive “Exxon Knew”-style lawsuits, I initially thought a dissection of this latest lawsuit would be just a quick checklist comparison to my Puerto Rico v Exxon lawsuit dissection — they both contained identical wording and identical errors concerning the “reposition global warming” memos.

It would be a simply matter to then point out that this identical lawsuit blunder was committed by a law firm 3700 miles away from Puerto Rico, thus the plain overarching question implied by deep examination and comparison of all these lawsuits is elemental: who actually are the dummies writing this “Global Warming / #ExxonKnew Show”?

However, when I finally had time to sift deeper through this Oregon filing, it turns out the same question obviously applies, but the blunders within this one pointing to the Puerto Rico filing and other lawsuits in a key way are … well … not quite that simple. Continue reading →

The Irony of The Mann

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Russell Cook

During this interim inconvenient time where I must downsize to a much smaller residence, which includes selling off unneeded books at the HalfPrice Bookstore, almost no time is available for in-depth blogging. But while I was at that bookstore today, I had the opportunity to look through a used and perhaps not especially cherished copy of Dr Michael Mann’s “The New Climate War” book, which allows me to at least minimally offer the following for future investigators to consider: Ironic that Dr Mann, who filed a defamation lawsuit which he ultimately lost and is forced to pay lawyers fees to at least one of the people he falsely accused of defamation, apparently commits the very same giant act himself, while recklessly pointing an arrow the size of Texas at the people he relies on for his accusations. Remember, the definition of the term is that a person knowingly tells a falsehood, or recklessly doesn’t make sure the accusation has merit.

(Don’t get me started on James Hoggan’s enslavement to Ross Gelbspan for the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation. Plus, back in Feb 2022, I covered Dr Mann’s inexplicable blunder in this same book concerning ye olde “reposition global warming memo.”)

Municipalities of Puerto Rico v. Exxon Mobil, et al. Part 2: RICO-teering

Posted on January 3, 2023 by Russell Cook

Bad enough that this lawsuit filing from the Milberg Coleman Bryson Phillips Grossman LLC law firm has a no-win appearance of being either a mismanaged effort guided by the Sher Edling law firm without any disclosure of that partnership, or it appears to be a spectacularly inept and possibly unethical plagiarizing of the accusation content and other bits from the 16 boilerplate copy Sher Edling lawsuits. I detailed all of that in my Part 1 blog post (handily reproduced at WUWT, enabling me to reach a wider reading audience).

Exponentially worse for Milberg Coleman is the widespread news assertions that their lawsuit filing “is unique” because it is “the first climate case against fossil fuel companies alleging harms against cities as a class of plaintiffs, and the first climate case to include Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) claims” as if this tactic is some kind of new idea. Many ‘news’ outlets belched out this RICO idea without questioning anything about it. It seems this mob is oblivious to the central hallmark of far-leftists, namely how they project what they do as accusations of what their political opposites do.

Why is all of this bad for Milberg Coleman? Because their RICO tactic doesn’t point to anything done by ‘Big Coal & Oil’ and skeptic climate scientists, it instead points an arrow the size of Texas at one of the core promulgators of the “crooked skeptic scientists” accusation. Continue reading →

Tom Nelson Podcast, #39: “Russell Cook: On climate change, ‘the mainstream media has not done its job’”

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Russell Cook

Questions …….. I have questions. We all should have questions regarding the “Clima-Change™” issue, because the issue itself demands unquestioned belief in its orthodoxy. So, in Tom’s 53 minute interview of me, I describe the questions that landed me in the issue, starting out with just the simplest question I had as a little kid, and then the questions I have now of why the traditional news media is not asking questions they should pose as a matter of basic investigative journalism. The elemental point I wish to drive home in this interview is that the questions end up being larger than just the science, where the ultimate implication is that if we are pressured in any way not to ask questions on any controversial issue, that’s where democracy dies in darkness.

Here, let me add a few details about the visuals that accompanied my telephone interview, along with some other info bits. Continue reading →

The Power of the Li’l Green Group in PBS Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil”

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Russell Cook

On Easter Sunday, CBS News spectacularly reinforced how the collective enviro-activist community has only one primary go-to source of viable-looking evidence to indict the fossil fuel industry of running disinformation campaigns designed to undercut the ‘certainty’ of catastrophic man-caused global warming. With Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil” broadcast on Tuesday April 19, the Public Broadcasting Service began its spectacular reinforcement of exactly where the tiny source is for that unsupportable accusation, and how it dates all the way back to the mid-, late-1990s with two key promulgators. But before anyone examines the faults in this latest mainstream media journalism malfeasance, they should never lose sight of what the two central hallmarks are for extreme political leftists:

intellectual dishonesty, as the late Rush Limbaugh often pointed out, in one way or another, with both themselves and with the public on the narratives they push. Utterly false premise narratives, in other words.
psychological projection, on pretty much any accusation they make when they need to aim the accusation squarely at themselves.

Frontline’s “The Power of Big Oil” is a case study on how this all comes together in one presentation, Continue reading →

Naomi Oreskes – the gift that keeps on giving, redux

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Russell Cook

When historians specialize in researching and reporting about a particular range of history events, they are universally expected, as a basic tenet of their profession, to always be able to place specific events with considerable accuracy on a timeline. If they are praised as heroes from their reporting of otherwise ‘hidden’ situations, they should never put themselves in the awkward position of appearing to embellish their ‘heroic status’ via superficial, self-serving analysis of criticism of their work, and they should certainly never display hypocritical positions about their analysis of criticisms, relative to their own personal actions. Continue reading →

“Al — I’m on first name basis with him”

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Russell Cook

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 →

Did Naomi Oreskes formulate her ‘climate scientists corrupted by tobacco / fossil fuel industries’ idea before she was ‘told’ about those scientists’ existence?

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Russell Cook

Global warming issue. 3 talking points. It’s just this simple:

the science is settled
the fossil fuel industry pays ‘skeptic climate scientist shills’ to lie that it isn’t settled
ignore those skeptics because of the two above points

Regardless of which angles of the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation that objective investigators choose to examine, the moment they start pulling on loose threads in those angles, that’s when the bigger fabric starts coming apart, to the point where it looks like it will never be stitched back together neatly. One really big loose thread is “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes’ alleged happenstance foray into the global warming issue which supposedly led to her ‘discovery odyssey’ concerning the ‘corruption of skeptic scientists,’ and she supplies many more loose threads to pull in her apparently faulty narratives about her role in the issue. This post details one more problem to throw onto Oreskes’ latter threadbare pile. Continue reading →

The Big Ben Santer Problem, Pt 6: When Were His Eyes Opened on the Tobacco Angle?

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Russell Cook

The “tobacco angle” being the notion that the fossil fuel industry allegedly fully knows their products cause catastrophic global warming harm in a manner no different that the tobacco industry knowing full well about the cancer-causing harm of cigarette smoking, and how both industries are accused of creating disinformation campaigns to deceive the public about the harm of their products. Within the global warming disinformation accusation is the claim that some of the same people supposedly spewing climate disinformation also did so for the tobacco industry. “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes gained heroic – no, make that “supernova” / “living legend” – status from revealing this claim to the world, partly praised on that latter accolade by no less than the person she credits with being the first to steer her toward that ‘tobacco industry connection,’ Lawrence Livermore atmospheric scientist Ben Santer.

Examine Oreskes’ particular narrative about …

1) being personally attacked after she wrote a paper about the scientific consensus for man-caused global warming; 2) advised to talk to Ben Santer, a victim of a similar attack; and 3) how Santer “started telling this whole story about how he had been attacked by Fred Seitz and how it was just like the tobacco industry…”

…. at a superficial level, and sounds quite plausible. Go deeper on that last bit, and various problems start to arise. Continue reading →

Gelbspan Files

Tag Archives: S. Fred Singer