Tag Archives: Sheldon Rampton

The Problems in the ExxonKnew Lawsuits Keep Getting Worse

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This happens – I’m in the midst of compiling a blog post, I look up something I remember in connection with another accusation angle, then I spot something that doesn’t line up right in the whole narrative. What I’d planned to describe concerning “Committing Acts of Journalism” (or the lack thereof by the reporters over the last two+ decades on the climate issue) will have to wait until the next blog post, (is in my next post as of 2/24/25) because I just spotted a new problem with the basically still-current (originally Matt Pawa-led) pair of 2017 Alameda County / San Francisco County lawsuits. I dissected that pair jointly in my October 6, 2017 People(s) of California v. BP, while also bringing up those two again in my November 30, 2024 Maine v BP dissection, since the Sher Edling law firm inexplicably decided to apparently plagiarize Matt Pawa’s old 2017 accusation paragraph to use in their filing for Maine. What I did not catch in my latest dissection there was the basic fault with Matt Pawa’s citation source for the bit about Dr S Fred Singer’s “launch[ing] repeated attacks on mainstream climate science,” namely the 2007 UCS report. Those words are not in that report that way. I can show where they are seen that way, and where the actual source is . . . . . . which does not help the credibility of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits one bit. It reinforces the fatal fault in essentially every one of these. Continue reading →

“Inside Track: Sowing Seeds of Doubt in the Greenhouse”, Part 2: troubling connections

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Part 1 described how Phil Shabecoff’s June 1991 Greenwire electronic news brief was the first news item to directly quote a set of worthless ‘leaked memos’ which supposedly revealed how the fossil fuel industry aimed faulty climate science assessments at ignorant people in order to spread misinformation about the issue. The old Greenwire brief also quoted a spokesperson for an electric utility trade organization who categorically stated his organization was not participating in a public relations campaign of which those memos were supposedly guided by, which undercuts current accusations about that organization spearheading the PR campaign. But wait, there’s more. Continue reading →

Pawa’s pro-/anti-Gelbspan Weirdness

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That’s Matt Pawa, who’s increasingly gaining fame as the leader of four current global warming lawsuits, and who was described in a December 2017 Huffington Post article as the main driver behind such legal action. “Wierdness”, because there is much about Pawa’s manner of establishing how ‘fossil fuel companies conspired with skeptic climate scientists to hide the harm of man-caused global warming’ in his landmark 2008 Kivalina v. Exxon lawsuit which makes no sense. And “Gelbspan” is the person who’s self-described as the first one to reveal that conspiracy.

What’s weird here is how Pawa can’t bring himself to give Gelbspan that direct accolade to this day, regarding Gelbspan’s evidence which appears plausible enough to nail fossil fuel companies to the wall for the whole world to see. Continue reading →

King County v. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch and ConocoPhillips

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Here we go again, with yet another lawsuit attempt to say ‘the science of global warming is settled, the fossil fuel industry knew this all along but paid skeptic climate scientists to say otherwise, thus victims can sue that industry to recover the costs associated of dealing with this settled science.’ The otherwise uninformed general public expects – rightly so – such lawsuit accusations to stand on their merits beyond any shadow of a doubt. They’re supposed to be open-and-shut cases, welcoming independent corroboration and never having the remotest appearance of hoping nobody checks the veracity of the accusation evidence, or look like they’re using shell game tricks to obscure the origins of a highly questionable solitary evidence source, or give any impression, however slight, that the so-called evidence is actually part of an orchestrated long-term effort to advance a political agenda by marginalizing critics through baseless character assassination.

This latest case not only fails on all those points ….. Continue reading →

Three Degrees of Separation or Less, Part V: Ross Gelbspan and Global Warming Nuisance Lawsuits

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Not long ago, lawsuits were filed against cigarette companies for all the suffering caused by smoking, saying tobacco executives fully knew their product was a killer when they hired shill experts to testify and report that there wasn’t a clear connection between smoking and lung cancer. A leaked tobacco company memo pushing “Doubt is our Product” was a key bit of evidence in those complaints, but industry efforts to hoodwink the general public were arguably ineffective since a slang term for cigarettes had been “coffin nails” for multiple decades. Meanwhile, someone in the enviro-activist community decided to apply that same kind of complaint to high-level global warming nuisance lawsuits. Guess who and what is connected in a questionable manner to those cases? Continue reading →

Who put the “ICE” and its “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” phrase in Wikipedia?

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As ever, the fatal problem with enviro-activists’ enslavement to the “reposition global warming as theory” phrase as proof that skeptics are paid illicit money to lie about certainty of global warming is that there is no evidence of it being a top-down fossil fuel industry directive of any kind. Nevertheless, it has been in place at one of the top-most viewed web sites in the world, put there in a questionable way begging for harder scrutiny. Continue reading →

On James Hoggan / James McCarthy, et al. There’s More, Always More.

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At my 10/18/13 piece at JunkScience, I detailed how Desmogblog’s James Hoggan essentially named IPCC scientist James J. McCarthy as the person who prompted Ross Gelbspan into an ‘investigation’ of the funding of skeptic climate scientists, and I concluded by questioning why a trained scientist like McCarthy would focus on a funding point that is irrelevant to scientific inquiry. But his problems on that don’t end there. Continue reading →