Despite being mentioned less and less lately, Ross Gelbspan is still arguably the public face of the accusation that energy companies paid skeptic climate scientists to knowingly deceive the public about the ‘certainty’ of man-caused global warming via sinister disinformation efforts<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, who is Gelbspan? According to his bio page at his “Heat is Online” website<\/a>, he \u201cretired from daily journalism in 1992 after a 31-year career as a reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Washington Post the Village Voice and The Boston Globe. As special projects editor of\u00a0 the Globe, he conceived, directed and edited a series of articles that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. …\u00a0 Gelbspan received his B.A. at Kenyon College<\/em>“.<\/p>\n In 1995, Gelbspan helped launch the modern global warming movement by writing a story<\/a> on the issue that appeared on the cover of the December, 1995 issue of Harper’s Magazine<\/em>. In 1997, his book titled The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate<\/a> was published by Perseus Books.<\/p>\n The book caused a sensation because it grossly exaggerated the threat and certainty of future global warming, it also unambiguously stated in its book jacket’s inside sleeve<\/a> (falsely<\/a>, as it turned out) that Gelbspan himself was a Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist, and finally because it described an alleged conspiracy led by the coal industry to pay scientists to \u201creposition global warming<\/a>\u201d as a theory rather than a fact.<\/p>\n The last of those three things, the accusation that skeptic climate scientists are paid by the fossil fuel industry to lie, is Gelbspan’s most lasting legacy. For example, a book titled “The Great Debate on Conservation” describes<\/a> Gelbspan as follows<\/a>:<\/p>\n In his retirement, he began to wonder how global climate change had come to be so shrouded in confusion in the United States. His dedication to intellectual honesty wouldn\u2019t let him ignore the question, and when he began to investigate further \u2013 aided by his journalistic skill at tweezing the truth out of complex situations\u2014he uncovered a widespread campaign of misinformation promulgated by the oil and coal industries and intended to assuage public concern.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On page 34<\/a> of The Heat is On, Gelbspan quotes from supposedly secret memos produced by a trade association for the coal industry,\u00a0alleging a campaign to mislead and confuse the public about the science of global warming. Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, the book that accompanied his award-winning documentary film by the same title, says<\/a> the memo \u201cwas discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan.<\/em>\u201d That is now the widely accepted legend.<\/p>\n The accusation is powerful. In his movie, Gore literally spells out the words “reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact<\/em>” in red letters across the screen, saying they were from a leaked memo no different in comparison<\/a> to an old tobacco company\u2019s leaked internal document, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public\u2019s mind<\/em>.” In Gore\u2019s 2009 book titled Our Choice, both sentences are spelled out in half-inch tall letters on pages 356 and 357<\/a>.<\/p>\n But Gelbspan didn\u2019t discover the memos. They actually were reported in a 1991 New York Times<\/em> article<\/a> which claimed they came from an unnamed source at the Sierra Club<\/a>. Gore\u2019s 1992 book, Earth in the Balance \u2013 published five years prior to Gelbspan\u2019s book \u2013 says on page 360<\/a> that his Senate office received documents \u201c\u2026leaked from the National Coal Association<\/em>\u2026\u201d and quotes identical lines that appear in Gelbspan\u2019s 1997<\/strong> book.<\/p>\n So Gore apparently attributed discovery of the \u201creposition global warming\u201d plan to Gelbspan, a \u201cPulitzer-Prize-winning reporter,\u201d to apparently cover up his role in acquiring and then spinning the plan some four years later. If you read the actual memos<\/a> you will see the spin is false, too: The memos Gelbspan quotes were a rejected proposal for the PR campaign, unsolicited<\/a>, and were never actually implemented<\/a>, thus they would not have been seen by other fossil fuel company executives. There was no industry directive to “reposition global warming,” period.<\/p>\n After years of research dating back to my start in late 2009, I conclude that the accusation that skeptic climate scientists were paid to misrepresent the science of global warming is not only baseless, but it has every appearance of being an conscious effort to distract the public from taking skeptic scientists (and the organizations they associate with) seriously.<\/p>\n So, are Ross Gelbspan, Al Gore and other enviro-activists guilty of outright misinformation in the pursuit of enriching themselves? Or do they do what they do out of misplaced ignorance and political bias? Honestly, I don\u2019t know and it really is not my concern. I do not wish to psychoanalyze their actions. That will be left to others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite being mentioned less and less lately, Ross Gelbspan is still arguably the public face of the accusation that energy companies paid skeptic climate scientists to knowingly deceive the public about the ‘certainty’ of man-caused global warming via sinister disinformation … Continue reading