This is a pair of huge problems. The 60 Minutes clip egregiously left out – as was disclosed just three days before the election – the President’s statement that it was ‘too early to tell if the event was a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, I already detailed right here at RedState in my 10/17/12 article how the NewsHour’s defense of Obama falls apart when we look into their own 9/12 broadcast archive.

Worse, the very recent revelations about the eroding narratives of UN Ambassador Susan Rice implodes the notion floated by one media outlet, MSNBC, about Senator McCain having racial prejudice against Ms Rice. National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac) founder Kevin Fobbs examines the Rice ‘race card’ in a very good essay here. But did we see any such examination by members of the mainstream media after the McCain / Graham / Ayotte news conference?

So, what we see is the mainstream media apparently taking the side of the Administration without questioning any part of it in the face of legitimate, plausible criticism. Is it sheer negligence? Or willful breaches of journalistic integrity in the pursuit of a political agenda?

To further illustrate how endemic this problem may be, take Mitt Romney’s surprised reaction to what President Obama said at the debate about Benghazi and apply that same reaction to the way skeptic climate scientists reacted in the late 80s / early ’90s to news of global warming erasing a decade’s worth of concern over global cooling.

If the number of red flags that the mainstream media overlooked in the Benghazi situation is highly troubling, then what was missed in the global warming narratives is a gargantuan problem. Skeptic climate scientists would offer mountains of dispute about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change if news outlets like the PBS NewsHour would allow that. But if the mainstream media chose to ignore such skeptics because information was fed to them about the skeptics being “corrupted” by fossil fuel industry money, this may be the most crippling problem of all considering the red flags seen in this small sampling:

• A 1991 New York Times article detailed a coal association’s PR ad campaign to downplay concerns about global warming, stating “[t]he goal of the campaign, according to one planning document, is to “reposition global warming as theory” and not fact.”, and that the document was leaked to the paper by the Sierra Club. To this day, no mention of the Sierra Club’s role in this matter can be seen in their current or archive web pages.
• In a 1992 Boston Globe article written by Ross Gelbspan, climate scientist Stephen Schneider said in regard to skeptic scientists “[...] it is irresponsible to give equal time to a few people standing out in left field.” Senator Al Gore’s quote concluded the article by saying, “The overall weight of evidence [...] is so clear that one begins to feel angry toward those who exaggerate the uncertainty.” The article also insinuated that skeptic scientists held politically motivated views, but no evidence was presented about either the actual quantity of scientists involved in the issue or how the issue was ‘scientifically settled’.
• In 1996, the enviro-activist group Ozone Action issued reports slamming skeptic climate scientists as fossil fuel industry shills, stating in one that “According to documents obtained by Ozone Action and by Ross Gelbspan, [...] strategies were laid out including: the repositioning of global warming as theory, not fact…” The reports do not state whom the documents were obtained from.
• In 1997, Gelbspan, published “The Heat Is On” featuring a chapter where the above mentioned coal association strategy document phrase, reworded as “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”, was offered as proof of those scientists’ corruption at the hands of the fossil fuel industry. Gelbspan did not cite either the NY Times or the Sierra Club for the source of the document in his book.
• In 2006, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” movie spelled out the “reposition global warming” phrase full screen as a direct comparison to the infamous 1969 tobacco industry leaked memo “Doubt is Our Product”. Gore’s movie companion book stated that the coal association phrase “was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan”. The Pulitzer organization does not acknowledge Gelbspan as a Pulitzer winner.
• Gore’s 2010 “Our Choice” book makes the same tobacco / fossil fuel industry comparison on pages 356-57, repeats the ‘memo discovery’ accolade for Gelbspan on page 358, while calling him a Pulitzer winner on page 411. On the same page, Gore thanks his spokesperson Kalee Kreider, “who has been of invaluable assistance in all of my climate work.” A current Fenton Communications bio page for Kreider notes her July 2012 return to Fenton after leaving Gore’s office, and prior to her previous work at Fenton (the PR firm which promoted Gelbspan’s book in 1997), she had “worked for ten years in the non-profit community, helping to start Ozone Action and then [...] for Greenpeace”.
• Ozone Action was merged with Greenpeace USA in 2000, and its founder took over as Executive Director of Greenpeace USA.
• Al Gore’s 1992 book “Earth in the Balance” quoted phrases from the very same memo set that he later claimed Gelbspan had discovered. Gore apparently had the memo set at least three years prior to Gelbspan.
• The “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact”as proof to indict skeptic climate scientists falls apart when anyone reads the full-context memos at Greenpeace archive scan pages (where only astute researchers would know to look for them; they aren’t found via ordinary internet searches). The memos were quite obviously for a very limited pilot project PR campaign, and the “reposition global warming” phrase only appears to be a ‘sinister industry directive‘ when it is seen out-of-context.

When Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein showed how narratives in Watergate did not remotely add up right, they ultimately became journalism legends. The narratives in the Benghazi situation still aren’t lining up right, and they most certainly do not line up in any form when it comes to the notion that skeptic climate scientists operate in a manner that is supposed to be a parallel to the way ‘expert shills’ worked for the tobacco industry.

People like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer revere the doggedness of Watergate reporting, yet he and his fellow reporters seem oblivious to their failures to emulate that, and they might actually look like deer caught in the headlights if the public skewers them on Benghazi and global warming by demanding to know “Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins?”

Russell Cook has nine previous RedState articles on the global warming issue, and his entire collection on the issue can be seen at “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists” . Follow him at Twitter via @questionAGW

That’s a strong, unambiguous characterization, and considering all the analysis of the anti-Muslim video that supposedly sparked the deadly event, I had no memory of the President calling it a “terrorist attack” from the start. So when Obama said “get the transcript”, I did an immediate check on the internet and found the official White House statement, a four paragraph piece (screencapture of it here) that simply characterized the attack as an “outrageous attack”. Certainly, an official statement like that would describe such an attack as one of terrorism, if it could be immediately determined to be one.

However, I was more interested in watching the remainder of the debate, and I figured post-debate analysis would sort out what the President said and when he said it.

Quickly enough, news outlets pointed to the President’s longer remarks, with most in the media implying it vindicated his assertion, while others say it vindicated Romney because the wording toward the end of Obama’s remarks about “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation” were seemingly in reference to the 9/11 anniversary. Indeed, at the beginning of his 9/12 remarks, Obama called the attack “this outrageous and shocking attack”, and much like the official statement, you’d think he would have called it an “outrageous and shocking terrorist attack” if he knew it to be one.

Last night’s (10/17/12) PBS NewsHour broadcast segment titled “Fact-Checking Debate Claims on Libya Attacks, Gas Prices and Tax Policy” apparently sided with the President. After replaying the Obama / Romney debate exchange, the segment host said the following while the screen showed specific words overlaying the full transcript of Obama’s 9/12 remarks:

RAY SUAREZ: According to the White House transcript, Mr. Obama said the following on September 12:  “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”

Period. End of story. Except it appears this end-all fact check is contradicted by the Newshour’s own presentation of the story on September 12th.

In its segment that day, titled “Attacks Linked to Web Video Leave Four Americans Dead at U.S. Consulat in Libya”, viewers are left with the impression that the Benghazi attack was the result of the controversial anti-Muslim video. Although the segment host Margaret Warner noted near the beginning how “White House officials said militants tied to al-Qaida may have used protests against an anti-Islam film as a diversion”, no mention is made about Obama’s speculation of this, and the remainder of the segment focuses on the effects of the controversial video, but first set it up with quotes of Hillary Clinton saying the situation was “an attack by a small and savage group”, and Obama stating “Today, we mourn for more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act.”

Those two sentence quotes from Obama’s remarks were right after the one about “No acts of terror …”, but the NewsHour did not play that sentence. Instead, it continued with translated remarks from the president of Libya’s National Assembly about his country as a “a scene of cowardly reprisals.”

MARGARET WARNER: Those reprisals came apparently in response to Internet clips of a film titled “The Innocence of Muslims” that crudely defamed the Prophet Mohammed.

If the NewsHour saw fit to leave out the “No acts of terror …” sentence while devoting the bulk of the segment’s time to the controversial video, it would not have been led to believe from the President’s remarks that the Benghazi attack was one of premeditated terror. So why, in the face of its own 9/12 segment’s evidence, did the Newshour not mention all of this in its ‘fact-checking’ segment last night?

I suggest this particular problem is no isolated incident, but is instead indicative of a far larger problem with the NewsHour and the mainstream media as a whole. In a piece at JunkScience.com, I noted how the NewsHour claims a scientific consensus validates the idea of man-caused global warming, but they contradicted their own position on “consensus” in  2011 news piece which suggested a single science report might overturn 100 years of consensus about Einstein’s theory of relativity. And in a lengthy article last year at American Thinker, I detailed how the NewsHour has a huge problem with not being able to explain its way out its failure to report half the story of global warming for over fifteen years, namely the side involving highly detailed viewpoints of skeptic climate scientists.

When the NewsHour leaves out critical details in their own reporting of their reactions to the President’s September 12 Benghazi remarks, it further undermines their own credibility in light of prior instances of inexplicable lapses in journalistic integrity, and they look ever more like the proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’ when it comes to the public sensing the entire mainstream media should be viewed with suspicion rather than with unquestioning trust.

Russell Cook’s collection of writings about the global warming issue – inspired by the NewsHour’s apparent bias – can be seen at “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists.” Follow him at Twitter:  @questionAGW

Witness the late IPCC scientist Stephen Schneider’s proclamation in the September 1992 Discover magazine (bold emphasis added, back-up link here):

…  a few contrary-minded scientists had always argued that the possibility of a nasty greenhouse effect was too uncertain to justify spending billions of dollars to fix it. They (as the tobacco industry has done for decades with smoking) called instead for further studies.

And this week, California Governor Jerry Brown’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) web site on climate change proclaims (bold emphasis added, back-up link here)

A small but vocal group has aggressively spread misinformation about the science, …. Their goal is to create confusion and uncertainty, thereby preventing meaningful action to remedy the problem. The same strategy was used cynically for decades by the tobacco industry after research showed that cigarettes caused cancer. …

RedState readers may remember I’ve written several articles showing how this accusation is literally unsupportable, and therefore should not be surprised that I caved into temptation and sent a letter to the OPR web site’s Director asking him to prove the above quoted assertion and others on that page. Considering such emails often end up in virtual trash cans, perhaps if I redirect it as an open letter directly to Governor Brown, it might prompt a public response.

Honorable Governor Jerry Brown
August 14, 2012

Governor Jerry Brown,

Your OPR’s “The Deniers” web page makes numerous assertions that are unsupported by the citations you provide, namely that:

• skeptic scientists are a ‘small group’
• they “spread misinformation”
• they “create confusion and uncertainty” rather than point to pre-existing uncertainty
• they “have little or no expertise in climate science”

And most egregiously, that:

• they “receive funding for their efforts from industries”
• this is the “same strategy was used cynically for decades by the tobacco industry”

The most simple response to every assertion above is two words:  Prove it.

Since you have California state employee researchers at your disposal to back each of the above assertions with detailed citations, and yours is a state government web site, I strongly suggest you undertake that effort as a matter of basic public obligation to the citizens of your state. Citations relying on guilt-by-association accusations are not credible when no evidence is offered to prove exchanges of money resulted in false, fabricated science papers or assessments.

As I have documented in my own articles (“The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists“), the particular assertion about a ‘tobacco industry parallel’ of fossil fuel industries corrupting skeptic climate scientists into putting out knowingly false, fabricated science papers and assessments is literally unsupportable. Worse, the accusation has every appearance of being consolidated by enviro-activists back in the ’90s as a means of manufacturing doubt about the credibility of skeptic climate scientists and those who support them.

How do you justify proceeding with greenhouse gas regulations when the science debate over the idea that human activity drives climate change is not settled, and why has so much effort been made to marginalize skeptic scientists using 20 year-old talking points?

Respectfully,

Russell Cook

McCarver’s outlandish claim quickly blew up because baseball stats can be checked so easily. Home run totals have declined since 2000.

The mainstream media gets away with many other tougher-to-see faults because most people don’t know much about climate science. Smart-sounding scientists and reporters are saying our CO2 emissions are worsening the climate, who are we to question them?

That is precisely what the propagandists fear the most:  the public must never see crippling faults in narratives about any facet of the issue. If doubt gets out of control, it’s no less deadly than the loss of confidence that implodes any ponzi scheme. Here, the issue is kept afloat not by infusions of cash, but with ceaseless unquestioned media reports supporting the issue and about allegedly corrupt skeptic scientists.

Ocean acidification caused by CO2 absorption? A melting Arctic, drowning polar bears? Unprecedented extreme weather? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is beyond reproach?

Skeptic scientists and their supporters point to meticulous analysis of faulty IPCC methodology, and to screaming newspaper weather headlines from from long ago, and to the Arctic Ice Cap returning to its 1979-2000 average extent, and the oceans’ current alkalinity, just to name a few contradictions.

But we have a monstrous public disconnect when the mainstream media is a gatekeeper to that information. Why report it when skeptic scientists are corrupt, and nothing they say is worthy of consideration?

With remarks at the White House in March 1995, Al Gore has long insinuated that skeptics operate no differently than ‘expert shills’ paid by the tobacco industry to ‘manufacture doubt’ about cigarette smoking risks. In his 2006 movie, he directly equated a supposedly leaked coal industry memo to the infamous Brown & Williamson Tobacco “Doubt is our Product” memo, yet neither he nor his followers show how scientific doubt about global warming has not existed from the start, or more specifically, that skeptics fabricated demonstratively false climate assessments after receiving industry money.

Despite those two massive faults, Gore’s loyal followers, including many in the mainstream media, rely on this to imply there’s no legitimate scientific criticism worthy of discussion.

Problem is, when anyone digs into the accusation, all they find are bigger problems.

Al Gore says investigative reporter / Pulitzer winner Ross Gelbspan discovered leaked evidence from 1991 coal industry memos ‘proving’ skeptics are corrupt. But Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer and other authors and reporters quoted fragment sentences from those memos prior to Gelbspan’s 1997 book exposé, including Gore’s own 1992 book. Worst of all, no accuser shows the memos in full context, so how are we to know this is no less problematic than the Peter Gleick / Heartland Institute memo controversy four months ago?

Gore equates these coal industry memos to the infamous Brown & Williamson Tobacco “Doubt is our Product” memo, but an actual comparison falls flat. The full context B&W memo is found within seconds on the internet. It took me seven months to find the coal industry memos, but only my articles link to their location at Greenpeace archive scans. Anyone reading them soon sees they are merely a small pilot project PR campaign and not any kind of sinister industry directive.

Skeptic scientists have exposed the IPCC’s faulty science for two decades. Any ordinary citizen can easily spot massive faults in the efforts to smear skeptics.

We don’t need to solve a climate crisis. We instead have a politically-driven agenda begging for a top-to-bottom investigation.

Russell Cook’s collection of writings on this issue can be seen at “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists” .  Follow him at Twitter via @questionAGW

Truth is, liberals don’t fear Perry so much as they do his mere mention of skeptic scientists. You see, the primal fear is that the general public will actually want to hear what such skeptics have to say, which would only lead to widespread doubt about the necessity to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If you are Al Gore, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or any other people – as in nearly all of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media – who have put stock into the idea that human activity causes global warming, such opposition could be very bad unless there is an ironclad case for the IPCC’s underlying science conclusions.

Notice how Gore never debates skeptics? Notice how the IPCC chairman compares skeptics to ‘flat earth believers’? Notice how mainstream media reports like Eugene Robinson’s 8/23 Washington Post article mentions an ‘overwhelming consensus‘, and ‘multiple investigations have found no evidence of fraud or manipulation of data‘, yet these MSM people never say who quantified the consensus, and don’t refute the mind-blowing level of detail about fraud, data manipulation and other shenanigans that sites like Steve McIntyre’s, Donna Laframboise’s, Anthony Watts’ and Marc Morano’s are exposing?

Nothing to see at those critic sites, move along. “Oh, if you must look”, says the MSM, “rest assured those critics are fossil fuel industry shills, or are driven by religious or political zealotry”.

According to another GOP presidential candidate, Jon Huntsman, such overall ‘zealotry’ renders Perry unelectable. At an 8/22 Wall Street Journal article, Paul Gigot quoted Huntsman’s statements that ‘scientists should be trusted’ and that the GOP heads for trouble if it embraces ‘anti-science’. I wish Gigot or some other journalist would ask Huntsman why he does not appear to put any trust in skeptics, considering how they cite thousands of peer-reviewed science journal-published papers in assessments that contradict the IPCC.

Since the MSM and enviro-activists leave out huge and important details about the skeptics, Huntsman should instead consider the distinct possibility that he has been hoodwinked to believe there are no legitimate critics of the IPCC.

To illustrate my point, I must refer to another person in Gigot’s article, Huntsman’s chief strategist, John Weaver, who worked as chief strategist for Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. That was the time period when McCain began believing in man-caused global warming, and as I pointed out in my December 2010 American Thinker article, McCain was apparently steered into this by a guy working for the enviro-activist group Ozone Action. It doesn’t exactly help matters that the current executive director of Greenpeace was an Ozone Action worker who claimed in a 2009 interview to have also convinced McCain to ‘champion global warming’.

For those who didn’t catch it, my previous RedState article detailed how practically all of the corruption accusations against skeptic scientists spiral right back to Ozone Action, and also showed how Al Gore’s efforts to point to a different origin instead only begs for serious questions of how deeply he is involved in this whole mess.

The irony is Huntsman will be the one who is unelectable if it’s revealed that his Horizon-PAC statements from earlier this year on “well-grounded leaders” is wiped out by evidence that his own global warming position is not only groundless, but is also only defended by the same ‘partisan politics’ accusations he says he wants to eliminate.

If Huntsman wants to salvage his position, he will have to offer solidly convincing explanations on how he got snookered into believing the IPCC is infallible. If he sticks to his guns, he may go down in history as a major ‘tipping point’ that sent the so-called global warming crisis into a final slide towards total collapse.

Near the end of my first RedState piece on the smear of skeptic scientists, I noted how a Society of Environmental Journalists board director couldn’t be bothered to tell me which other journalists corroborated book author Ross Gelbspan’s accusation that skeptic climate scientists were being paid to deliberately mislead the public.

I’m still searching the internet to find anyone who independently corroborates that lone accusation. Hard scrutiny reveals the different accusations virtually all spiral right back to a small group of people associated with the enviro-activist group Ozone Action and Ross Gelbspan, circa early 1996. A scant few point back to a period of time in 1991, and I first detailed the enormous problems with those at Marc Morano’s Climate Depot, then here at RedState. Long story short: Gore praised Gelbspan for discovering 1991-era coal industry PR campaign memos supposedly proving the corruption accusation, but Gore had the memos in his Senate office years before Gelbspan.  Houston, we have a problem….

Last week, the New Scientist magazine coughed up the same old accusation when it reviewed Orrin Pilkey’s new book Global Climate Change (backup link here in case their link goes behind a pay wall later). In the magazine review’s third paragraph, the book’s quotes are the same words from the 1991 coal industry PR memos – “older, less educated males” and “younger, lower-income women” – that were seen in Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 book The Heat is On, and in Gore’s 1992 Earth in the Balance. The insinuation is that the PR campaign knew its message was false and had to target gullible people.

The plot gets thicker. Google Books has a preview of Pilkey’s book, and in a page prior to the above quotes, he regurgitates the infamous “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” accusation phrase, saying it was one of seven strategy points of PR documents put online by Naomi Oreskes, and that the PR campaign took place in four cities, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Champagne, Illinois, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Fargo, North Dakota.

Wrong on both counts. There were nine strategy points, and regarding the claim that Oreskes put the documents online, that comes from George Monbiot’s Dec 2009 blog, where it turns out his link was just to Oreskes’ oft-repeated 2007 PowerPoint presentation which only quoted the memos. Seems unlikely that Pilkey would make a typo of the point number total if he actually saw the complete-context memos. As we can see at the page 10 scan enlargement here, there is no mistaking the number count, or that Bowling Green, Kentucky was also part of the PR campaign tour, as seen at the page 14 scan.

Astute readers rummaging through the rest of the 1991 coal industry PR campaign memos there are able to see that the whole collection is not the sinister top-down industry directive it’s portrayed to be, but is instead just an interoffice set of memos to guide a little five-town information campaign designed to point out contradictions between Al Gore’s side of the story and existing – not fabricated – opposition to it. Ross Gelbspan made the claim that “we got a copy of the strategy papers for that campaign. And it said that the purpose of the campaign was to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact…They sent these scientists all over the country to do media interviews.”

Right. Wouldn’t ‘all over the county’ mean major population centers like L.A. Philadelphia, Seattle, Boston, Miami? But first, who gave him copies of the strategy papers? Al Gore? And if nobody disproves these scientists’ science assessments outright, what was so sinister about this campaign?

I could go on for another couple thousand words. Oreskes has her own circuitous problems with citing Gelbspan, and then we have the problem just recently where Gore profanely accused skeptic scientists of corruption and cited Oreskes instead Gelbspan. There is also the problem with a 1991 article by Mary O’Driscoll in The Energy Daily titled, “Greenhouse Ads Target ‘Low-Income’ Women, ‘Less-Educated Men’ .” It was written prior to the July 8, 1991 NY Times article Gore indirectly cited in just the 12th paragraph of his 7000 word Rolling Stone magazine diatribe a couple of months ago. Not a word of praise going to O’Driscoll from Gore, Oreskes or Pilkey.

I’m no investigative reporter, though, just someone with an accumulation of computer notes on this whole mess that’s probably over 66,000 words, and my plea is for professional journalists to take this beyond my limited means. I’ve unearthed more than enough red flags, it’s time for others with more resources to see how deep all these problems go.

There appears to be only one source for the accusation against skeptic scientists. It is unsupportable, and a rather small cast of characters spirals around it. This is especially ironic considering the way Pilkey says at the opening of his Chapter 4,  “…the hoax is being perpetuated by public relations efforts by the fossil fuels industry.”

When enviro-activists offer no more than a worn out, 20-year old, paper-thin, guilt-by-association accusation saying skeptic climate scientists are paid by oil and coal executives to deliberately stall action to mitigate global warming, then we probably have the opposite problem: A ponzi scheme of incessant media story infusions designed to steer the public away from seeing skeptic scientists as whistleblowers on an idea that can’t support its own science assessments.

In my RedState article just a short while ago, “Forget the Science; Is Al Gore’s Accusation of Skeptic Climate Scientists a Hoax?“, I described how the accusation is based on a memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, who had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier. Considering the way he and many others have praised that so-called “Pulitzer winner”, Ross Gelbspan, the revelation of those memos at his Senate office in 1991 certainly does pose a problem.

In a quick skim though Gore’s article today, I’m struck by one brand-new oddity. On its first page, he says about deniers’ efforts,

Part of the script for this show was leaked to The New York Times as early as 1991. In an internal document, a consortium of the largest global-warming polluters spelled out their principal strategy: “Reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

In all the searching I’ve done for the “reposition global warming” phrase, I’ve only found a couple other references to people who cite Matt Wald’s 1991 NY Times article. One was a book co-author who cited the phrase in his 1994 book, a year prior to Gelbspan’s first public mention of it. That particular individual seems also to be inconveniently tied to the IPCC, as I detailed in my American Thinker article, “There is a Cancer Growing on the IPCC and Al Gore“. The other is the lawyer in the Kivalina v Exxon global warming nuisance lawsuit, seen in my November 2010 article at Breitbart’s BigGovernment site. I noted how the lawyer seems to have far too many ties to Gelbspan.

Since it is quite rare to see anyone referring to the ’91 NY Times article, I found it strange for a former Greenpeace researcher to link to it just last month when mentioning the original source for the “reposition global warming” phrase, the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). Gelbspan was associated with the enviro-activist group Ozone Action, which first bragged of ‘obtaining’ the memos in early 1996. It later merged with Greenpeace USA in 2000, and its founder became Greenpeace USA’s new executive director. Kalee Kreider, currently Al Gore’s spokesperson, was a recent transfer to Greenpeace from Ozone Action when she offered high praise of Gelbspan’s work in a 1997 Greenpeace press release. The current Greenpeace USA director, himself a former Ozone Action worker, praised Gelbspan in 2009 for “uncover[ing] the scandalous cover up of global warming by polluting companies“.

Suddenly Gore now links to that old NY Times article in a way that will be widely seen and reproduced. What’s going on here?

Meanwhile, another bit at the end of Gore’s long article isn’t surprising at all.

…contact your local newspapers and television stations when they put out claptrap on climate — and let them know you’re fed up with their stubborn and cowardly resistance to reporting the facts of this issue. One of the main reasons they are so wimpy and irresponsible about global warming is that they’re frightened of the reaction they get from the deniers when they report the science objectively.

Yawn. ‘Blame the media for cowardly resistance, a.k.a. allowing too much equal weight to be given to skeptic scientists who dilute public concern to the point of fatal inactivity’. I showed the enormous problems with that narrative in two different articles, “Will MSM Look into the Global Warming Abyss and Find Their Character?” and ” ‘Media Too Fair to Climate Skeptics’, say reporters who’ve been unfair to skeptics“. Speaking for myself, it’s difficult to count the number of times I sent letters to my local newspaper questioning their Gore-style global warming reports, with only one of the whole bunch ever getting published. That paper has no fear of ‘deniers’, a virtual trash can has long been the final resting place for such emails.

This is a historic time we’re in right now. The entire global warming ideology is falling apart in front of our eyes, with Al Gore gladly guiding it toward complete ruin. Years from now, people will be able to point out which of these current events is the one where global warming went into the irreversible slide toward its total collapse.

Russell Cook’s collection of writings on this issue can be seen at “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists” or at this backup link  Follow him at Twitter via @questionAGW

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum boldly questions the first part. Meanwhile, the accusation against skeptic scientists sits there like an unseen 800lb-gorilla-in-the-room. I suggest this is actually an 8,000lb gorilla. Conservative leaders have much to gain by putting the accusation under hard scrutiny, and probably have no idea how hard Gore’s followers will work to divert attention from its monstrous problems.

Why is this so huge? Two reasons:

First, Al Gore’s narratives about corrupt skeptic scientists have every appearance of containing a huge irreconcilable contradiction, and second, this completely undermines the global warming crisis while shaking the mainstream media’s credibility to its core. If there’s no legitimate reason to ignore skeptic scientists’ climate assessments, then Democrats pushing this as a crisis demanding draconian countermeasures have a monumental problem, as do journalists who jumped on the ‘burning planet’ bandwagon without questioning anything about it.

It’s easy to trace the lineage of Gore’s accusation and spot where its source changes. In a May 8, 2010 article for The New Republic (full text reproduced here), he says, (bold emphasis added)

The largest carbon polluters have, for the last 17 years, sought to manipulate public opinion with a massive and continuing propaganda campaign… It is a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” In other words, they have mimicked the strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry…

At the 29 minute 10 second point of this January 2008 YouTube video, Gore (off camera) clearly says:

Exxon Mobil has funded 40 different front groups that have all been a part of a strategic persuasion campaign to, in their own words “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.”

In his 2006 An Inconvenient Truth movie just before the 1 hour 13 minute point, he spells out “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” full screen in capital red letters, comparing it to the way tobacco industry executives hired ‘experts’ to confuse the public about the science of cigarette smoke. The companion book for the movie directly mentions his source on page 263 (bold emphasis added):

One of the internal memos prepared by this group to guide the employees they hired to run their disinformation campaign was discovered by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ross Gelbspan. Here was the group’s stated objective: to “reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

(I put the misnomer of “Pulitzer winner” under an entertaining interrogation at The Daily Caller last December, and blogger Steve Milloy pointed out this error 14 years earlier, but that’s another story)

Ross Gelbspan had the movie’s memo quote and another memo phrase on pages 51-52 of his 2004 Boiling Point book:

One campaign… was crafted, according to its strategy papers, “to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” and, more specifically, was designed to target “older, less-educated men . . . and young low-income-women” in districts that get their electricity from coal…

Gore’s familiarity with Gelbspan is evident in his August 15, 2004 NY Times review of the book, where he repeats the “reposition global warming” phrase. Gelbspan’s citation source was his own 1997 The Heat is On book, page 34:

This public relations firm clearly stated that the aim of the campaign was to ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact’…. the ICE campaign targeted “older, less-educated men and young low-income-women”

The earliest I can find when Gelbspan repeats words from the memos is a December 1995 NPR radio interview. Wikipedia describes the ICE campaign as a coal industry association’s PR effort, but doesn’t show the memos in complete context, a critical omission on the part of every single person who makes the corruption accusation while citing the memos as proof. It took me seven months to find them at an obscure Greenpeace archive scan page (click on thumbnails 10 and 17 to see the “reposition” and “Low-Income/Less-Educated phrases”, respectively). Rather than appearing to be a sinister top-down industry directive for skeptic scientists, they instead look like ordinary interoffice instructions. That’s probably why Gelbspan never shows them, the most he says about how he has them is “we got a copy of the strategy papers“, or that these were “internal strategy papers I obtained at the time“.

Obtained from whom?

The ‘source’ for the memos changes prior to December 1995. A July 8, 1991 New York Times article repeats the “reposition global warming” phrase, noting they had received the memos from the Sierra Club. A June 24, 1991 article in The Energy Daily is titled “Greenhouse Ads Target ‘Low-Income’ Women, ‘Less-Educated’ Men” (seen in this book page’s footnote reference), but I have not yet found an online version of the article. It’s plausible that it had the same source, considering the proximity of the articles’ dates, and a note by Gelbspan saying the ICE program was “exposed by a trade paper, The Energy Daily, … The National Journal, The Arizona Republic and The New York Times“.

A more troublesome citation of the memos is found in Al Gore’s own Earth in the Balance. No online preview is available at Google Books, so readers will read this in the actual book. On page 360 of my 1992 copy, Gore says (bold emphasis added):

Documents leaked from the National Coal Association to my office reveal…as follows: “People who respond most favorably to such statements are older, less-educated males from larger households, who are not typically active information-seekers… another possible target is younger, lower-income women…”

In order to counter entrenched interests like this one, we will have to rely on the ability of an educated citizenry to recognize propaganda for what it is.

Gore left himself no wiggle room in the 2004 NY Times book review I mentioned above, when he clearly stated, “… Gelbspan first encountered the issue as a reporter nine years ago…” That’s 1995. Earth in the Balance was published in June 1992. It’s possible Gore received the memos around the same time in 1991 as the reporters at the NY Times and The Energy Daily.

His call for “educated citizenry to recognize propaganda” may have stemmed from problems surrounding praise of his college professor Roger Revelle in pages 4-6 of Earth in the Balance. Gore prominently described how Revelle introduced him to the idea of global warming, but during 1992, Revelle essentially recanted his long-held climate assessments in an article co-authored with skeptic scientist Dr S Fred Singer, as described in a 2006 American Thinker article.

More appearance problems arise, considering how Ross Gelbspan began promulgating his accusation at the Ozone Action enviro-advocacy group, which itself was the target of Fred Singer’s criticisms about their cries to ban CFCs. From that time onward, his general fossil fuel funding accusation against Singer has continued unabated.  And unquestioned.

Hard scrutiny of the overall global warming issue never yields nice neat answers, it prompts ever-increasing questions. Among those, we all should ask why people who accuse skeptic scientists of corruption can’t keep their stories straight.

I also got word recently that Hertsgaard and a number of other climate activists are going to interrogate the climate cranks on Capitol Hill, at FOX News, at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and other places this week. Looks like a fun and useful idea.

Fun and useful? Not really, when we see what actually happened when Hertsgaard confronted Sen Inhofe yesterday, Feb 15th, at Inhofe’s own Youtube site.

However, there is a bigger problem for Hertsgaard, when we reword a biblical phrase to say, “let he who is above reproach cast the first interrogation”.

This is the same Mark Hertsgaard who has questionable ties with anti-skeptic book author Ross Gelbspan, as I detailed in my article “Unending Problems with Accusations Against Skeptic Scientists, When Anyone Digs Into Them“. Hertsgaard was also the “Reporter & Editorial Consultant” for the April 2007 PBS Frontline show “Hot Politics“, where viewers were treated to a few tantalizing global warming science assessments from skeptic climate scientists, followed immediately by Gelbspan’s insinuation that his investigative work exposed the scientists as corrupted well-funded frauds. While the scientists were speaking, a little tag at the bottom of the screen directed viewers to a PBS “Profiles of the skeptics“ web page. On that page, Gelbspan was referenced twice about items that are guilt-by-association accusations at best, and were certainly worthy of hard follow-up questions that could have been explored in the broadcast by interviewer Deborah Amos.

The very first reference link at the bottom of that web page goes to ExxonSecrets.org, a site created by a former member of the enviro-advocacy group Ozone Action, which I described as the epicenter of the ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists in my July 2010 American Thinker article.

The PBS web page was written by Oriana Zill de Granados, who had a like-minded hit piece about skeptics called “The Manipulation of Science” at the ironically named Center for Investigative Reporting. Funny thing is, she wrote at length about a prominent 1998 NY Times article, but when she put a web link reference for it at the end of her piece, the link wasn’t to the original article, it linked to a reproduction of the article at Gelbspan’s own web site. Her Gelbspan link is followed by one to Mark Hertsgaard’s Vanity Fair article – the same problematic one I described in my “Unending Problems with Accusations Against Skeptic Scientists” article. I could probably write another two thousand words detailing the faults with Ms de Granados’ link reference choices, and about insinuations and troubling information sources within the NY Times article.

But my piece here is about Hertsgaard. Enviro-activists like him have long made unsupportable accusations. What happens when the tables are turned, with hard scrutiny of those accusations? Hertsgaard unwittingly opens the door to a Pandora’s box of interrogation aimed at him and many others who have portrayed skeptic scientists as corrupted by big oil interests.

Care to imagine a House investigation hearing in which Hertsgaard, de Granados and others are asked to explain the appearance of framing public-funded PBS programs to be biased against skeptic scientists? Or hearings in which Gelbspan and ex-Ozone Action employees like Al Gore’s spokesperson Kalee Kreider are asked to explain why the central bit of evidence of their skeptic scientist accusation is based on a widely quoted phrase – seen in Gore’s movie, and at numerous other places -  sourced from a memo that has remained hidden from public view since 1991? This is exactly the GOP leadership opportunity I mentioned in my first RedState.com article. At the very least, the intended ‘victims’ of enviro-activists like Hertsgaard have every opportunity to ask their accusers some mighty rough questions.

That looks like a much more fun and useful idea.

You’d have to have a fairly low IQ not to see the irony of greenies’ mansions & jets, and you’d have a lower one if you’re easily led to believe skeptic web site operators just ‘make stuff up’. The far-left loves saying Rush Limbaugh or Marc Morano fabricate doubt about global warming, as though each creates it out of thin air. These smears evaporate when anybody reads the content at Limbaugh’s, Morano’s, and other skeptics’ sites.

Our far-left friends fervently hope you follow the implied “nothing to see here, move along” instruction. My worry is we are letting another major fault in the so-called global warming crisis slip by, because some conservatives might think there is a little something to see.

That would be the near universal accusation of big industry corrupting skeptic scientists. Supposedly, they accept money from coal and oil companies in exchange for assessments intended to confuse the public about the science being settled. A bribe to make stuff up despite knowing better, in other words. When articles, books and op-eds describe various guilt-by-association situations of skeptic scientists and big coal & oil ….. gosh, it does sound a bit plausible, so maybe the topic should be avoided. Take the example where environmental writer Bill McKibben said this,

Six of the ten largest companies on earth are in the fossil-fuel business. Those companies have spent some small part of their wealth in recent years to underwrite climate change denialism: Jane Mayer’s excellent New Yorker piece on the Koch brothers is just the latest and best of a string of such exposés dating back to Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 book The Heat Is On.

Uh, oh, conservatives better not draw attention to that. Let’s re-frame the discussion by saying cap & trade is too expensive to contemplate during recessions.

I categorically disagree on two counts: we cede the moral high ground to the far-left who’d say conservatives are too cheap to save the planet, but more important, this completely fails to question McKibben’s fundamental assertion about a ‘string of such exposés’. Al Gore himself provides a tidbit that begins to undermine that assertion, in his New York Times review of Gelbspan’s 2004 Boiling Point book:

Gelbspan’s first book, ”The Heat Is On” (1997), remains the best, and virtually only, study of how the coal and oil industry has provided financing to a small group of contrarian scientists who began to make themselves available for mass media interviews as so-called skeptics on the subject of global warming….documenting the largely successful efforts of companies like ExxonMobil to paralyze the policy process, confuse the American people and cynically ‘reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,’ as one strategy paper put it…

Wait, that was 2004. When Phil Radford talked about his 2009 promotion to head Greenpeace USA and who inspired him, he described Gelbspan in an April 2009 magazine interview:

Ross has been the lone voice, the moral compass, the beacon that has inspired countless people, me included, to demand our country and our future back from the coal and oil interests behind global warming.

So was there a string of exposés between then and Jane Mayer’s August 2010 New Yorker article? Hardly. As I detailed in my September 15, 2010 American Thinker article “Warmist Slander of Scientific Skeptics“, Mayer’s assertions about questionable funding of skeptic scientists relied on information from Greenpeace, Naomi Oreskes, Joe Romm, and the Center for Public Integrity. Each in turn cite Ross Gelbspan as the source for their information. That would then be the same old “exposé”, replete with all the inherent problems I describe there and below.

So have others independently corroborated Gelbspan’s accusation? Sorry, no. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why I started in my research, because I was told by a Society of Environmental Journalists board member (deep within the comments section in this page) that:

Gelbspan was only the first of many to document payments by industry to a small group of scientists who consistently defend the interests of industry reliant on not controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

Document? Or just repeat? Books such as James Hoggan’s & Richard Littlemore’s Climate Cover-Up, Mark Bowen’s Censoring science and Thin ice, Jeff Goodell’s Big Coal, Donald Brown’s American Heat, and others, along with magazine articles and TV programs, all directly cite Gelbspan’s “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” accusation or cite other references that themselves cite Gelbspan. However, as I noted in my July 2010 American Thinker article, “Smearing Global Warming Skeptics“, there are fundamental problems with him simply being the center of attention. He did not actually discover the memo he derives his accusation from, the memo is never seen in its full context (until I showed it), the memo seems to be nothing more than an interoffice set of PR instructions, and he is not the Pulitzer winner he is portrayed to be.

Think about the larger picture. This may not be simply a small matter of libel/slander of skeptic scientists – if an ordinary citizen like me was able to find all these problems, why didn’t the mainstream media find these? Why have they instead surged ahead with the idea the science is settled, in the face of such easily found giant red flags?

The new US House GOP committee chairmen aren’t just presented with a ‘witch hunt’ opportunity to score a few points on the ClimateGate scandal, conservatives everywhere now have an unprecedented opportunity to expose the far-left agenda once and for all. Yes, doctoring temperature data is bad, but when people pushing an ideology resort to portraying critics as villains using an unsupportable accusation, solely to distract us from seeing the IPCC’s highly questionable claims about humans causing global warming, we have a huge problem. When an entity as globally influential as the mainstream media fails to seriously question any part of it, and actually joins in on the push, then we have a monumental problem.