While a smear campaign rages in the media and at the Congressional level, Russell Cook takes a look at its roots
“Regurgitate Unsupportable Accusations, We Much?” Kert Davies is Back. Again.
A brief word of explanation about the first part of that title, it’s a variation of the “Resist, we much” teleprompter reading gaffe by the Reverend Al Sharpton, where he meant to say “Resist, we must” on his TV show. It lends itself to a variety of other overblown political situations which beg for a “Sharptonism” parody. The latest instances where Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post articles cited Kert Davies’ supposedly damaging documents (screencaptures here, here and here), in an effort to trash skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon, invites exactly that kind of parody.
Funny how none of those publications bothers to mention (hiding appearances of bias, we much?) Davies’ former position as Greenpeace’s Research Director.
Regarding the Washington Post article in particular, the comical aspect of it is how the late WashPo editor Ben Bradlee must be spinning in his grave at the sight of Chris Mooney as its author – Mooney being nothing like the thorough reporters who investigated the Watergate scandal under Bradlee’s command, but is instead apparently too much in love with Ross Gelbspan’s ‘industry-corrupt skeptic climate scientists’ accusation, as I described in my 2011 WUWT guest post. Conspicuous by its absence in Mooney’s WashPo bio is his association with Desmogblog, the anti-skeptic site built around the works of Ross Gelbspan.
But, that’s only part of the silliness. It isn’t simply that Kert Davies is also the source of this ‘breaking’ story for nine different science journals, it is the plain fact that there is nothing new in these reports that wasn’t already seen in older reports on Dr Soon which cited Davies just the same way.
The June 28, 2011 Reuters report about Dr Willie Soon’s “$1 million in funding” had the following quote from Davies:
“A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over twenty years by Big Oil and Big Coal,” said Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace US.
“Scientists like Dr. Soon who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists are pawns.”
The UK Guardian’s same-day variation written by John Vidal contained the identical quote from Davies, but Vidal skipped the last sentence in the Reuters article where Dr Soon said he’d gladly accept Greenpeace funding. An internet search of just that date and Dr Soon’s name shows just how far and wide those twin stories were spread.
Want to see a fun circular citation in action? Greenpeace’s own ExxonSecrets web site (created and run by Davies) has a page dedicated to Dr Soon, where it cites the above John Vidal Guardian article as the source to say Dr Soon received a million dollars of ‘big oil’ funding. Who did Vidal cite for that? Greenpeace.
All of that was in the summer of 2011. But back in the summer of 2009 — stop the presses — Kert Davies himself gave us the same ‘breaking news’ about Dr Soon’s funding at the Huffington Post (by default, HuffPo shows Davies current “Director, Climate Investigations Center” title, but rest assured that the Internet Archive for his 2009 article shows his then-current “Research Director for Greenpeace US” title):
Finally. After years of denying its role in the campaign of climate denial, Exxon has revealed a dirty secret, that it has and likely still is directly funding junk scientists. …
The new Exxon Giving report shows straight pipe funding, in the odd but specific sum of $76,106 to the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory, home of Dr. Willie Soon…
Back in 2007, a giant 176 page official complaint was lodged at Ofcom, (the UK’s communications regulator of broadcasts) about skeptic climate scientists seen in the British video “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, and the complaint went so far as to include its criticism of Dr Soon’s non-speaking contribution to the film, while noting his ‘big oil’ funding. Who did the complaint cite for news of that? Kert Davies. Stop the presses! Breaking news!
However, this GelbspanFiles blog focuses on the origins of the overall smear of skeptic climate scientists. To see how Kert Davies fits into that, we have to go back about a decade earlier.
Prior to starting at Greenpeace in 2000, Davies worked at Ozone Action, the organization that merged into Greenpeace USA in 2000. Prior to that, he worked at the Environmental Working Group, which produced an undated Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) report titled “Affiliations of Selected Global Warming Skeptics” (“Greenpeace USA née Ozone Action”’s copy here), which says the following near the end of page 2….
Willie Soon
Suspected fossil fuel funding – Compensation for services to Western Fuels Assoc. funded project
… and this on its page 3:
Organizational affiliations are from CLEARS database, compiled from primary sources and media reports. Additional research assistance provided by Ozone Action.
Funding information primarily compiled from:
Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On. Perseus Books: Reading, Massachusetts. 1997,1998
Ross Gelbspan, “The Heat is On,” Harpers. December 1995.
Ozone Action, Ties That Blind: Industry Influence on Public Policy and our Environment. March-December, 1996. …
Pages 4 through 10 at that Greenpeace scan collection is of CLEAR’s November 10, 1998 (one month after Davies began working at Ozone Action) report titled “Western Fuels Association’s Astroturf Empire.” Page 7 paraphrases a section of Ozone Action’s “Ties That Blind” report, having these key words:
According to documents obtained by environmental group Ozone Action and journalist Ross Gelbspan, ICE messaging strategies included targeting “older, less educated males” … and “younger, lower income women.” ICE’s stated goal was to reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”
My educated guess is that Gelbspan and Ozone Action ‘obtained’ those documents (assuming their statement is accurate) sometime around late 1995, since Gelbspan first mentioned them in a December 1995 radio interview. Who did they ‘obtain’ the documents from? Well, the above CLEAR report mentions the same “older, less educated males”/ “younger, lower income women” seen in Al Gore’s 1992 book. Note how Gore’s 1992 book pre-dates Gelbspan’s 1995 radio interview quote of those same words… yet Gore later prominently said Gelbspan discovered that memo set.
I can at least say Kert Davies had ties with Ozone Action as far back as 1997, since Greenpeace saved a copy (screencapture here) of his July 29, 1997 email from his Environmental Working Group address to a person at Ozone Action.
What is the critical missing element to this 20-year collection of ‘breaking news stories’ about skeptic scientists’ funding? Any scrap of evidence proving the skeptics falsified/fabricated data or conclusions as performance required under a monetary grant or paid employee contract. It’s all guilt-by-association and nothing more.
When gullible news outlets unquestioningly cite people from the same enviro-activist clique every time, failing to realize they could win Pulitzers if they turned the tables on sources of smear material, and when they egregiously allow members of that clique to be labeled as ‘reporters’, this all invites one more “Sharptonism” to be applied to the mainstream media:
Commit political suicide, we much?
This whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as a South Park episode, where they kids used a BS History Channel special as a source in their school report, and then the History Channel cited their report as further proof in another special on the same subject. I think it was Aliens at the original Pilgrim Thanksgiving.
The problem here is it isn’t a joke, it’s a cynical ploy to destroy the reputation of people who disagree and present inconvenient truths, as it were. People like Winston who haven’t learned yet that 4 fingers is actually five fingers if the Party wills it
To further add, I’m afraid that these days I consider Orwell and Huxley to be raging optimists about our futures.
How about an expose of some warmista “scientist” and his tie to Big Green Energy money?
They report it proudly (and apply for more!). The difference is that they are paid to prove predefined results which will pass peer review through politics.
Gawd, reads like an Adam West line in the TV Batman.
Or, how about “paid prophets pretending to prove predefined protocol, pursuing peer-review politics”.
That should cover the P’s…
Anyone care to tackle the Q’s?
This just in:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/opinion-rich-lowry-climate-change-115518.html?ml=po
at least one fair minded piece
I emailed the New York Times in question of their coverage this propaganda for accuracy and balance. I even received an email response from their senior editor asking that I explain the errors, no questions about the imbalance -Greenpeace as an unbiased source anyone? I laid out the lack of evidence for the $1.2 million claimed by Greenpeace let alone the $1.5 million claimed by the Climate Investigations Center which in another link on their site claims he received $1.25 million. When you add up the amounts in their document evidence it equals $125K from Southern Company and $170K from the Koch Foundation and Donors Trust and $76K from Exxon totaling $371K between 2008 and 2012.
Did I miss some large grants totaling nearly $1 million?
After laying out the details on both the sums listed in the smear propaganda and the lack accuracy or precision regarding southern Company I did not receive a reply.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
I think we are officially at step three in Ghandi’s 4 steps to success.
GreenPeace has perverted a good cause.
The founder of GreenPeace, Patrick Moore, has testified to that.
Al Gore does this also in his book “Earth in the Balance.” It has a superficial appearance that is better than citing yourself, but looks much worse if someone digs to find the source.
Page number hint? I slogged through his book once, it’s really hard to read.
If I were going after the skeptics I would tread lightly. There’s an 800 pound gorilla skeptic in the room called the US Congress.
Ralph, I wish you were correct, but I believe you are not. Actually, it is a blind and neutered 800 pound StayPuff marshmallow man that hides under the bed whenever things get tough. They huff and puff, and then blow themselves over. I don’t even know why they exist since Obama has essentially made them completely irrelevant.
and Ralph absolutely every one should be writing their congressman and senators as well as arguing on the blogs. Both Republicans and Democrats share in the disgrace that the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the history of the world has come to this. Congress and the Senate can in fact take back the out of control bureaucracy and trim their sails. Citizens should run Grijalua out of town on a rail unless he is willing to open the investigation to the financing of big green as well!
What exactly did Dr. Soon Write, that they have taken issue with? Has he made any statements in his research that are in some way wrong? Would he have written anything different if the funding came from somewhere else? Will there be investigations into the many dubious studies that have been made to support the CAGW belief? Will there be law suits? What matters most is the integrity of the content, of the research.
Eamon.
Well Eamon, for one thing, he was the primary author of an excellent book titled “The Maunder Minimum, and the Variable Sun-Earth connection.”
I say primary author in that his co-author who sadly I can’t name at this point, was I believe in a sense a language editor.
Willie Soon is Korean, and in my own exchanges with him some years ago, I got the feeling he was decidedly an ESL person. So the aid of someone who could shape his words so that they look like what English readers would expect to see, and not read like a Japanese Transistor Radio Manual, was a wise move. Dr Soon is actually a quite funny guy and he knows his science. You should buy his book, and really learn what the Maunder minimum and the Maunders themselves were all about.
In addition to that and closer to the subject, Dr Soon, and Dr Sally Baliunas co-authored a paper that was a review of around 200 peer reviewed scientific papers from all around the world, in authorship and geography of their research, and that paper review demonstrates quite clearly that both the Mediaeval warm period MWP, and the little Ice age wer indeed global phenomena, and not some northern hemisphere anomaly like Michael Mann claimed in his first exposition on the Hockey Stick which he asserted was global, even though his graph is clearly labeled Northern Hemisphere.
This literature revue by Baliunas and Soon has become a text book for people studying the global climate science literature, and the trouble with it is that it is literally a 2 x 4 right between the eyes, so that only the rational thinking handicapped could possible conclude that the MWP and the LIA didn’t happen or were local freaks.
Remember it was the LIA that nearly did in the Pilgrims in those harsh winters of the early US Colonies.
Now Drs. Baliunas and Soon did not personally go through each and every paper in a critical way to independently verify the accuracy or correctness of every one of those papers, but they collated the findings in such a way as to demonstrate that the global nature of those events was inescapable.
That’s what the warmistas are upset about. They are literally trying to pooh pooh the laws of thermodynamics, as a way to push their agenda; well figuratively of course.
G
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
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If they had facts, they’d pound the facts, but since they have none, they pound their opponents.
Pat Frank argues that the 1996 Telecommunications Act is the source of media bias. There are two or three problems with this theory.
First, it coincides with the advent of Fox News on cable TV, which has come to dominate cable news for many years, and has itself become a dumping ground for reporters not conforming to the Left (cf, Brit Hume, Bernard Goldberg, John Stossell, among others). Ironically, studies show FNC reporters to still be majority Democrats; a smaller percentage of political contrarianism makes enormous difference, as UCLA’s Tim Groseclose shows.
Second, if profit was the “real motive,” then they could certainly make more money by serving other underserved people, because decades of opinion research sh0ws that self-identified “conservatives” out number self-identified “liberals” by an order of 2 to 1 (roughly 40% to 20%, respectively). But they don’t.
Take the timing of the death of my own newspaper habit. I was at the University of Alabama in 1998 to ’99, during Clinton’s impeachment, helping a buddy get tenure in the history department. Because the articles of impeachment never mentioned the “sex,” yet became a witch hunt all about sex in the NYTimes/NBC, etc, fever swamps narrative and, in turn, became the conventional “wisdom” about Clinton. Because of all that – instead of the lie anyone honest and perceptive knew it to be – I not only stopped buying the Times, I stopped my lifetime of newspaper subscriptions. I never looked back. (And yes, a famous and distinguished University of Alabama US historian testified to the Congressional impeachment committee about the sacred place of “Oathmaking” in the founders eyes – the part about the President’s swearing in to see that “the laws be faithfully executed” – an oath again widely understood to be breached by Obama, at least to anyone quaint enough to care about the Rule of Law and American Constitutionalism anymore.)
Finally, this period is also when the internet took off as a news aggregator source. When it became ubiquitous, instead of a library research too, electronic internet competition eventually bled the subscribers away from the dead tree echo chamber.
Thus, Pat Frank is wrong to imagine that the 1996 Telecommunications Act is the source, and that repealing it will matter to the problem of bia. Groseclose has much deeper, more empirically grounded perspectives.
Ah – SEE Pat Frank here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/26/the-origin-of-climate-smear/#comment-1870247
Perhaps others will support me on this detail, but I recall that the problem of declining newspapers profitability and declining numbers was one of the reasons the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed. Consolidation was thought to be better than no local newspapers at all.
Suburban newspapers back then did fine, using classified ads and commercial ads. It was the urban dailies that were suffering, by comparison. The model for improvement came from the successes of monopoly telephone deregulation, as well as cable-TV laws. Hence, the Act.
Btw, until recently the nyt owned the boston globe.
This is a standard tactic, attack the reputation and funding of skeptics, used relentlessly by the Warmistas. IMHO it is done as an organized and planned effort. Also, IMHO, the skeptics need to respond in kind. There ought to be a formal organization that has the purpose of public pillory and funding elimination aimed squarely at the nutty (no, stark raving mad! in many cases) pseudo-science being pushed daily from all fronts. Embarrass the hell out of the NSF would be a good place to start.
Fighting an asymmetrical battle from the weak side, and not bothering to attack in kind when attacked, needs to end.
“failing to realize they could win Pulitzers”
The pulitzer committee are these same people. It’s incest all the around.
all the way around
Greenpeace is all about self-promotion. Everything it does is advertisement designed to generate more “income”. Advertisement is the only product it produces. When you strip that away there is nothing underneath.
Politicians, whose business is also self-promotion, recognize Greenpeace as an advertising firm who services they can buy with government money. An organization such as Greenpeace is a natural for politicians to court. From their point of view (not the public’s) it is highly cost effective.
Of course, Greenpeace has a war budget used against those who are a threat to its income. Even castles built in clouds must be defended.
Eugene WR Gallun