The famous Marc Morano asked me in person while I was at the April 8-9 Heartland Institute climate conference if I knew whether if Naomi Oreskes was still active. Wish I had the answer right then – yes, she is. I know that now because the Court Listener website, which I inadvertently ran across while trying to learn more about the Ramirez v Exxon lawsuit, turns out to be even more useful than I first thought.
While the official court document that’s the topic of this blog post is not an actual amici curiae filed by Naomi Oreskes and her pals, it just as well may be. It has all the tell-tale indicators that it could be one of those if she applied it to the many other lawsuits filed by the San Francisco law firm Sher Edling, of which she’s already filed amici briefs (plural!) for their California plaintiffs, and for Baltimore, Minnesota, the pair of Hawaii filings, and Washington DC. Funny thing here, I found this one when I dropped in a phrase search for “reposition global warming” within the Court Listener website’s search window – it put out results for all of the “ExxonKnew” lawsuits I’ve already dissected …. plus also this mystery 2025 Conservation Law Foundation v Shell lawsuit which I’d never heard of before April 26th. Neither its July 2021 initial complaint nor its February 2022 amended complaint (not available for free download at Climate Listener, but publicly available the Climate Policy Radar collection) fit my 2-part definition of an “ExxonKnew” lawsuit because this one never really says Shell Oil knew about its products causing global warming, and there’s no hints at all within it that the energy industry ran disinformation campaigns to deceive the public about what the ‘industry knew.’
Leave it to Naomi Oreskes to insert the specific points about ‘industry disinfo campaigns’ into the CLF v Shell lawsuit via her “Expert Report” she submitted for it…. which inadvertently reinforces how she is not actually an expert on this angle at all, but also how her enslavement to unsupportable political accusations could torpedo all of the actual “ExxonKnew” lawsuits.
Since this report of hers seems at first glance to borrow from her original California amici curiae, I’ll return to the checklist format for this dissection like I did with my 2023 one for her Washington DC brief.
So, to see if this “Expert Report” qualifies as a ‘boilerplate copy Oreskes amici brief or not, we need to have just how similar it is to those prior filings of hers:
✓ Ye olde supposedly ‘smoking gun’ industry “reposition global warming” memos – PDF file page 91– which are falsely attributed to the Western Fuels Association “Information Council for the Environment” (“ICE)” public relations campaign because the people running that campaign rejected the whole memo proposal containing that idiotic phrase. Although she rewords what was last seen in her Washington DC amici, her bit here is a repetition of her standard inept labeling of the actual ICE public relations campaign – “Information Council for the Environment,” not on. No secret about it, his overall accusation been her cornerstone ‘evidence’ for her claim about ‘industry-run disinfo campaigns’ ever since 2008, repeated far more prominently by her outside of these Friends of the Court briefs in her 2021 UK Guardian article about ‘forgotten* oil industry disinfo ads’(* she didn’t get the ICE name right at all there, plus the two ‘ads’ in her article there were not forgotten; they were never published anywhere in the first place – but that’s a whole other story). And … just like all her prior amici filings, she oddly leaves out her beloved ‘newspaper advertorials’ evidence in this “Expert Report.”
One more thing surrounding the following bit, which is repeated from Oreskes’ two prior amici briefs, the D.C. one and the Hawaiian pair: ✓ the bone-headed mistake of attributing the “reposition global warming” phrase to a letter written by Dr Patrick Michaels, which I first pointed to in my dissection of her California brief. Who knows why Oreskes and her inept law firm filing assistants keep repeating that blunder, but it at least serves potentially as proof that Oreskes does not read my GelbspanFiles blog at all.
✓ Ye olde American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” memos – PDF file page 87 – however, unlike what she did for her prior 2023 D.C. one and her 2022 Honolulu / Maui pair, and all of her previous briefs, she does not cite Kert Davies’ Center for Climate Investigations’ Climate Files website in this one. Instead, she inexplicably cites a quote straight out of the 2017 “Smoke & Fumes” report (hold that thought about the name of that report for a few paragraphs here), which itself in turn cites an Inside Climate News (ICN) page link for the victory memo. The ICN page link merely has a clickable link to a PDF file, which goes to nine pages of degraded photocopy scans, none of which indicate who the source for the scans is. But as I showed in my July 6, 2024 blog post, ICN’s nine pages of scans, with all of their little photocopy dust marks, are identical to Kert Davies’ Climate Files nine page scans set, and his Climate Files scans are the same as his 2013 Greenpeace scans set – not similar; identical.
That all right there for this “Expert Report” of hers is what’s known as a citation cascade. Such things have the hugely suspicious appearance of trying to bury the original source out of sight. Why not say the “victory” memo comes from Greenpeace?
One more thing surrounding this bit: Naomi Oreskes knows better than this strange new switcheroo. Regarding this “Expert Report,” her signature under penalty of perjury page is signed May 1, 2025 – just short of 25 months after she filed her April 7, 2022 Honolulu / Maui amici pair, where her source in that pair, as I showed in my screencapture above, is clearly Kert Davies. But the problem is deeper. I wrote a whole blog post about her ‘embracing’ of the “victory” memo when she had basically avoided it for years, and showed that in a 2025 Declaration she submitted to just the Honolulu case, she again directly cited Kert Davies’ Climate Files as the source for the “victory” memo, albeit while quoting different sentences from that same memo, and her signature under penalty of perjury page is signed May 8, 2025 – just seven days after she signed her ‘expert report’ for CLF v Shell.
So, her inexplicable switcheroo for her “Expert Report” is ever more a reckless thing to do, since one day sometime relatively soon, major investigators may comprehend how Davies has long been associated with all four accusation elements about ‘skeptic scientist shills on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry.’
🚫 Missing from this “Expert Report” of hers is what was seen in her prior amici briefs (as I noted in my dissection of her Minnesota version): the “Willie Soon accusation.” How odd. Is this an indication of forgetful oversight on her part … or that she has figured out her accusation has no merit?
What is another element that returns from those prior filings of hers, however? Here comes that name which I suggested to ‘hold that thought about’ …..
✓ citation of a 2017 “Smoke & Fumes” report – PDF file pages 48 onto 49 – where Oreskes references Stanford Research Institute (SRI) report that supposedly ‘proves’ the oil industry knew for certain back in 1968 that the burning of their products caused global warming. Her bit on that in this “Expert Report” is worded differently than what appeared in her prior 2023 Washington DC amici but it still repeats the same ‘lack of full disclosure’ problem. Just as I did for in my dissection of her Washington DC amici, I’ll direct readers here back to my Dec 15 2022 blog post where I showed how the very same “Smoke & Fumes” report she cites concerning the 1968 SRI report is arguably basic disinformation effort on her part, because the “Smoke & Fumes” report omitted highlighting how the 1968 SRI report contained specific wording clearly showing its authors weren’t certain at all whether burning fossil fuels was going to lead to warming or cooling. Who was the author of the “Smoke & Fumes” report? Carroll Muffett …. who thanks both Naomi Oreskes and Kert Davies for contributing to his report. That Muffett, seen in an effort to portray Exxon as corrupt alongside …… wait for it ……. Kert Davies.
One more thing surrounding this bit: Naomi Oreskes is free to include the mention of Dr Roger Revelle as alleged proof that the American Petroleum Institute ‘knew’ about the harm of global warming as far back as 1968 … but Dr Revelle nevertheless recanted his position on CO2 being a major driver if man-caused global warming in 1992.
Naomi Oreskes is the gift that keeps on giving.
Now – arguably – this “Expert Report” she offers to support the Conservation Law Foundation v Shell lawsuit does not contain quite enough tell-tell indicators for it to be labeled an outright boilerplate copy of her prior amici filings, but it comes close enough to raise questions about how it was assembled, particularly regarding its few inconsistencies with her prior filings.
But there’s one new angle to Naomi Oreskes being seemingly oblivious to the political suicide of re-using her amici briefs template, which I wasn’t expecting to find.
Up at the top of this blog post, I noted how I found her “Expert Report” by searching for the “reposition global warming” within the Court Listener website. When I entered just her name into that court docs site’s search window, it turned up a pile of cases I already knew about, along with its top result being a 2025 Colorado Supreme Court hearing which I was only aware of via various news reports, concerning the Boulder v Suncor Energy “ExxonKnew” lawsuit. Her name was within a string of other names which were just the name list in her standard amici briefs. The bit that the Court Listener site revealed turned out to be what the Colorado Supreme court was presented:
For [meaning law firm representing them] Amici Curiae Robert Brulle, Center for Climate Integrity, Justin Farrell, Benjamin Franta, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, Geoffrey Supran, and the Union Of Concerned Scientists: … Keller Rohrback LLP
Unlike all her prior amici briefs which were readily found on the internet, I can’t find her Colorado version amici curiae anywhere so far.
The question is, was it persuasive enough to the Colorado Supreme Court justices that they ruled against the defendant companies?
The next question beyond that is, since this case is now headed to the United States Supreme Court later this year, is whether this same unsupportable amici curiae will be dusted off and used once again to trick the SCOTUS justices into believing there really were ‘industry-led disinfo campaigns’ …… or will such an effort explode in Oreskes’ face for the first time ever?
I’ll repeat again what I said toward the end of my dissection of her 2023 Washington DC amici brief: Naomi Oreskes gets away with this because the people who should notice if they actually did their jobs properly — the legacy new media reporters — have never once questioned a word she says regarding how she got into this climate issue in the first place and what propelled her to become a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on energy company disinformation campaigns.
The legacy new media reporters never once questioned the collective accusation sources behind the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation. This rock-bottom journalism malfeasance problem is unsustainable. The crash of the entire situation could be epic, with worldwide repercussions.
