I view the entire climate issue as completely unsustainable; the collective thing is based on disinformation, from the notion that the ‘science is settled’ about deadly catastrophic man-caused global warming, to the feeling that ‘Exxon knew that but instead created disinformation campaigns to deceive the public about what they knew.’ It’s like viewing a crumbling building with spreading cracks and wondering how soon the whole thing goes down, or like a topped dam where it’s a wonder it hasn’t collapsed yet. Or perhaps it’s akin to how Titanic builder Thomas Andrews must have felt upon fully comprehending the situation in front of him in the remaining minutes of April 14, 1912 – things are still nearly level at the moment, but it’s purely a matter of time when the existing damage starts bringing in fatal amounts of accumulation that cannot be stopped. The climate issue will sink, it is a mathematical certainty. The self-inflected damage was actually done long ago to seal its fate, when its arrogant pushers decided to use character assassination and disinformation as a tactic to counter critics while hoping nobody would question that maneuver.
I just don’t yet know which ‘iceberg’ incident will be the one to begin the process of sending the issue to the bottom. Meanwhile, I try to give that iceberg a nudge toward this looming colossus recklessly speeding straight toward its inevitable doom.
Upon reading Washington Free Beacon journalist Ira Stoll’s July 9th report about New York Times editor Joe Kahn himself revealing how there’s a need at the NYT for “skeptical editors, including those on the political right, who ask ‘what are we missing here?‘, I wanted to hear that interview in its full context. Was editor Kahn serious? The interview was by someone named Peter Kafka, and sure enough, editor Khan said pretty much that. So, I immediately penned the following to him, it’s verbatim here, including the way I fully spelled out my clickable links:
Mr Kahn (longtime NYT employee Andrew Revkin is cc’d in this email).
I was alerted to the July 8, 2026 interview Peter Kafka had with you, where you specifically noted how there is a need at the NYT for “beat reporters and editors .. asking themselves questions about ‘what are we missing here’?” — 19:23 point to 19:35 point of the interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/were-in-a-race-against-time-joe-kahn-on-running-the/id1080467174?i=1000775950830
That right there is one of my biggest pet peeves with the NYT. My news tip, arguably potentially one of the bigger news stories could cover, is what the NYT has egregiously missed ever since 1991 on the climate issue. Specifically, about what Matt Wald reported in July 1991 in his “Pro-Coal Ad Campaign Disputes Warming Idea” ( https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/08/business/pro-coal-ad-campaign-disputes-warming-idea.html ) concerning a leaked industry memo with the notorious strategy to ” ‘reposition global warming as theory’ and not fact” was implied to be ironclad ‘evidence’ that the fossil fuel industry ran a disinformation campaign to dupe the public about the harm of global warming. That very same memo phrase, with parentheses around the “not fact” words is a mainstay bit of ‘evidence’ in the current “ExxonKnew” lawsuits, e.g. the latest January 2026-filed Michigan v BP lawsuit ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Michigan-reposit-no-citation.jpg ), and it was spelled out full screen in red letters in a just slightly different form in Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” movie. Do your own internet search of it in either variant, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” or “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact),” and you’ll see it repeated in almost viral fashion as ‘evidence’ that ‘Big Coal & Oil’ knew the science of human-induced global warming was settled science but chose to deceive the public by ‘repositioning’ it back to theory.
To the small – small! – credit of the NYT / Matt Wald back in 1991, it was noted that one suggested name for the “ICE” campaign, “Informed Citizens for the Environment,” was an advised name that was unsolicited and never used. But that was it. What the NYT / Matt Wald missed was that the entire memo subset with the strategy to “reposition global warming” (and, not mentioned in the NYT / Matt Wald article, its suggestion for the campaign to target “older, less educated men and younger, low income women”) was an unsolicited and never-implemented memo set ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Arnold-corroborates3.jpg ) which was rejected outright by the operators of the actual Western Fuels Association “Information Council for the Environment” PR campaign. Despite that, people such as self-declared ‘industry disinformation expert Naomi Oreskes claimed in a late 2021 UK Guardian article ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Oreskes-expert-informed-reposit.jpg ) that the campaign did operate under that never-used strategy / audience targeting tactic, while publishing a pair of newspaper advertorials that turn out to have been never published anywhere – the same pair described in the Michigan v BP lawsuit.
It’s ironic how you said, starting at the 19:10 part of your interview, that “we want a really broad number of curious people, regardless of their own political leanings, to be able to get a lot of value out of the reporting that the New York Times does.” The irony is that the collection of climate issue reporters at the NYT after 1991 apparently themselves express exactly zero curiosity about what they are fed concerning the accusations about ‘industry-corrupted skeptic climate scientists.’ Even at the most basic of levels.
A case in point was the NYT ‘s 2/16/24 obituary for the namesake of my blog, ex-Boston Globe reporter / environmentalist book author Ross Gelbspan ( https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/business/media/ross-gelbspan-dead.html ), which only mentioned in cursory fashion that he’d been associated with a 1984 Pulitzer-wining reporting series at the Globe; his newspaper inexplicably named him as a “co-recipient” of the Prize ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/NYT-Pulit.jpg ). That’s tantamount to movie director James Cameron naming Leo DiCaprio as an Academy Award winner for the 11 Oscars-winning Titanic movie …. and yet nobody at the NYT apparently had any curiosity about that situation or the far more egregious problem of Gelbspan self-labeling ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/HiO-BP-pulitzer-covsleeve3.jpg ) / others labeling him ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CCNow-2-8-24-Pulit.jpg ) as a Pulitzer winner. Including Al Gore ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/AnIncTr263-Reposit-Gelb2.jpg ), when Gelbspan never won a Pulitzer at all ( https://www.pulitzer.org/search/Gelbspan ). Al Gore’s movie companion book said Gelbspan ‘discovered’ the [again – never implemented] “reposition global warming” memo. The NYT’s obituary for Gelbspan said he “…dug up a 1991 memo … to ‘reposition global warming as theory’ ” ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/NYT-reposit.jpg ), a massively ironic assertion in the face of the NYT’s Matt Wald report about that memo phrase literally years before Gelbspan first publicly mentioned it.
What has the NYT missed all this time? That one of the most influential figures in the global warming issue apparently committed one of the most egregious forms of stolen journalism valor while basically committing epic-level defamation against skeptic climate scientists by saying they operated under a rejected strategy memo. Worse, between his 1997 hardcover “The Heat is On” and his 1998 paperback version, he swapped out one of those scientists’ names and substituted another ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/HiO-34s-Fred-or-Sherwood.jpg ) because he apparently figured out that the swapped-out name had zero association with the PR campaign Gelbspan accused him of having. He offered no apology or explanation about that name swap. Imagine the amount of trouble Gelbspan would have faced if he worked under the legendary WashPo editor Ben Bradlee ( https://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Bradlee-v-Haldeman.jpg ).
My question is elemental: were you actually serious about seeing the need at the NYT for all of you to ask what you all missed, enough so that you can comprehend the enormity of the news tips I have here, and do something to fix your years of reporting malfeasance on the climate issue …. or was that just a hollow lip service statement?
Ask me more on my years of work concerning this aspect of the climate issue, I’ll be glad to answer all day long on any question. Start posing the toughest kinds of questions to the likes of Al Gore and Naomi Oreskes and the law firm handlers / prosecuting attorneys for the “ExxonKnew lawsuits” – return to the core tenets of journalism, in other words – and those people will flee in terror from the NYT, saying it has sold its soul to the fossil fuel industry. Some of your own staffers will say the same thing, exposing how they never were real reporters, but were carrying the propaganda news water for the Al Gore side of the issue.
– Russell Cook
I cc’d longtime NYT reporter Andrew Revkin, who I’d had a brief email correspondence with back in 2009. So, far, however, no response from Mr Revkin or editor Kahn. But perhaps via this open letter version, someone in my blog readership circle might know someone who knows someone who knows Andrew Revkin and editor Kahn, and might then relay this open letter to them and ask, “Did you see this?? Is this actually a huge problem for the New York Times that they must fix?”
One can never predict how connections are made. Beyond the above effort, I try to catch the attention of other influential types. Wish me success here . . . or if you can, lend a hand in making the connection.
It isn’t the climate crisis that needs to be fixed, it’s the epic level journalism malfeasance that’s been happening for upwards of 30 years in this issue.
Wow. Cracks in the dike are forming.
If I get cracks in my “dike” the effluent flows.
As far as the legacy media blindly accepting
Environmentalist claims in general, it dates from Silent Spring, which was like 1962.
By 1968, when the UN banned the aerial spraying of DDT, every single claim in Silent Spring had been tested and busted.
It’s a work of fiction, but it provided the blue print for all the watermelon environmental campaigns of the last 60 years and counting.
There is a paper out earlier this week describing how current global climate models fail to represent the cloud cover changes during el Nino formation
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/news-and-media/highlights/climate-models-get-key-feature-el-nino-wrong-undermining-forecast-accuracy
They also fail to represent the recent hear wave in Europe.
These are just two examples where current models fail to model reality with sufficient precision. These models are bad, 50 years old models are much much worse! When their prediction range us evaluated using current knowledge of their flaws, gaps and resolution problems, the resulting uncertainty overwhelms everything.. the “Exxon knew” claim is absurd, judges should address the effort of the involved climate scientists misleading about these easy and well known facts!
“current global climate models fail to represent the cloud cover changes during el Nino formation”
Do current global climate models represent the cloud cover changes during any time?
Well there are a lot of times when the cloud cover is not changing much locally, so the right behavior in the model is to do nothing, which they excell at.
Global climate models fail. Is the default position.
The science is settled.
One of the most fundamental parameters of climate models, the one which mainly determines how they predict CO2 levels will affect temperatures, is called climate sensitivity, and the most commonly cited climate sensitivity metric is called Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, or “ECS.” If the climate modelers actually understood the Earth’s climate system well enough to model it, then they would largely agree on basic parameters like ECS.
But ECS sensitivities assumed or implied by leading CMIP6 models vary by more than a factor of three (3).
That’s proof positive that the modelers don’t understand the system which they’re trying to model, and their models are not fit for purpose.
The most likely ECS value determined from observations is 1.5°C to 2.0°C per doubling of CO2, which is at the very low end of the models’ range, and well below what the IPCC contends is most likely. Most GCMs assume ECS values of 3°C or more, even though we’ve already had log2(427/280) = 61% of the radiative forcing that we’d get from a doubling of CO2, plus the effects of various other GHG increases, yet we’ve nevertheless only had about 1.3°C of warming. That’s obviously inconsistent with ECS values of 3°C or more, even if you assume that all of the observed warming was anthropogenic.
A computer model is a computer program which simulates (“models”) real processes for the purpose of predicting their progression. Other sorts of models also exist, such as mathematical models, and physical scale models, but all models are attempts to approximately simulate, and thereby predict, reality.
The utility and skillfulness of computer models is dependent on:
🗹 1(a). how well the processes which they model are understood,
🗹 1(b). how faithfully those processes are simulated in the computer code, and
🗹 2. whether the results can be repeatedly tested so that the models can be refined.
If you can check all those boxes, you can certainly build a useful computer model.
If you can check either 1(a) & 1(b), or else 2, then you still have a fighting chance of building something useful, but it will be challenging.
Specialized models, which try to model reasonably well-understood processes, like PGR and radiation transport, can be useful, because the processes they model are manageably simple and well-understood.
Weather forecasting models are also useful, even though the processes they model are very complex, and not very well understood, because the models’ short-term predictions are repeatedly tested, allowing the models to be validated and refined. They can’t check box 1(a) but at least they do check box 2.
But more ambitious models, like GCMs, which attempt to simulate the combined effects of many poorly-understood processes, over time periods far too long to allow repeated testing and refinement, are of very dubious utility. They can’t check any of the boxes.
Note: “hindcasting” doesn’t count, because…
How well do you think weather models would predict the weather if their predictions were so far into the future that they could not be tested? Well, that’s exactly the situation with GCMs.
Worst of all are so-called “semi-empirical models,” which aren’t actually models at all. It’s “modeling” that doesn’t actually model anything. It is similar to modeling, but without reference to any physical basis. It’s really just curve-matching. It can be made to produce just about any desired result.
Willis Eschenbach applied the Rahmstorf “semi-empirical modeling” approach to temperature data, over 12 years ago, and, voilà!
Mr Burton,
Well said. It would be ideal if all the GCMs were software implementations of rigorous mathematical models of the physics of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, some of the physical processes are still not well understood, and mathematical models don’t exist, or are just parametric curve fits.
And billions of dollars are spent based upon the results.
How can a process that never achieves equilibrium have an equilibrium sensitivity?
ECS is the average eventual temperature change that would result from a doubling of CO2, if everything else remained the same. (“Eventual” means after a few hundred years.)
The fact that that scenario obviously will never happen does not mean the number doesn’t exist. It’s a characteristic of the Earth’s climate system.
If you have a mystery solid substance, and you don’t know its melting point, it still may have a melting point, even if you never get it hot enough to melt. The melting point is a characteristic of the substance. It’s the temperature at which the substance would melt, in a hypothetical scenario. The characteristic is real, even if the scenario is not.
ECS is greater than the “practical climate sensitivity” implied by already-realized warming (about 1.3°C since the late LIA from the combination of 61% of the RF that a CO2 doubling would produce plus the effects of other changes such as a 160% increase in methane). That, in turn, is greater than “TCR” climate sensitivity.
The model is not the system; the map is not the territory.
And they should address the cut-and-paste lawyers as well.
Do the current (or past) climate models represent reality in any valid way?
My guess is that neither Editor Kahn nor employee Revkin will finish reading this email nor respond if they do. Rather, I suspect, they will work to complete the next issue of the NYT with current event stories, not obscure (to 97% of people) things that happened 12,740 days ago. One of the top news stories of July 1991 was Boris Yeltsin being the first freely elected president of the Russian Republic. How many U. S. citizens under age 50 would recognize Yeltsin’s name?
I responded to some climate forward claims of the NYT refuting their false and misleading claims but never got a response. The “reporters” are ignorant and untrainable.
I asked MS’s LLM, Copilot, for details on the who, when, and where of the claimed payments supporting the alleged disinformation campaign. It was unable to find anything in the public record to support the claim. It initially attempted impugn Exxon et al. by innuendo. I reminded it that I specifically asked for details of who received payments, the dates and amounts, and how the payments were made. Copilot and I now have an understanding that when I ask for details, rumor, innuendo, and unverified association are not acceptable responses.
Earlier, I had asked Bing a similar question and while I got it to admit that its initial statement was not correct, it continued to repeat what it admitted was incorrect. I have not used Bing since then.
I have started to use Grok in place of search engines as it seems to perform better and you can argue with it. I asked about the UK’s junk weather station network that provides the Met Office with fake scary high temperature records. In the end it had to concede that the network was not of enough quality to use for claiming records.
I posit that any given “A.I.” system is still little more than a lightning-fast search engine, but now with a more ‘human’ face on them to make them seem more trustworthy, and thus less likely to be questioned. I tried the Grok system with an answer to something I already knew. It plowed straight into the same “garbage in/garbage out” brick wall that others did: “Is Grok A.I. smart or stupid? It’s Simple Test …“
My sad conclusion is that, these days, in general, NY Times reporters and editors simply don’t care whether what they write is true and unbiased.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/media-lying-about-climate-and-hurricanes
That disease is not confined to the Gray Lady. It’s an industry-wide affliction, in the journalism biz.
There was a time when journalism was an honorable, respected profession, with high standards (not always followed, but always expected) for fairness and impartiality. Those days are long, long gone.
As with so many other sins, bias has always been a part of journalism, but at the upper tiers of the profession it was at least struggled against. Journalists were expected to try to be impartial, once upon a time.
No more. As with so many other sins, journalistic bias and dishonestly is no longer struggled against. When exposed, it no longer causes embarrassment. Now it is openly embraced, and even celebrated.
…it’s the epic level journalism malfeasance that’s been happening since 1851 in most issues. FTFY
I presume you say “since 1851” because the NY Times published its first issue on Sept. 18, 1851. But the NY Times didn’t used to be as bad as it is now.
Nor is the problem confined to the NY Times. For instance, I remember when the BBC used to be one of the most trusted (and trustworthy) news sources on Earth. Now it’s just plain awful.
Very few people will admit they were wrong in falling for the carbon dioxide emissions con. They will go quiet or change their circle of friends.
Several years ago at my squash, tennis, padel club there were lively discussions and the climate worriers bought their Teslas to show their efforts to save the planet. I was the dinosaur saying it was cobblers. Now they look away when I ask how the Tesla is doing.
I very much doubt that Mr Kahn has ever seen the original missive. His secretarial staff will have neatly filtered it out of his in-tray.
Most likely. It’s why I first cc’d Andy Revkin when I sent the direct email before turning the letter into an open one at my GelbspanFiles blog, with its small reading audience. Odds were in my favor that WUWT might reproduce my blog post version, whereupon an even larger reading audience might see it. Hence the bit at the end were I suggest the plausibility that someone who knows someone who knows either editor Khan or Revkin will ask them if they saw my letter. Call it ‘forcing the issue,’ for lack of better description — once someone within the NYT sees and comprehends the enormity of the problem with their reporting about the false accusation of ‘skeptic climate scientists being paid / directed to “reposition global warming,” they won’t be able to unsee it. Get that seed inside the NYT, it will grow like an cancer and eat them up from within.
Yeah, no, Climate Liars can pretend to be interested in the truth all they want, but it’s just one more way of lying. They’re not interested in the truth. They can’t handle the truth.
From the article: “variant, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)” or “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact),”
That is exactly what a person who is trying to inject truth into the climate change narrative would say because human-caused global warming IS a theory, not an established fact, then, when the words were written, and still today.
This wasn’t disinformation, it was, and is, the truth.
The people claiming this is oil company disinformation are the real disinformers.
Years ago, in my science education, I was taught that hypotheses and subsequent theories explain facts. Some theories become so solid they become facts in and of themselves. As a hypothesis, global warming explains nothing. It doesn’t even rise to the level of a theory.
Mr Abbott,
It is not a theory. It is, at best, a supposition. Not even an hypothesis.
I know the difference. I was just replying to the language of the quote. Defining the difference between a theory and a hypothesis in this case would have confused the point, which is that human-caused climate change is not an established fact and has never been an established fact.
I completely agree with your last sentence. Not so much with what preceded it. Nobody would use that manner of phrasing to counter what Al Gore & friends were saying back in the early 1990s. Just the bizarre wording of that phrase by itself of the phrase was enough to prompt me in 2009 want to read the alleged ‘memo’ containing it in its full context, and right there is where it started to unravel for me when I finally found it. The horrid degraded photocopy scans attributed to this memo were stashed in Greenpeace USA’s collection (which could only be found when a person knows where to look for them) and were in two different font styles, indicating some sections did not go with others. Be that as it may, the phrase only has one meaning, it’s an accusation that skeptic scientists were paid and directed to ‘reposition’ the certainty of the ‘settled CAGW science,’ despite knowing what they were doing was dead wrong. As such, accusations using that phrase as ‘evidence’ are outright disinformation.
By giving any credence to the memo phrase, that allows the promulgators of the false accusation to continue to get away with what they’ve been doing. There was no need to ‘reposition’ anything by the skeptics, the doubt about CAGW was pre-existing before they were ever approached by energy company people.
“Not so much with what preceded it.“
well, don’t keep me hanging. What was it you didn’t agree with?
• Nobody on the skeptic scientists side used that manner of phrasing to counter what Al Gore & friends were saying back in the early 1990s.
• Nobody on the skeptic scientists side uses that manner of phrasing today counter the CAGW pushers. There is nothing to ‘reposition.’
• The “reposition global warming” memo phrase was 100% disinformation because the phrase was and is used deliberately and specifically as a weapon to accuse skeptic climate scientists of being paid to say the science is not settled when they – and their Exxon benefactors – knew for certain it was. Naomi Oreskes uses that phrase precisely to imply sinister deceit on the part of the industry. It was an unsolicited memo proposal that was rejected by the people it was sent to, where their copy ultimately ended up in the trash. The phrase is not some generic manner of thinking.
• Nobody should give any credence to that specific, awkwardly-worded phrase to imply that skeptic climate scientists might operate under that suggestion given to them in any kind of manner. That’s not what they do now and that’s not what they did back in 1991 when the phrase first started getting media notice. The moment they first heard Al Gore’s blatherings, they pointed out in detail how his unsupportable claims were doubtful out of the gate.
Ok, I get where you are coming from.
Thanks! You wouldn’t be the first online skeptic commenter to mistake that never-used specific memo phrase as being only some casual way of speaking. It is solely used by the promulgators of the “crooked skeptic climate scientists” accusation as a weapon, from the start back at the old Ozone Action group and with the namesake of my blog, Ross Gelbspan, on through Al Gore’s 2006 movie and into the present day with social media ‘influencers’ and the ExxonKnew lawsuits. It’s worthless as evidence that skeptic scientists and the fossil fuel industry deceived anyone, but it is nevertheless the central one-trick pony the enviro-activist side is enslaved to for keeping their beloved political issue alive.
If I could ask one favor, don’t simply go forward being better informed on the origins of that awkward weaponized memo phrase, please find influential people who may not know how totally vulnerable that whole accusation angle of the climate issue is to total collapse surrounding the core promulgators who’ve pushed it ever since the 1990s. It’s not the energy industry that needs to be prosecuted for ‘climate crimes,’ it is those accusation promulgators who need to be looking at jail time.
Journalistic standards have certainly dropped through the floor over the past 30 years as more and more gov’t trained ‘journalists’ chose the easy life of repeating propaganda. Once enough charlatans are on board the good ship Presstitute, they can easily make the real journalists who are left walk the plank.
Disney acquired ABC in 1996.
Kind of says it all, eh?
I don’t believe the media’s representation of AGW has anything to do with lack of ‘journalism integrity’ (oxymoron these days) and everything to do with serving their master which is where the scam is codified. Write or say what they want and you have a job and can keep it. The media owner/editor rewards those that do and cancels those that dare to stray from the narrative. Finding replacements is easy.
Therein lies a fantastically large irony. The so-called ‘journalists’ out there squeal about the need to defend Freedom of the Press, but the reality is that there is no such freedom within their own workplaces — if any reporter / editor dares to question any angle of the orthodoxy of CAGW ……. . . . . . they’re fired. All it will take for the healing of the profession to begin is when somebody major at the top of it acknowledges that what they put out is not climate news, it’s climate propaganda. Funny thing is, with enough of them working in such tiny echo chambers, many may not even be aware of what their own problem is.
This is a problem with highly educated people on a mission, they can use language to make the absurd seem possible. It’s shame.
Control the language, control the ideas.
Exactly. Consider the rut the issue would be in if it stuck only to “global warming.” If one or three too many snowy, cold winters happened, or even some cool summers, that would present a problem. Then consider the switch to “climate change” with its essentially uncompleted label. Climate change … to what?? The enviros want the gullible public to fill in their own rest of the label — change from a stable climate to an unstable one / change to increasingly violent weather / change to more unpredictable jet stream flows / change from the ‘old normal’ to the ‘new normal of rampant climate-driven destruction’ — endless choices based on the trash the complicit biased news media spits out.
The climate issue is a window into the world of how the basic war works over who controls the information.
It’s a bit like a flat-earther asking “what are we missing here?” With regard to climate, the answer is “everything”.