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.
