Such was the assertion a person submitted in a letter to the Los Angeles Times editor back in September. The first part is a provable fact, the latter half is arguably one more disinformation talking point to throw onto the collective deception pile generated by enviro-activists about the climate issue. The plain fact that the greater public sees virtually no questioning of the climate issue should be an integral part of Federal-level investigation into what keeps the issue alive – including lately the climate litigation lawfare efforts – when it should have otherwise died of natural causes well over two decades ago at the hands of objective, unbiased reporters.
The full context of the LA Times letter is here, just two paragraphs long, while containing two massive items of basic disinformation, the first being within a link to a dubious LA Times article used to support the letter writer’s its central point, and the second item of disinformation is on the writer’s supposed overarching but otherwise unsupportable accusation about industry corruption. I’ve boldface-highlighted the two faults in my condensation of the letter:
According to Deirdre Macnab, “Ranchers are extremely concerned [about climate change] … I guess now that makes it an official problem (“Global warming is ruining their way of life. These Colorado ranchers demand accountability,” Sept. 5). It has been 20 years since the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” spilled the beans to the public about climate change and fossil fuel.
The message was … labeled a hoax, and that message has persisted in this country into the present, pushed by the fossil fuel industry ….
The “ranchers” in question there were the topic of the September 5 LA Times article, a group expressing support for the Boulder v Suncor climate damages case which the Supreme Court was going to be examining in the first week of October. However, a day prior to the above letter-to-the-editor, an Energy in Depth article tile gave a huge hint to what the crippling problem was. In a nutshell, there really was no rancher or agricultural support for the plaintiffs against the fossil fuel industry.
The LA Times letter writer, when confronted with these facts, might sidestep the problem and say she believes the LA Times article’s implication that Colorado ranchers statewide were in favor of the lawsuit. But the next problem only amplifies the misplaced trust.
The first hour and twelve minutes of Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth” movie was devoted to his setup that catastrophic man-caused global warming was settled science. No “beans were spilled about the climate issue” on that, the news media had been stating this basic assertion for well over fifteen years. Skeptic climate scientists have heavily disputed that decade+ basic assertion at every level, but Gore never mentioned that. After all his setup, Gore then offered a pair of his slide show screens to claim that there was a 100% science consensus for all that he just presented. Skeptic climate scientists naturally dispute that immediately, no science conclusion has ever been validated by “a show of hands,” the idea itself is a logical fallacy. It’s simply not the way the Scientific Method works.
The “spilled beans” the LA Times letter writer was referring to in Gore’s movie was what followed immediately after his illogical ‘science consensus’ bit. He implied the handful of skeptic scientists were corrupted by the fossil fuel industry, revealed by a leaked memo reading, “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” Gore compared that phrase straightaway to the notorious “Doubt is our product” tobacco industry memo, implying skeptic climate scientists deceived the public in a way no different that anyone in the tobacco industry who said smoking cigarettes wasn’t harmful or caused cancer.
The “Doubt is our product” Brown & Williamson tobacco company memo was real, readers can sift through the whole foolhardy thing themselves at the formerly-named “Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.” Back in 2009, it took no more than 30 seconds for me to find the entire memo in its total context there, the ‘smoking gun’ phrase is on page 4. Brown & Williamson’s idea was a mindlessly stupid because anybody who has any brains would never believe it was harmless to inhale burning particulates big enough to see with the naked eye, laced with addictive chemicals.
The “reposition global warming” memo was real. It took me seven months to find it, buried so deep out of public view in Greenpeace USA’s industry document scans archive that nobody would know to look there without first knowing what Greenpeace’s connection was to the old forgotten “Ozone Action” environmental group. But the problem with the memo is far less than the lack of transparency of where it was at, it was that I subsequently found out (corroborated by Ron Arnold via a larger inquiry he undertook, and by others) that the memo was never implemented in any form anywhere.
The LA Times letter writer, when confronted with these facts, along with the challenge to point to a solitary instance of where any fossil fuel industry executive ever labeled the climate issue as a hoax in any capacity which was a major influencing factor heard by the public, might sidestep this massive problem and say she believes the overall legacy news media’s reporting that all of the claims about industry disinformation campaigns was above reproach.
Therein lies the part of the investigation that will need to go beyond how the false ‘industry-led public deception’ accusations were conceived / planned / implemented, and who specifically was behind all of this.
The question is why the collective legacy news media journalists never stopped to ask any basic questions about any angle of this, when so many myriad faults with the accusations are so easily found that even an ordinary letter-to-the-editor could find them, if he or she simply had the intellectual curiosity to find out if the accusations had any veracity to them.
Al Gore’s movie companion book for “An Inconvenient Truth” clearly credits “Pulitzer winner” Gelbspan with the discovery of the “reposition global warming” memo. Stop the presses right there — objective, unbiased reporters should have asked point blank what work of Gelbspan’s prompted that award. When that claim blew up, reporters should have moved next to whether the memo which both Gore and Gelbspan promulgated was actually implemented, and upon discovering that it never was implemented, the next question should have been: from whom did Gelbspan and Ozone Action obtained the memo, and under what circumstances?
See how that works? See how that should have worked?
Those questions were never asked by legacy news reporters. Ironic that the LA Times letter writer brings up the analogy of ‘ostriches burying their heads on the sand,’ when it is something that can land squarely on the shoulders of the legacy news reporters.
It isn’t the climate crisis that needs to be fixed, or the fossil fuel industry that needs to be investigated; it’s the epic level journalism malfeasance which must to be investigated after the ‘industry disinformation campaigns’ accusation is properly labeled as the hoax that it is.
