There’s an old adage that liberals spotlight what they fear the most by striking back as hard as they can at that particular fear. Case in point in the last several days is what GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry said about scientists who are skeptical of human activity causing global warming. Simply put, he sides with the growing numbers of such skeptics.

Truth is, liberals don’t fear Perry so much as they do his mere mention of skeptic scientists. You see, the primal fear is that the general public will actually want to hear what such skeptics have to say, which would only lead to widespread doubt about the necessity to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. If you are Al Gore, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or any other people – as in nearly all of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media – who have put stock into the idea that human activity causes global warming, such opposition could be very bad unless there is an ironclad case for the IPCC’s underlying science conclusions.

Notice how Gore never debates skeptics? Notice how the IPCC chairman compares skeptics to ‘flat earth believers’? Notice how mainstream media reports like Eugene Robinson’s 8/23 Washington Post article mentions an ‘overwhelming consensus‘, and ‘multiple investigations have found no evidence of fraud or manipulation of data‘, yet these MSM people never say who quantified the consensus, and don’t refute the mind-blowing level of detail about fraud, data manipulation and other shenanigans that sites like Steve McIntyre’s, Donna Laframboise’s, Anthony Watts’ and Marc Morano’s are exposing?

Nothing to see at those critic sites, move along. “Oh, if you must look”, says the MSM, “rest assured those critics are fossil fuel industry shills, or are driven by religious or political zealotry”.

According to another GOP presidential candidate, Jon Huntsman, such overall ‘zealotry’ renders Perry unelectable. At an 8/22 Wall Street Journal article, Paul Gigot quoted Huntsman’s statements that ‘scientists should be trusted’ and that the GOP heads for trouble if it embraces ‘anti-science’. I wish Gigot or some other journalist would ask Huntsman why he does not appear to put any trust in skeptics, considering how they cite thousands of peer-reviewed science journal-published papers in assessments that contradict the IPCC.

Since the MSM and enviro-activists leave out huge and important details about the skeptics, Huntsman should instead consider the distinct possibility that he has been hoodwinked to believe there are no legitimate critics of the IPCC.

To illustrate my point, I must refer to another person in Gigot’s article, Huntsman’s chief strategist, John Weaver, who worked as chief strategist for Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. That was the time period when McCain began believing in man-caused global warming, and as I pointed out in my December 2010 American Thinker article, McCain was apparently steered into this by a guy working for the enviro-activist group Ozone Action. It doesn’t exactly help matters that the current executive director of Greenpeace was an Ozone Action worker who claimed in a 2009 interview to have also convinced McCain to ‘champion global warming’.

For those who didn’t catch it, my previous RedState article detailed how practically all of the corruption accusations against skeptic scientists spiral right back to Ozone Action, and also showed how Al Gore’s efforts to point to a different origin instead only begs for serious questions of how deeply he is involved in this whole mess.

The irony is Huntsman will be the one who is unelectable if it’s revealed that his Horizon-PAC statements from earlier this year on “well-grounded leaders” is wiped out by evidence that his own global warming position is not only groundless, but is also only defended by the same ‘partisan politics’ accusations he says he wants to eliminate.

If Huntsman wants to salvage his position, he will have to offer solidly convincing explanations on how he got snookered into believing the IPCC is infallible. If he sticks to his guns, he may go down in history as a major ‘tipping point’ that sent the so-called global warming crisis into a final slide towards total collapse.

Ordinary ponzi schemes pretending to be worthwhile investments collapse if they aren’t constantly infused with new money, and when anyone starts asking tough accounting questions. The theory of man-caused global warming is kept afloat only because a sizable portion of the public believes the issue is settled, and that our efforts to reduce greenhouse gases will stabilize the climate. Faith in the issue is continually propped up with new stories that no ‘legitimate’ critics exist. But what happens when the IPCC / Al Gore side can’t answer questions any better than Bernie Madoff?

Near the end of my first RedState piece on the smear of skeptic scientists, I noted how a Society of Environmental Journalists board director couldn’t be bothered to tell me which other journalists corroborated book author Ross Gelbspan’s accusation that skeptic climate scientists were being paid to deliberately mislead the public.

I’m still searching the internet to find anyone who independently corroborates that lone accusation. Hard scrutiny reveals the different accusations virtually all spiral right back to a small group of people associated with the enviro-activist group Ozone Action and Ross Gelbspan, circa early 1996. A scant few point back to a period of time in 1991, and I first detailed the enormous problems with those at Marc Morano’s Climate Depot, then here at RedState. Long story short: Gore praised Gelbspan for discovering 1991-era coal industry PR campaign memos supposedly proving the corruption accusation, but Gore had the memos in his Senate office years before Gelbspan.  Houston, we have a problem….

Last week, the New Scientist magazine coughed up the same old accusation when it reviewed Orrin Pilkey’s new book Global Climate Change (backup link here in case their link goes behind a pay wall later). In the magazine review’s third paragraph, the book’s quotes are the same words from the 1991 coal industry PR memos – “older, less educated males” and “younger, lower-income women” – that were seen in Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 book The Heat is On, and in Gore’s 1992 Earth in the Balance. The insinuation is that the PR campaign knew its message was false and had to target gullible people.

The plot gets thicker. Google Books has a preview of Pilkey’s book, and in a page prior to the above quotes, he regurgitates the infamous “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” accusation phrase, saying it was one of seven strategy points of PR documents put online by Naomi Oreskes, and that the PR campaign took place in four cities, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Champagne, Illinois, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Fargo, North Dakota.

Wrong on both counts. There were nine strategy points, and regarding the claim that Oreskes put the documents online, that comes from George Monbiot’s Dec 2009 blog, where it turns out his link was just to Oreskes’ oft-repeated 2007 PowerPoint presentation which only quoted the memos. Seems unlikely that Pilkey would make a typo of the point number total if he actually saw the complete-context memos. As we can see at the page 10 scan enlargement here, there is no mistaking the number count, or that Bowling Green, Kentucky was also part of the PR campaign tour, as seen at the page 14 scan.

Astute readers rummaging through the rest of the 1991 coal industry PR campaign memos there are able to see that the whole collection is not the sinister top-down industry directive it’s portrayed to be, but is instead just an interoffice set of memos to guide a little five-town information campaign designed to point out contradictions between Al Gore’s side of the story and existing – not fabricated – opposition to it. Ross Gelbspan made the claim that “we got a copy of the strategy papers for that campaign. And it said that the purpose of the campaign was to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact…They sent these scientists all over the country to do media interviews.”

Right. Wouldn’t ‘all over the county’ mean major population centers like L.A. Philadelphia, Seattle, Boston, Miami? But first, who gave him copies of the strategy papers? Al Gore? And if nobody disproves these scientists’ science assessments outright, what was so sinister about this campaign?

I could go on for another couple thousand words. Oreskes has her own circuitous problems with citing Gelbspan, and then we have the problem just recently where Gore profanely accused skeptic scientists of corruption and cited Oreskes instead Gelbspan. There is also the problem with a 1991 article by Mary O’Driscoll in The Energy Daily titled, “Greenhouse Ads Target ‘Low-Income’ Women, ‘Less-Educated Men’ .” It was written prior to the July 8, 1991 NY Times article Gore indirectly cited in just the 12th paragraph of his 7000 word Rolling Stone magazine diatribe a couple of months ago. Not a word of praise going to O’Driscoll from Gore, Oreskes or Pilkey.

I’m no investigative reporter, though, just someone with an accumulation of computer notes on this whole mess that’s probably over 66,000 words, and my plea is for professional journalists to take this beyond my limited means. I’ve unearthed more than enough red flags, it’s time for others with more resources to see how deep all these problems go.

There appears to be only one source for the accusation against skeptic scientists. It is unsupportable, and a rather small cast of characters spirals around it. This is especially ironic considering the way Pilkey says at the opening of his Chapter 4,  “…the hoax is being perpetuated by public relations efforts by the fossil fuels industry.”

When enviro-activists offer no more than a worn out, 20-year old, paper-thin, guilt-by-association accusation saying skeptic climate scientists are paid by oil and coal executives to deliberately stall action to mitigate global warming, then we probably have the opposite problem: A ponzi scheme of incessant media story infusions designed to steer the public away from seeing skeptic scientists as whistleblowers on an idea that can’t support its own science assessments.

Al Gore is on some kind of roll lately. First, he latched onto the population control thing, and today he has a multi-thousand word article online at Rolling Stone, taking his usual swipe at skeptic scientists for being corrupted by fossil fuel industry money.

In my RedState article just a short while ago, “Forget the Science; Is Al Gore’s Accusation of Skeptic Climate Scientists a Hoax?“, I described how the accusation is based on a memo no one was allowed to see, using an out-of-context sentence, promoted by a person who was not a Pulitzer winner despite accolades to the contrary, who was credited with finding the memo by Al Gore, who had the memo collection in his own possession four years earlier. Considering the way he and many others have praised that so-called “Pulitzer winner”, Ross Gelbspan, the revelation of those memos at his Senate office in 1991 certainly does pose a problem.

In a quick skim though Gore’s article today, I’m struck by one brand-new oddity. On its first page, he says about deniers’ efforts,

Part of the script for this show was leaked to The New York Times as early as 1991. In an internal document, a consortium of the largest global-warming polluters spelled out their principal strategy: “Reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact.”

In all the searching I’ve done for the “reposition global warming” phrase, I’ve only found a couple other references to people who cite Matt Wald’s 1991 NY Times article. One was a book co-author who cited the phrase in his 1994 book, a year prior to Gelbspan’s first public mention of it. That particular individual seems also to be inconveniently tied to the IPCC, as I detailed in my American Thinker article, “There is a Cancer Growing on the IPCC and Al Gore“. The other is the lawyer in the Kivalina v Exxon global warming nuisance lawsuit, seen in my December 2010 article at Breitbart’s BigGovernment site. I noted how the lawyer seems to have far too many ties to Gelbspan.

Since it is quite rare to see anyone referring to the ’91 NY Times article, I found it strange for a former Greenpeace researcher to link to it just last month when mentioning the original source for the “reposition global warming” phrase, the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). Gelbspan was associated with the enviro-activist group Ozone Action, which first bragged of ‘obtaining’ the memos in early 1996. It later merged with Greenpeace USA in 2000, and its founder became Greenpeace USA’s new executive director. Kalee Kreider, currently Al Gore’s spokesperson, was a recent transfer to Greenpeace from Ozone Action when she offered high praise of Gelbspan’s work in a 1997 Greenpeace press release. The current Greenpeace USA director, himself a former Ozone Action worker, praised Gelbspan in 2009 for “uncover[ing] the scandalous cover up of global warming by polluting companies“.

Suddenly Gore now links to that old NY Times article in a way that will be widely seen and reproduced. What’s going on here?

Meanwhile, another bit at the end of Gore’s long article isn’t surprising at all.

…contact your local newspapers and television stations when they put out claptrap on climate — and let them know you’re fed up with their stubborn and cowardly resistance to reporting the facts of this issue. One of the main reasons they are so wimpy and irresponsible about global warming is that they’re frightened of the reaction they get from the deniers when they report the science objectively.

Yawn. ‘Blame the media for cowardly resistance, a.k.a. allowing too much equal weight to be given to skeptic scientists who dilute public concern to the point of fatal inactivity’. I showed the enormous problems with that narrative in two different articles, “Will MSM Look into the Global Warming Abyss and Find Their Character?” and ” ‘Media Too Fair to Climate Skeptics’, say reporters who’ve been unfair to skeptics“. Speaking for myself, it’s difficult to count the number of times I sent letters to my local newspaper questioning their Gore-style global warming reports, with only one of the whole bunch ever getting published. That paper has no fear of ‘deniers’, a virtual trash can has long been the final resting place for such emails.

This is a historic time we’re in right now. The entire global warming ideology is falling apart in front of our eyes, with Al Gore gladly guiding it toward complete ruin. Years from now, people will be able to point out which of these current events is the one where global warming went into the irreversible slide toward its total collapse.

Russell Cook’s collection of writings on this issue can be seen at “The ’96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists.“

Hard scrutiny of the overall global warming issue never yields neat answers, it prompts ever-increasing questions. Among those, we all should ask why people who accuse skeptic scientists of corruption can't keep their stories straight.

Global Warming Alarmist ambushes Sen. Inhofe, however, "let he who is above reproach cast the first interrogation". Enviro-activists have long made unsupported accusations against skeptic climate scientists. What happens when the tables are turned on the activists?

The new US House GOP committee chairmen aren't just presented with a 'witch hunt' opportunity to score points on the ClimateGate scandal, conservatives everywhere now have an unprecedented opportunity to expose the far-left agenda once and for all. When people pushing an ideology resort to portraying skeptic scientists as villains using an unsupportable accusation, solely to distract us from seeing the IPCC's highly questionable claims about humans causing global warming, we have a huge problem. When an entity as globally influential as the mainstream media fails to seriously question any part of it, and actually joins the push, then we have a monumental problem.