Lawyer David Schnare has made a career of suing and harassing climate scientists, abusing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to demand masses of scientists’ emails and wasting people’s time.

Much of this work has been executed via a dark money-funded 501(c)(3) “public charity” called the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (EELI), where he was General Counsel among other roles. 

Schnare’s work at EELI was often in conjunction with another shadowy group he founded, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FMELC), which he co-founded in 2011 with long-time associate Chris Horner. These two groups dispute the scientific reality of climate change, and have made a business of targeting climate scientists with invasive and harassing lawsuits.

FMELC recently imploded in spectacular fashion. Embroiled in multiple lawsuits and mired in infighting, the operation and legality of the “public charity” FMELC have been in heated dispute.

Recently, Schnare was ordered to disgorge $630,000 from FMELC, whose bank account he is alleged to have used as his own personal bank.

“Medieval Warm Period was warmer”  is not only irrelevant to future climate, but was known wrong within science by the early 1990s. In 2017, it is still repeated by climate deniers.  They have long misused some version of an IPCC(1990) curve, whose abuse is the focus of this MedievalDeception series. The first known promoter now seems to be Richard S. Lindzen.

He was featured in The Greening of Planet Earth (produced 1991, published 1992), a 28-minute video,*  widely promoted by the coal group Western Fuels Association (WFA), which funded many climate disinformation efforts, such as those by Pat Michaels and Robert Balling, Jr. For more, see Western Fuels Association's Decades Of Dollars For Doubt And Denial.

Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy have filed bankruptcies, incidentially revealing payments to cllimate anti-science groups. The Western Fuels Association (WFA) may be smaller and less known, but its long history of funding climate denial is already better exposed. It was called out by Senator Tom Udall in his #WebOfDenial remarks in July 2016.  Its earliest well-known disinformation effort is detailed in MedievalDeception 1991: Lindzen Hijacks Curve For Western Fuels Video - Early Fake News.

Its front group Greening Earth Society (GES) claimed “sound information” following the “sound science” theme of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), started as front for Philip Morris in 1993, but like WFA, also involved Pat Michaels.

Newly-assembled information adds evidence that #WesternFuelsKnew the science was against them, decades ago.

PART 1. Inside the machinery of doubt - money, think tanks, politicians and “experts” all agree in Texas
Will Happer rebranded part of the George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) as the CO2 Coalition (“CO2Co”) in 2015, but was little noticed, as GMI finally ended  “not with a bang but a whimper.”  Gayathri Vaidyanathan reported in EENews: 

Three deadly sins in academe and journalism are Falsification, Fabrication and Plagiarism (FFP).¹  Political speechwriters normally take great pains to avoid obvious text-copy plagiarism,² but on Monday Melania Trump's speech plagiarized text from Michelle Obama. Trump employee Meredith McIver took responsibility, but new analysis here raises more doubts.

Climate denial is pervaded by FFP examples, the most famous likely that around the Wegman Report, where plagiarism and reactions to its exposure resemble those in the Trump case.

First, high-profile work is trusted to inexperienced people, who can make silly errors. Competent organizations check.
Then, exposure generates contradictory excuses, some clear fabrications, such as personal attacks on irrelevant people.
Finally, the organization takes surprisingly long to produce official explanations, about which doubts may be raised.

Senators Launch Resolution, Speech Blitz Calling Out #WebOfDenial Blocking Climate Action summarized the comments by 19 US Senators July 11-12.  The text of their remarks was extracted from the Congressional Records, annotated and combined into the attached 42-page PDF.  That is easily searchable, and may help guide selection of videos to watch.

They offered strong words, including Senator Elizabeth Warren's analysis of Viscount Christopher Monckton.

Pink shading is used to emphasis denierfunders, groups and indviduals, many found in the DeSmog Research Database or other analyses at DeSmog, which was mentioned 8 times by the Senators.

The two tables below give page numbers of Senators' remarks, showing first the funders they mentioned, and then the denial groups.  Many Senators mentioned the Kochs, ExxonMobil, tobacco, and Donors Trust.