Recently my whacko right-wing friend posted this headline with a link on Facebook. It turns out that Fox has "covered the story" both on TV and in print, and it has been repeated on various lunatic sites for nearly two years now as "news."
How close to true is this headline found on many webpages today ?
So I watch the video from Fox and then search for more on the John Coleman guy who is putting this BS out and where he might have come across these 30,000. How much of the story is true?
Starting in January of 2008 Coleman starts to claim that Al Gore is going to be sued publicly, at least that is the earliest date I have found.
The 30,000 "scientists" are people with at least a Bachelors of Science in some field, including computer science and other non-research science degrees. They signed a petition back in 1998 saying that they did not believe in Global Warming. Many of them are dead now. None have agreed to be party to a lawsuit.
After nearly two years no lawsuit has been filed. There are actually no grounds that a lawsuit could be based on against Al Gore on the issue of Global Warming. Over the last twelve years not one single peer reviewed scientific paper has been published that challenges Global Warming. There is no "scientific debate," and even if there was one a person cannot be sued for supporting a reasonably sound scientific hypothesis, even if it turned out to be wrong.
So the real "headline" here should be "One person who claims to have the support of 30,000 other people who signed a petition eleven years ago and have not given their consent to be used for these purposes wishes he could sue Al Gore but has no grounds to do so, and will not do so."
The entire story is simply made up and the "reporter" for Faux News never asks how Coleman got all those people to agree to sign onto a lawsuit, never asks what the legal grounds for the suit will be, never inquires what lawyers have been retained or where the suit will be filed...never even comes close to being a journalist. When is the last time you saw any news coverage of a legal matter and the lawyer was not right there on TV?
This "story" is an entirely fabricated one and Fox had to know that, and yet they have pretended it actually existed. Right-wing lunatic websites are continuing to "cover" the story as news and making further exagerations to it as recently as this month.
