YOU IDIOTS! The cover of the 10 January 2010 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Meet the planet's worst enemies -- inside the battle over global warming. Includes 'The Climate Killers: Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming' By Richard Pauli, guest blogger
23 September 2010 Every so often, Rolling Stone magazine presents some outstanding journalism. This is just my opinion. The recent issue has an exciting read about the science of ice. I am reading it now…It’s about glaciers and ice sheets and how ice is controlled by atmosphere and then how oceans affect ice — a dramatic depiction of the dynamic relationship. Halfway through the ice excitement, I went looking for the January 2010 issue of Rolling Stone — the cover was “You Idiots! Inside the battle over global warming”. Rolling Stone listed the 17 people whom it calls “climate killers.” It was powerful. It named, shamed and blamed. But I can no longer find those names listed anywhere on the Internet…at least not where it is supposed to be. They were there, but they have disappeared from the Internet. Even though the magazine presumably fact-checked and vetted, and even called it opinion. (You know, like opinions about Obama?) Rolling Stone must have hit a nerve, because this content has pretty much left cyberspace. And that is very hard make happen. It smells like the work of overpaid, crazed agnotologists (wizards that remove facts from the Internet). Try this simple question: Who are the 17 people that Rolling Stone called the Climate Killers? Go ahead. You do a search. Or you can still see it widely mentioned — just Google “Climate Killers RollingStone.com” Here is some background on the Rolling Stone story: Rolling Stone on ‘The Climate Killers: 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb the climate catastrophe.’ (Earlier this year, these original links on Climate Progress worked fine.) If you have a print version of the issue you better save it, because it may be collectible. Now, to be fair, it may be that this once free-of-charge article has been put behind their pay section. If someone has an online subscription, please tell me. Google does not list or connect this Rolling Stone article any longer, not even in the cache. And I even noticed that the trusty Wayback Machine citation in www.archive.org is now only set to 2005 for RollingStone.com. That means they got to Google and to Archive.org. Some power there. (Hope this email gets through OK.) However a Bing search got a cached version of a simple list  found on Stumblers.net (Thanks goes to Stumblers for holding on to this – for now.)

  1. Warren Buffett, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway (investments)
  2. Rupert Murdoch, CEO, News Corporation (Fox News, WSJ, MySpace, etc.)
  3. Jack Gerard, President, American Petroleum Institute
  4. Rex Tillerson, CEO, ExxonMobil (funding climate denial by the Heritage Foundation)
  5. Sen. Mary Landrieu, Democrat, Louisiana (campaign funding by Big Oil)
  6. Marc Morano, Founder, Climate Depot (funded by Richard Mellon Scaife); former producer for Rush Limbaugh
  7. Sen. James Inhofe, Republican, Oklahoma
  8. David Ratcliffe, CEO, Southern Company
  9. Dick Gephardt, CEO, Gephardt Group; Lobbyist for Peabody Energy; former US House majority leader
  10. George Will, Commentator, ABC
  11. Tom Donohue, President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce
  12. Don Blankenship, CEO, Massey Energy
  13. Fred Singer, Retired physicist, University of Virginia; former mouthpiece of Big Tobacco
  14. Sen. John McCain, Republican, Arizona
  15. Rep. Joe Barton, Republican, Texas
  16. and 17. Charles and David Koch, CEO and Executive Vice President, Koch Industries

You might want to save this list because it is now really hard to find on the Internet. And it may be harder to find as these folks try to influence the history of opinion. After a few hours of searching — thank goodness for the tenacious anarchy of the Internet — for a little while at least, you can see a temporary cache at  http://weirddream.com/. They will probably get attacked by lawyers, guns and money, so see it fast before it melts away quicker than an Arctic glacier. And I am not sure what this says about Rolling Stone magazine — these were both great stories,  but it says a lot about how journalism becomes history on the Internet.    Back to the ice report in the current issue. Hope it’s still there.