Ross Gelbspan, Who Exposed Roots of Climate Change Deniers, Dies at 84

Ross Gelbspan, an investigative journalist whose reporting on climate change exposed a campaign of disinformation by oil and gas lobbyists to sow doubt about global warming — a denialism that was embraced by Republican officials and, in some cases, by a credulous news media — died on Jan. 27 at his home in Boston. He was 84.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Anne Gelbspan, said.

Mr. Gelbspan’s career included reporting on dissidents in the Soviet Union and on F.B.I. harassment of domestic critics, and his interest in the climate crisis, like those other subjects, came from a sense of outrage that powerful interests were suppressing information needed for democracy.

“I didn’t get into the climate issue because I love the trees — I tolerate the trees,” he said on YouTube last year. “I got into the issue because I learned the coal industry was paying a handful of scientists under the table to say nothing was happening to the climate.”

In a 1995 cover story for Harper’s Magazine headlined “The Heat Is On,” which he expanded into a 1997 book with the same title, Mr. Gelbspan shined a light on a group of scientists that coal and oil groups had paid to tell lawmakers and journalists that global warming wasn’t a serious threat. He dug up a 1991 memo from the fossil fuel lobby calling for a strategy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” At a news conference, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said he was reading it.

“In ‘The Heat Is On,’ Ross was the first to do a serious debunking of the campaign by the oil and coal companies to promote and finance a pseudoscientific narrative of denial,” Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the magazine The American Prospect, to which Mr. Gelbspan