Paging Rep. Inhofe: One of your chief denial "scientists" was exposed

[Ulaven_Demorte]

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

More Here:
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher

See VetteBigot, this how you don't infringe on someone's copyrighted material.

This sort of tactic comes directly from Big Tobacco's playbook from the 60's. They paid doctors to not only say that cigarettes weren't bad for you, but even some that claimed they were good for you. Oil companies and energy providers reliant on burning coal are employing "scientists" to pump out papers in denial of man's impact on global climate change.

 

[1sickbastard]

Okay, so the point here is non-disclosure of his funding sources which, one would assume, indicated bias (potential or actual) in his published works, yes?

If that is the nub of the issue at hand, then the questions, at least in my mind, follow:
Was his work published in peer reviewed journals?
Was his work actually reviewed by peers in the relevant fields?
Did his work pass the peer review process?
Did he correct & edit his work in response to any criticism, ensuring his methodology was proper, his reasoning sound and his conclusions to have any merit as solid science?
Were his conclusions then tested so as to be confirmed or falsified?

While I agree that his non-disclosure of funding does tarnish his reputation for ethics, I'm not sure that it logically follows that it discounts his work as a scientist, so long as he was doing good science, if you see what I mean. (Argumentum ad hominem)

 

[KingOrfeo]

Okay, so the point here is non-disclosure of his funding sources which, one would assume, indicated bias (potential or actual) in his published works, yes?

The point is that no climatologists not funded by the fossil-fuel industry appear to be denialists, and that ought to tell us something about AGW denialism.

 

[1sickbastard]

The point is that no climatologists not funded by the fossil-fuel industry appear to be denialists, and that ought to tell us something about AGW denialism.

Look, if you mean that the funding means that the conclusion is pre-determined and the study designed to support the conclusion, that's an issue.

However, the questions asked:

Was his work published in peer reviewed journals?
Was his work actually reviewed by peers in the relevant fields?
Did his work pass the peer review process?
Did he correct & edit his work in response to any criticism, ensuring his methodology was proper, his reasoning sound and his conclusions to have any merit as solid science?
Were his conclusions then tested so as to be confirmed or falsified?

Address the actual science supporting those studies.
My contention is that THOSE questions are the RELEVANT questions, and should determine if the science is solid or not.

To paraphrase HL Mencken: The test of an idea is the idea itself, not the source of the idea.
Or is it your contention that the source of an idea is more important than the actual idea?

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Look, if you mean that the funding means that the conclusion is pre-determined and the study designed to support the conclusion, that's an issue.

However, the questions asked:

Address the actual science supporting those studies.
My contention is that THOSE questions are the RELEVANT questions, and should determine if the science is solid or not.

To paraphrase HL Mencken: The test of an idea is the idea itself, not the source of the idea.
Or is it your contention that the source of an idea is more important than the actual idea?

Just as an example,

The first paper he published as first author with Sallie Baliunas in 1999: "Environmental effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide" was rebutted by a paper by 13 other scientists who had three main issues with the paper. Their three main objections: 1. Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; 2. they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric mean temperature anomalies; and 3. they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends.

Ultimately five of the ten members of Climate Research's editorial board resigned in protest over what they felt had been a failure of the peer review process on the part of the journal in publishing Soon's paper. Hans von Storch resigned and openly condemned the journal's review process in his resignation letter: "The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked ... the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given."

Another editor, Tom Wigley, wrote to a colleague that "I have had papers that I refereed (and soundly rejected), under De Freitas’s editorship, appear later in the journal -- without me seeing any response from the authors. As I have said before to others, his strategy is first to use mainly referees that are in the anti-greenhouse community, and second, if a paper is rejected, to ignore that review and seek another more ‘sympathic’ reviewer. In the second case he can then (with enough reviews) claim that the honest review was an outlier."

Wigley supported the suggestion of an ethics committee, which he would be willing to serve on. Until then, he urged others to "dissociate themselves from Climate Research". The editors who had not resigned appeared to him to be mostly "a rogues’ gallery of skeptics", and he thought any reputable scientists still listed as editors should resign

The research budget for the paper was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute.

Soon has a history of publishing junk science in return for funding from those with a vested interest in outcomes that he provides without fail.

 

[1sickbastard]

Just as an example,

The first paper he published as first author with Sallie Baliunas in 1999: "Environmental effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide" was rebutted by a paper by 13 other scientists who had three main issues with the paper. Their three main objections: 1. Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; 2. they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric mean temperature anomalies; and 3. they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends.

Ultimately five of the ten members of Climate Research's editorial board resigned in protest over what they felt had been a failure of the peer review process on the part of the journal in publishing Soon's paper. Hans von Storch resigned and openly condemned the journal's review process in his resignation letter: "The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked ... the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given."

Another editor, Tom Wigley, wrote to a colleague that "I have had papers that I refereed (and soundly rejected), under De Freitas’s editorship, appear later in the journal -- without me seeing any response from the authors. As I have said before to others, his strategy is first to use mainly referees that are in the anti-greenhouse community, and second, if a paper is rejected, to ignore that review and seek another more ‘sympathic’ reviewer. In the second case he can then (with enough reviews) claim that the honest review was an outlier."

Wigley supported the suggestion of an ethics committee, which he would be willing to serve on. Until then, he urged others to "dissociate themselves from Climate Research". The editors who had not resigned appeared to him to be mostly "a rogues’ gallery of skeptics", and he thought any reputable scientists still listed as editors should resign

The research budget for the paper was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute.

Soon has a history of publishing junk science in return for funding from those with a vested interest in outcomes that he provides without fail.

So Soon has demonstrated record of poor science as evidenced via peer review.

Fair enough. His ethics over funding are perhaps a consequence of his lack of ability as a scientist. Perhaps his funding is what caused his poor performance as a scientist.

Either way, for me, it's the point that he's a poor scientist and his hypothesis don't survive the peer review process that I consider relevant.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

Super-Duper Big: Harvard-Smithsonian Harboring Koch-Funded Climate Denier Wei-Hock Soon

Documents uncovered by Greenpeace reveal that Dr. Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon has taken money from the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, coal giant Southern Company, and others to produce "deliverables" that push the long-debunked claim that solar activity, not fossil fuel pollution, drives global warming.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/...ring-Koch-Funded-Climate-Denier-Wei-Hock-Soon

Senator Edward J. Markey is calling on coal and oil companies to reveal whether they are funding scientific climate change studies after his staff reviewed newly obtained documents illuminating the relationship between a researcher for a Cambridge-based institution and energy interests. . . .

“For years, fossil fuel interests and front groups have attacked climate scientists and legislation to cut carbon pollution using junk science and debunked arguments,” Markey said in a statement. “The American public deserve an honest debate that isn’t polluted by the best junk science fossil fuel interests can buy. That’s why I will be launching this investigation to see how widespread this denial-for-hire scheme stretches within the anti-climate action cabal.”

-Boston Globe

 

[Busybody]

The Smearing of Willie Soon



A blockbuster peer-reviewed paper in the Science Bulletin, authored by Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, David Legates and Wei-Hock (“Willie”) Soon, is roiling the global warming Left. The paper identifies flaws in the computer models that predict major global warming–which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the models’ predictions have flopped. It concludes that due to mathematical errors, the models overstate the impact of CO2 on the climate by a factor of three times.

So far, global warming Leftists haven’t been able to find any technical flaws in the Science Bulletin paper, which you can download here. So, naturally, they have resorted to smearing its authors. Greenpeace focused on Dr. Soon, an astrophysicist who works part time for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Greenpeace served a Freedom of Information Act request on the Smithsonian, a public entity, for documents relating to funding of Dr. Soon’s projects. Greenpeace claims that these documents show that Dr. Soon’s projects received funding from Southern Company Services that was not disclosed in certain papers that Dr. Soon published.

The New York Times, having been fed the documents by Greenpeace, eagerly took up the cudgels for global warming Leftists, publishing a supposed expose under the headline, “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher.” The Times and its fellows on the Left argue that Dr. Soon should have disclosed certain corporate funding with respect to past projects–not, however, the recent paper that the Left seeks to discredit.

You can read about the controversy here and here, and draw your own conclusions. I am not able to sort out whether Dr. Soon should have made additional disclosures with regard to the funding of projects completed years ago; in any event, that has nothing to do with the current paper on the defects in the alarmists’ models.

This is the point I really want to make: the New York Times and other pro-government sources assume that government funding of research is lily-white, while corporate funding is inherently suspect. This is ridiculous. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that the American environmental movement is funded by Russia’s state-controlled oil company. Also the fact that Greenpeace gets money ($203 million) from the American Petroleum Foundation, with another $214 million coming from the Chamber of Commerce.

That isn’t the real scandal. The real scandal is that the overwhelming majority of money spent on climate research comes from governments. Governments, most notably ours, fund climate hysteria to the tune of billions of dollars per year. Why? Because the whole point of global warming alarmism is to persuade voters to cede more control over Western economies to government. (No one actually cares about CO2 emissions from India or China, which together vastly exceed ours.)

Governments fund climate research–but only climate research that feeds alarmism–because they are the main parties in interest in the climate debate. Governments stand to gain trillions of dollars in revenue and unprecedented power if voters in the U.S. and other Western countries can be stampeded into ceding more power to them, based on transparently bad science.

The New York Times and other left-wing news sources assume that government funding is no problem, but private funding is a scandal. I think the opposite is true. It is a scandal that our government spends billions of dollars, enriching many compliant climate scientists–Michael Mann is just one of many examples–to promote its own power. Thank goodness that there is a tiny amount of independent funding that supports objective research and contributes to a debate that is being won, hands down, by climate realists like Dr. Soon

 

[BotanyBoy]

The Smearing of Willie Soon


So, naturally, they have resorted to smearing its authors.

So you're claiming he has no history of questionable ethics nor a conflict of interest with his funding riding on RW fringe loons backing him so long as he says what they want?

You saying that never happened?

 

[dan_c00000]

Okay, so the point here is non-disclosure of his funding sources which, one would assume, indicated bias (potential or actual) in his published works, yes?

If that is the nub of the issue at hand, then the questions, at least in my mind, follow:
Was his work published in peer reviewed journals?
Was his work actually reviewed by peers in the relevant fields?
Did his work pass the peer review process?
Did he correct & edit his work in response to any criticism, ensuring his methodology was proper, his reasoning sound and his conclusions to have any merit as solid science?
Were his conclusions then tested so as to be confirmed or falsified?

While I agree that his non-disclosure of funding does tarnish his reputation for ethics, I'm not sure that it logically follows that it discounts his work as a scientist, so long as he was doing good science, if you see what I mean. (Argumentum ad hominem)

You have to read the whole article:

Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change....“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” [said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan].

Also, you need to realize that rich guys spread their money all over the world to deny climate change. Soon is connected to someone in New Zealand named Chris de Freitas:

First, three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over its publication, including the incoming editor-in-chief who charged that “…some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.”

This highly unusual mass resignation was followed by an even more unusual public statement from the publisher that acknowledged flaws in the journal’s editorial process.

Three editorial resignations and a publisher’s acknowledgement of editorial flaws are not standard scientific practice and call for further examination of the authors and the accepting editor.

The first author of this paper, Dr Willie Soon, is an astrophysicist by training. In U.S. congressional testimony, he identified his “training” in paleoclimatology as attendance at workshops, conferences, and summer schools. (The people who teach such summer schools, actual climate scientists, published a scathing rebuttal of Soon’s paper.)

Undaunted, Dr Soon has since become an expert on polar bears, publishing a paper that accused the U.S. Geological Survey of being “unscientific” in its reports about the risks faced by polar bears from climate change.

Most recently, Dr Soon has become an expert on mercury poisoning, using the Wall Street Journal as a platform to assuage fears about mercury-contaminated fish because, after all, “mercury has always existed naturally in Earth’s environment.”

Lest one wonder what links paleoclimatology, Arctic ecology, and environmental epidemiology, the answer is not any conventional area of academic expertise but ideology.

As Professor Naomi Oreskes and historian Erik Conway have shown in their insightful book, Merchants of Doubt, the hallmark of organized denial is that the same pseudo-experts emerge from the same shadowy “think” tanks over and over to rail against what they call “junk science”.

Whether it is the link between smoking and lung cancer, between mercury and water poisoning, or between carbon emissions and climate change, ideology inverts facts and ethics whenever overwhelming scientific evidence suggests the need to regulate economic activity.

So what of the editor who accepted the flawed Climate Research paper, Dr Chris de Freitas of Auckland?

Take a look at some of the stuff this guy has done and you'll see that he's on the same payroll as Soon was/is.

 

[NeverEndingMe]

just because you wear tights...doesn't make you a military person

 

[RobDownSouth]

Okay, so the point here is non-disclosure of his funding sources which, one would assume, indicated bias (potential or actual) in his published works, yes?

If that is the nub of the issue at hand, then the questions, at least in my mind, follow:
Was his work published in peer reviewed journals?
Was his work actually reviewed by peers in the relevant fields?
Did his work pass the peer review process?
Did he correct & edit his work in response to any criticism, ensuring his methodology was proper, his reasoning sound and his conclusions to have any merit as solid science?
Were his conclusions then tested so as to be confirmed or falsified?

While I agree that his non-disclosure of funding does tarnish his reputation for ethics, I'm not sure that it logically follows that it discounts his work as a scientist, so long as he was doing good science, if you see what I mean. (Argumentum ad hominem)

It taints his entire body of research, whether disclosed or not. The fact that "Doctor" Soon did not disclose his funding sources for years permanently disqualifies any and all research he has done from consideration.

If you received one million dollars from folks with a tremendous interest in denying global warming (Southern Company and Koch brothers), there is a presumption of bias, no matter how "solid" the underlying science is.

 

[KingOrfeo]

Okay, so the point here is non-disclosure of his funding sources which, one would assume, indicated bias (potential or actual) in his published works, yes?

If that is the nub of the issue at hand, then the questions, at least in my mind, follow:
Was his work published in peer reviewed journals?
Was his work actually reviewed by peers in the relevant fields?
Did his work pass the peer review process?
Did he correct & edit his work in response to any criticism, ensuring his methodology was proper, his reasoning sound and his conclusions to have any merit as solid science?
Were his conclusions then tested so as to be confirmed or falsified?

While I agree that his non-disclosure of funding does tarnish his reputation for ethics, I'm not sure that it logically follows that it discounts his work as a scientist, so long as he was doing good science, if you see what I mean. (Argumentum ad hominem)

See the Soon and Balunias controversy.

The Soon and Baliunas controversy was an incident in which a paper published by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas in the journal Climate Research led to the resignation of a number of its editors. The paper reviewed over 200 previous papers on global warming and alleged that the 20th century hadn't shown any especially large amount of warming.

A number of the scientists whose research was used in the paper complained that their work had been misrepresented. Other scientists trashed everything from the paper's methodology to its conclusions. Due to the number of complaints, editor-in-chief Hans von Storch, wrote an editorial on the state of the review process at the journal and questioned the judgment of Chris De Freitas, who had been responsible for the acceptance of Soon and Baliunas's paper. When De Freitas objected, von Storch and a number of other editors resigned from the journal. Von Storch said afterward that deniers "had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common."[1] Claire Goodess, one of the editors who resigned, said:

"Some journalists are digging even deeper – into the sources of Soon and Baliunas’s funding. Their Climate Research paper includes acknowledgements to NOAA, NASA and the US Air Force, as well as to the American Petroleum Institute. Yet NOAA flatly deny having ever funded the authors for such work, while the other two bodies admit to funding them, but for work on solar variability – not proxy climate records, the topic that has caused such a storm."[2]

Michael Mann criticized the paper:

"Serious scientists will tell you over and over again that this was a deeply flawed study that should never have been published… Scientifically this study was considered not even worthy of a response. But because it was used politically, to justify policy changes in the administration, people in my field felt they had to speak out."[2]

After the Bush administration attempted to include the paper in an EPA report, Jim Inhofe (Wingnut-OK) said:

"The powerful new findings of this most comprehensive of studies shiver the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd."[2]

The paper was later re-published with additional "research" added by the Idso family. Of course, Soon and Baliunas's work is still an article of faith among the denier crowd. After all, "it's peer-reviewed!"

E-mails regarding Climate Research and the controversy were quote mined during the Climategate investigations to make it appear as if scientists had been attempting to "censor skeptics" or "subvert the peer-review process" in some way.

Soon and Baliunas

Soon and Baliunas have acted as a climate denial duo for quite some time. They are employed both by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank founded by Frederick Seitz. When Seitz had begun to help distribute the Oregon Petition, Soon, Baliunas, and Arthur Robinson attached a brief "review" of denialist research to the petition. Robinson's organization has also published "research" by them claiming that global warming isn't bad because "carbon dioxide is plant food!"[3]

In further "research," the two claim that solar cycles were the largely to blame for any increased warming. The solar cycle hypothesis has become a common talking point among deniers, but repeatedly debunked. Solar activity has actually been decreasing in recent history. UV rays are also proposed to be causing this effect, but other research shows that they have only a local effect on temperatures at best, not a global one. The hypothesis also fails to explain a variety of other phenomena, such as the warming at higher latitudes.[4] However, the two have been pushing this talking point hard for many years.[5]

Baliunas' "skepticism" dates back to 1995 with her adventures in ozone denialism when she testified before Congress that CFCs were not responsible for the hole in the ozone layer (ironically, a few weeks before the Nobel in chemistry was awarded to the originators of the theory).[6]

Soon himself has admitted to receiving loads of cash from oil and coal companies. He has also denied health risks related to mercury emissions from coal plants. For this, he was rewarded with column inches in (where else?) the Wall Street Journal.[7][8] In 2015, Greenpeace revealed that Soon had received $1.25 million in funding from energy companies over a period of 14 years.[9]

 

[RobDownSouth]

Okay, so the point here is non-disclosure of his funding sources which, one would assume, indicated bias (potential or actual) in his published works, yes?

If that is the nub of the issue at hand, then the questions, at least in my mind, follow:
Was his work published in peer reviewed journals?
Was his work actually reviewed by peers in the relevant fields?
Did his work pass the peer review process?
Did he correct & edit his work in response to any criticism, ensuring his methodology was proper, his reasoning sound and his conclusions to have any merit as solid science?
Were his conclusions then tested so as to be confirmed or falsified?

While I agree that his non-disclosure of funding does tarnish his reputation for ethics, I'm not sure that it logically follows that it discounts his work as a scientist, so long as he was doing good science, if you see what I mean. (Argumentum ad hominem)

It appears your questions were answered today.

Long story short: Dr. Willie Soon's research has been routinely criticized and failed to pass academic muster on a number of different occasions. SkepticalScience website has a special section devoted to debunking the so-called science in Soon's research.

Finding out he had an undisclosed financial stake in his research disqualifies him permanently from rational discussion.