Climate-Denier Scientist Caught Accepting Bribes from Koch Brothers

Colpy

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Nov 5, 2005
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Another day, another attack on the integrity of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, this time in the New York Times.

I first became aware of Soon in 2009 when reading through the Climategate emails. One of them was a jocular suggestion by a warmist called Tom Wigley as to how best to smear Soon and his co-author Sallie Baliunas.
Might be interesting to see how frequently Soon and Baliunas, individually, are cited (as astronomers). Are they any good in their own fields? Perhaps we could start referring to them as astrologers (excusable as…’oops, just a typo’).
You might be wondering what Soon and Baliunas had done to incur the wrath of the climate alarmist establishment. Well, they’d just published a meta-analysis of all the papers which had been written on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). What their paper showed is that contrary to claims by one Michael Mann (the name may be familiar), the MWP was not a small, localised event but global, big and widespread.
So the memo went out from the Hockey Team (the uber-vindictive Mann and his lickspittle posse) to get Soon, and they’ve been going at him ever since: not by criticising the quality of his science — that would be too difficult because his science is impeccable — but simply by trying to make his life miserable, deny him tenure, and to smear him as compromised and corrupt.
The reason for the latest attack on Soon is that he is the co-author, with Christopher Monckton et al, of a paper published earlier this year in the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences journal Science Bulletin.
This study — Why Models Run Hot — infuriated the alarmist establishment, first because it was unusually popular (receiving over 10,000 views — thousands more than most scientific papers get) and second because it made a mockery of their cherished computer models.
As Paul Driessen explains:
Results from an irreducibly simple climate model,” concluded that, once discrepancies in IPCC computer models are taken into account, the impact of CO2-driven manmade global warming over the next century (and beyond) is likely to be “no more than one-third to one-half of the IPCC’s current projections” – that is, just 1-2 degrees C (2-4 deg F) by 2100! That’s akin to the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and would be beneficial, not harmful.
Rather than attack the substance of the paper, the warmists reverted to their usual tricks, lead by Kert Davies, an activist lawyer who works for a Greenpeace front organisation called Climate Investigations Center.
Climate Investigations Center executive director (and former top Greenpeace official) Kert Davies told the Boston Globe it “simply cannot be true” that the authors have no conflict of interest over their study, considering their alleged industry funding sources and outside consulting fees. Davies singled out Dr. Willie Soon, saying the Harvard researcher received more than $1 million from companies that support studies critical of manmade climate change claims. An allied group launched a petition drive to have Dr. Soon fired.
Davies’ libelous assertions have no basis in fact. Not one of these four authors received a dime in grants or other payments for researching and writing their climate models paper. Every one of them did the work on his own time. The only money contributed to the Science Bulletin effort went to paying the “public access” fees, so that people could read their study for free.
I spoke to Soon last night. He told me that of course he receives private funding for his research: he has to because it’s his only way of making ends meet, especially since the Alarmist establishment launched its vendetta against him when, from 2009 onwards, he became more outspoken in his critiques of global warming theory.
Harvard-Smithsonian strove to make his life harder and harder, first by banning him from working on anything even remotely connected with issues like climate change or CO2, then by moving his office away from the astrophysics department to a remote area Soon calls Siberia. What the faculty couldn’t quite do was actually sack Soon because it had no cause: he was producing too many quality papers, and he was also bringing in too much money (40 per cent of which goes straight into the faculty coffers).
So there’s nothing new or scandalous about this latest New York Times hit job on poor Willie Soon. It’s just a continuation of a vendetta which has been waged for years against an honest, decent, hardworking — and incredibly brave — scientist who refuses to toe the official (and increasingly discredited) line on man-made global warming.
What most definitely is scandalous is the vile hypocrisy of Soon’s harrassment by the warmist establishment, which receives billions every year from the US government, left-wing charities, and billionaire activists like Tom Steyer and George Soros to prop up their bankrupt cause by promoting exactly the kind of junk science which Soon (and similarly principled scientists) have made it their business to shred.
The warmists are losing their argument. Their desperation is beginning to show.


NYT Smears Scientist Willie Soon for Telling the Truth About 'Global Warming' - Breitbart

Your crappy opinion is invalid, way more people have died by the actions capitalists and continue to. There's also nothing inherently dangerous in the communist ideology. I can not say the same for the climate-denying ideal, which has the real possibility to result in our doom.

I see.....having latched on to one failed pseudo-religion, you have decided to adopt another......
 

waldo

House Member
Oct 19, 2009
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so odd that you won't name a single paper! When you throw down a question like you did, your (denier) implication is to suggest that he has 'standing paper(s)... work that hasn't been discredited'.
Has his work been discredited? Do his papers still stand?

can you name... even a single (climate science related) peer-reviewed paper... that is, as you say, 'standing & credited'? Just what has the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, Southern Company, the Koch Brothers, etc., been getting for all their direct funding of "Willie"?
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oh my, Colpy!!! "Delingpole... reference linked from breitbart"!!! Well done, Colpy... well done! C'mon, Colpy... please champion that paper "Willie" co-authors with lawdy Monckton... in the "prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences journal Science Bulletin". Sure you can!
 
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Blackleaf

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Oct 9, 2004
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Leading Climate-Denier
I can understanding denying Global Warming - that's the commonsense position which most of humanity follows - but denying that we have a climate?! Very weird.
 

Angstrom

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May 8, 2011
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more like we affect the environment but that's not really as pay-off sexy as the alarmists well know.

For all we know changing the weather could save us from a global killer condition we had not anticipated. Why would you spend you're time on earth all worried about something so absolutly random as weather. People really have to much time to waist.

Global killers happen all the time, who knows, we could all die tomorrow. Why waist you're energy on something we have absolutly no way of being sure if it's good or bad?
 
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Tonington

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Oct 27, 2006
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Rather than attack the substance of the paper, the warmists reverted to their usual tricks, lead by Kert Davies, an activist lawyer who works for a Greenpeace front organisation called Climate Investigations Center.

Lots of good points in this article. It's ironic, because a lot of it is exactly what happens when the deniers respond to a new paper from the 'warmists'. This site is a prime example, someone posts a paper, and various reasons offered that the findings can't possibly be correct include the funding scientists receive, the methods used to keep the surface record robust, and climategate.

I don't actually give a $hit that Soon took money from the Koch brothers. Most academics are required to look for outside funding, and they'll get it wherever they can. The Koch brothers also donated money to the BEST project, which examined the surface temperature record. The strength of the methods proposed and used were being lauded by the deniers long before the results came out. When the results were published? Silence. The results affirmed the surface records produced by NOAA, CRU and NASA GISS. Yes, believe it or not making adjustments to data doesn't mean the results are fraudulent, or wrong...to suggest otherwise is to be ignorant of what is actually done.

The source of funding doesn't mean the results are wrong. That's a logical fallacy. Apparently, like Gerry is asking for, it's too much for people to actually read something and explain why they think the results are wrong. That latest paper of Soon et al. referred to in this article, what does it actually say? They think that the universe must be confined by the process design limits that engineers impose on their work. There is no explanation why feedback factors cannot exceed this parameter. Further, there's no use of actual data to test the validity of this parameter. So when they get a modelling result that is 1/3 of the IPCC response, well that's actually a product of an imposed limit which they did not test the validity of, or support with references to other works. Not very convincing results.

See, how hard is that? Read, ask questions. Who cares where the money came from? When the science is good, it doesn't matter.
 

Blackleaf

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Lots of good points in this article. It's ironic, because a lot of it is exactly what happens when the deniers respond to a new paper from the 'warmists'. This site is a prime example, someone posts a paper, and various reasons offered that the findings can't possibly be correct include the funding scientists receive, the methods used to keep the surface record robust, and climategate.


The less gullible amongst us have long since learnt not to believe a word the Warmists say. Their "data" is very iffy and there's a lot of fiddling of the data going on. And you can't get much more blatant than fiddling figures which show the world has been getting colder over that last 100 years to make it look as though it's got warmer over the last 100 years. When a Warmist shows me a graph to show how much the world has warmed recently I automatically know that that means the world has got colder in recent years.

The Warmists really do have to cut it out. We just don't believe them anymore. The world is getting naturally colder. It's not getting warmer through the actions of humanity.
 

Blackleaf

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Oct 9, 2004
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Case in point.


Too right it is. Warmists' "data" is very suspect has has been found wanting on many occasions. Much of Warmists' data is the result of much fiddling of the figures. It's been proven that Warmists have fiddled with graphs which have shown cooling over the last 100 years to make it look as though they actually show Warming. Anybody in their right mind does not believe any "data" that the Warmists have come up with. They fiddle the real data - which often shows results which show there is no Global Warming - to make it look as though warming is real.
 

gerryh

Time Out
Nov 21, 2004
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Too right it is. Warmists' "data" is very suspect has has been found wanting on many occasions. Much of Warmists' data is the result of much fiddling of the figures. It's been proven that Warmists have fiddled with graphs which have shown cooling over the last 100 years to make it look as though they actually show Warming. Anybody in their right mind does not believe any "data" that the Warmists have come up with. They fiddle the real data - which often shows results which show there is no Global Warming - to make it look as though warming is real.


Do we just take your word for that or do you have some proof?
 

taxslave

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Nov 25, 2008
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Communism is about the working class being treated fairly.

Communism is about the many slaving and starving for the benefit of the few at the top.

Leading Climate-Denier Harvard Scientist Caught Accepting Bribes from Fossil-Fuel Corporations as well as the Koch Brothers








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.


Though Dr. Soon did not respond to questions about the documents, he has long stated that his corporate funding has not influenced his scientific findings.


The documents were obtained by Greenpeace, the environmental group, under the Freedom of Information Act. Greenpeace and an allied group, the Climate Investigations Center, shared them with several news organizations last week.




Environmentalists have long questioned Dr. Soon’s work, and his acceptance of funding from the fossil-fuel industry was previously known. But the full extent of the links was not; the documents show that corporate contributions were tied to specific papers and were not disclosed, as required by modern standards of publishing.




“What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.


Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on Friday that Dr. Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals.


“I think that’s inappropriate behavior,” Dr. Alcock said. “This frankly becomes a personnel matter, which we have to handle with Dr. Soon internally.”




more




http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/u...-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

So he was paid by industry. Big deal. That is not proof that his work in invalid. Someone has to pay for the research to prove the globull warming empire is a fraud.
 

Blackleaf

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Oct 9, 2004
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Do we just take your word for that or do you have some proof?


The proof is everywhere. Warmists fiddle their "data". We all remember the University of East Anglia incident. Time and time again Warmists receive data which shows that the world is cooler now than it was 100 years ago, yet they change the data to make it look as though it's been getting warmer, and then they release it out into the public and say: "Look! More proof of Global Warming!"

Even the recent news which stated that "2014 was the hottest year on record" - which was much trumpeted by the Warmists - turned out to be a con and a lie.

Why don't you do your own research instead of being gullible?
 

gerryh

Time Out
Nov 21, 2004
25,756
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The proof is everywhere. Warmists fiddle their "data". We all remember the University of East Anglia incident. Time and time again Warmists receive data which shows that the world is cooler now than it was 100 years ago, yet they change the data to make it look as though it's been getting warmer, and then they release it out into the public and say: "Look! More proof of Global Warming!"

Even the recent news that which stated that "2014 was the hottest year on record" - which was much trumpeted by the Warmists - turned out to be a con and a lie.

Why don't you do your own research instead of being gullible?


Ok, so the answer is no you don't have proof, and yes we have to take YOUR word for it. Got ya.