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Climate Skeptic Funded By Oil and Coal Companies
Honken writes with a report from The Guardian that "'One of the world's most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.' This somewhat contradicts that [Harvard researcher Willie] Soon in a 2003 US senate hearing said that he had 'not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any organisation that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.'"
There are indeed such websites:
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Willie_Soon#Funding
Not surprising; the main source of critiques that attempt to discredit climate science is the "Heartland Institute," which doesn't state its funding sources, except to say it's funded by "foundations and corporations"... but reading the budget information from Exxon Mobil shows those "foundations and corporations" tend to be fossil fuel companies, and fossil-fuel funded institutes like the American Petroleum Institute.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Please people RTF(biased)A carefully.
He didn't lie. They are taking a (true) statement he made in 2003 and then pointing at grants and stuff he received in 2005 and later then going "A HA! LIAR!"
Unless they have a quote of him saying he "would never ever take money from those groups ever" or time has suddently started working backwards I fail to see why people are up in arms or how this discredits him or his work.
He started out doing a bunch of research using a variety of funding sources. Took a certain position. Then as funding and open mindedness about the topic dried up he started accepting funding from the only sources that remained interested in paying for him to continue his work. I see nothing that would imply he started out chasing exxon et all with a "research slanted your way for cash" program.
Was there really any doubt that Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon were full of it?
Here's a thorough debunk of their most infamous paper.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXesBhYwdRo#t=2m00s
i.e. The one skeptics go crazy about how in emails, how other climate scientists said it shouldn't have even been published in the first place.
Lying to Congress is not a crime if you are not under oath. Typically, witnesses do not give oral testimony under oath except in confirmation hearings and investigations. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/98-392.pdf
But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world's largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.
Take "Greenpeace" with a grain of salt but that clearly says 2001 and 2002 which is before 2003 testimony, no?
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Ah the out-of-context quote, an outdated weapon from the age when it took effort to find the context, like throwing a spear at a tank.
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
He was saying that environmental policy affects economic policy, and that economic policy has become the sticking point to environmental policy change:
http://www.environmentaltrends.org/single/article/un-climate-talks-and-power-politics-its-not-about-the-temperature.html
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents. "Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.
Source, 2007.
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You're quite wrong, and all the people around me who are paid by grants agree.
A research scientist can make ten times as much money if s/he can make a potentially valid claim that pollution isn't hurting the environment. That's been true ever since Reagan took office, OK?
Politicians pay for what they want to hear, polluters pay (even more!) for what they want to hear, but nobody else wants to pay squat for research that makes no new claims or discoveries.
And yes, I have spent years working in an academic research institution funded by both private and public grants. My spouse and many of my friends still do; half our family income is based on grants.
What you are saying is simply not true. There is far, far more money available to scientists willing to deny so-called "global warming" (which is merely one symptom of excessive pollution, really) than to scientists who are not.
As my friend the historian once told me, "I can't make name for myself by saying Tacitus's histories are just fine, but I can get grants and book deals by claiming he dressed in women's underwear". In real life, you simply don't get grants by knuckling under to some other person's ideas. You get grants by challenging conventional wisdom, and proposing a means of validating your challenge.