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How One Climate-Change Skeptic Has Profited From Corporate Interests
Lasrick writes Elected officials who want to block the EPA and legislation on climate change frequently refer to a handful of scientists who dispute anthropogenic climate change. One of scientists they quote most often is Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun's energy can largely explain recent global warming. Newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon has made a fortune 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 Koch Brothers are cited as a source of Dr. Soon's funding.
If the fossil fuel industry wants to spend their money, that sounds great. I am not going to complain that they are wasting their money, and research in to alternative reasons why the climate is changing is important. As for declaring where his funding comes from, why? A scientific paper must stand alone, and not be judged by any other standard than if its logic is correct and if it is repeatable. All research is funded by someone, and no one is going to fund a paper that they have no conflicts of interest in. Probably far more worrisome is that each and every researcher has a huge personal and professional conflict of interest to have their research hypothesis proved correct and find interesting publishable results. That the funding also ubiquitously comes partied have how huge expectations of getting the results they want can also cause problems, but since no one has yet found a way to conduct research for free, it is not a solvable problem.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Zero. Gore put his money where his mouth was and made an educational movie, the profit went straight back into his educational foundation, not his pocket. Gore is worth ~$100m, none of it has come from his activism on AGW, that activity has COST him money.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The basic mechanism is straightforward, even thought the physical system has many interacting processes.
The key observation is that human activity has changed the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and this has changed the equilibrium temperature of the system.
Al Gore, although not a scientist by training, is smart enough to understand this. You, on the other hand, are too biased and stupid to accept facts that have been well known for a long time.
Just to make sure that your are up to speed on basic facts, the world is not flat, the earth revolves around the sun, and the universe is more then 5000 years old. Glad that I could clear these things up for you.
Why is Snark Required?
Dr. Soon may even truly believe his science is valid, but the funding he receives creates a lopsided megaphone which unfairly skews the perception of the debate.
Having a conflict of interest is understandable; hiding a conflict of interest is problematic.
By the same token, all scientists who receive funding from the pharmaceutical industry or groups they influence, should be barred from publishing papers on vaccine safety.
Scientists who receive funding from, for example, the pharmaceutical industry are expected to fully and explicitly disclose potentially conflicting interests--and by golly, they do. It's taken quite seriously, actually. If you look at any article in a respectable medical journal today, you'll find a section of the manuscript that's explicitly headed with Conflicting interests: or something synonymous. It will appear on every article, even on the ones where it's followed by "None declared" or the like, just so that it's clear that the journal asked for and got an on-the-record response from the article's authors. It doesn't remove the potential bias associated with outside funding, but it at least makes the potential for bias transparent.
Lying about competing interests - even through omission - is looked on very poorly by serious, credible medical researchers. Interestingly, one of the many, many types of misconduct engaged in by Andrew Wakefield was his failure to disclose significant financial interests when he published his (now-retracted and thoroughly discredited) Lancet paper suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. (Wakefield wasn't receiving pharmaceutical money, of course; he collected almost half a million pounds from lawyers involved in an anti-MMR lawsuit.)
And while the practice of mandatory disclosure started with the medical journals, the expectation has gradually bled across into other fields as well, particularly among top-tier journals.
~Idarubicin
Bullshit. Papers directly supported by funding/grants should, and usually do, thank/credit the sources. But just because someone funded you for one thing doesn't mean you have to disclose that in every paper you write that is remotely related.
Papers directly supported by funding/grants usually don't thank/credit sources (or maybe it's just so small that I never noticed it?).
Also, keep in mind that he got the $1.2M over the last decade
So.....$120k per year? That's not actually very much.
in 2004...that was back before "global warming" became "climate change".
'Climate change' and 'global warming' have been used interchangeably long before 2004.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Papers directly supported by funding/grants usually don't thank/credit sources (or maybe it's just so small that I never noticed it?).
Every paper I've ever seen in geosciences credits the public funding agency as part of the grant requirements. Not just "usually do", it's all do.
A paper funded by private sources will credit what is required by that source. Carnegie-Mellon, etc, usually do, but it isn't required. It's polite to do so as a way of saying "thanks". The fact that someone hasn't doesn't mean anything.
So.....$120k per year? That's not actually very much.
That's a pittance. It will cover salary and benefits for one researcher. It won't cover much in the way of travel.
Compare that to other grants that cover the salaries of five or six researchers and travel to conferences in Hawaii or Spain or other nice places...
This is another example of "if we can't discredit the science, discredit the scientist for being paid to do research." That ignores all the scientists who are part of the consensus who are also paid to do research. No, nobody is pocketing the loot, it just shows up as salary. Salary for research that means that the scientist doesn't have to be paid on state money so he doesn't have to teach or do other stuff that is attached to non-grant research salary. A stable source of funding means you can hire people and build a lab and build a reputation that helps get more money. The more people you pay, the higher your status. The more stuff you get from the University because your overhead fees benefit them, too.
> NASA, NOAA point out warming has stalled, no temperature has exceeded 1998's.
You deniers have got to stop using that one.
By now, we've all figured out that any mention of 1998 is just cherry-picking at its worst.
All you do is identify yourself as a zero-knowledge shill that should be ignored.
He's in good company here, this scientist in 2008, using the same hypothesis correctly predicts the awful and cold winters of 2013 and 2014
The winters of 2013 and 2014 were in the top-10 warmest. Not sure why you would refer to them as "awful and cold".
You think it's warming? Show me your data that proves NASA wrong then.
How about NASA's own data where they show it's warming ?
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
His evidence has been debunked. The scientists whose research he used have called him out for misrepresenting the results, i.e. he basically lied about them to con others in his papers. This was done years ago, the guy is basically a fraud.
"the effect of CO2 is problematic, because it is mixing with other gasses and that makes a difference". Mixing how? Chemically? Via radiation? Interacting with clouds?
The different gases overlap in their absorption bands, so that makes it hard to say what the individual contribution is. Also, while CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere, water vapour is not. For instance, most of the water vapour is in the lower layers of the atmosphere, and in the arctic areas there's very little water vapour at all, so in higher layers and in the arctic, greenhouse effect is mostly determined by CO2. In humid layers, water vapor is the main contributor.
You've never heard of Willy Soon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy
The "deal with science" bit is (among others) "On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late-20th Century Warmth", Eos, Volume 84, No. 27, 8 July 2003.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
your precious warmism sources consistently start THEIR charts in 1979, and if that isn't cherry-picking, nothing is.
That didn't seem right to me, so I did a google image search for "global temperature" and looked at the starting year of the graphs. They are (in the order returned by google): 1880, 1978, 1880, 1979, 1860, 1880, 1000, 1900, 1880, 1992, 1979, 1850, 2500BC, 0AD, 1880...
My admittedly lazy way of researching this doesn't seem to lend any support for your claim. In fact 1880 or so is a far more popular starting year and more importantly, it doesn't seem to matter to the overall point if the graph starts in 1880 or 1980. Where's the cherry picking?
Ironically if I make the search "warmism global temperature" instead, the starting years are 1880, 1880, 1880, 1880, 1880, 1950, 1950, 1880, 1880, 1979 (finally!), 1881, 1880, 1880, 1978...
Looks to me like everyone consistently uses 1880 for whatever reason (perhaps that's when we started recording data?) Also note: in spite of the fact that 1880 is so overwhelmingly popular -- these are different graphs.
You are obviously not a scientist.
If you have "blindly done research" and you're publishing in a reputable journal... then you'll get your ass handed to you if your science isn't correct (trust me: my ass still stings from some of the scathing reviews I've received on a few of my papers).
The funding agency DOES NOT MATTER... if proper peer review is undertaken. If the science is good... then the science is good... this isn't an opinion piece in the New York Times paid for by big oil...
Astrophysics is a specialty directly relevant to the radiative transfer of energy between the sun and the earth, and the behavior of the earth-sun system. Aerospace engineering is not as good a match for being an authority in that area. And maybe people might not know the difference without checking, but it is trivial to check. The bigger issue is the honesty of Dr. Soon. He never studied at Harvard or got a paycheck from Harvard. He did not study astrophysics. That he would allow Fox News to call him a "Harvard Astrophysicist" suggests he is dishonest. Failing to disclose his funding is another sign of dishonesty. This is dishonesty related to his authority and profession. It is small wonder he easily becomes hostile over these issues.
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