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.

Comments

Re: Corporate interests

[Required Snark]

Gore is right: the science is settled. In fact, it's been understood for nearly 200 years.

The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence was further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838, and reasoned from experimental observations by John Tyndall in 1859, and more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

In 1917 Alexander Graham Bell wrote “[The unchecked burning of fossil fuels] would have a sort of greenhouse effect”, and “The net result is the greenhouse becomes a sort of hot-house.” Bell went on to also advocate for the use of alternate energy sources, such as solar energy.

The basic mechanism is straightforward, even thought the physical system has many interacting processes.

The Earth receives energy from the Sun in the form UV, visible, and near IR radiation, most of which passes through the atmosphere without being absorbed. Of the total amount of energy available at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), about 50% is absorbed at the Earth's surface. Because it is warm, the surface radiates far IR thermal radiation that consists of wavelengths that are predominantly much longer than the wavelengths that were absorbed (the overlap between the incident solar spectrum and the terrestrial thermal spectrum is small enough to be neglected for most purposes). Most of this thermal radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere and re-radiated both upwards and downwards; that radiated downwards is absorbed by the Earth's surface. This trapping of long-wavelength thermal radiation leads to a higher equilibrium temperature than if the atmosphere were absent.

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.

Strengthening of the greenhouse effect through human activities is known as the enhanced (or anthropogenic) greenhouse effect. This increase in radiative forcing from human activity is attributable mainly to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to the latest Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations".

CO2 is produced by fossil fuel burning and other activities such as cement production and tropical deforestation. Measurements of CO2 from the Mauna Loa observatory show that concentrations have increased from about 313 ppm in 1960 to about 389 ppm in 2010. It reached the 400ppm milestone on May 9, 2013. The current observed amount of CO2 exceeds the geological record maxima (~300 ppm) from ice core data. The effect of combustion-produced carbon dioxide on the global climate, a special case of the greenhouse effect first described in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, has also been called the Callendar effect.

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.

Re:Yes, it's a conflict of interest.

[Idarubicin]

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.

Re:disclosure

[Obfuscant]

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.