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:disclosure

[mbone]

'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. Im a little curious if it is standard practice to not disclose this type of relationship. If it is, it is wrong. I see an ethics issue at hand

  Id like to see a breakdown on which scientists are getting paid and by whom in all their works.

Most of the scientists I know make a salary and that's it. A $ 100 honorarium (say for giving a talk to the public) is regarded as a big deal.

Re:disclosure

[Xylantiel]

Apparently you don't read many papers. It is very common, I daresay almost ubiquitous, for scientific papers to say "this work supported by X".

Re:disclosure

[TapeCutter]

The thousands of scientists who help compile the IPCC reports do it for free, none of them get a dime from the IPCC, at best they get their regular salary from their university. The IPCC has a $5-6M annual budget, most of it is spent on conference rooms and transport, there are a handful of full time admin staff. The IPCC accounts are published on their website for all to see. The money comes from individual nation states, last time I look there were about 130 nations on the donor list representing every colour of the political rainbow.

Most people in the climate science community will not be surprised that Soon was on the FF payroll.

Re:disclosure

[fermion]

At the base it is disclosure. Papers should have a note of who is funding the research. Sometimes that funding is obfuscated because the money goes through shell non-profits. This is why government funding is so useful. But there is nothing wrong with independent funding, as long as it transparent. When Al Gore was big, he never hid his objective or funding. Likewise Green Peace and PETA are generally transparent. OTOH, when Philip Morris was trying to push cigarettes as healthy, most of their research was far from transparent.

This is interesting, because despite the diplomatic title of the post, many if not most researchers who are publishing against man made climate change are funded by people who are going to lose money, at least short term, if man made climate change becomes a political reality. To be sure the improvements to industrial processes are going to create a whole new class of very wealthy people, but those who will no innovate will be left behind.

Re:disclosure

[beelsebob]

Right, and then you're somewhat bound to give the "right" result, because otherwise they won't fund more research.

Hence the conflict of interest.

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

[Baloroth]

That's why there is a little thing called "peer review". If his observations are incorrect then a peer review will discover it.

A common misconception. Peer review does not verify that the data is correct, that the methodology in the paper is followed, or in general that the results are reliable. It looks at the methods outlined in the paper and tries to spot obvious flaws or oversights, as well as any major problems with the structure of the paper. It can't detect fraud, cherry-picking data, or a host of other problems. Some "scientists" have gotten away for years with made up data or other fraud. And of course the quality of the peer review (or even if it is peer reviewed, in some cases) depends heavily on the journal that publishes it. Anyone can make the "Journal of American Climate Study" or some other professional sounding name and publish total garbage.

If his experiments can't be reproduced then the paper will be discredited (along with his career)

This has pretty much already happened. He's published papers with deeply flawed methodology that has misrepresented the work of other scientists, espouses a scientific viewpoint (that solar variation causes most observed climate changes) that has been shown wrong years ago, and has failed to disclose the source of his funding, a fairly major ethical violation.

Re:disclosure

[riverat1]

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.

Did they predict it for the whole globe? If they did they were wrong. They were right if they only predicted it for Eastern North America.