Statement from Heartland on the climate skeptic witch-hunt

A relevant quote:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Joseph Goebbels – Reich Minister of Propaganda

“By agreement between donors and the Smithsonian, Dr. Soon wasn’t even aware of who some of the donors were, making a conflict of interest impossible.”
Really? Why would the Smithsonian agree to this, and don’t you think Dr. Soon would have some idea of who was funding his work?
“Disclosure of funding sources is not a common requirement of academic journals in the physical sciences field. Most climate scientists – alarmist as well as skeptical – do not disclose their funding sources.”
It may not be a requirement, but most funding agencies expect to be acknowledged.

A giant smear campaign. It will get even uglier. The alarmists have nothing left: their junk science is exposed, the warming trend ended twenty years ago, nobody but the gullible and ignorant pay any attention to their screeching while the rest of the public yawns.All that’s left is smear tactics. These tactics will backfire.

In the 1990’s The Scripps Research Institute received a ca. $200M grant from a drug company to perform research in certain areas that could be profitable to the company, and useful for human health advancement. Scripps ongoing federally-supported and other research were not impacted, the idea allowed Scripps to expand its research base. As TSRI was private, no eyebrows were raised. A few years later, UC Berkeley was similarly propositioned. The leftist screamers came out in force. “This is a public resource, it belongs to California citizens, and can’t be stolen from us by corporate pirates.” Alas, Berkeley had been suffering from declining state support for years–the citizens of California were declining to pay to keep the university up, federal funding had long surpassed state funding, and the private grant had few strings, mainly giving the company access to research results before they were published, and giving it the opportunity to co-patent certain discoveries (processes and products).
It was demonstrated that new facilities and equipment would be owned by UC and usable to all faculty, graduate and postdoctoral trainees would benefit from cutting edge technology, and new faculty could be recruited, and current top-grade faculty would be better able to resist “poaching”.
The brow-ha settled and the project was a success. There were no shady dealings.
Then BP gave Berkeley a $500M grant for energy research. The shrieks from the left were defining. “This university is being bought by private interests!”
Today the university is being harassed by leftists for a new policy that welcomes out-of-staters and international students, at the cost of 3X the tuition paid by in-state residents. The leftists consider this a form of undue private influence too, as the many of the new students come from affluent families. The leftists fail to understand that the super tuition is used to subsidize the education of in-state residents, improving UC’s affordability to middle and working class families. Moreover, the new students are largely STEM majors: thanks to Cali’s crappy schools, local STEM talent has been declining for decades. Cal’s grad programs in math, physical science and engineering became Asian-majority long ago.
Privately funded research has a long and honorable history: before WWII, it was synonymous with research in the physical sciences and engineering. Even after WWII public universities continued to do privately funded research, although it was dwarfed by government-funded Big Science.
Med schools, both public and private, receive substantial drug-testing funding by Big Pharma.
On the Soon et al. matter, this is just more leftist harping The demands for funding records by Raul Grijalva and other politicians should move the GOP House and Senate leadership to assure the receiving university officials that Congress has no intent to hold committee meetings on scientists’ funding, so no response is necessary until and if the Dems reclaim majority status and have the political power to pursue Congress-approved investigations.
Furthermore, if academic freedom protects government-funded raw-data and code (research product, that is their holders, consensus climate scientists) from public scrutiny, then academic freedom clearly protects the privacy of researchers who do privately funded research; in the latter case it must, because the blatently-obvious purpose of the latter information-seeking is nothing more than to generate harassment campaigns, particularly to intimidate corporations and private groups into halting their support of “inconvenient research”, that is research that the climate alarmists don’t want performed or reported, Grijalva and his ilk have no knowledge of or interest in Soon, Curry, Pielke, Lindzen: they are being pressured by outside, unnamed (by themselves) Green lobbyists to go after the “inconvenient research” scientists and their supporters, by using the slimy veneer of, at best questionable, if not bogus “Government Authority” that the lobbyists do not themselves possess as private enterprises.
So as a start, Grijalva’s Committee Chairman should send out letters assuring the institutions that they are authorized to ignore Grijalva’s demands until such time as Committee investigation of the matter of scientists’ private funding is brought up for hearing, the majority passes the motion, and the Chair schedules hearings.

Greenpeace staffer Kert Davies is like Jame Bond. He has been given a license to kill in an effort to save the world from evil criminals against humanity. No scratch that, to save the world from evil people who use electricity, cars, internet and stuff like that.
In other words Kert Davies has been given a license by the media and idiot politicians to kill us.

3 links to Dr. Soon’s works on 2001 and 2003:
Climate History and the Sun by Dr. Sallie Baliunas and Dr. Willie Soon – June 5, 2001
https://web.archive.org/web/20120728151019/http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=90
Lessons & Limits of Climate History: Was the 20th Century Climate Unusual? – April 17, 2003
https://web.archive.org/web/20120717000101/http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=136
Was the 20th Century Climate Unusual? Exploring the Lessons and Limits of Climate History – May 16, 2003
https://web.archive.org/web/20130322155415/http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=139
Dr. Willie Soon
https://web.archive.org/web/20130313080715/http://www.marshall.org/experts.php?id=44

Above, TYoke linked to Mark Steyn’s article on this. For those who didn’t click, this section is worth repeating verbatim, especially that part dealing with Roger Pielke, Jr.:
“When the three investigations into my writing by three separate Canadian “human rights” commissions were finally over (with the acquittal by the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal), a lot of people commented along the following lines:
‘I don’t know what Steyn and Maclean’s are complaining about. They were investigated and acquitted. The system worked.’
And that’s true if you don’t mind wasting a year of your life and a significant seven-figure sum. Most people do mind, of course. Which is why the real target of Big Climate’s thuggery is not the individuals themselves, but the thousands of lesser-known scientists who may secretly, furtively half-agree with the targets of the Warmanos, but figure that, if they can do this to Willie Soon or Judith Curry or Richard Lindzen, what’ll they do to Assistant Professor Wossname at the Podunk Institute of Meteorology? As Jo Nova writes:
‘Consider how hard-line the inquisition is. Roger Pielke Jr. accepts most of the consensus IPCC positions, even calling for a carbon tax, and supporting Obama’s proposed EPA regulations, but he’s under fire as much as those who question everything. The aim here is much larger than just stopping Pielke — the real audience are the thousands of silent borderline skeptical academics watching on. Imagine if they spoke their minds? The message to them is “don’t even think it”. All academics must be 100% believers, and even the smallest deviation from the permitted line will receive the same treatment.’
As with the firebreathing imams who demand that a cartoon or a teddy bear or a swirl on a Burger King ice-cream carton must be punished by death, you’re struck by the insecurity of the true believers. Nevertheless, as Jo says, it works:
‘The harassment and pressure work on whistleblowers. We are all human. Sadly even Pielke admits, despite having tenure, that the harrassment means he has changed the way he writes and researches:
“The incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt, I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues. I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject.”
http://www.steynonline.com/6831/the-warmish-inquisition

honestly? It is 100% irrelevant who funded research, it only matters if it can be proven and fits the actual world we live in. Obviously people can be biased but this goes for anyone, even potentially those who have no idea where there funding is from, and have personal views influencing them whether they realize or acknowledge this is also irrelevant.
One thing we know, the world simply isn’t warming at the rates expected for the dangerous end of the claims. Most of the field is trying to explain this in a dozen different ways, and Dr soon is one of those making the case the real problem is weighting co2 as this powerful to begin with. this is clearly the most obvious answer, despite the political posturing and rhetoric.

Heartland endorsing Mr Soon, is like Greenpeace supporting Michael Mann. Interesting but it helps him very little.

This falls directly into the category of, “Be careful what you ask for!” If all studies overtly funded by Greenpeace, Tides, etc. were disqualified and withdrawn, 90% of all pro-AGW “Climate Science” papers would vanish. Good riddance to bad rubbish, of course.