Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
I cannot bring myself to quote from this unconscionable piece of journalistic malfeasance:
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher
By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ FEB. 21, 2015
Instead, I simply let my title and the following excerpts from the so-called “supporting” documents offered by Greenpeace speak for themselves. Their [non-]journalist lackeys: Justin Gillis and John Schwartz of the NY Times, apparently didn’t actually read them – or they might have noticed that the contracts are between the Smithsonian (not Soon) and Southern and if they had stretched themselves, might have uncovered the definition of “deliverables”….I can’t believe Gillis and Schwartz allowed themselves to be duped again.
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Author’s Comment Policy: I am so sickened by this that I really don’t care to discuss it, but others may choose to do so – feel free.
The “documents” consist simply of the contracts between the Smithsonian and Southern Corp and copies of the contractually required progress reports.
Related story: Smear campaign: “His judgment cometh and that right soon”
The alarmists are getting more desperate by the day (especially a certain Mr R Ward – the instigator of this smear).
Facebook’s “Trending” has this: “Willie Soon: Climate change-refuting scientist reportedly accepted funding from fossil fuel industry”, with links to posts from the N.Y. Times, The Raw Story, Grist.org, Andrew Revkin, Guardian Environment, Discover Magazine, Greenpeace USA,
NCSE: The National Center for Science Education, and more, including the Smithsonian, which said:
“Smithsonian Statement on Willie Soon, researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory
The Smithsonian is greatly concerned about the allegations surrounding Dr. Willie Soon’s failure to disclose funding sources for his climate change research.
“The Smithsonian is taking immediate action to address the issue: Acting Secretary Albert Horvath has asked the Smithsonian Inspector General to review the matter. Horvath will also lead a full review of Smithsonian ethics and disclosure policies governing the conduct of sponsored research to ensure they meet the highest standards.
“Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon is a part-time researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. He was hired to conduct research on long-term stellar and solar variability. The Smithsonian does not fund Dr. Soon; he pursues external grants to fund his research.
“The Smithsonian does not support Dr. Soon’s conclusions on climate change. The Smithsonian’s official statement on climate change, based upon many decades of scientific research, points to human activities as a cause of global warming.”
My bus runneth over me.
The only posts I saw in support of Soon were Christopher J Shaker’s and Breitbart’s. Shaker commented, including a quote from Breitbart:
“Snort! Snort! Snort! I wonder if the ‘greens’ understand how this precedent bodes for Dr. Michael E. Mann and his battle to keep his supposedly ‘proprietary’ emails secret?
‘Greenpeace was able to access all of eminent solar physicist Willie Soon’s emails from his employer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center regarding the paper. But they found nothing suggesting any kind of foul play, deception or receiving of illegal funds. Mr. Bannon mocked the Harvard-Smithsonian center for having released Soon’s correspondence, sarcastically referring to the institution as a “profiles in courage” for providing all of Soon’s private emails.’ ”
Breitbart’s article: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/23/experts-smeared-by-media-and-greenpeace-for-debunking-global-warming/
VicV
Let me laugh the next time warrenlb claims there is no conspiracy amongst Obola administration’s multiple-tiered funding of 60 billion dollars in three years of Obola’s Big Government funding links to Big Science corruption.
“The “documents” consist simply of the contracts between the Smithsonian and Southern Corp and copies of the contractually required progress reports.”
Yes, they do. They show Smithsonian billing Southern Company Services for about 400 hours per year of Soon’s time, and listing what they get for that (deliverables) which are a set of papers by Soon and others outside. Soon was PI with respect to the contracts. The problem is that several of those papers did not indicate the SCS funding. Here is one such. It acknowledges many people, and eg India’s national Institute of oceanography, but not SCS or their client.
All I see is that the “deliverables” are progress reports to Southern for their “internal” use. This is standard boilerplate language for any funded research by a private corporation.
Where does it say that the “deliverables” are externally published papers?
Your point?
Nick Stokes February 23, 2015 at 4:28 pm
“The problem is…”
Are you implying that Dr. Soon did something inappropriate?
Nick,
What the deliverables are is clear defined in the contract and they are not papers. Your normal posting us that of obfuscation but here you have moved to out right lying.
“What the deliverables are is clear defined in the contract and they are not papers. Your normal posting us that of obfuscation but here you have moved to out right lying.”
From p 41 of the doc
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/williesoon.png
It would be nice to get an occasional apology for these really stupid accusations of lying.
Here is the paper.
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/Hiremath2012-d/AgnihotriDuttaSoon11-Aug5-TSIderivativevsISM-final.pdf
I agree that Soon should have acknowledged his financial support.
However, reading the paper, one would question why one would conclude Southern “bought” anything.
Of course this should have no affect on the “Models run Hot” paper, which is why Greenpeace went after him.
Of course I’m sure the NYT will aggressively investigate all the honoraria climate scientists receive…
I think what Stokes is suggesting is that the Smithsonian who paid for Soon’s work, are actually stooges, and it was a conspiracy between the Smithsonian and Dr Soon, and the Smithsonian was outsmarted by their evilness. Or possibly, Stokes is suggesting that the Smithsonian is a corrupt organisation in the pay of the fossil fuel industry, and that Dr Soon was a hapless stooge. But should have seen through the conspiracy. Or possibly a third thing he is suggesting (to reasonable people) is that Stokes is something of a nitwit.
Although completely turned off by this whole affair, I do take some comfort that Nick Stokes has finally been shown to be the person of low character I always suspected.
I worked on a research project funded by an agency of the US government. We were not allowed to disclose that the funding came from that agency. We did not acknowledge their funding in papers or in conference talks. We were actually instructed to LIE and say that our funding came from a different agency.
Nick, what’s Harvard/Smithsonian’s cut for the grant? Typically, administrative overhead sucks 40%-60% of the grant. Unless, you are claiming this is a personal grant, but in that case, Smithsonian wouldn’t likely have been a signatory.
I’m sure that institutions as lofty as Harvard and the Smithsonian wouldn’t take any of that filthy, evil big oil money, would they?
Reply to Stokes ==> It would help civil discourse if actually read, if not the actual full documents themselves, at least the extracts I include above.
Stokes is a warmista hypocrite and I wouldn’t bother with any of his meanderings
“Stokes is a warmista hypocrite and I wouldn’t bother with any of his meanderings”
What makes him a hypocrite?
If they billed SCS about 400 hours per year for Soon’s time, that would amount to about 10 40-hour weeks or less than 2.5 months per year. That would leave him plenty of time to work on other research. Is there any evidence that Soon billed them for any of the hours he worked on other papers? If not, why is it relevant, and why should he have disclosed it?
” Is there any evidence that Soon billed them for any of the hours he worked on other papers?”
In fact, I mixed up slightly above. I showed above the report to Donor’s Trust for 2011. It’s also listed as a deliverable to Southern Company Services in 2012 (p 59)
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/williesoon2.png
There it is listed as part of a 3.25 month effort.
He didn’t mention either Donor’s Trust or Southern Company Services in the paper.
@Nick – you need to put that up a bit further under your comment “It would be nice to get an occasional apology for these really stupid accusations of lying.”
No need to mention the Donor Trust of the Smithsonian. Acknowledgments are for those who actually contribute to the research and not just provide monetary support to the institute, although it is usually polite to add the funding source. Its not for disclosure.
Elviser asks for any conflicts of interest to be disclosed in a form, if that particular journal asks for it. If that did not occur, the oversight was by the lead author, Koushik Dutta, who did not get funding from SC.
So you’re not the CSIRO guy, are you?
“No need to mention the Donor Trust of the Smithsonian. Acknowledgments are for those who actually contribute to the research and not just provide monetary support to the institute, although it is usually polite to add the funding source. “
Donor Trust is another body to which Willie Soon, as PI, put a proposal, with budget specifying hours etc, for project support. Donor’s Trust represents a donor who prefers to remain anonymous. A report was provided to each of SCS and DT, designating this paper among others as deliverables for the project.
This was an Elsevier journal. In their conflict of interest guideline, one thing forbidden is
“Neglecting to disclose the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication”
Woops. I messed up the threading. I’ll just cut and paste the above comment where it should have gone.
I worked on a research project funded by an agency of the US government. We were not allowed to disclose that the funding came from that agency. We did not acknowledge their funding in papers or in conference talks. We were actually instructed to LIE and say that our funding came from a different agency.
Nick Stokes said on February 23, 2015 at 9:30 pm
According to the agreement between Southern and The Smithsonian, the supposed study sponsor (allegedly Southern) did not have a role “in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication”, save only for a confidentiality provision. Therefore, there does not appear to have been any neglect to disclose a role, since there does not appear to have been any such role, as you apparently imply.
Nick Stokes,
As far as I can tell, the acknowledgements paragraph doesn’t try to be a comprehensive list of funders; quite the opposite, it’s a thank you to contributors outside of the funding.
The mention of financial support from the Institute of Oceanography and use of facilities doesn’t look like a transparency statement.
Other papers seem to do much the same thing, often with no allusion to financial contributions.
Are we all astonished that greenpeace doesn’t fund Willie Soon?
For what it’s worth, I don’t like to see the accusations of lying directed at you. I would like to see an apology, too.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t like to see the accusations of lying directed at you. I would like to see an apology, too.”
Technically you are correct. Stokes should not be called a liar when all he is indulging in is smear and innuendo. If the other side of the debate weren’t doing much much worse, it would be laughable.
I’ve just noticed Nick Stokes’s later comment, revealing that he had misrepresented a piece of evidence.
Well, that was a very vague and barely comprehensible mea culpa from him. A bit like a recalcitrant teenager mumbling after being found out.
I’ll still reserve judgement on “lying” but it doesn’t look great.
How do you know that any of Willie Soon’s SCS-funded work or time went into the paper you linked, Nick? The SCS-funded 400 hours is 20% of the work-year. That means 80% of Willie’s time is otherwise funded.
The paper itself is about a possible sun connection to the Indian monsoon. Koushik Dutta is the communicating author, not Willie.
It could well be true that Willie did his part of the analysis during time not directly funded by SCS. In the absence of any specific information, your argument against Willie is specious, and rather malign given the context of attempted character assassination.
Your charge of possible malfeasance in that paper doesn’t stop at Willie, either, Nick. All authors on a paper are responsible for all ethical content. You are effectively imputing ethical malfeasance against Willie’s co-authors Rajesh Agnihotri and Koushik Dutta. Maybe you’d like to re-think your accusation. Perhaps an equally public apology and retraction here is appropriate.
“How do you know that any of Willie Soon’s SCS-funded work or time went into the paper you linked, Nick?”,/i>
Well, for SCS for 2012 (year ending Nov) there was a budget of $69,942, citing 3.25 months of PI’s time. Reporting to them what they got for that, Soon listed just 3 deliverables, all papers published. This was one of those. I think that establishes a connection.
Agnihotri and Dutta acknowledged their (Indian) financial support.
I spoke too soon. The grant final report shows that Willie claimed the paper with Rajesh Agnihotri and Koushik Dutta as part of his SCS-funded work.
On the other hand, item 15 on page 56 of the agreement between SCS and the Smithsonian says, “Publicity, Smithsonian shall not publish and utilize the name or otherwise identify SCS or its affiliate companies in any publications or other advertisements without the express written consent of SCS. As further consideration to SCS, Smithsonian shall provide SCS an advance written copy of proposed publications regarding the deliverables for comment and input, if any, from SCS.”
“… not publish or utilize the name or otherwise identify SCS… in any publications…” makes no exception for peer-reviewed science papers. Did SCS provide written consent to Willie Soon to acknowledge them in his papers? It seems they would have required this prior assent. If not, then Willie would be contractually required to leave out mention of any association of the work with SCS.
“The grant final report shows that Willie claimed the paper with Rajesh Agnihotri and Koushik Dutta as part of his SCS-funded work.”
That was 2012. He also claimed it as part of his Donor’s Trust funded work, 2011.
Talking of 80% – that is the amount of tax on fuel in the UK. So therefore, any scientist ( including UAE and UK Met office ) who accept government grants and funding are implicitedly accepting money from the fossil fuel industry.
The argument also goes for road tax, vehicle tax, VAT, corporation tax and income tax – anything derived from the value of our current economy is heavily dependant on the evil fossil fuels. What is the biblical quote about he who is free from sin cast the first stone?
Nick Stokes have the guts to state what you are implying.
“The problem” @Stokes is that It appears you are assuming that the publisher requires an insert of financial declaration, in the article. Although for transparency, I believe every academic publication should declare all support, minimally in supplementary material and not necessarily in the acknowledgements. But one of the referenced papers appeared in an Elsevier journal. Here is a link to their conflicts of interest: http://www.elsevier.com/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/163717/ETHICS_COI01a.pdf and it does not appear this grant would need to be disclosed in the article. Although, it may have been declared somewhere, I am not sure. It seems it could be enough to declare it TO ELSEVIER and that you think they have ‘no role’ in the design, interpretation etc…
I am sure that CSIRO’s climate divisions opinions:
Do not taint any of your research or statements…
@Nick Stokes
It seems that it may be The Smithsonian that has acted unethically.
Dr. Soon correctly identifies himself in the referenced paper as follows:
As you have noted, Dr. Soon is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian. Consequently and contrary to the statement issued by the Smithsonian, it is the Smithsonian that funds/funded Dr. Soon. Quoting from the contract/agreement with Southern:
In short, the Smithsonian performed research by means of a part-time employee funded by grants from, among others, Southern. By disclosing that he was with the Smithsonian, it seems to me that Dr. Soon has properly disclosed the direct source of his funding. You are focusing on the indirect source of his funding. The problem with disclosing the indirect source of the funding is the language in the publicity clause (as others have noted and as further developed below):
This clause does not seem unusual to me. It seems reasonable that a grantee would not want its name associated with a publication over which it had no control, as is the case with a grant (as others have pointed out). The request for an advance copy of the proposed publication, given that it is in this clause, would also seem reasonable to provide Southern with a means for enforcing this clause before it becomes moot. I don’t see any mechanism for Southern to object to the scientific content of any publication.
Right after saying that they had hired Dr. Soon to “conduct research on long-term stellar and solar variability,” The Smithsonian statement of 22 Feb 2015 claims:
When an organization hires an employee, either full or part time, they are giving funds to the employee. Claiming that they are not “funding” the employee is quibbling of the level of debating the meaning of the word “is.” The Smithsonian takes out, according to the documents, “overhead” of about 30% of the grant. Dr. Soon may indeed be pursuing external grants, but the grants are paid directly to the Smithsonian. There is no evidence of any direct payments to Dr. Soon by Southern. Consequently, conflict of interest allegations against Dr. Soon would be difficult to prove, IMHO. The Smithsonian, however, may well have a conflict of interest. Indeed, it seems that their admission that they “do not support Dr. Soon’s conclusions on climate change,” may be an admission of a conflict of interest, given their employment of him over the years. The fact that Dr. Soon is not a signatory to ANY agreements or contracts with Southern, is very relevant. Dr. Soon, as any employee, has a duty to his employer, The Smithsonian, regardless of any agreements or contracts that The Smithsonian may have with third parties.
In its STATEMENT OF VALUES AND CODE OF ETHICS, The Smithsonian makes the following statements:
It is difficult to see how Dr. Soon has violated this statement. He appears to have made full disclosure of all “external” grantors to The Smithsonian and there is no allegation that he has acted “in furtherance of (his) personal interest or for private gain.” If The Smithsonian thinks that a conflict of interest exists in the arrangement with Southern, then it seems to me that it is The Smithsonian who has violated its own values and ethics by failing to “avoid apparent or actual conflicts of interest and ensuring that potential conflicts of interest are disclosed…”
Contrary to their public statement of 22 Feb 2015, The Smithsonian clearly states as ITS policy to “seek and rel(y) on … grants …” to “achieve its mission.” Whether it relied upon part-time employees to help in seeking grants is a choice it made. There appears to be no evidence that Dr. Soon acted in any way contrary to The Smithsonian’s written policy regarding Outside Financial Support. Furthermore, the statement that The Smithsonian “adheres to professional standards and best practices” to protect its “independence,” would seem to prevent the very conflict of interest concerns that are now being alleged against Dr. Soon. In short, The Smithsonian appears to have established itself as a bulkhead or barrier to eliminate any ethical questions between its researchers (like Dr. Soon) and outside sources of funds. Indeed, it would appear that The Smithsonian has placed its own reputation on the line to ensure that the scholarship produced by its employees was as free from outside influence as practical. Barring any direct payments to Dr. Soon by Southern, it would seem that The Smithsonian only has itself to blame for concerns about outside influence of research and publications.
As for the “interests and privacy concerns of donors and sponsors,” it would appear that The Smithsonian has violated its own policies in disclosing the information about Southern. If The Smithsonian could be trusted to be an honest intermediary in ensuring that it adhered to “professional standards and best practices” in maintaining its “independence,” then the identity of the donors and sponsors would not be relevant. The Smithsonian is, in effect, admitting that it did not follow its own standards to prevent outside influence on scholarship and publications, but I don’t see how Dr. Soon is at fault, barring something like direct payments to him by Southern.
Further, Smithsonian Directive 807, dated 11 Jan 2012, states the following:
It would appear that The Smithsonian did not comply with this directive and that the documents that were released were covered by these provisions. The agreements with Southern appear to be dated in Feb 2008, so they would NOT be exempt from the policy NOT to disclose them under the provision exempting (i.e. disclosing) documents entered into prior to 30 Nov 2007. It seems that The Smithsonian has acted in a manner contrary to its own written Statement of Values and Code of Ethics and contrary to its own Directive. One could conclude that it was The Smithsonian who may have acted unethically, perhaps for political purposes rather than in support of its mission.
By correctly identifying himself as being part of The Smithsonian, Dr. Soon would seem to have made all relevant disclosures about his source of funding, especially in view of the Statement of Values and Code of Ethics of The Smithsonian, which seems to ensure that it provides the oversight (and charges 30% of the grant for that purpose!) to prevent any undue influence by outside parties (such as donors or sponsors) on any scholarship or publications supported by The Smithsonian. I would agree that this hits The Smithsonian hard and that the Inspector General of The Smithsonian has him- or herself a conflict of interest in investigating these allegations due to the apparently unethical and contrary to stated policy release of documents that would reasonably be considered were going to be or could be used for inflammatory purposes.
“By correctly identifying himself as being part of The Smithsonian, Dr. Soon would seem to have made all relevant disclosures about his source of funding, especially in view of the Statement of Values and Code of Ethics of The Smithsonian”
The policies of the Smithsonian are irrelevant here. The issue is between Dr Soon and his Journal, and beyond that, their readers. As I’ve said above, one of his publishers at least, Elsevier, is quite explicit.
“If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared”
So Dr Soon has put a proposal to the company, set out a budget, reached an agreement, presumably (by the agreement) sent the paper to SCS for prior vetting, and declared it as a deliverable under the agreement. If that doesn’t require declaration under Elsevier’s requirement, whatever would?
Nick Stokes says, “So Dr. Soon has put a proposal to the company….” What company? The Smithsonian? It’s demonstrated above that the grant docs show the parties, Soon is not a party. He worked for Smithsonian, not “the company, how can Smithsonian’s policies be brushed off as “irrelevant”? Here’s an apology-I’m sorry to see you joining this smear.
What company Nick? Not Southern. Soon was hired by and paid by The Smithsonian and had no direct contact with Southern.
Paul Courtney,
” “So Dr. Soon has put a proposal to the company….” What company?”
LamontT,
“had no direct contact with Southern”
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/williesoon3.png
Nick Stokes appears to unintentionally misrepresent the Elsevier ethics guidelines: “If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared”. Look closely Nick; you will see a footnote that says the requirement applies for medical journals.
“So Dr Soon … sent the paper to SCS for prior vetting …”. How do you know he did that? If he did, that would require declaration under Elsevier’s requirement, but not otherwise. From Pat Frank’s post, it would seem that soon would only have to do that if he wanted to say he got funds from SCS. So he seems that he was in a bit of a catch 22.
In my 30 years of getting research grants, I never sought one that would require prior vetting of publications. And I never would have accepted such funding. But if the funding agency said “you only need our vetting if you want to put our name in the paper”, I might well have said “OK, then”. I have always listed all applicable funding support, but that is usually a requirement of the funding agency. I think that journals requiring that is a fairly recent development.
Mike M,
“Nick Stokes appears to unintentionally misrepresent the Elsevier ethics guidelines: “If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared”. Look closely Nick; you will see a footnote that says the requirement applies for medical journals”
I don’t believe the footnote does say that. The document itself is a general guide to authors. Nowhere in the text is there such a restriction. The adjacent box describes something not allowed:
“Neglecting to disclose the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication”
No footnote there. The footnotes themselves (3) are just sources of further information. 1 is “A brief overview on Conflict of Interests” from ORI. 2 is “International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Ethical Considerations in the Conduct and Reporting of Research:
Conflicts of Interest.”. and 3 is COPE “Guidelines on Good Publication Practice”. None of those implies restricted applicability of anything in the text. Footnote 2 is referenced by each of the boxes on the right. With your interpretation, that would make virtually the whole doc limited. In which case, it would be very surprising that there is nothing in the text to say so.
Anyway, I’ll come back to Dr Soon in the Guardian, 2008:
“The rules of the leading journals in which my research is published are clear: the sources of funding must be openly declared in the paper”
On vetting, I said:
“presumably (by the agreement) sent the paper to SCS for prior vetting”
It’s what the agreement provides. I don’t know whether it happened.
Contradicting the assertion on this blog that he somehow did the research at his own expense, since the salary received is included in those documents.
None of this controversy has anything to do with the contents and conclusions of Soon’s latest paper. Since you have the ability to critique it, why don’t you discuss the paper and its flaws, if there are any?
Mr. Stokes: And you never disclose whether you’ve ever received funds directly or indirectly related to the”deliverables” you post here. I assume none, as they so often have no value.
I hear that witches float so we can simply throw Willie into a pond to see if he floats, OR we can be really clever and see if he weighs more than a duck. Just be careful or he may turn you into a newt.
Every mother-effing research grant from the federal government requires deliverables in the form of published papers, conference talks/posters, etc. That’s what they’re called with every research grant I’ve ever seen.
So the whole Smear was based on what?
ozric101
You ask
I answer, falsehood.
The reality is explained above by Phil in his excellent post which is here.
I ask you to note that the linked post was addressed to Nick Stokes who subsequently continued being an apologist for the falsehoods from Greenpeace when he ignored the documented information provided by Phil and gave the ludicrous reply
That reply is ludicrous because Soon declared he was employed by the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian – n.b. NOT Soon – obtained funds from Southern.
Stokes attempts to justify his nonsensical reply by saying Soon helped the Smithsonian to obtain funds from Southern but, of course, that is not relevant to the fact that it was the Smithsonian – NOT Soon – who accepted those funds.
Soon did not obtain funds from Southern and any suggestion that he did is a falsehood.
Richar
Actually what you say is true, but that does not change the fact of who exactly brought the money in in the 1st place, that person being one Dr. Soon.
Having worked for a government body and having brought in money, I never signed a single binding agreement, management did that. Which is the exact same situation here. Dr, Soon went after the money. Management signed all the necessary paperwork. Simple as that.
I wonder how warmists are getting their daily bread, since it seems that you think they are saving the humanity out of the goodness of their heart and for free. Actually they are living well being fed at the trove filled with our tax dollars by corrupt government agencies. Now who is on higher moral ground?
Well a bit of a gallop there. As to your question, what moral ground and why?
Who do you think underwrites this website, the tooth fairy?
JR says: February 24, 2015 at 3:48 am
Who do you think underwrites this website, the tooth fairy?
========================
Do tell, RJ, who do *you* think underwrites this website?
[Reply: This site is supported entirely by private, individual donations. ~mod.]
Here’s one way they get their daily bread:
https://www.biggreenradicals.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Klein_Report.pdf
This report is not about Green Peace, but it clearly shows links between the Sierra Club, NRDC, and Sea Change. It seems that those organizations are receiving donations not from American big oil, but, instead, they are funded by RUSSIAN big oil. Now you know where a lot of the American anti-fracking sources get their money. Dirty money, indeed.
But let’s look at Green Peace’s funding to see if they have the right to criticize anybody. Well, there is the $203 million dollars received from the American Petroleum Foundation. Then you find that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has given them $214 million dollars. Oh, and there’s the Tides Foundation involved in grant giving. So they are taking money from George Sorros from that connection, which tells you all you need to know about their politics. They even took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, yep HP, declared Hewlett Packard a “green company,” and attacked Apple because they aren’t, supposedly.
Sixty percent of all “donations” go to pay the salaries of the various “managers” around the world. Only six percent goes to funding “operations,” which mostly consists of performing criminal activities and putting out fraudulent environmental statements (some of which they have admitted to). What a highly moral organization they are.
What was that you were saying about Willy Soon? These are the some of the associations of Nick Stokes. Under no circumstances does he have any credibility with me, or the moral right to argue about anybody else’s funding.
JR Anthony underwrites this website himself. He has flat out stated he gets no money to run it. Are you claiming some divine knowledge that contradicts this?
What difference should it make in evaluating the validity of the science presented in the paper?
I didn’t propose the straw man argument that the author of this post did. Your question does not directly address the author’s straw man argument. I’m trying to stay on topic.
But, since you asked, most people expect honesty from others, including any possible conflicts of interest.
As to the science, it would appear that Dr. Soon’s works are largely inconsequential.
ICU
You say
Really!? You think his papers are “largely inconsequential”?
If so, then please explain why you think
(a) Greenpeace, NYT, and other detractors bother to mention his papers,
(b) those detractors don’t explain how and why the papers are “largely inconsequential”,
and
(c) the detractors are spending time, money and effort to smear the author of the papers.
Richard
I guess if it didn’t make a difference, he would have disclosed it to the journal he was publishing in, right?
And so. Is not the question about this absurd? I do not assume you received a salary of 100 percent of the funding you brought in. I do not assume you were corrupted by your income. Their needs to be far more then assumptions to make any credible accusation. There are many reasons to think that the “team” proponents of CAGW are corrupted by massive single source funding. there are zero indications that Dr. Soon was guilty of anything.
“there are zero indications that Dr. Soon was guilty of anything”
:large
Untrue, he seems to be in a spot of trouble with the Smithsonian for not disclosing his funding sources…
I wonder if the Smithsonian has a publication authorization process.
We would then be faced with the Smithsonian having signed the contract, the Smithsonian having approved the publication, and the Smithsonian being “troubled” by the lack of disclosure.
Could get interesting.
Se my above comment to fhhaynie, I am not the one making a straw man or false flag argument.
Please specifically specify the “strawman argument” you are referring. The subject of this post was the Smithsonian’s potential exposure. My comment was specific to what the Smithsonian’s policies are. Please be specific as to your complaint.
The topic is Dr. Soon who worked for the Smithsonian. Please stay on topic.
I know you guys (strident consensus believers) like to order people around, but I remind you of the title of this post:
I know you guys also like to be deliberately obtuse, so just so there’s not consfusion:
“Hit Smithsonian Instead”.
Bevan, what a devastating statement from the Smithsonian! To paraphrase: “We are looking into this. We don’t agree with Dr Soon’s conclusions (whatever they are) and human activities may cause climate change (no kidding).”
Not exactly a robust denunciation of Dr Soon is it? Sounds more like a plea to call off the Big Green attack dogs so they can get on with some real work… Like finding out ‘why GCMs run too hot” for example.
Bevan, the contracts are signed by three different contracting officer of the Smithsonian. One says
Attention: Dr. Willie Soon (for technical matters)
Attention: Mr William J. Ford (for contractual matters)
Page 19 https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1672782/climate.pdf
Who ever wrote that has lied.
It seems the Smithsonian was well aware of his funding as they signed the documents approving of it….
Why isn’t there a person who signing this Smithsonian statement.
An institution must of course have people speak for it.
And without it signed, by a responsible person- seems it not worth
any consideration.
@ Bevan
February 23, 2015 at 5:01 pm (re the Smithsonian’s statement)
Given that they’re the ones who agreed to the contract, received the funds, then paid Soon, doesn’t that make that part of their statement an outright lie?
If he really went after the money he would be lined up with the other hogs getting the easy money for papers supporting the money (gravy) train, but then reality isn’t your concern is it. For you and others of your ilk it is much easier to smear those presenting a differing opinion. Shame on you.
You assume way too much. Whatever you think I said, I did not say what you think I said.
ICU:
Tim did not name you. You are like the guy who takes a coat off a rack, tries it on, and says, “This coat fits perfectly, therefore it must be my coat!”
I agree with Tim 100%. If Dr. Soon had published a trumped-up ‘analysis’ purportedly showing that human emissions are the cause of most or all global warming, he could expect to cash in handsomely. Plenty of others of lesser status have done just that.
Instead, Dr. Soon did his research and published his consclusions. But his conclusions do not conform to the Narrative. So now the hounds are baying. But as others have pointed out, this could get very interesting. Many others have done what Dr. Soon is only accused of doing — doubled and squared. Let’s open that can of worms, and see how successful they are at putting them all put back again.
This is a witch hiunt, no more and no less. That is an overused phrase, but it applies in spades here. The ‘climate studies’ industry is rife with waste, fraud and abuse. $Billions are wasted every year, and for what? Global warming stopped between 10 – 18 years ago, and as a result the original premise of man-made global warming has taken 5 or 6 torpedoes; it’s going down.
If Dr. Soon stands his ground, his accusers may well regret their present course of action.
Reply to ICU ==> There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for Dr. Soon to have sought grants from corporations that give grants for research into environmental issues — that Southern Services Company is associated with one of America’s largest utilities is why they have the money to fund research — into climate issues, solar energy, nuclear energy, carbon capture and sequestration, and other important issues of our day.
That Dr. Soon was able to raise grant money, as an astrophysicist, to investigate the sun’s effects on the climate is how science works — qualified researchers seek money for research in their specialized fields.
ICU, this smear has been used by others in the past against Dr Soon — the Guardian itself, even.
And they had to apologise because the Press Complaints Commission investigated and found the lies to be lies before.
Once bitten by the dogs, you know Dr Soon will be aware of this smear and have been careful to avoid your dirty tricks.
You had better get ready with the humble pie.
And you have fallen in my estimation.
“And they had to apologise because the Press Complaints Commission investigated and found the lies to be lies before.”
I think you should substantiate that a little better. Your link shows no apology or PCC finding of fact. It just says the matter was resolved when the Guardian published a letter in which he stated his complaint.
Nick Stokes, this is beneath you.
The witch hunt has been proven to be a lie before. It will be again.
Here is Monbiots’s apology that was forced out of him by the Press Complaints Commission.
got something wrong abt Willie Soon. I suggested he’d never declared his fossil fuel funding. Unlike many, it turns out he has. Apologies.
Will we hear your apology before being legally forced to?
“Nick Stokes, this is beneath you.”
No, you are proving unreliable. You cited a matter settled in 2008 where Soon challenged the Guardian. You said that “And they had to apologise because the Press Complaints Commission investigated and found the lies to be lies before.”. But your link didn’t say that and you offer nothing further, except a 2011 tweet from Monbiot, with no context.
The allegation here is not that he never declared funding. It is that on several occasions when it was required, he did not. Evidence is provided.
Press Complaints Commission I quote the complaint.
Clearly, the Guardian did not challenge the facts that Dr Soon presented. The PCC considered it resolved.
I quote from their website:
Even Monbiot acknowledges that the smears were false.
It will come out again that the smears are false.
And then your muck-raking will be seen to be as unreliable as you accuse me of being.
An interesting quote from Soon’s letter to the Guardian, cited above
Nick Stokes:
M Courtney has owned you on this issue.
I suggest you quit digging. You’re only making it worse for yourself.
ICU
You say
For sake of argument, let us assume that what you say is completely true. Then so what?
Soon’s employer accepted that money, not Soon.
Soon is divorced from those and any other monies obtained and/or disbursed by his employer. Soon did NOT accept any money from Southern; his employer did and only his employer has any responsibility for that.
If you have a complaint then it is solely against Soon’s employer, the Smithsonian. You have no valid complaint against Soon.
Richard
Your analysis is incorrect, the documents do not simply consist of contracts between the Smithsonian and Southern Corp.
Pages two and three clearly shows Willie Soon as the Principal Investigator of these studies, which are funded by Southern Corp.
The documents are available from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/21/science/document-climate.html
http://i60.tinypic.com/30cpv2c.jpg
http://i57.tinypic.com/2i12pef.png
Have you ever worked for a corporation? The contract is between the Smithsonian and Southern. Willie Soon is the PI as an employee of the Smithsonian.
This isn’t rocket science.
Yes. Dr. Soon proposed the work, Dr; Soon did the work and Dr. Soon did not express any potential conflicts of interest in publishing those works. Those are the facts as I understand them and that appears to be why the Smithsonian (and CfA) would presumably be doing their investigations.
ICU
And Obola’s democrat party operatives don’t like the results of his research, and that is why the NYTimes and Obama’s ABCNNBCBS press corpse are “investigating” this travesty ever so vigorously right before the Paris Conference – while ignoring all of the private money Dr Hansen took and Soros donated to parties that the Obola administration does like.
I guess I’ll have to repeat my question.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/23/greenpeace-enlists-justin-gillis-john-schwartz-of-the-ny-times-in-journalistic-terrorist-attack-on-willie-soon-miss-target-hit-smithsonian-instead/#comment-1866806
Hint.. Who owns the papers? If I write something on company time, they own it. I don’t have to document the source of funding. If The corporation uses, publishes or allows, another to publish it, the document is still owned by the corporation. Dr Soon would only have to acknowledge the Smithsonian.
michael
One of the funding sources isn’t listed in the grant proposals: “$324,000 from anonymous donations via DonorsTrust, a fund set up to funnel money from the Koch brothers and other conservative funders to groups that promote climate science denial like the Heartland Institute and Americans for Prosperity.”
John:
It must be ‘rocket science’ to ICU and Nick Stokes.
What they claim is damning evidence is nothing of the kind, instead it is standard contract language and practice.
Willie Soon title for the above ‘proposal’ is “principal investigator”. A title that expressly means a Smithsonian team is responsible, otherwise Dr. Soon would not have the title.
The contract does not explicitly describe who is responsible for performing the work. Only that Dr. Soon as Principal oversees the technical aspects. To ensure correct technical language, Smithsonian’s Contract Officer who is the legal signature, will likely ask/order Dr. Soon to write or oversee writing the research results.
Dr. Soon declared his funding via Smithsonian! The Smithsonian may pull funds from fifty donors to actually pay Dr. Soon and the other employees; as such, the Smithsonian is responsible for identifying whose funds they were using.
Dr. Soon’s value as an effective employee is that he successfully locates potential sponsors and brings funds to the Smithsonian.
It is quite odd that the alarmists are soiling their panties in such an effort to smear Dr. Soon. Twisting contractual wording and communications to mean other than the Smithsonian intended. Meanwhile alarmists get caught committing flagrantly illegal acts, e.g. Gleick, and they honor him. Lucky for them the Holder Department of Justice is blind to alarmist wrongful actions.
Ah JR, more fabrications, falsehoods and misinformation.
Or did you hack into Donorstrust and steal their donors list?
I doubt it. Anyway the amount of money Koch Brothers and others contribute is a tiny drop of funds compared to the billions of dollars flowing through the green blobs.
Unlike the honest scientists like Dr. Soon, those green blobs do demand that work done for them be the results they want.
Specifying who you want to have working on a project, is entirely normal in the corporate world.
How would gov-paid doomers know this?
Wow, sold his soul to the devil for $60,000?
Imagine, if Soon hadn’t been so evil, he could have made millions from helping the forces of light, millions of dollars of untainted government money, instead of selling out for a few 10s of thousands of dollars of evil private money.
/sarc
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/03/hansen-rakes-it-in/
http://www.nationalcenter.org/PR-Michael_Mann_Money_011410.html
etc.
Eric Worrall,
Those are damning links. I wonder how ‘ICU’ would respond?
Sorry dbstealey, I can’t see I C U. Maybe he’s off reading “Why Models Run Hot” and preparing a devastating rebuttal to Dr Soon’s challenging new paper. Or maybe not…
wmbriggs.com/public/Monckton.et.al.pdf
Lucky he is not a plumber, he would have charged twice as much.
Stop the presses, he did research on solar variability and climate change, something the IPCC has neglected to do. Does not look like anything too nefarious, does it?
Reply to Bevan ==> No grant is ever made without signifying who will do the research. The contract is between the Smithsonian and Southern Company Services — SCS is a holding and administrative company for the Southern Corp, which is a giant electrical utility. They give tons of research grants all over the political spectrum — including huge investments in solar energy, nuclear energy, Carbon Capture and Sequestration, etc.
that’s a strawman argument, its simple, Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and did not acknowledge his funding in those papers.
Reply to Bevan ==> You need to read the Southern and Smithsonian contract. No specific projects were requested by Southern, no specific papers or reports were ordered, no areas of research even specified other than the study of the effects of solar on climate.
The reporting requirement is conflicts of interest. Partial funding from a diversified electric utility company is hardly a conflict for astrophysical research.
“The reporting requirement is conflicts of interest. Partial funding from a diversified electric utility company is hardly a conflict for astrophysical research.”
The monsoon paper was in an Elsevier Journal. Their Conflict of Interest advice is explicit.
“If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared”
Dr Soon put proposals to SCS and Donor’s Trust, with budgets. He reported publication of the papers as deliverables. Sounds like SCS and DT were funding sources.
Bevan:
Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and did not acknowledge his funding in those papers.
___________________________________
What a cr@p argument.
I have written reports for a corporation. Do you think I add a ‘funding disclosure’ to the report? I am an employee – where the money comes from is the corporation’s business. The report is the corporation’s property: they bought it, they organised it, they own it, and they did something – somewhere – to earn the money to do so.
If you are doing freelance work, that is different. Your responsibility. But it is clear here that Smithsonian arranged and signed the contract with Southern, and so it is their responsibility. And since they would have ‘signed off’ the resulting paper as being fit for publication, it is doubly their responsibility. So for the Smithsonian to turn around and say it is Soon’s problem, and they are investigating, is the height of disreputable dealing. If there is a University Lecturers’ union in the US, they should be investigating the Smithsonian.
But they will not, of course, because if they are like NAFTHE, the UK’s university lecturer’s union, they will be uber-supporters of Greenpeace. In fact, NAFTHE has its own brigade of student and unemployed ‘brownshirts’ called the ‘UAF’, who are paid to go and beat up anyone that liberals and Greenpeace disagree with. (Yes, the UAF stormtroopers are run from the NAFTHE offices in London.)
These, I am afraid, are the levels to which the modern education establishment have sunk to. Academia is no longer a matter of enlightened debate in hallowed halls, it is all about the deployment of ‘brownshirts’ to shout down the opposition, or put the literal boot in during violent demonstrations. And many of these riots have been violent enough to turn into kristallnachts. Strangely, if you talk to them, these ‘enforcers’ think they are being liberal and enlightened, when they are actually emulating the very worst politics that the modern world has known.
R
Mr Stokes says the Elsevier ethical guidelines require disclosure of all funding. No: they do so only for publication in medical journals.
Bevan
You wrongly assert
That is a falsehood. Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and said he did. He had and has NO RESPONSIBILITY OF ANY KIND for funding obtained and/or disbursed by his employer.
The Smithsonian accepted funds from Southern; Willie Soon did not.
Richard
Bevan says:
Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and did not acknowledge his funding in those papers.
Bevan, WAKE UP. If he worked for the Smithsonian, then they know who funded his research. You’re not a rocket scientist, are you?
It was incumbent on the Smithsonian to do any disclosing. Now they’re frantically pointing fingers. But why should they get a free pass?
The letter from the Smithsonian is obviously to placate Big Green. But in reality, this is a tempest in a teapot. It won’t amount to anything because there was nothing improper done by Dr. Soon. And without him to crucify, there is no reason to continue the hue and cry.
richardscourtney February 25, 2015 at 3:30 am
Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and said he did. He had and has NO RESPONSIBILITY OF ANY KIND for funding obtained and/or disbursed by his employer.
richard you are letting your lack of experience of university research lead you into error.
Post docs, like Soon, are employed on ‘soft’ money, which means he has to raise the funds to support his employment/research. Typical numbers mean that you need to raise double your salary to cover benefits and overhead. As the PI you write the proposal to a funding agency, typically it is submitted via the university’s office of sponsored research who make sure that all regulations and procedures are met and if so sign off on it. The PI himself is responsible for the scientific content, when writing a paper it is the author who is responsible for meeting all the requirements of the journal to which the paper is submitted. I would never have agreed to one of the clauses that Soon apparently agreed to, namely allowing the sponsor to pre-approve a paper. The only time that was suggested to me, I refused and we renegotiated, that is something that should always be declared to the journal.
Elsevier’s Conflict of Interest Policy for all Journals, not just Medical:
“Disclosure and conflicts of interest
A conflict of interest may exist when an author or the author’s institution has a financial or other relationship with other people or organizations that may inappropriately influence the author’s work. A conflict can be actual or potential, and full disclosure to the journal is the safest course. All submissions must include disclosure of all relationships that could be viewed as presenting a potential conflict of interest. The journal may use such information as a basis for editorial decisions and may publish such disclosures if they are believed to be important to readers in judging the manuscript. A decision may be made by the journal not to publish on the basis of the declared conflict. At the end of the text, under a subheading ‘Disclosure Statement’, all authors must disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three (3) years of beginning the work submitted that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work.
Examples of potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest stage possible.
All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed. This declaration (with the heading ‘Role of the funding source’) should be made in a separate section of the text and placed before the References. Authors must described the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication. (In addition some funding organizations have particular policies to enable their grant recipients to publish open access in Elsevier journals – for more detail on this, please visit our Funding Body Agreements page.
…potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed…
I am one of those who understands the difference between “should” and “must”.
But clearly, not everyone understands the difference.
Bevan, what has this Solar Variability paper got to do with the Monkton et al. paper on why models run hot?
It appears that certain agencies/NGOs are trying to discredit the Monkton paper (of which Soon was a co-author and received NO funding), by associating Soon with a Smithsonian study 6 years ago for which he did receive money. If that is the case then the link is tenuous at best, and distracted from the recent paper.
Surely no one wants people to be distracted by the Monkton papers conclusions that GCMs are not actually very good at predicting the climate?
Personally, I find this ‘funding corruption’ distraction tedious and asinine. If the source of funding is relevant to the veracity of science then we have surely moved from genuine sceptical enquiry to the era of Lysenkoism.
That’s what’s bugging me. This is a giant bait-and-switch here. Soon may have messed up on noting a sponser on a paper three years ago, but that’s completely irrelevant to the paper at had.
My questions
1: Does someone actually have access to the resulting paper from which this started?
2: Did Soon properly note the sponsers?
2A: If so, good.
2B: If not, well, that’s a problem. Get your act together on documentation.
Now, I still don’t see how funding starting four years ago is relevant to the paper he did with Monkton just a few months ago.
OMG…this isn’t government money!! Oh, the humanity!
We need more taxes to pay for more studies of the climate so NOAA can make even worse mistakes predicting future weather.
ems news is right. Unless Bevan, Stokes, and one or two other mudslingers are shareholders, what explains all their wild-eyed consternation? It’s an internal corporate matter. That’s all.
They are trying to get traction on a non-event. This is just like the Wegman Report, which thoroughly debunked Mann’s Hokey Stick. They couldn’t fault Wegman’s statistics, so they tried to monkey-pile on what they called “plagiarism”. Where did that go? Nowhere.
The small handful of clowns throwing mud here have nothing. They’re just making noise. This is just a “Hey! Look! A kitten!” distraction from the real problems.
I am pretty amazed that Soon allowed a read thru that lets Southern approve his papers before they are submitted. Like saying, “I am your pocket pls control me”
@trafamadore:
So, what is your view on Michael Mann being allowed to confer with his “investigators” before the formal investigation, to decide which questions he would, and would not be asked? Are you “pretty amazed” about that, too?
Reply to trafamadore ==> The “read thru” allowed under the agreement applies only to “Publicity” produced by the Smithsonian. You may have misunderstood that. It is on Page 33 of the documents supplied by the Smithsonian to Greenpeace. (linked repeatedly elsewhere).
Traffy:
You need to provide proof that that clause exists. Otherwise you are repeating silly noise from the wrong end of the goat.
Attacking the messenger is tried and true.
And the “piling on” is astounding: viz:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/02/22/1366041/-Wei-Hock-Soon-and-the-best-Climate-Change-Denial-money-can-buy
http://www.salon.com/topic/wei_hock_soon/
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/34625/20150222/climate-change-denier-wei-hock-soon-mired-in-controversy-for-receiving-funds-from-fossil-fuel-industry.htm
Also see the feed for the Yahoo front page. Stories by NYT, Think Progress, Take Part, Seattle Times, Washington Post (now with a second story), and The Daily Beast. This is a smear from the start. One piece of evidence may resolve everything in this dispute. Who was required by the IRS to provide a 1099 to Dr. Soon?
I read this news piece two days ago and it clearly is a hit job. I tried to post an online comment accordingly but it was declined (no surprise), Here are some reasons why the article may have appeared when it did.
1).Deflect attention from the record snowfalls and record cold temperature in the northeast and middle west of the USA.
2). Rev up a story as a UN poll and other polls show that the public isn’t that concerned about climate change.
3). In view of Driessens book on “Eco-Terrorism” one even wonders if Dr. Soon was possibly singled out because of his heritage, maybe.
And yes, the money goes to the Smithsonian and Dr. Soon is the PI.
Is there a quality difference between research supported in academe by private industry and government> Absolutely not. In my previous life as a university professor of geology, I received grants and contracts from both industry and government. The resulting research met all publication peer review standards and were cited about equally internationally.
Private industry has high standards of quality control in its research. Their bottom line depends on it and their internal peer review system is far more stringent than a lot scholarly journals or research panel review committees.
There may well be no quality difference between government funded and private funding research but ethically you HAVE to acknowledge your funding sources…and Dr Soon did not.
Is it your position that any climate scientist who ever received funding from an NGO mustdisclose that funding in every subsequent paper they publish?
Wow, now AGWs are worried about ethics? Ha! Not really, it is just in their benefit to scream about someone not dotting his ‘i’s and crossing his ‘t’s. What’s wrong you can’t rebut his science?
Has Mann disclosed funding from the Koch Bros?
Dr. Muller disclosed Koch funding,
Many (most?) researchers have multiple projects and multiple sources of funding at any instance of time. When doing the REAL intellectual aspects of their investigations, there is generally no compartmentalization or meter running. Human brains don’t work that way. Researchers do their JOB. In consequence, acknowledgment of financial support is often based on things more tangible than ideas in minds, such as stipends for graduate students, equipment purchases, overhead(!), page fees paid, etc. The input funds and acknowledgements should roughly balance. Second guessing could be both unproductive and endless. That’s why most institutions have professional managers to oversee sponsored programs.
ICU says:
Dr. Muller disclosed Koch funding.
That was not the question.
Bevan
You repeat a falsehood I rebutted above here when you write
I copy the rebuttal I made at the link to your previous post of your falsehood.
That is a falsehood. Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and said he did. He had and has NO RESPONSIBILITY OF ANY KIND for funding obtained and/or disbursed by his employer.
The Smithsonian accepted funds from Southern; Willie Soon did not.
And I add that your iteration of a falsehood does not metamorphose the falsehood into being truth.
Richard
richardscourtney February 25, 2015 at 3:45 am
And I add that your iteration of a falsehood does not metamorphose the falsehood into being truth.
Good advice richard, you should take it.
Phil.
I see that in a thread about smears you provide a smear from behind the coward’s shield of anonymity.
Please state whatever falsehood it is that you claim I have iterated in this thread. Otherwise, withdraw your offensive remark and apologise.
The nearest I can find is that – as dbstealey told you – you misunderstood a factually correct statement I made because you failed to understand the difference between “should” and “must”.
Richard
Richard Courtney,
Lately “Phil.” has taken to labeling those he disagrees with as being dishonest. He did it with me, too. “Phil.” has simply run out of any good arguments.
I know from reading your comments over the years that you are completely honest. As with other skeptics of MMGW, we do not need to be dishonest in our arguments, because we are agreeing with what the real world says. That is not the case with the alarmist crowd.
The hit ‘n’ run comment above by “Phil.” is trolling, nothing more. Consider the source, and don’t be bothered.
But he did and what possible conflict of interest anyway, the research is published and merely reports findings. Read and consider them
The reason for the attack against Soon is because of the recent paper about why climate models run hot.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/16/peer-reviewed-pocket-calculator-climate-model-exposes-serious-errors-in-complex-computer-models-and-reveals-that-mans-influence-on-the-climate-is-negligible/
Am I right in reading from the posts above that the alleged offence was committed 6 years ago and totally ignored until Dr Soon co-authored this recent paper conflicting with current consensus and politically correct views?
Reply to Dr. Klein ==> If you would like to participate or supply printable quotes regarding this topicand Conflict of Interest in general for a Guest Essay either here or at Dot Earth (if we can get Andy Revkin’s blessing) , please contact me at my first name at i4 decimal net.
4). To distract from the IPCC Chairman stepping down amid scandal.
I hope Willie Soon finds himself a sharp lawyer and starts suing the people attacking him. Once the settlement money comes in, Soon probably won’t need other parties to fund his research.
The following was unfunded.
A simple proof that change to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) does not cause climate change has been hiding in plain sight. Here it is:
CO2 has been considered to be a forcing. For a unit area, the units of a forcing are Joules/sec. Energy change for that same unit area has units Joules. Average forcing times duration equals energy change (analogous to average speed times duration equals distance traveled). Energy change divided by effective thermal capacitance is temperature change. Thus equivalently, the appropriate scale factor times the time-integral of the CO2 level would produce the average global temperature (AGT) change attributable to the CO2 change.
According to widely available data from Vostok, Antarctica ice cores, during previous glaciations and interglacials, CO2 and AGT went up and down nearly in lock-step (as so dramatically displayed in An Inconvenient Truth). If CO2 is a significant forcing (scale factor not zero), temperature could only increase and it would increase with the time-integral of the CO2 level. Because instead AGT and CO2 go up AND DOWN nearly together, this actually proves CO2 change does not cause significant average global temperature change. Because CO2 is only a trace gas in the atmosphere, if CO2 change does not cause temperature change, it cannot cause climate change. THUS THE CO2 CHANGE FROM BURNING FOSSIL FUELS HAS NO SIGNIFICANT EFFECT ON CLIMATE.
Application of this analysis methodology to CO2 levels for the entire Phanerozoic eon (about 542 million years) (Berner, 2001) proves that CO2 levels up to at least 6 times the present will have no significant effect on average global temperature.
See more on this and discover the two factors that do cause climate change (95% correlation since before 1900) at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com . The two factors which explain the last 300+ years of climate change are also identified in a peer reviewed paper published in Energy and Environment, vol. 25, No. 8, 1455-1471 or search “agwunveiled”.
I can see why it was “unfunded”. JP
Why?
@John Parsons:
Two days later, and still no answer.
“scientific claims made in Energy & Environment have little credibility among scientists”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_%26_Environment#Climate_change_skepticism
Wow, Conolley’s wiki? How bizarre.
Bevan
You assert
and cite Conolley’s wiki as support for the bizarre assertion.
However, if your assertion were true then it would be an admission by you that IPCC Reports are not provided by “scientists”. Energy & Environment is indexed in the ISI and is cited 28 times in the IPCC reports.
Richard
You do realize that wikipedia is a very bad source for controversial topics as it tends to favor the opinion of the chief editor.
that’s great! wow thank you for the laugh; quoting wikipedia as a “scientific” source of credibility. Next up… “well my dad can kick your dad’s butt, so I am right and you stink!”
And wikipedia is not a credible source either.
Attacking someone because he has presented a differing opinion is a sign of a slime ball and a weak mind. Try examining the paper and presenting a rigorous paper in rebuttal instead or is that beyond all of the AGW crowd. Oh wait Climategate showed how limiting opposing scientific opinions is the AGW’s prefered way of business.
Consider the dates. It all points to Gillis and Schwartz rushing to publish a hit piece in order to divert attention from the Pachauri scandal.
Dr. Soon has clear grounds for litigation. This is his chance to sue for slander.
Reply to Brute ==> You are too kind by far — I think they just let themselves be shamelessly used by Greenpeace.
Same difference, my friend. It’s a timing issue.
Actually I’m wondering whether this hit piece was instigated by Greenpeace to divert attention from the Greenpeace-sponsored and perpetrated desecration of the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site in Peru.
Have any of the Greenpeace members or the organization itself yet been held to account for that?
This mini-tempest-in-teapot has the stench of Greenpeace and willing accomplices at the NY Times pulling a “look over there -> a squirrel” distraction ploy.
Well, government funding of NOAA has led to the last dozen years of utter rubbish forecasts about any sort of weather. The incompetence level has shot through the roof and I think all the staff should be fired.
They have either struck out or whiffed the ball repeatedly. No home runs. It is a joke. Farmers were supposed to be educated by NOAA so they would better run their farms which are very weather dependent.
Instead, if you do the exact opposite of forecasts, you are more likely to have the correct forecast.
This is a multi-dimensional attack.
There’s the professional attack on Dr. Soon for having the temerity to ask for money from anywhere at all for any research related to his field. They want to shut him down because he’s professionally effective.
Then there’s the unjustified and unwarranted attack on Dr. Soon’s personal credibility and ethics. What did he do wrong here? Isn’t securing funding for research by people like him do in their job, and what makes that wrong?
One underlying, unstated premise the warmist goons are making is no funding of solar variability/climate studies is worthwhile. They don’t want anyone else to study the sun-earth climate connection either, as they consider the case to be closed, by their closed minds, of course.
Dr Soon said in the Research Target and Proposal: “…The ability to confirm or reject the statistical correlations shown in Figure 1 will be of enormous scientific importance….”
Unquestionably true.
Obviously Dr. Soon getting to the truth of the matter is making the warmists very nervous.
It’s too late – here’s 200+ other solar related papers that the warmists couldn’t stop from getting published: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/02/over-200-peer-reviewed-papers.html
The weak Sun is going to do in the warmists, and they can’t stop that from happening, no matter what else they try to pull…..
Keep on truckin Dr. Soon!
“They don’t want anyone else to study the sun-earth climate connection either, as they consider the case to be closed, by their closed minds, of course.”
They don’t consider it closed, they are crapping bricks that even more evidence will emerge accurately predicting a turndown in temperatures and tightly correlate it to some specific aspect of the solar cycle. The argument “if it can make the temp go down it probably made it go up”, is very powerful.
As the CO2 hypothesis is largely sold on the basis that correlation is causation with some fancy modelling thrown in, the more powerful correlation of solar activity with temperature stasis and decline drives a stake through the heart of the CAGW vampire.
If funding moves from tracking butterflies up mountains to astrophysics, guess who loses the most?
Forget the contracts, who paid for what etc? The Smithsonian is a world class organization and perfectly capable judging the merits of Soon and his work. The issue here is whether the work had merit or not and since the philistines are attacking the man and not the work we have a clear answer.
Indeed. The Smithsonian was evidently aware of the source funding and saw no problem with it.
If the Smithsonian was in the loop and they signed documents, then I am missing the nuanced problem. They appear to have known more than they are letting on publicly.
Beyond the legalese, isn’t all of Soon’s work available for intense scrutiny by his peers?
If it is, then use science to destroy his work.
For anyone to ignore the timing of this slime attack, is beyond naive. Vito Corleone would be envious of such tactics in getting even with your enemies.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, what ethical grounds does Greenpeace think they have, what credibility do they think they have after pulling all the disrespectful, and unlawful stunts they’ve pulled over the years, most recently the desecration of the Nazca Lines in Peru?
None of course. They’re goons. All they’ve accomplished is demonstrating their duplicitious nature for all to see once again.
Hoist by their own petard, eh? How about a campaign to get the NYT to fire Messrs. Gillis and Schwartz, for journalistic malpractice, pursuing personal agendas, and making potentially libelous attacks against a citizen?
/Mr Lynn
“Bevan
February 23, 2015 at 5:03 pm
There may well be no quality difference between government funded and private funding research but ethically you HAVE to acknowledge your funding sources…and Dr Soon did not.”
I am confused!? Since three Smithsonian representatives signed or witnessed those contracts with Southern Company Services, how can they now claim Soon did not acknowledge his funding sources?
Hi Tobyglyn,
the issue doesn’t relate to those documents, it relates to Soon not acknowledging that funding in the published papers:
Soon was contractually obligated to NOT mention them! So what is he to do? Kiss his funding goodbye because he didn’t follow the contract or do as you want and loose his funding? You alarmist crack me up.. You want him shut up and that is what your trying to do.. by slander!
Is your position so weak that you can not deal with the facts Dr soon exposed? The answer to that would be.. Yes it is weak and without basis.
Except as Nick Stokes pointed out at the top, this funding was for research related to Chinese historical records, which is not even mentioned in any of the mentioned documents.
So he’s supposed to put conflict of interest statements on unrelated papers for every dime he got ever?
Or only every dime he got from a politically unfavored source?
The first noted paper was a RESPONSE to a critique of Soon et al’s original 2007 paper. Their original paper “acknowledged that Soon received grants from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil.”
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/23022015/guide-willie-soons-climate-research-funded-fossil-fuel-companies
Physical Geography, had no formal conflict-of-interest or disclosure policies when Soon submitted one of the questioned papers, although it does now.
http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/02/smithsonian-asks-legal-watchdog-investigate-climate-skeptic-s-disclosure-practices
Louis Russell, senior editor of Ecology Law Currents, confirmed in an email that the journal doesn’t require authors to disclose potential conflicts of interest.
Miranda Walker, director of publications at the professional society that publishes Interfaces, said the journal’s conflict-of-interest policies do not apply to authors unless questions are raised during the peer review process “with respect to suspicion of duplicate publication, fabrication of data or plagiarism.”
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/23022015/scientific-journals-alerted-fossil-fuel-funding-contrarian-climate-studies
Funny – I don’t see a single news source, nor Greenpeace or any of the other thugs involved, actually bothering to do the minimal work necessary to identify exactly what the requirements of each of these handful of publications were at the time of publication. Yet that has not stopped them from smearing Soon and calling for his head.
Pure vermin.
Reply to Bevan and InsideClimate News ==> The graphic provided by Bevan, produced by the activist “news” outlet, InsideClimate News (who are funded by Common Sense Fund, Energy Foundation, Educational Foundation of America, Ford Foundation, Grantham Foundation, ioby.org, Knight Foundation, Marisla Foundation, Park Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, amongst others) is based on the same misunderstanding/misrepresentation (which I believe is entirely intentional) of Conflict of Interest policy.
InsideClimate News’ headline on the Soon “story”: Willie Soon: ‘Too Much Ice Is Really Bad for Polar Bears’ — In return for undisclosed funding from a coal utility, the scientist delivered contrarian talks and papers on Arctic melting. By Sabrina Shankman, InsideClimate News
Ms. Shankman even fails to find out who Southern Services Company is and what they do — so much for journalism there.
“Soon was contractually obligated to NOT mention them!”
He has an obligation to the Journal and their readers to declare funding. Elsevier is explicit.
“If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared”
Saying, well, I couldn’t, because we agreed not to tell, won’t cut it.
Greenpeace gets around this problem by not publishing journal papers so they don’t have to disclose the funding they get from Big Oil. The hypocrisy it astonishing.
The NYT is doing its best to silence a messenger, in favour of another messenger’s message. Yawn. Welcome to America.
Remember the Spanish-American War? That was a war started for reasons entirely based on a New York paper’s fabricated accounts, some from fictitious reporters. It seems to so typical of the Big Apple to sell garbage to a credulous public then demonise (literally) anyone who shows they are lying through their teeth.
That the strings being pulled start in a foreign land is perhaps new. The NYT is dancing to a British tune? Who’d-a-thunk.
Bottom line on a Paris treaty: No taxation without representation.
That might sound familiar even to the sophisticated people in New York.
@Nick Stokes … I generally stand up for you even though I disagree with you here …. that you have the right to express youir opinion like any other. You’ve just seriously challenged my likelihood of doing so in the future.
In a comment about Ethics you cherry pick to remove the context – which is a lie – by omission.
The entire quote – from the is it unethical column:
In the “What it is” column – describing the issue of “an undisclosed funding source and its role” YOUR link says:
And from the “What you should do” column:
The context makes absolutely clear – disclosure is only required if a study sponsor has a role … in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
I’ve read thru a number of the contracts. They are relatively simple. They provide no opportunity for the sponsors to have any “role” in design, in collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, nor in the decision to submit for publication. The ONLY thing the sponsor is allowed is an advanced copy, and the right to submit comments and input. There is NO provision whatsoever requiring authors to give ANY consideration to these comments and input.
IF the authors incorporated any such comments then a disclosure would be appropriate – IN THAT PAPER. There is zero requirement to disclose any prior funding not related to the present paper.
Additionally Nick – you provided a link from PRESENT – with total disregard for what the rules were at the TIME of publication of each paper in question. A simple read shows the PDF you linked to referenced 2012 documents/links in its footnotes. Clearly it has NO clear relation or relevance to the first 8 papers listed – all published BEFORE 2012.
A simple investigation into the PDF metadata shows: a create date of 2-15-2013:
“MetadataDate>2013-02-15T12:47:24Z”
A review of the notes in the table of the 11 alleged violations above, shows just THREE with 2013 or later dates to which your link MIGHT apply. However, they note TWO of those – the Feb 2013 and Feb 2015 papers- were submitted in 2012 – eliminating them from the rules you posted from applying.
The SINGLE remaining paper – dated Dec 2013 – is noted that it was published in “Astronomy & Astrophysics” … NOT an Elsevier publication. Oh, and it was published in 2009, not 2013.
You are not only wrong here Nick – you are seriously wrong. You took a gratuitous cheap shot, purposely withholding the important “rest of the story” – the CONTEXT.
Inexcusable in my opinion for someone with credentials in the industry.
Reply to Stokes ==> You misinterpret the entire subject of Conflict of Interest, but thank you for providing the link, as the Elsevier document linked makes it clear that Soon had no reportable Conflict of Interest in regards a general research grant from Southern.
Those who have this question should read the Elsevier document linked Conflict of Interest as it will clear up this entire smear attack.
The generalized rule is stated as:
“When an investigator, author, editor, or reviewer has a financial/personal interest or belief that could affect his/her objectivity, or inappropriately influence his/her actions, a potential conflict of interest exists. Such relationships are also known as dual commitments, competing interests, or competing loyalties.”
Specifically in regards to funding, the Elsevier guidelines state:
“Neglecting to disclose the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.
Researchers should not enter into agreements that interfere with their access to all of the data and their ability to analyze them independently, and to prepare and publish manuscripts. If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared.
When submitting a paper, a declaration (with the heading ‘Role of the funding source’) should be made in a separate section of the text and placed before the References. Describe the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication Editors may request that authors of a study funded by an agency with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.”
The grants from Southern to the Smithsonian in support of Soon’s work 1) Do not constitute sponsorship of any particular study, but rather are a free grant towards research in a particular field. 2) Southern is expressly distanced from everything about Soon’s work — it has no say in what, when, where or how he fulfills his obligation to engage in research, except that he submit a annual report showing that he did engage in research. 3) Since there were no studies sponsored by Southern, Soon is under no obligation at all to discuss his general research grants with anyone. 4) How a unfettered research grant from an electrical utility could possibly be a Conflict of Interest for general research into Solar/Climate relationships still continues to escape me.
I can not even fathom the idea that “electrical utilities” are “fossil-fuel companies”. They produce the electricity that I am using to type this comment. They do not produce fossil-fuels.
Those who are still under the misguided illusion that Southern must be “bad” because it produces electricity should see the list of grants and research supported by them at this link.
You may have a reading comprehension problem. Elsevier’s C of I policy states thus:
“A journal may use disclosures as a basis for editorial decisions and may publish them if they are believed to be important to readers in judging the manuscript. Likewise, the journal may decide not to publish on the basis of the declared conflict.”
There are two “publishes” in this statement – the first refers to publishing the disclosure, which Elsevier say “may publish“. The second “publish” refers to publishing the paper, which may be impacted by the disclosure. Conflict of Interest disclosures are inherently confidential in nature at the outset. Publically publishing the disclosure is determined by the disclosure monitor, taking into account impact, validity, relativity and contractual restrictions. Elsevier requires C of I disclosure to Elsevier. It doesn’t require that disclosure to be published in the paper, necessarily.
“In a comment about Ethics you cherry pick to remove the context – which is a lie – by omission.”
No, the statement is clear, and not altered by the context. Again
“Researchers should not enter into agreements that interfere with their access to all of the data and their ability to analyze them independently, and to prepare and publish manuscripts.
If funding has been provided, all sources must be declared”
The first sentence is independent of funding. It forbids a different circumstance. The second is clear, explicit, and is as I quoted.
“The context makes absolutely clear – disclosure is only required if a study sponsor has a role…”
No, you are misinterpreting “if any” to apply to the role – it clearly qualifies what it immediately follows (sponsors). Sponsoring is a role. The previous sentence says unconditionally that there should be such a statement.
Don’t over analyze this Nick. In the case of anonymous donors, by your logic, I can’t publish.
Berkeley Earth has a big fat anonymous donor yet they publish and nobody complains.
These are guidelines you are citing, not hard fast rules.
Probably the sources you aren’t able to acknowledge in the paper should be disclosed with the publishing editor, but ultimately the responsibility for disclosing actual conflicts of interest (rather than potential ones) needs to be left up to the author and his institute.
The usual reason for disclosing sponsors is so they can take credit for the work, so it’s a completely different logic than tracing conflicts of interest.
Nick is a paid troll, for him to make any comments on anything that has to do with ethics is ridiculous. I have said it before< STOP Paying any attention to him!
Bod Boder:
No, Nick is not a troll and he’s not paid.
The point he is raising is actually an interesting one. Just not one that is likely to bear fruit in discussions on this blog.
Carrick
Nick is a troll and it is exemplified by what he is doing here now, what does this serve, how does it advance the scientific debate? If Nick has real concerns about Soon and his motives he would wait and see where this goes, but he doesn’t he is the first one out there hitting hard, why? because he is a troll who is being fed a line to push. You can convince yourself of what ever you want but when someone is so dedicated to attacking a fellow scientist he clearly has a motive, Nick is always the first with the byline, he is always the first with the counter argument, he either has a ton of time on is hand and is really great at pulling together info on EVERY subject or he is a spokesman. The clue to me is in the end his argument are always proven false by careful examination of the facts. His game is a media show nothing more.
Stokes:
How ridiculous Nick. Can you torture the clear, plain meaning of the statement any more? You are better than this. At least you have been.
Neglecting to discuss the ROLE… IF ANY – the words and meaning cannot be more clear.
“Should” – not “must/shall” place … describe the “ROLE” “IF ANY” …
The journals reviewed EACH of these papers. Part of that review is whether the paper complies with the journal requirements. Some have tried to say funding sources MUST be disclosed. The rules do NOT say or require that. And IF it were true – that there MUST be a financial disclosure as so many idiots keep claiming – the failing would on the part of the journal for allowing the paper to be accepted and published without complying with their alleged rules of submission and publication.
You are simply wrong Nick … not to mention that there is ZERO evidence the CURRENT rules you posted were in effect in 2007-2009 when these papers were published.
I’ve had one run in with Stokes. He quoted Roy Spencer as making a certain claim. I followed his link and Stokes had carefully truncated the quote such that Roy Spencer had actually said the *exact opposite* of what Stokes claimed. I cited the full quote in context. Sometimes if someone already holds certain views they might stop reading once they’ve found the confirmation they think they were looking for. So this could have been merely a mistake. No. Stokes refused to admit he was wrong, even when presented with the full quote. He lost all interest in discussing the quote. Note: This wasn’t over the merits of Spencer claims, only on what he’d actually written. So the situation was 100% black and white. Stokes wiggled like a worm, started to bring in all kinds of irrelevances in order to change topic. He never admitted he had misrepresented and had ample opportunity to do so. When you behave like that, you go on the record as a liar, not someone who is merely confused or mistaken.
A. Scott,
“You are simply wrong Nick … not to mention that there is ZERO evidence the CURRENT rules you posted were in effect in 2007-2009 when these papers were published.”
Well, 2008-2015. But I’ll quote again from Dr Soon’s letter to the Guardian in 2008, as cited by M Courtney:
Mr Stokes is incorrect about Elsevier. Its requirement that if funding has been provided all sources must be declared applies to medical journals only.
I don’t see the big deal. The NYT had a reporter tour the Soviet Union in the early 30s? He sent back glowing reports about the workers paradise. Some how he did not notice the Holodomor. Not much has changed in the reliability of the NYT.
I don’t believe they were “duped into” anything. They needed to one up the hit job Joel Ashenbach from the Washington Post did in this months National Geographic.
This smear campaign is disgusting, albeit predictable. I am completely on the skeptic side, and am disgusted by the lack of integrity shown by the climate science establishment. However, please recognize this is a war. A war of only words (so far) but a war none the less. I am deeply grateful of Dr. Soon’s efforts to get to the truth and I hope he will continue the good fight. But not disclosing this information appropriately was a mistake that our cause cannot afford. Yes, the smear campaign, like most of their other campaigns, is disgusting. But in war it goes with the territory. Bottom line, the responsibility is on those fighting on the front lines to ensure that these types of gaffes don’t happen. Period.
average joe
Please state what “gaff” you think Willie Soon made because I know of none.
You say he did not reveal “this information appropriately”. What “information”?
Willie Soon said he was employed by the Smithsonian. That was all the funding “information” he needed to state and he did state it.
At present your assertion of an unstated “gaff” by Willie Soon indicates your post as being concern trolling which smears with innuendo.
Richard
Well I thought the “gaffe” was obvious. Here it is. If, instead of saying simply he was “employed by the Smithsonian”, he would have said that he was “employed by the Smithsonian where he is/was Principal Investigator on project(s) funded by Southern Corp, xyz corp, etc.”, then they wouldn’t have had anything to work with. When a group is looking to dig up any dirt they can, one must go out of their way to not leave them any ammo! This is simple 6th grade street smarts. With Naomi whats-her-face out there claiming big oil is buying results, the last thing this cause needs is a paper trail they can point to and say “see, we told you so”. All it would have taken is for him to think a little bit about the consequences of not providing full disclosure. All the damage this paper may have done to the warmist cause may now never be realized because he didn’t provide FULL disclosure. If I still haven’t cleared it up for you let me know I will break it down even simpler.
average joe
Please don’t be silly. You are smearing by asserting a “gaffe” which does not exist.
Soon said he was employed by the Smithsonian. That was all the “disclosure” required.
But you say
The “disclosure” you demand is not possible because it would require each publication from Soon to include a copy of the entire accounts of the Smithsonian since Soon commenced his employment by the Smithsonian. No publisher would allow that.
It seems you are demanding that Soon publish a statement that implies all his work is conducted on behalf of “Southern Corp, xyz corp, etc.”. Your demand is a smear, and the implication of the statement you demand would be a lie.
Richard
Well Richard, I assure you I am not being silly. In my view it would have been an easy thing for Soon to disclose a simple sentence or two more information, BEYOND what was “required”, and thereby avoid this $hitstorm over his credibility. Why wouldn’t he do that? Oversight? Pride? Indignation? Lazy? What do you think? The reason for my comment is that I am ticked off because this fantastic opportunity to knock these climate model zealots down a notch, and all the efforts by him and other authors of the simple model paper, are now tainted. It matters not whether he was in the “wrong”, he should have exercised more diligence in making sure he was “squeaky clean” before putting his name on the paper. The fact that he didn’t certainly diminishes his credibility in my eyes, which is just what the zealots want. If I were one of the other authors, I would be calling Soon up and saying what in the bloody xxx were you thinking? If you don’t see it that way, fine. But don’t for a second mistake my motives for trolling or silliness. I am very serious about this. This is my final communication on this topic.
average joe
I see you are still smearing with innuendo thrown from behind the coward’s screen of anonymity.
Your latest daft innuendo is in the form of these questions
You have added another smear by asserting that Soon’s “credibility” is affected by his having done all that was required of him and not having done something impossible. I think such smears are despicable.
As I already explained, no publisher would permit the publication in a paper of your “simple sentence or two more information, BEYOND what was “required””. This is because – in reality – that “simple sentence etc.” is a call for a complete listing of all funding for the Smithsonian from the time Soon gained employment with the Smithsonian.
He did not do what nobody can do. Laziness, oversight, pride and indignation are not relevant.
Richard
Richard, to all the above: BULL$HIT Good day sir.
average joe
I reply for benefit of onlookers.
Your response to being called out is typical behaviour of anonymous concern trolls when their smears and innuendoes are pointed out.
Richard
Can I make a request Kip Hansen? You are obviously passionate about this and I appreciate anyone helping out Anthony. Those who know what you are talking about are making comments–but there is a “foundation” piece of information that I do not have here and don’t know what you are talking about. I can glean a bit from the comments but would have preferred to see a synopsis somewhere for reference. thanks..Shelly
Reply to Day By Day ==> The foundation is the first linked headline:
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher
By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ FEB. 21, 2015
A travesty of science journalism in the NY Times.
Judging from some of the contributions above , eg those of Bevan, the subject has been extremely well researched and organised . That takes time , and time as we all know is money . where is that coming from?
good question as I’ve seen none of it? $$$
Briggs emphasized that “if you don’t remember anything else from this radio program listen to this: If you have a theory and that theory makes bad predictions, that theory is in error….Climate forecasters have made, for decades, lousy predictions. They are therefore in error….People should not rely on them to make decisions. Certainly, they should not rely on them to make legislation.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/23/experts-smeared-by-media-and-greenpeace-for-debunking-global-warming/
If I didn’t know better, I’d say this is an obvious attempt to distract from the real problems with comput…SQUIRREL!!
😉
P.S. We can only hope against hope the mainstream media will apply the same standards of scrutiny the next time they are about to ‘Ctrl+V’ a scientific press release.
We flush Billions away on cronies, but worry about Dr. Soon’s .000004 parts per billion!
The administrations name and shame game in action. Just like this presidentially sponsored slander!
https://www.barackobama.com/climate-change-deniers/#/
This just illustrates what everyone already knows “The Grey Lady” is effin nuts.
This fashionable bigotry (as it was called on a recent thread) will cause its problems for these vile people. There will be a time soon when it will not be fashionable, but the internet will not forget that they are bigots.
Good thing the Anthropocene Jihadists can’t read English. In that footer of the grant they, could-a should-a would-a read that the Smithsonian itself was created in 1846 (before the Emasculate Conception of “Human [Carbon] Global Warming” that occurred, as legend has it in 1850) by money from a … FOREIGN NATIONAL. How Scandalous!
Well as you say, playing devils advocate, just how would the “Anthropocene Jihadists” if not schooled in English have come to pin such a diatribe in the NYT, or Guardian for that matter, pray tell?
Answer 1: The Anthropocene Jihadists have one hundred “monkey” Anthropocene Jihadists at AGU, AAAS, Penn State U., EPA, GISS, NOAA and NSF (and the “Greens”) to randomly cobble together a document on one hundred vintage IBM Selectric typewriters. Micromanagers are still waiting for the “Hamlet” text to appear. This will provide parameterizing constraints on the IPCC models in use today and centuries to come.
Answer2: The Anthropocene Jihadists use Google Translate for all communications. LOL (y)
Ha ha.
http://pindanpost.com/2015/02/23/global-warming-causes-more-ice-but-the-smithsonian-doesnt-know-why/
Smithsonian science.
What’s that saying again? “Wow, that belongs in the Smithsonian”.
Your time is up on this massively failed conjecture. It belongs in the Smithsonian, Smithsonian.
(Although sadly it hasn’t failed has it ? In loserfraud world, this has been a success story).
you HAVE to acknowledge your funding sources…and Dr Soon did not.”
============
Bull Shirt.
“Why Models Run Hot: Results from An Irreducibly Simple Climate Model.” was not funded by Southern Corp.
Hasn’t Greenpeach has receive millions from BP? As such, maybe Greenpeach is secretly in league with big oil to try and remove the only competitor to oil, which is coal?
And all these new shills that are appearing on WUWT? Are they not, in fact paid by oil to try and get the US off coal, so they can jack up the prices for natural gas? With BIG donations to the campaign of politicians willing to toe the party line.
Why else would the Commander in Chief spend more than $1 billion dollars to get a job that pays $400,000 per year for 4 years?
I think you dropped your tinfoil hat?
Greenpeace received $25,000,000 from Chesapeake Energy Corp. to mount a negative campaign against the coal industry. What’s your snide remark about that fact?
sounds pretty clever to me, a free $25000000?
$25m for advocacy? beats writing papers obviously.
Actually, it was The Sierra Club and not Greenpeace which took the $25 mil. from Chesapeake.
http://science.time.com/2012/02/02/exclusive-how-the-sierra-club-took-millions-from-the-natural-gas-industry-and-why-they-stopped/
Kip Hansen,… If Dr Soon was not a threat to them they would not have pulled out all the stops to attack him.
The Smithsonian gets some funding from the government. With the threat of Senate investigation over temperature data tampering, they may choose to avoid controversy
The greens are use to winning with no one willing to stand up to them. This time may be different. We shall see, we shall see.
michael
“If Dr Soon was not a threat to them they would not have pulled out all the stops to attack him.”
How exactly is Dr. Soon a threat to them? For example, in all likelihood NYT reporters covering the 2000 elections wanted Gore to win. But nobody lost their job when Bush did.
Chris.. By “them” I I am referring to Green peace the group that did the freedom of info act so they could start their witch hunt. The NYT their just “useful tools (fools)” as Stalin would say.. You do know who Stalin is don’t you?
michael
Mike – Yes, I know who Stalin is – he is the one the Koch’s father Fred made his initial millions with when Fred Koch went to Russia and helped Stalin build cracking plants in the 1930s.
In what alternate universe is Willie Soon a threat to Greenpeace? If anything, his work can be used by them to galvanize support and further donations.
Since government funding is via congressional action, the political leanings of said congressional decision makers should be announced. Over the years we simply say “tax dollars”. Yet a simple high school course in political leanings of various congressional bodies demonstrates a clear bias towards the political faction in power.
It is overwhelmingly hypocritical to call out the name of anyone whom you think stinketh when your own backdoor is an abundant source of odor.
Mr. Hansen, it is incorrect to say “the documents consist simply of the contracts between the Smithsonian and Southern Corp.” This cedes too much credence to the claims of the warmist press.
As is usual in this kind of research funding, the documents are clearly labelled “Agreement” for funding research, and it is clear that it is a grant, not a contract. The distinction is important and relevant to the falsity of the charges against Dr. Soon.
A contract is used when a funding entity, private or government, provides funds for research and the funding entity expects deliverable of some specific work product. If such deliverables are not produced meeting the contract requirements, the fundee is legally subject to demands to return the funds on the part of the funder. The document agreed to between the funder and fundee is then a contract in the legally binding sense. It can be terminated at any time by the funder if the production of the agreed upon product is not progressing on schedule.
On the other hand, a grant is literally giving money away to someone in the general expectation that they will pursue useful research in some area, but by definition it cannot require a specific deliverable product. If the researcher fritters away time collecting string instead of working on topic, the funder cannot get the money back, they can only not renew the grant the next time it is up. There is no default mechanism because there is no mutually agreed work product. In general the only “deliverable” required in grants is a progress report, the details of which are entirely up to the researcher. Documents establishing these relationships are called “Agreements” precisely because they are not enforceable contracts. One party agrees to give the money and the other agrees to take it. That is the entirety of the agreement between the parties. These points may seem arcane, but anyone who has been involved in the funder/fundee process knows how important these distinctions are.
In particular Mr. Stokes is incorrect in claiming that the Agreement sections shown here list any set of papers or other matter that Dr. Soon or others are required by the agreement to produce. Dr. Soon is only required to produce a progress report, which is typically required internally and for IRS and SEC purposes by funders to document that the money they granted was in fact utilized by the grantee institution and was not “laundered” in some way for some other purpose. Inclusion of activities, papers published, or any other specific item in a progress report as cut and pasted here is entirely the discretion of the grantee and in no way is individually required as a deliverable of the grant. Dr. Soon could have fulfilled his end of the agreement with a general discussion of his results and no specific list of publications. This grant is typical for current research grant practice and is not evidence of financial interest in the results of research.
Nor is there any evidence in the documents that the grant was open when the work was done on the specific paper that has caused such anger. The latest date in the documents posted was a no-cost extension of period of performance into 2013, some months after Dr. Soon submitted his final report on the grant. That appears to be well before work on the paper under consideration was begun. Even if it had been a contract, if it was not in force when the work was done, without expectation of future compensation based on the results, there is absolutely no basis for a charge of conflict of interest.
Just a minimal listing of some of the grantees of the Southern Company is too extensive to list here. There are overviews and lists of the grantees, ranging from wildlife federations to universities, at http://www.southerncompany.com/what-doing/corporate-responsibility/economic-stewardship/home.cshtml
Reply to FAH ==> I concede that the documents are labelled Agreement. I am not a lawyer [why does that sound like a joke??] But I suspect that the document is of a type that lawyers consider a contract under the law.
Any contract law experts reading tonight?
Contracts are a sub-set of agreements. Unlike other agreements, contracts are legally enforceable, while mere agreements are not.
Don’t want to claim myself as a “contract law expert”, but the Smithsonian’s “agreement” sure looks like it has the form of a contract–an offer, an acceptance, and an exchange of value. So assuming that the Smithsonian contracting officer was not a minor or drunk on his butt, just why isn’t the Smithsonian/SCS agreement a contract (a legally enforceable agreement), again? Please spell all this out FAH.
Further, FAH notes that “a grant…by definition… cannot require a specific deliverable product” However, para 5 of the “agreement” “entitles” SCS to a no-cost license, as a specific deliverable product, in “consideration” for its funding. Seems like that aspect of the “agreement”, “definitionally” deprives the “deal” of any claim that it is a mere, legally unenforceable “agreement” and, rather, establishes the whole business as a contract. Unless, of course, FAH maintains that SCS has no “breach of contract” recourse if the Smithsonian fails to provide the specified no-cost license. Be curious to see FAH’s legal reasoning here.
Let me add to my above comment, that I don’t see where classifying the agreement between Smithsonian/SCS as a contract or not is of pertinence to the issue of any alleged wrongdoing by Professor Soon. Elsewhere on this thread, I think a very cogent case has been made that Prof. Soon’s funding was from the Smithsonian and that he, an employee of the same institution, acknowledged that funding. In contrast, SCS, as an indirect funder, was not the source of research funding, as Prof Soon received the funding, and therefore was not required to be reported as such.
Some commenters, however, seem to maintain that Prof Soon was obligated to cite SCS as a source of funds because even though the company’s funding of Prof Soon’s research was indirect. In that regard, Eli Rabett, in a 23 February 2015, 5:27 AM post appearing at his “Rabett Run” blog, advises (if I understand “the bunny’s” write-up) that the Smithsonian, in at least one case, sought a funder’s permission to reclassify a gift (treated as a grant) to an “unrestricted donation”. That reclassification then allowed the fund to be placed in a DDF (Director’s Discretionary Fund) and used as “bridge funding” for other research projects. Consequently, it appears, to moi, that the same logic that would require Prof Soon to cite SCS as a funding source would also require researchers receiving “bridge funding” from the DDF fund to also also cite as sources of funding any contributor to the DDF fund. Is such a thing really done? Or is the rule on citing indirect funding sources one that only applies to Prof. Soon?
Reply to FAH ==> Thank you for the very insightful explanation of the legal documents between the Smithsonian and Southern released by Greenpeace. If you are willing to write this topic up with a few examples and maybe include definitions of Conflict of Interest arising from this type of agreement, it would help many to read it here as a Guest Essay. You may write to me at my first name at i4 decimal net.
And thanks for the link to Southern’s other research grants snd efforts — I looked for it but couldn’t find it this afternoon.
I don’t suppose any privately funded research ever works, including how oil companies find and develop oil and gas fields; they never find anything, and shareholders never get any dividend.
Strange how the whole world seems to like the idea of a free market though, as they keep giving money to them.
And with big government returning trillions of dividends to the tax payers each year, I fail to see why everyone doesn’t want to invest more in it. (/sarc)
Meanwhile nothing to see here, move along…
http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/02/22/why-was-media-silent-flashback-nasa-james-hansen-received-250000-from-partisan-heinz-foundation-endorsed-dem-john-kerry-for-pres-in-2004/
Mann grants, 1996 – 2009:
Development of a Northern Hemisphere Gridded Precipitation Dataset Spanning the Past Half Millennium for Analyzing Interannual and Longer-Term Variability in the Monsoons, $250,000
Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, $1,884,991
Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, $541,184
A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, $330,000
AMS Industry/Government Graduate Fellowship, $23,000
Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana, $759,928
Analysis and testing of proxy-based climate reconstructions, $459,000
Constraining the Tropical Pacific’s Role in Low-Frequency Climate Change of the Last Millennium, $68,065
Acquisition of high-performance computing cluster for the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC), $100,000
Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results, $102,000
Reconstruction and Analysis of Patterns of Climate Variability Over the Last One to Two Millennia, $315,000
Remote Observations of Ice Sheet Surface Temperature: Toward Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Antarctic Climate Variability, $133,000
Paleoclimatic Reconstructions of the Arctic Oscillation, $14,400
Global Multidecadal-to-Century-Scale Oscillations During the Last 1000 years, $20,775
Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere, $214,700
Advancing predictive models of marine sediment transport, $20,775
Multiproxy Climate Reconstruction: Extension in Space and Time, and Model/Data Intercomparison, $381,647
The changing seasons: Detecting and understanding climatic change, $266,235
Patterns of Organized Climatic Variability: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Globally Distributed Climate Proxy Records and Long-term Model Integrations, $270,000
Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last Millennium, $78,000
[May be a few duplicates]:
2009-2013 Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, NSF-EF [Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)] $1,884,991 [This needs investigated. Why was Mann given this very large grant? It pays for a study of mosquito vectors. Should it not be given to a biologist, or an epidemiologist? Or was it just payola? There is no record of any paper being produced from this grant.
2009-2012 Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model, NSF-ATM [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann; Co-Investigators: K. Keller (Penn State Univ.), A. Timmermann (Univ. of Hawaii)] $541,184
2008-2011 A Framework for Probabilistic Projections of Energy-Relevant Streamflow Indices, DOE [Principal Investigator: T. Wagener; Co-Investigators: M. Mann, R. Crane, K. Freeman (Penn State Univ.)] $330,000
2008-2009 AMS Industry/Government Graduate Fellowship (Anthony Sabbatelli), American Meteorological Society [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.)] $23,000
2006-2009 Climate Change Collective Learning and Observatory Network in Ghana, USAID [Principal Investigator: P. Tschakert; Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann, W. Easterling (Penn State Univ.)] $759,928
2006-2009 Analysis and testing of proxy-based climate reconstructions, NSF-ATM [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.)] $459,000
2006-2009 Constraining the Tropical Pacific’s Role in Low-Frequency Climate Change of the Last Millennium, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigators: K. Cobb (Georgia Tech Univ.), N. Graham (Hydro. Res. Center), M.E. Mann (Penn State Univ.), Hoerling (NOAA Clim. Dyn. Center), Alexander (NOAA Clim. Dyn. Center)] PSU award (M.E. Mann): $68,065
2006- Acquisition of high-performance computing cluster for the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC), NSF-EAR [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann, Co-Investigators: R. Alley, M. Arthur, J. Evans, D. Pollard (Penn State Univ.)] $100,000
2003- Decadal Variability in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Integrating Paleo & Coupled Model Results, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigators: M.E. Mann (U.Va), J. Cole (U. Arizona), V. Mehta (CRCES)] U.Va award (M.E. Mann): $102,000
2002- Reconstruction and Analysis of Patterns of Climate Variability Over the Last One to Two Millennia, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann, Co-Investigators: S. Rutherford, R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes] $315,000
2002- Remote Observations of Ice Sheet Surface Temperature: Toward Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Antarctic Climate Variability, NSF-Office of Polar Programs, Antarctic Oceans and Climate System [Principal Investigators: M.E. Mann (U. Va), E. Steig (U. Wash.), D. Weinbrenner (U. Wash)] U.Va award (M.E. Mann): $133,000
2002-2003 Paleoclimatic Reconstructions of the Arctic Oscillation, NOAA-Cooperative Institute for Arctic Research (CIFAR) Program [Principal Investigators: Rosanne D’Arrigo, Ed Cook (Lamont/Columbia); Co-Investigator: M.E. Mann] U.Va subcontract (M.E. Mann): $14,400
2002-2003 Global Multidecadal-to-Century-Scale Oscillations During the Last 1000 years, NOAA-Climate Change Data & Detection (CCDD) Program [Principal Investigator: Malcolm Hughes (Univ. of Arizona); Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann; J. Park (Yale University)] U.Va subcontract (M.E. Mann): $20,775
2001-2003 Resolving the Scale-wise Sensitivities in the Dynamical Coupling Between Climate and the Biosphere, University of Virginia-Fund for Excellence in Science and Technology (FEST) [Principal Investigator: J.D. Albertson; Co-Investigators: H. Epstein, M.E. Mann] U.Va internal award: $214,700
2001-2002 Advancing predictive models of marine sediment transport, Office of Naval Research [Principal Investigator: P. Wiberg (U.Va), Co-Investigator: M.E. Mann] $20,775
1999-2002 Multiproxy Climate Reconstruction: Extension in Space and Time, and Model/Data Intercomparison, NOAA-Earth Systems History [Principal Investigator: M.E. Mann (U.Va), Co-Investigators: R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes] $381,647
1998-2000 Validation of Decadal-to-Multi-century climate predictions, DOE [Principal Investigator: R.S. Bradley (U. Mass); Co-Investigators: H.F. Diaz, M.E. Mann] $388,000
1998-2000 The changing seasons? Detecting and understanding climatic change, NSF-Hydrological Science [Principal Investigator U. Lall (U. Utah); Co-investigators: M.E. Mann, B. Rajagopalan, M. Cane] $266,235
1996-1999 Patterns of Organized Climatic Variability: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Globally
Distributed Climate Proxy Records and Long-term Model Integrations, NSF-Earth Systems History [Principal Investigator: R.S. Bradley (U. Mass); Co-Investigators: M.E. Mann, M.K. Hughes] $270,000
1996-1998 Investigation of Patterns of Organized Large-Scale Climatic Variability During the Last Millennium, DOE, Alexander Hollaender Postdoctoral Fellowship [M.E. Mann] $78,000
For those keeping score, that’s more than $6 million in grants for various predictions, models and reconstructions over the last 13 years by Mann and his cohorts.
Shall we look into Mann’s
payolagrants? Or does the Willie Soon witch hunt take precedence?Of course.
Yes but more importantly – Did M. Mann ever get a cheeseburger voucher from BP? Now that would surely make him a ‘paid shill’ of evil polluters and invalidate all his ‘work’.
Dr. Mann worked with investigators from the CRU East Anglia (Dr. Phil Jones et al) and they indeed do list oil companies as sponsors. It’s on their acknowledgement of funding page. Nothing unusual there. Many universities and research groups take oil industry funding.
So, if it’s dirty to take oil company funding then a significant portion of the climate research I am aware of should be rejected…
Only a moron would equate government funding with funding from the fossil fuel industry.
But that’s what this is really about itsn’t it- you just don’t like paying taxes because you’ve failed at life…
Um… I think I’ve been a much better than average success at life. Maybe that’s just projection on your part, dog.
And if you noticed, most of those Mann ‘grants’ are not from government agencies.
You are right Husky. You can’t compare the two funding sources. One demands results and the other only demands validation. Where do you think the saying “Good enough for government work” comes from?
The dog gives new meaning to the term, “out in the cold.”
Ouch…some kind of truth there.
Au contrare, my pet doggy. I like paying my taxes, but I don’t like what current governments spend it on.
Spending $50 billion a year on trying to destroy Western industry, technology, standards of living and culture, is not very good value in my book. And I shall continue to resist paying those taxes, and donate them to WUWT instead, for as long as this nonsense continues.
R
dbstealey February 23, 2015 at 8:23 pm
And if you noticed, most of those Mann ‘grants’ are not from government agencies.
Actually stealey they are almost all from government agencies according to your list: NSF, DOE, USIAD, NOAA, ONR,
The ones from gov’t agencies are even worse. That money should be returned to the Treasury:
http://www.nationalcenter.org/PR-Michael_Mann_Money_011410.html
Husky
Because we all know the government is our friend and is out to help us.
Let me ask you something when the communist killed 50 million is Russia or 90 million in China or when the Fascists in Germany and Japan tried to take over the world and exterminate everyone they thought was inferior was your biggest worry about who was cornering the market on oil?
Both industry and government are out of control but if you think they are on opposite sides you are crazy. The difference is, industry is trying to control a market, government is trying to control you. Neither cares a wit about you or me.
That is incredible db! I had no idea that kind of money could be garnered by a few people writing papers. What Dr. Soon collected for the Smithsonian was a pittance by comparison. It underscores the complete utter hypocrisy of the warmists.
Chris
You rightly say
Soon clearly stated that he worked for the Smithsonian and he made full disclosure of his research sources of funding.
I am at a loss to understand your point.
Richard
The question is the disclosure of funding sources for research, not whether someone received funding for their research.
No, the question is of whose business it is that there is a disclosure of funding sources…
“No, the question is of whose business it is that there is a disclosure of funding sources…”
Are you saying a journal or employer of association should not have that right?
The last time I checked, no one forced Soon to work for the Smithsonian, which has these requirements clearly stated. No one forced him to publish in journals that require disclosure research sources of funding.
He could work on his own, and self publish or publish through a journal or site that does not place these restrictions.
A call for Michael Mann to return grant loot to the Treasury:
http://www.nationalcenter.org/PR-Michael_Mann_Money_011410.html
dbstealey February 23, 2015 at 7:06 pm
2009-2013 Quantifying the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases, NSF-EF [Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)] $1,884,991 [This needs investigated. Why was Mann given this very large grant? It pays for a study of mosquito vectors. Should it not be given to a biologist, or an epidemiologist? Or was it just payola? There is no record of any paper being produced from this grant.
More of stealey’s usual blind copying and pasting without any understanding of the subject, and associated innuendo and misinformation!
The PI for this grant was an expert on the subject: Matt Thomas, Ph.D., Professor and Huck Scholar in Ecological Entomology. One of his specialties is Malaria: http://www.thethomaslab.net/climate-change
Lists about 12 recent papers on the subject (out of 29 listed at NSF as arising from the award), here’s one with Mann as co-author, note the acknowledgement section:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/PaaijmansEtAlCCOnline14.pdf
“Acknowledgments This work was supported by the NSF-EID program (grant no. EF-0914384).”
Awaiting with bated breath for stealey’s retraction of this slur.
LOLOL!!!
The truth hurts, eh, “Phil.”?
What’s comparison for the goose is comparison for the gander. You give Mann a totally free pass. But not Dr. Soon? Didn’t think so. I still don’t see a Mann paper in return for that 1.8 mil.
Being a Mann apologist doesn’t surprise me at all. How about that Hokey Stick, eh, “Phil.”?
dbstealey February 24, 2015 at 6:13 am
The truth hurts, eh, “Phil.”?
Apparently it does stealey, you got caught out not telling the truth and now you try to evade responsibility for it.
I still don’t see a Mann paper in return for that 1.8 mil.
That’s your problem, perhaps you should try reading, as cited above:
‘Downscaling reveals diverse effects of anthropogenic climate warming on the potential for local environments to support malaria transmission’,
Krijn P. Paaijmans & Justine I. Blanford & Robert G. Crane & Michael E. Mann & Liang Ning & Kathleen V. Schreiber & Matthew B. Thomas
Matthew B Thomas is the recipient of the ‘1.8 mil’ and the PI of the grant Robert G Crane is another of the collaborators on the proposal, NSF list 29 papers arising from the award.
You give Mann a totally free pass. But not Dr. Soon?
Mann acknowledged his source in his paper, apparently Soon has not, there’s no equivalency.
Being a Mann apologist doesn’t surprise me at all.
Not an apologist, just pointing out your untruths and misinformation, your being a Soon apologist doesn’t surprise me at all, par for the course, trying to defect criticism by posting false information.
I imagine that if $1,800,000 were on offer in return for a paper, there would be a line of applicants from Miami to L.A. That amount is so much higher than the average grant that only the most naive and credulous would believe that it’s all just due to an interest in mosquitoes.
Also, “Phil.”, I’ve never told lies or knowingly posted misinformation. That’s your psychological Projection speaking.
dbstealey February 24, 2015 at 9:55 am
I imagine that if $1,800,000 were on offer in return for a paper, there would be a line of applicants from Miami to L.A. That amount is so much higher than the average grant that only the most naive and credulous would believe that it’s all just due to an interest in mosquitoes.
That grant was for four years work, that’s not exceptional, I’ve had bigger ones than that myself.
As pointed out the NSF credits the award as leading to 29 papers, not one. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently committed $168million to malaria research.
Also, “Phil.”, I’ve never told lies or knowingly posted misinformation.
Get real stealey, you’ve done so multiple times in this thread alone.
You posted this:
“NSF-EF [Principal Investigator: M. Thomas; Co-Investigators: R.G. Crane, M.E. Mann, A. Read, T. Scott (Penn State Univ.)] $1,884,991 [This needs investigated. Why was Mann given this very large grant? It pays for a study of mosquito vectors. Should it not be given to a biologist, or an epidemiologist?
and this “There is no record of any paper being produced from this grant.” when in fact there are records of multiple papers being produced from it .
In reply to this: “here’s one with Mann as co-author, note the acknowledgement section:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/PaaijmansEtAlCCOnline14.pdf
Acknowledgments This work was supported by the NSF-EID program (grant no. EF-0914384).”
You posted: “I still don’t see a Mann paper in return for that 1.8 mil.”
Sticking your fingers in your ears and saying ‘I can’t hear you’, doesn’t cut it.
“Phil.” lowers himself to name-calling because that’s the only real argument he has. I’ve got news for the anonymous “Phil”: I don’t lie. If I have ever posted incorrect information, that’s the problem of those who produced it. I’m the messenger, see, name-caller? I never post anything that I know is wrong. But every time “Phil.” comments, it is dishonest. Why? Because he is on the wrong side of the debate, and he knows it: global warming stopped close to twenty years ago. Any skeptical scientist [the ONLY honest kind of scientists] would look at that fact and admit that he was on the wrong track.
I will admit that “Phil.” is the the resident expert here: his expertise consists of doing internet searches, so he can sound intelligent. But the fact is, “Phil.” is just a chameleon; a wannabe smart guy. In reality, “Phil.” is quite stupid on his own. He’s a know-nothing. Take away his internet, and he’s a mouth-breather.
Hey, prove me wrong, “Phil.”. Instead of being an internet coward, post your name. If you don’t have the balls to do that, then you’re nothing.
Dbstealey…..you are way out of line attacking Phil. like that.
@Reed Bukhart:
When someone labels me a ‘liar’, the gloves are off.
What would you do? Turn the other cheek?
I’m ‘awaiting with bated breath for “Phil’s” retraction of that slur’.
dbstealey February 24, 2015 at 1:08 pm
“Phil.” lowers himself to name-calling because that’s the only real argument he has. I’ve got news for the anonymous “Phil”: I don’t lie. If I have ever posted incorrect information, that’s the problem of those who produced it.
Really? Stealey, you produced this statement:
dbstealey February 23, 2015 at 8:23 pm
And if you noticed, most of those Mann ‘grants’ are not from government agencies.
Actually stealey they are almost all from government agencies according to your list: NSF-7, DOE-3, USAID-1, NOAA-5, ONR-1, for a total of 17 government grants vs. 2 non-governmental. So who are you going to blame for producing that incorrect information? How could you not know that your statement was untrue?
And yet according to: ” I never post anything that I know is wrong.”
take a look into Nick Stokes.
fredberple:
Or anyone else. William Briggs (one of the co-authors) says it was written on the authors’ own time. The hit men from the NYT and Greenpissers are just dredging up old accusations against Dr. Soon. The hit men don’t mention “Why Models Run Hot,” so my guess is that Greenpissers thought they hit pay dirt with a FOIA request from the Smithsonian, and then whispered to the Times guys, “Hey, you want to slime the d•niers? Here’s an easy target.” Of course, they didn’t notice that the contracts were between Southern and Smithsonian, not with Dr. Soon.
Of course, the New York Slimes (as Mark Levin calls them) are nothing less than Pravda for the Obama administration. Unfortunately whatever they publish gets picked up by every third- and fourth-rate publication in the country as the gospel truth. So as usual, the lies run around the world while the truth is just getting its boots on (Mark Twain).
/Mr Lynn
[Snip. Calling people denialists gets you snipped. See? ~mod.]
Siberian_Husky No one here uses such language in reference to you. I think you owe an apology. Decide what type of human being you are.
One who engages in honest civil debate over the facts, or no.
michael
ps I await your reply
I often read the article and then the posts so as to get better insight. The posts on this article are not up to standard for this site with the personal attacks and acrimony. I enjoy the point counterpoint but the name calling is childish and weakens your arguments. Please stop.
In other circumstances I would agree with you, but do you really think Justin Gillis and John Schwartz deserve any respect for their transparent attempt to ruin the career of a distinguished scientist and to further the agenda of the Warmist ideologues?
/Mr Lynn
Well – not that bad. But it might be advisable for anyone posting under a screen-name to ask himself/herself if he/she would press the submit button if the real name were showing. If one must use a fake name, that is understandable in some cases, – – but you unavoidably lose points, especially as one spews invective!
Reply to John Towers ==> The inability of some to engage in meaningful civil discourse is regrettable. Remember, this is the internet, where children mix in posing as adults (and, unfortunately, in other places, adults mix in pretending to be children). That there are Junior Deputy Climate Defenders (from both sides of the divide) here who can not discuss but only call names is the price we pay for an open and free internet. I generally ignore comments from those not using their full real names (but sometimes I have allowance for those using their initials, such as Dr. Brown at Duke University who uses “rgbatduke”). It is very hard for commenting Moderators to maintain and enforce free discourse and to cut out the badmouthing kids at the same time. Even I get angry and over-react at times, to my own regret.
To read here and else where on the ‘Net, one must have an active and serviceable reading filter — to skip over the childish nonsense.
The only one of these “journalist” I have found with even a science degree is Monbiot of the Guardian and his is Zoology which still means he is far less qualified than the average sceptic to speak about this dispute between scientific equals.
They don’t have the scientific credibility and by the look of it, they just copy and paste the carbage from the foreign government funded greenblob.
This is why they are no longer the mainstream on climate and WUWT is the mainstream.
Wow it’s amazing how a coordinated personal attack of no substance can take so much traction in the media. Which shows more what a bunch of easily manipulated idiots make up the media than any failings of Dr Soon.
Meanwhile women coming forward with complaints of sexual harassment by the chairman of the IPCC has little traction except in India. Apparently Indian media is more concerned with men in position of power sexually harassing women than American media does, well unless the accused is a comedian, then it is front page news for months. While they are not at it, would be nice if someone looked into the relationship Pachauris public role as chairman affected his private company and his personal wealth. Let’s see the decisions made at the IPCC have a direct relationship to the bottom line of the companies he owns. Talk about a conflict of interest.
What does sexual harassment have to do with the “science”? Well nothing. What does Soon being funded by SCS have to do with the science. Nothing. Except if you are not a bobble head in the AGW crowd, then it means some ambiguous everything.
It is interesting what a bunch of cowards are running the Smithsonian. They are acting like trailer trash who claim ignorance when confronted with the obligations they have due to the contracts they put their signature on. The Smithsonian cowards felt the need to explain they did not agree with Dr. Soon, why not provide a list of all the scientists they do not agree with? In the same spasm of fear they then gave a mealy mouthed position on AGW; “human activities are “a” cause of global warming.” Yes “a’ cause among many other causes affecting climate temperature. I believe Dr. Soon believes the same, you dumb-arses at the Smithsonian. Thanks to the executives running the Smithsonian for sullying its reputation.
Can’t wait to see what else Climate Science can stain on its narcissistic parade to imagined relevancy.
It’s the Green Inquisition. I hope they don’t blaspheme themselves by driving cars or flying airplanes.
Wow!
The Republicans have suggested they will call witnesses to question adjustment of temperature records. Dr. Soon was thought to be on the witness list.
Why are they discrediting Dr. Soon? I’m sure you can work it out.
With their triple-chins purple with the Borsch-stain of Russian funding, Greenpeace are unashamed to add racism to hypocrisy in their bullying of Willie Soon. This makes Greenpeace’s money trail to Putin’s thugs even more unmistakable.
I am somewhat confused by many of the comments attached to this particular article. I, like I suspect many that read here, have read hundreds and hundreds of papers across a number of fields of research and I have yet to see any that list their funding sources. It appears to be the default expectation of some commentators that any funding source will automatically taint a paper but the same argument could be made that the biggest source of influence are the personal ones of the researchers themselves, regardless of any funding sources. One notable exception are government funded departments required to produce government directed results.
Reply to J Hein ==> You are correct. Those attacking Soon confuse general research grants with Conflict of Interest. A general research grant does not create a conflict of interest. Nothing produced by Soon would result in his financial gain….Southern Corp’s grants to Soon are not predicated on his various findings. Southern is an electric utility whose fortunes do not depend on Soon’s findings about the relationship between the Sun and the Climate or on his personal opinions on Climate Change and its causes.
Exactly. A very convenient confusion by the AGW-crowd. And in any case, what is the function of the disclosure of conflict of interest? Not a full disclosure of all funding resources, but of potentially conflicting interests. What is supposed to be the conflicting interest of an electrical company providing such a general research grant for research in the variability of the sun in terms of the earth’s climate? Not a very smart move by the AGW-camp, since all this hand waving will most likely bite the AGW-cult back as they are setting the bar really high also for the AGW-scientists.
“I, like I suspect many that read here, have read hundreds and hundreds of papers across a number of fields of research and I have yet to see any that list their funding sources.”
You don’t read very carefully. The last two posts at WUWT, and the one that follows, are about papers. Each has a statement of funding source, which is repeated in the press release.
Past funding over their entire career?
Says a paid Troll
Nick –James Hein and you are talking about two different things – and you knew that, or should have.
He is talking about “hundreds” of papers within his own experience. You said “The last two posts at WUWT, and the one that follows, are about papers. Each has a statement of funding source, which is repeated in the press release”. Really! What “posts” are you talking about! So you, in contrast, apparently, seem to have SPECIFIC papers by Soon in mind. Is that so? You don’t specifically say. And – very few papers are accompanied by press releases!
True, Hein is most certainly wrong, viewed globally, about a total lack of notices of funding acknowledgment. Such acknowledgments are common, although far from universal, are frequently pro forma and easy to overlook – especially as they may be tucked in at the end following acknowledgments of intellectual contributions that ARE interesting. Even that said, MANY papers do NOT have such notices because funding was non-existent, or too remote in time, place, or topic.
As I mentioned above, we need to be careful about insisting on literalist interpretations on what amounts to guidelines for publications. What is allowed eventually is determined by what the editors allow and not by what is written on paper.
The usual reason for disclosing sponsors is to protect the IP rights of the sponsor. With “for profit” research (e.g., new drug protocols), the reason for disclosure is because an actual conflict of interest exists… the “for profit” sponsor has a financial stake in the outcome. It would be unethical to publish research with favorable outcomes to the funding entity, that the funding entity can then earn a profit on.
You get into a bit of a boggy swamp though if you try and start insisting that all funding sources that contributed to research be disclosed. For example, some of us have “anonymous donor” funding.
Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures has received $500,000 in anonymous funds in the past two years that they have reported.
By Nick’s logic, apparently not disclosing the name of the anonymous funders would amount to an ethics violation.
Obviously I don’t buy any of this tribally motived nonsense.
There is already a mechanism in place, which I suspect Nick is fully aware, which is the Conflicts of Interest Statement (I’ve linked Elsevier’s). This disclosure is made typically between the author and the publisher (for some journals a sign off by the author’s institute is required).
The other thing to look at is when Elsevier created these supposedly written in stone rules versus when Soon published. Most of the papers listed above almost certainly were published before the new guidelines, which themselves came out of an abuse of peer review by people who were publishing artificially inflated results on the behest of pharmacy companies.
I’ve little regard for Soon’s work, but this is yet another witch hunt directed by true believers. That bothers me far more than what is probably sloppy academic behavior on Soon’s part.
Carrick,
“Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures has received $500,000 in anonymous funds in the past two years that they have reported.”
Yes. And here is one of their acknowledgements:
“This work was done as part of the Berkeley Earth project, organized under the auspices of the Novim Group (www.Novim.org). We thank many organizations for their support, including the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the William K. Bowes Jr. Foundation, the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (created by Bill Gates), the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, and three private individuals (M.D., N.G. and M.D.). More information on the Berkeley Earth project can be found at http://www.BerkeleyEarth.org.”
I noted above this quote from a letter Dr Soon wrote to the Guardian:
“The rules of the leading journals in which my research is published are clear: the sources of funding must be openly declared in the paper”
Things are going to get more fraught as Paris approaches.
It’s not Dr Soon’s fault that the planet hasn’t warmed for over 18 years.
For some reason I don’t understand, the fact that armageddon seems to have been cancelled has the alarmists taking out their frustration and disappointment on the sceptics.
I personally will never forgive Putin for releasing Greenpeace !!
And why did he ? Putin is not a kind hearted or forgiving man and he has more absolute power than anyone since Stalin.
Was a deal made? Release of activists in exchange for Greenpeace using its formidable propaganda resources for Putin?
One cannot but wonder.
no such thing as a free lunch
I don’t wonder that – but then, I’m not a conspiracy theorist.
Context & Perspective
The court of NYT & Grist have just sentenced Dr Willie Soon to 5 years in jail for not having lights on his bicycle.
– when I challenged the severity
They replied “Well, he was lucky ……….. If it had been dark, we would have given him 10 years” ..
(….. On the same day a truck being drunk driven by Naomi Oreskes & Michael Mann ploughed thru a crowd of schoolchildren …. But they were let off with a caution and the right to award themselves a Nobel Prize )
Of course, this is already posted up on wiki in typical con-nully fashion.
The triumph in their voices when they declare “he was paid by INDUSTRY!” never ceases to amaze me.They think that they’ve just shown a royal straight flush, when they’ve only got two cards and they came out of a cereal box.
I am intrigued as to why the Smithsonian has continued to indulge Willie Soon since 1991, even though they don’t seem to like what he says. He doesn’t have tenure.
In my view this particular attack on Willi Soon was undertaken to steal the headlines away from the revelations of Pachauri being investigated for sexual harassment. Let me explain. The news about Pachauri was initially contained but then started to spread world wide.It is obvious that the IPCC’s PR machine (which extends to all its associated climate activist groups) was caught on the hop (ie with its pants down as we say in Australia). In such a case, an old PR strategy is to fog the media with another “sensational” story that fits into the same newspaper space to push the other story out. Media mates are asked to give the new story big headlines. Willi Soon had been targeted previously by the warmist camp so all they needed was to add a new twist which is what was done.(and obviously so given the clumsiness of the story). Overall the Soon story is chicken feed compared to the Pachauri story which comes complete with a background ripe for investigation and endless titivating revelations about his relationships with female staff, business dealings and finances.
Next up: bob Ward is paid by Jeremy Grantham, who is an arch-Malthusian hedge fund billionaire who was heavily invested in oil, being the peak-oiler that he is, and I wonder just how much Jerry just lost in the oil rout.
Also Grantham is PRIVATE SECTOR – discrediting EVERYTHING Bob Ward or Jeremy Grantham ever said – Bob Ward and his master are pure evil – they are PRIVATE SECTOR money.
Also, Greenpeace takes no money from governments, but from PRIVATE PEOPLE, meaning THEY’RE EVIL.
Also the NYT is by now officially state funded. THEY’RE EVIL.
All this distraction from the scientific results of Soon et. al. seems to build upon a number of misunderstandings. The most unfortunate of them being the one where Smithsonian/Soon misunderstood the contractual vocabulary as they in the they year 1 report, refer to the scientific articles as deliverables, whereas according to the agreement the deliverables consist of a yearly report of the progress of the research (not of the research or research publications) and of a non-exclusive license to the data. Without that misunderstanding there would be little to wave hands within the AGW-camp since “evil money” is being handed to both sides of the AGW-debate. The actual story is however the desperation of the AGW-crowd displayed by the need to shoot the messengers when little can be done about the message.
Coincidence ? Not, in my view. This was a timed strategy to get the Pachauri story off the headlines and quickly. Think of the damage it does to have your IPCC Chairman potentially (not proven) reduced to being a harasser of women. Think of all those young women who are committed to saving the planet and believe that they are equals in their quest. And here is your leader accused of sexual harassment. Not nice and not only one staff member but several staff members over different years are making the case. Dare I say it, in many women’s eyes this suggests a “dirty old man” syndrome which, regardless of politics, is an absolute no,no. Not a good signal is it from the IPCC or the UN? And, what’s worse for the IPCC it will cause all sorts of divisions within the organization. Now deal with this and the fact that the planet hasn’t warmed for 15 plus years. The IPCC is in heaps of trouble. Just mere mortals who make mistakes?
Mem, I hope you were not addressing with you reply since otherwise you completely misunderstood my post.
OK, so James Hansen receives $250,000 cash from the Heinz Foundation for his “great work” in 2004. The Heinz Foundation is headed by Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz. Al Gore, who establishes Generation Investment Management, focused on carbon trading, carbon credits, etc., in 2004, conveniently tosses $6 million to John Kerry for his run for the presidency.
Let’s see =
James Hansen receives money from Kerry’s wife.
Kerry receives money from Al Gore.
Al Gore stands to make millions, possibly billions, should Kerry win office.
I’m sure NY Times covered all that when it happened. And Hansen has declared all his financial conflicts of interest on his research work ever since.
Don’t forget the Rolex from the WWF.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/nov/22/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment
Imagine if the Koch brothers gave Soon an award and a Rolex.
Your comment pretty much sums up the rotten state of ‘climate science’.
Sceptics are outfunded by alarmists by several thousands to one, and have to fight against the machinations of the Green Blob in the left wing media, plus the smears of dodgy unscrupulous politicians. Yet the alarmists are losing the argument, as nature refuses to confirm the supposed catastrophe caused by predicted runaway global warming.
The politicians who support green policies are usually tainted by their personal, or spouse’s, investment policies. Add to that, the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, whose understanding of science makes Michael Mann appear honourable and honest.
Sometimes I think it is a miracle we sceptics have managed to survive.
There are big monies in renewable energy. The big oil, like Shell, simply supports the catastrophic AGW scare because they know they can provide renewables and make profit with them, and the world will be in any case using a lot of oil to the foreseeable future.
There is no such thing as corporate money in dubious climate change research. There is a lot of money in dubious ‘renewable’ schemes.
Bevan:
Dr. Soon worked for the Smithsonian and did not acknowledge his funding in those papers.
___________________________________
What a cr@p argument.
I have written reports for a corporation. Do you think I add a ‘funding disclosure’ to the report? I am an employee – where the money comes from is the corporation’s business. The report is the corporation’s property: they bought it, they organised it, they own it, and they did something – somewhere – to earn the money to do so.
If you are doing freelance work, that is different. Your responsibility. But it is clear here that Smithsonian arranged and signed the contract with Southern, and so it is their responsibility. And since they would have ‘signed off’ the resulting paper as being fit for publication, it is doubly their responsibility. So for the Smithsonian to turn around and say it is Soon’s problem, and they are investigating, is the height of disreputable dealing. If there is a University Lecturers’ union in the US, they should be investigating the Smithsonian.
But they will not, of course, because if they are like NAFTHE, the UK’s university lecturer’s union, they will be uber-supporters of Greenpeace. In fact, NAFTHE has its own brigade of student and unemployed ‘brownshirts’ called the ‘UAF’, who are paid to go and beat up anyone that liberals and Greenpeace disagree with. (Yes, the UAF stormtroopers are run from the NAFTHE offices in London.)
These, I am afraid, are the levels to which the modern education establishment have sunk to. Academia is no longer a matter of enlightened debate in hallowed halls, it is all about the deployment of ‘brownshirts’ to shout down the opposition, or put the literal boot in during violent demonstrations. And many of these riots have been violent enough to turn into kristallnachts. Strangely, if you talk to them, these ‘enforcers’ think they are being liberal and enlightened, when they are actually emulating the very worst politics that the modern world has known.
R
Who’d want to be an iconoclast in this game? Ah, but that is why they are doing this to Dr Soon
Sadly has a smear job its working , that fact it lies and BS , does not mean a thing .
But then this is climate ‘science ‘ where lies and BS have far more value than reality and honest data .
I would be proud to be associated with any fossil fuel company or Utility at the moment. Without Coal and Gas millions of people in North America would be dead by now from the cold. Industry would have ground to a halt. The miners and the drillers produce it and the Utilities convert it to useful energy and people stay warm, get fed, get medical treatment in warm hospitals while the temperatures drop to minus 20.
Now tell me, Mr Gillis and Mr schwartz what exactly have you done to help keep people alive and working this winter. Tell me what Greenpeace and WWF have done to keep people alive and warm…..No article on that. What a surprise!
In the interests of full disclosure I worked in the oil and chemical industry all my life and now have the illnesses to prove it, but I am thouroughly proud of my working life and would start again in the same industry if I left college tomorrow. So F.U. Greenpeace and your toadies.
+1 Yes, we have been remiss in allowing the left and the enviro-whackos to demonize the ‘fossil-fuel’ companies. They are the life-blood of our civilization and the source of our prosperity. They should be celebrated, not vilified. /Mr Lynn
This attack should work very effectively.
You can’t do research without money. And this attack will have a chilling effect on bodies accepting money – they will soon only be able to accept funding from ‘acceptable’ sources. And therefore will only be able to make ‘acceptable’ ‘scientific’ findings’…
@Pethefin
“…Not a very smart move by the AGW-camp, since all this hand waving will most likely bite the AGW-cult back as they are setting the bar really high also for the AGW-scientists….”
Er… no. Pro-AGW scientists are allowed to accept money from ANY source – including ISIS, North Korea, and the Association of Child Murderers and Tax Dodgers. Because they are GOOD.
Climate skeptics, on the other hand, are not even allowed to spend their OWN money on independent research. Because they are BAD.,…
@Dodgy Geezer
In the short run yes, but it is our task to make sure that in the long run, the AGW-cult will not be able to fool the majority of the rest of the people all the time. Once this childish game of good vs. evil is revealed, the public will loose their respect for the AGW-crowd, although it might take few more years of “the pause” before people start asking questions…
Reply to Pethefin from mem
No, it was not a specific reply to you.
If it was a diversionary tactic to help Pachauri, it clearly hasn’t worked
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-31601122
No chairman, no warming. I’d say we’re in for another vanishing polar bear moment!
Great news about the holy leader. The house of cards is wavering in a cold wind.
1. Has ANY paper refuted Dr. Soon’s paper?
2. Pierre L. Gosselin at notrickszone has compiled the following referential list. One doesn’t have to read very far to see some interesting connections.
http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/09/long-list-of-warmist-organizations-scientists-haul-in-huge-money-from-big-oil-and-heavy-industry/#sthash.37UfnLFX.eobAk8Tn.dpbs
Personally I don’t ever give a flying stuff who pays for any research. All this hysteria shows both sides really just want to be able to appeal to authority.
The indentity of the paymaster matters only when the science stops and the advocacy starts. You can tell them apart because only one discloses its data and its code.
I haven’t taken the trouble to find out if Soon et al have disclosed but if this issue bothers you that’s where to start.
So if Dr. Soon was sort of ‘bus hopping’ would you then throw him: (0) Under the bus, (1) Over the bus, (2) In front of the Bus, (3) Behind the bus, (4) Next to the bus, (5) There is no such thing as the bus, (6) Dr. Soon is the bus, (7) Dr. Soon drives the bus, (8) Dr. Soon rides the bus or (9) Dr. Soon owns the bus?
Question for ICU ==> What is “bus hopping”? and what is “sort of ‘bus hopping’? Thanks.
Pachauri
ICU:
Are you blind? Pachauri threw himself under the bus.
No one made him chase skirts, and it certainly isn’t anyone else’s fault.
In attacking Dr. Soon, green journalists display a quite stunning world view. Behind their writings you can see their logic:
Climate scientists are paid to publish results supporting Global Warming.
Dr. Soon’s results don’t support Global Warming.
QED Dr. Soon is paid by those against Global Warming.
Seeing all the fame and fortune going to true believers, they can not imagine a scientist motivated by his own integrity. After all, in their view, all published results are bought and paid for.
Green journalists attacking Dr. Soon reveal their operating assumption: Climate science is totally corrupt. . .well, 97% corrupt.
[snip . . put up some evidence instead of a drive by shot . . mod]
So I guess the papers are so tainted by who paid for them they have been refuted and retracted?
No thought not.
Just a smear then.
Interesting, so it’s fine to talk about corrupt government funding before even knowing the results of the research – that’s apparently not a smear from the comments I read here. But for publications or the Smithsonian to require disclosure of funding sources by all researchers (not just Soon) IS a smear. Do I have that correctly?
As I pointed out above, there is a separate document that you supply when you send a paper in to get published, which is the Conflict of Interest statement.
The purpose of supplying the sponsor’s name was to protect the IP of the sponsor (you don’t always “own” the IP of work done for a sponsor).
It is also, in the modern day of large corporate donors, to adequately warn readers of the vested interest in a sponsor (e.g., a pharmaceutical company) in the outcome of the research. That is a relatively new ethical requirement, and postdates most of Soon’s publications.
Reply to Carrick ==> What gets reported in Conflict of Interest statement are, well, conflicts of interest — which are well defined by various governmental oversight bodies and in the link at Elsevier (given half a dozen times in comments). What doesn’t get reported in Conflict of Interest statements is “any and all funding ever received by any of the authors from any source for anything and everything.”
The papers in question, and the question of a general research grant to Soon from Southern Services Company, revolve around the difference between “sponsored research” — in which some person or entity pay a researcher or group of researchers to so a specific piece of work on behalf of the sponsor — and a unfettered general research grant, which is what Soon received from Southern. Southern did not sponsor any of Soon’s paper.
Even if they had paid him $ X.xx to produce “Some Climate Paper” — in which case there would have been a reporting requirement — it would not be judged an improper conflict — Southern Services Company, an electric utility conglomerate, had no influence over what findings he published. Further, it is absurd to say that Soon would financially benefit from Southern based on his findings.
Kip Hansen:
One caveat here. You certainly don’t need to list “any and all funding ever received by any of the authors from any source for anything and everything”. The Conflict of Interest form is to allow third party to screen for the existence of de facto conflicts of interest. In order to do that, you do need to list all funding sources that were provided non-trivial assistance towards the completion of this research.
Yes, I agree with this.
Without a vested financial interest in the outcome of the study, there is no de facto conflict of interest.
To be clear to people who don’t have to deal with this sort of thing, the existence of conflicts of interest is itself not an issue. When you have conflicts of interest, they need to be properly managed, but usually it is not necessary to avoid them. With pharmaceutical companies, it is a good thing they have the funds to provide the research to study the efficacy of drugs that they have developed.
It goes without saying that when a researcher takes money from a pharm company, he has created a conflict of interest. He has done nothing wrong by doing so. Hiding that conflict of interest is a problem. Reporting that the pharm company funded the research is one way to help manage that conflict of interest.
In the case of electric companies, they will sell electricity regardless of whether it is CO2 neutral or CO2 intensive to produce. It matters neither way to them whether there is e.g. a new accord on CO2 control. It matters to the consumer how much they will pay, but not to the electric company.
The electric company has no financial stake in the outcome, and for organizations that is chiefly what matters here. In addition, the company may decide they want to not be listed as a donor because of the possibility of negative publicity in the funding of controversial research. That is totally within their rights.
Why not listing these fundings sources is making Greenpeace bleed out of their eyes is frankly that it robs them of the ability to easily target organizations that fund heretical research. It has nothing to do with actual conflicts of interest and they (and their defenders) know it, and more to do with their ability to act in a hypocritical manner towards dissent of views that they hold dearly.
[snip – policy violation, racist rant -mod]
[snip – policy violation – hateful, racist laden rant -mod]
Thank you.
There is no potential conflict of interest of relevance for the following general situation:
A researcher is paid money ‘$M’ by funder ‘X’ to conduct research ‘A’. When the research ‘A’ is done the researcher has put in his bank money ‘$P’ which is the part of the money ‘$M ‘that funder ‘X’ paid for the researcher’s time during the research ‘A’. Then, long after research ‘A’ is done, to conduct other separate research ‘B’ which is self-funded, the researcher uses some of the money ‘$P’ in his bank account to pay for his living and costs while doing research ‘B’. There is no relevant potential conflict of interest to be raised by the researcher using the money ‘$P’ for research ‘B’.
If the any MSM news outlets are arguing that kind situation is unethical or lacking integrity, then they lack meaningful intellectual basis for their argument. If they are arguing that then they are smearing a researcher which means some of the MSM have ethical / integrity issues.
John
Even more damning are, I think, Greenpeace’s efforts to get the IRS to go after Willy Soon, alleging that he is in violation of the law if he is invited to and speaks at a political hearing.
The letter, which is concerned with funding for ~4 months work at two instances, is addressed directly to IRS commissioner John Koskinen (whose name they didn’t get right).
No, Greenpeace is no friend of humans, nor of civilization. And neither of nature or environment. They are no friends of the earth. They are strident players/soldiers in an ongoing culture war, which they however not want to be obvious to the broader population …
The attack on Dr. Soon is coordinated by a complicit Administration taking its guidance from Greenpeace and similar groups, and working with the mainstream media, the Smithsonian, the IRS, etc., to tar and feather anyone who publicly says things they don’t want the public to hear.
Before warrenlb or some other jamoke decides to call that a conspiracy theory, consider this:
ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, National Security Adviser.
CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.
ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former Whitehouse Press Secretary Jay Carney
ABC News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s Deputy Press Secretary
ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama’s Special Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood
CNN President Virginia Moseley is married to former Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.
That is only a sampling. It goes far beyond those players. There are also the lower echelon types who fall all over themselves trying to curry favor by monkey piling on the victim — in this case, Willie Soon.
As Ayn Rand wrote, they can get anyone this way. There are plenty of laws. And it could easily be you or me next. That’s why Dr. Soon need plenty of support.
Interesting theory. People get married or have relatives. It would appear to be the case of the double edged knife, as it cuts both ways.
Who is this Ayn Rant that you speak of?
ICU,
The ‘rant’ is yours:
People get married or have relatives.
But somehow they all seem to end up as unelected jamokes who control policy. What are the odds, eh?
If you can’t see a pattern there, you’re either blind or credulous. Maybe both.
But one thing we know for certain, ‘ICU’: you are an out and out racist.
Yea, but if he had done what was required of him, i.e declared his funding (particularly when you consider who the funding has come from), he would not be in the pile of dung he is, nor would you need to be making excuses for him. Bottom liner is Soon made a monumental cock up and he got called on it. Time to move on.
Except the ‘funding ‘ did not involve the paper being attacked, or are you really calling for all funding for any past research funding to be included on new research, which for some would make a big a boring paper? Meanwhile, before you move on, care to to tell us what is wrong with Soon’s et all work? Or this is just another drive by smear?
I am not interested in whether his work is any good or not and it is not the issue here. There are rules to play by. If you don’t play by them you get a hand smack and more importantly your honesty and integrity get questioned. How many times rightly or wrongly has Mann’s honesty been questioned here? More than one could count.
If Soon wants to be consigned to the “suspect” box, he is going about it the right way. I would suggest it is not a good place to be for a scientist who works in a field where every move is watched and every detail questioned. Both sides of this debate continually nitpick the slightest detail.
Moreover, the funding Soon didn’t declare was from the groups who stand to make the most from his work being successful. 1.2 million is no small amount of money to receive. That smells bad and is why the media love to write about it. He should be and needs to be, smarter than that particularly if he wants his work taken seriously.
Simon
Hansen got more than that. Did you complain? Did you comment? Did your ABCNNBCBS news media report that? Did your NYTimes report the deaths in the Ukraine when they got their prize that year? You, sir, need to answer honestly: Who told you to report here and write your responses? What is your funding and to whom do you report?
Sorry Mr RACookPE1978 …. but I have no idea what you are talking about.
@Simon:
I know exactly what RACook is talking about. I suspect you do, too.
DB….If you are saying Hanson has been negligent in declaring funding sources in the same way Soon has, then no, I don’t know what Mr Cook is talking about. Perhaps you can explain for me?
@Simon:
I know tap-dancing when I see it.
RACook asked you some questions. You feigned ignorance because answering those questions woud be very uncomfortable. So you claimed that you didn’t understand. Got it.
DB, answer my question…. When did Hansen do what Soon has done and fail to declare significant funding for a research paper? And what has the Ukraine got to do with this? No tap dancing from me.
Simon says:
DB, answer my question…
First, you answer RACook’s questions. Everything else is tap-dancing.
DB. I am saying as far as I know Hansen has not ever failed to declare 1.2 million he has received for research. If that is wrong then let me know and I will address it otherwise you are wasting everyone’s time.
Still avoiding answering Cook’s questions, I see.
Nick Stokes is trying to get everyone to miss the forest for a tree or two.
It’s time for a serious effort be put forth in the U.S. to end Greenpeace’s non-profit status. Time to take that green mask off.
https://www.activistfacts.com/organizations/131-greenpeace/
Is Greenpeace tax-exempt?
Yes — Kip
Where can I find a copy of Gillis’s resume/CV? He claims he took courses in climate change, etc., at MIT, but how many, and in what supporting fields (i.e., heat transfer, fluid mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.)? At this point in time why should I believe anything he and his coauthors write?
Why do I ask? Has anyone really considered that maybe Soon and colleagues produced a simplified climate model on their own time? I’ve been down that same road before, and those experiences were anything but pleasant.
Can someone point to a thorough takedown of Soon’s paper? The NYT hit piece states:
Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.
Those are very specific charges coming from “many experts” but the ad hominem NYT piece fails to cite. It does provide a blurb from GISS’ Schmidt about Soon’s science being “almost pointless” but ostensibly only because Schmidt feels strongly that his own science cannot be impugned.
Reply to million ==> I’m sure Gillis and Schwartz can support their statement — their experts almost all write for RealClimate.org or other Climate Activist internet outlets.
It concerns me that the word “astrpphysical” appears repeatedly in the signed documents.
Apologies if this has been noted before this posting. At the moment I’d have to read 296 comments to check if this has been mentioned before.
Ian M
Reply to Ian M ==> Congratulations! You are first to notice this typo in the signature section of the Southern/Smithsonian agreements.
Ian, try Ctrl-F and “astrpp”
I am amazed at the discussion here – I joined it late and, in wading through the hundreds of comments, the thing that stands out is the ability of one or two trolls to completely divert and obfuscate an entire thread. From the style, frequency and responsiveness of Mr NS in particular, I would guess that ‘he’ is actually a consortium, which is likely extremely well funded to put in the intensity of effort required. It reminds me of a famous ‘rebuttal unit’ of one of the main UK parties which could notoriously think two or three moves ahead of its chosen opposition. I imagine the answer to such gaming of discussions has, in the end, to be a technical one. No amount of reasoned argument will deal with it. I imagine the interventions here were planned in coordination with the original smear itself, and designed simply to draw fire, direct a narrative for a while, then withdraw when some critical time-window had expired.
Stuart B
Your point cannot be proven. But – after had read some 650,000 comments here the past years, YES – Your observation is correct. The volume tone and answers/replies from the large number of new posters here all uniformly attacking Dr Soon about these old, old charges “just magically dragged up” by the NYTimes and its ABCNNBCBS press corpse partners in the Obola administration in the weeks before their Paris CAGW conference are proof themselves in their “magical” uniform unanimous, anonymous presence.
Will I get audited because of it? Likely. It’s been done many times before. After all, to the Obola administration, CAGW – destroying the world’s carbon-based capitalist economies (while carefully preserving its communist competitors overseas!) means they must destroy the NUMBER ONE threat to “United States” security. While they negotiate to get intercontinental rockets to North Korea, nuclear bombs to Iran, and unrestrained access to the world for Islamic terrorists. While their democrat party predecessors worked to improve communist Chine intercontinental rocket re-entry and stage separation technology, and all the money they can find to other foes overseas commercially and by foreign aid.
“CAGW – destroying the world’s carbon-based capitalist economies (while carefully preserving its communist competitors overseas!)”
China has the world’s largest install base of wind power (almost as much as the entire EU and 2X that of the US). China has the 2nd largest install base of solar power behind Germany (and will soon pass Germany as their annual installation rate is 3X that of Germany). China has already piloted a carbon tax in 7 cities, and is now rolling it out nationwide: http://www.reedsmith.com/China-Outlines-Plans-for-its-Carbon-Trading-Markets-02-20-2015/?utm_source=Mondaq&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=View-Original
So how exactly is the AGW movement destroying capitalism while not impacting the economy of China, who is by far the world’s largest communist economy?
Chris,
Very true. It’s too bad that a large part of academia has become infested with people who want to ‘funadamentally transform America’. People don’t decide to transform something they love. Truth be told, they hate America.
You’re right about the ‘carbon’ scare destroying capitalism. Everyone will be poorer as a result. Well, everyone who isn’t living off the hard-bitten taxpayers.
Chris:
They also have a population >the EU and USA combined and something like 16X that of Germany. Are your numbers per capita?
If you search on Nick Stokes name, can you can easily find a blog he writes. It’s clear he spends a lot of time on his own blog and contents (including analysis) as well as making comments on other sites. Antony Watts presumably puts as much if not more time into WUWT. The idea of a well funded consortium choosing to post under a single fictitious name seems like a pretty far fetched idea.
So….has anyone actually debunked the science behind Dr Soons research?
real american
No, they cannot address the science. They can only distract with their news media’s reports about the (false) hype over the charges against the man.
untrue, the science behinds Soon (2005) has been challenged (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/02/the-soon-fallacy/) and the conclusions Soon drew from the available data found not to be supported by more recently available, and more credible solar forcing data
http://www.realclimate.org/images/soon_update.jpg
Your “realclimate” blog is not a credible source. A good, reliable source for deadly propaganda tremendously harmful to innocents worldwide, but not truth.
And Tamino’s blog is worse.
Bevan:
This is NOT about science.
If this was about science, then Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Phil Jones, Gavin Schmidt, and many other climate alarmists would be run out of town on a rail.
No, this is about monkey-piling on someone for saying some politically incorrect things; for not adhering to the Narrative.
You don’t understand the difference, so your comments make no sense.
Reply re” “RealClimate” rebuttals ==> Attack essays posted in blogs, particularly ISF (single issue fanatic blogs like RealClimate), are not scientific rebuttals any more than the hack-and-slash attack essays Willis writes here. There are just drive-by attacks intended to discredit without having to be held to any real scientific standard…refuting science is done in well-researched papers in reputable journals, under strict peer-review, in which the original author is invited to respond to the countering paper.
Even RealClimate authors are entitled to their opinions — but their blog posts are just that — no more real science than Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blogs in the Opinion Section of the NY Times, where he writes columns that are his personal opinions, or quoting the personal opinions of others. Revkin has even published my opinions there…but they are still, even if mine, just opinions.
Such things are not Science — just opinions about science.
Or for that matter, essays of opinions of all types published here at WUWT — it is all “opinions about” — real science requires actually doing all the hard work required to add to or correct the sum of human knowledge about a topic — and that includes honest replication attempts of refuted studies. A critique of a paper dashed off in a couple of hours by The Cause’s duly assigned RapidResponse Team member or a dedicated Anti-Team skeptic at WUWT does not add to our knowledge base — but only acts to obfuscate and confuse.
Obviously Greenpeace and their crony’s in crime do not find the scientific rebuttals to Soon’s work sufficient or credible. They still feel a burning need to not only discredit Soon but to smear and try to destroy him in the most despicable ways.
And Dr. Soon continues to receive funding, continues to have papers accepted for publication AND has those papers pass significant peer review. With the target the zealots have placed on his back do you believe ANY submission his name is attached with does not receive the most severe peer review possible?
You do not go to this extent to smear and try to destroy someone whose work is junk – and meritless.
My Conflict of Interest Declaration: I am the President of :a small charitable organization, a 501(c)3, The Family-to-Family Project Inc. Its purpose is to give micro-enterprise loans to the profoundly poor in the Dominican Republic. This organization once received an unsolicited grant of $20,000.00 from the TIDES FOUNDATION. The grant was a pass-through from an anonymous donor, specifically earmarked for our project. To this day, I have no idea who was the source of this money, but according to the existing Conspiracy Theory of Funding, in which all funding taints the receiver, I have received secret liberal/progressive funding for our politically neutral charity.
In addition, I do now, and have always, driven gasoline-powered automobiles and motorcycles. On my boat, I use electricity generated by solar, wind, and a diesel emergency generator.
My invested retirement funds, which I do not manage personally, are diversified and may or may not include stocks of companies that Greenpeace would not approve of.
Beven, what prevented RealClimate boys,from publishing a dissenting paper against Dr. Soon’s peer reviewed published paper?
Wrestling PIGS IN MUD!
It’s clear that these attacks on Dr. Soon are racially motivated.
When white guys do the same thing (as has been documented above), the racialists who attack Dr. Soon for his supposed transgressions are silent.
I think Dr. Soon’s inquisitors are anti-Asian. They should be silenced.
When white guys do the same thing (as has been documented above), the racialists who attack Dr. Soon for his supposed transgressions are silent.
Who are the ‘white guys’ who failed to acknowledge their source of funding when required to do so?
Citations please.
Dr. Soon accepted no funding; he wrote proposals for funding on behalf of his employer. Contracts for that revenue were executed by his employer, who subsequently paid Dr. Soon a rather small percentage of the funds realized.
I don’t think he’s the only scientist working for that particular employer, and I haven’t heard that the failed to follow the rules stipulated in his employment contract. Thus, it’s safe to conclude that he’s not the only one who proceeded in this entirely legitimate fashion.
But because he’s Asian, the racialists are out to destroy him.
The thing about racialists is that they will always vehemently deny their prejudice and bias because, as we have learned over the past 30 or 40 years, they aren’t even capable of *knowing* that they are racialists — their sick and twisted hatred comes from the very fabric of their being.
So deny away, because we all know what your motivations are and that you probably wear a white hood.
Are all the pillars crumbling, or is this rubbish.
Kirchhoff’s Law of Thermal Emission invalid
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2015/PP-41-04.PDF