Smear campaign: "His judgment cometh and that right soon"

The title is a quote from the framed embroidery over the Warden’s wall safe in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, which is a story about one man fighting the corruption of the penal system at the hands of the warden, who was using his position to profit, bully, and murder. Since the quote turned out to be wildly ironic, I thought it was appropriate for what’s happening to Dr. Willie Soon at the hand of green activists and the compliant media. I often think of the warden as a figurehead for people like Dr. Lawrence Torricello, who once called for the death of climate skeptics.

While the Bob Ward style smear campaign rages against Dr. Willie Soon, much like we saw against Dr. Richard Tol, such as this article on Soon which is in my opinion libelous and actionable, the media ignores the fact that green and climate science is a huge money machine, for which there is only one scientific opinion: “climate change/global warming is bad.”

Yet, how many times have we had a “consensus” of opinion only later to find that consensus overturned? Well there’s plate tectonics, phlogiston, Eugenics, Earth centric universe, stress caused ulcers, and now cholesterol. That’s enough times where the scientific herd mentality failed, and makes one think that consensus isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

And how is it, that magically, the billions collectively going into climate research, and the millions going to individual researchers, (such as 1.8 million dollars received by Dr. Michael Mann on a topic for which he is not an expert) which tends to have only one scientific outcome, is somehow pure, while research funding looking into linkage between climate change and the sun done by Dr. Soon, is somehow evil? They think it is evil because supposedly the outcome is paid for. That’s about as ridiculous as saying that because the Phil Jones Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the center of Climategate, somehow made specific outcomes in their climate research because CRU took money from “Big Oil” in the past.

From American Thinker:

Amid the thousands of files apparently lifted from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) last week sit two documents on the subject of the unit’s funding. One is a spreadsheet (pdj_grant_since1990.xls) logging the various grants CRU chief P.D. Jones has received since 1990. It lists 55 such endowments from agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to NATO, worth a total of £13,718,547, or approximately $22.6 million. I guess cooking climate data can be an expensive habit, particularly for an oft-quoted and highly exalted U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief climatologist.

But it’s actually the second document (potential-funding.doc) that tells the more compelling tale. In addition to four government sources of potential CRU funding, it lists an equal number of “energy agencies” they might put the bite on. Three — the Carbon Trust, the Northern Energy Initiative, and the Energy Saving Trust — are U.K.-based consultancy and funding specialists promoting “new energy” technologies with the goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth — Renewables North West — is an American company promoting the expansion of solar, wind, and geothermal energy in the Pacific Northwest.

Needless to say, all four of these CRU “potential funding sources” have an undeniably intrinsic financial interest in the promotion of the carbochondriacal reports CRU is ready, willing, and able to dish out ostensibly on demand. And equally obvious, Jones is all too aware that a renewable energy-funded CRU will remain the world’s premiere authority on the subject of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) despite any appearance of conflict.

And yet, no such latitude has ever been extended to scientists in the skeptical camp.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2009/11/cru_files_betray_climate_alarm.html#ixzz3SaJIib00

Climate action proponents would claim that the idea that CRU made specific outcomes in research due to such funding from Shell and others is ludicrous, but somehow Dr. Soon is automatically smeared as being “on the take”.

And it gets worse. David Mulberry writes on the WUWT Facebook page:

It will no doubt astound many readers to learn that there are more than 26,500 American environmental groups. They collected total revenues of more than $81 billion from 2000 to 2012, according to Giving USA Institute, with only a small part of that coming from membership dues and individual contributions.

“Cracking Big Green” examined the Internal Revenue Service Form 990 reports of non-profit organizations. Driessen and Arnold discovered that, among the 2012 incomes of better-known environmental groups, the Sierra Club took in $97,757,678 and its Foundation took in $47,163,599. The Environmental Defense Fund listed $111,915,138 in earnings, the Natural Resources Defense Council took in $98,701,707 and the National Audubon Society took in $96,206,883. These four groups accounted for more than $353 million in one year.

That pays for a lot of lobbying at the state and federal level. It pays for a lot of propaganda that the Earth needs saving because of global warming or climate change. Now add in Greenpeace USA at $32,791,149, the Greenpeace Fund at $12,878,777; the National Wildlife Federation at $84,725,518; the National Parks Conservation Association at $25,782,975; and The Wilderness Society at $24,862,909. Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection took in $19,150,215. That’s a lot of money to protect something that cannot be “protected”, but small in comparison to other Green organizations.

If you wonder why you have been hearing and reading endless doomsday scenarios about the warming of the Earth, the rise of the seas, and the disappearance of species and forests, for decades, the reason is mind boggling

Follow the money.

More reading, see The Merchants of Smear