Guest essay by H. Sterling Burnett
More than 500 scientists, colleagues, and friends of Willie Soon, Ph.D. signed a letter sent, along with accompanying supporting documents, to the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents defending the award-winning solar physicist against false allegations he failed to disclose conflicts of interest in publications requiring such admissions. The letter notes Soon, a researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has for a quarter of a century strictly followed Harvard-Smithsonian’s conflict of interest guidelines.
The letter was authored by Lord Christopher Monckton, David Legates, Ph.D., and statistician William Briggs, who had co-authored with Soon a highly popular study in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As the popularity and media coverage of the Science Bulletin article grew, mainstream media outlets began to publish years-old false allegations fed to them by a Greenpeace staffer. Rather than leaping to Soon’s defense, the Smithsonian said it was launching an investigation.
No investigation or waffling on the part of the Smithsonian was warranted. The Smithsonian itself had negotiated all the contracts in question under the condition the funder’s identity was not to be published, and all the money went directly to the Smithsonian, who then paid Soon out of the grants. The Smithsonian’s internal policies assured no conflict of interest. As the letter from Monckton et al. states, “The only papers in which Soon had not disclosed his funders’ identity were those papers covered by that contractual obligation of confidentiality, for which obligation the Smithsonian, not Soon, was entirely responsible.”
The Smithsonian’s failure to respond swiftly and appropriately to quash the allegations of impropriety further harmed Soon’s reputation.
To rectify this situation, the letter’s authors and signatories requested United States Chief Justice John Roberts begin independent investigations into the Smithsonian’s possible malfeasance. By the Smithsonian’s charter, the sitting Chief Justice is an ex-officio member of its Board of Regents. The letter specifically requests:
We now ask you –
1. To instruct the Inspector-General of the Smithsonian to investigate the co-authors’ findings (pages 3–4) and the evidence in support of the findings (pages 5–14) as part of his investigation of this matter;
2. To investigate Dr Alcock’s malicious and dishonest interview (overleaf) with the Chronicle of Higher Education; his refusal to make any correction of his falsehoods upon request by Dr Soon and separately by Dr Soon’s lead author; and his failure to forward to the Smithsonian’s general counsel the lead author’s freedom of information request;
3. To request the Attorney-General of Massachusetts to investigate those aspects of the conduct of the Smithsonian in general and of Dr Alcock in particular that constitute a criminal campaign of intentional, connected and co-ordinated deceptions, persisted in despite requests to cease and desist and, therefore, intended to cause not only reputational harm but also financial loss to Dr Soon; and
4. If the report’s findings be found in substance correct, to order the Smithsonian to apologize publicly to Dr Soon and to make just and full restitution to him for the loss and damage it and its senior management have intentionally caused.
Disappointingly, there has been no response to the letter from the Smithsonian. Shame on them.
SOURCE: Petition to Harvard-Smithsonian in Defense of Willie Soon
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This may be Climate “Science’s” Waterloo. I’ve always argued that the only way the climate “science” fraud can continue is if they can keep people from looking behind the curtain and discovering that nothing but a pile of crap is supporting all the claims against CO2. Once it goes to court, many questions can be asked, the hypocrisy can be exposed. Warmist would argue that CO2 is causing an arctic ice sheet to melt, a real scientist would argue that it is the volcano beneath the ice sheet that is melting it. I’m pretty sure there would be a consensus of voting tax payers that it is the volcano that is melting the ice. A simple graph of the IPCC models would result in a consensus of tax paying voters that beyond a reasonable doubt that the climate “scientists” have perpetrated a fraud upon the American people and looted the treasury for their own arrogance and avarice. Let’s get ready to Ruuuuummmmbbbbbllllleeeee!!!!!! Now jury on the face of the earth will side with the warmists once this chart is provided them…and the warmints know it.
http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/spencer-models-epic-fail2-628×353.jpg
For news of such deadly import as this, it is dismaying to watch both sides deteriorate into a sniper’s war of ad homs.
Firstly, it doesn’t matter whether Monkton or (say) Naomi Klein are ‘real’ ‘scientists’. This path leads to sterility, ending up as ‘Who’s the Pope’s (or president’s etc.) favourite?’. Scientists are not priests. A cat may look at a queen. Hypotheses can be based on dreams (example: Kekule dreamed the structure of the crystal).
What matters is the quality of the argument: how well does it predict? All hypotheses are underdetermined by the evidence. All hypotheses are subject to possible technological failure – e.g.., lack of precision or failure of measuring equipment such as cameras etc.
The failure of AGW to predict is its greatest weakness, and needs to be addressed urgently by those who hold this view. Its technological failures also need addressing – e.g. satellite vs. thermometer, depth gauges vs. buoys (etc.). The silence on these and related matters is deafening. (in fairness, a series of ad hoc plasters are now being put over some of the holes; but these can do nothing to rescue a deteriorating paradigm which is held to be true as a matter of faith)
However, there is a second ‘Marxist’ consideration, which to a large extent rests on money insofar as it facilitates power. The oil companies’ involvement in AGW is huge, as is the taxpayer contribution. The role of British Petroleum in financing the Hadley Climate Research Unit is a matter of public knowledge. Examples could be multiplied; however all this proves is that when powerful religious ideas grip the ruling elite, no organisation or person can escape its wrath. BP is the monkey, not the organ grinder.
So here is the nub of the problem: Any successful counter-argument must implicitly incorporate AGW as the greatest scientific fraud in history (with the possible exception of Lysenko in the USSR). It is not a scientific theory which should be under examination; this has been weighed and found wanting. It is a sociological account of power, which, unlike the Soon witch-hunt, attempts to tell the truth based on all relevant evidence.
Warmists ‘predictions’ lean heavily on altering the data dishonestly.
I find this whole thing bizarre. I am amazed anyone thinks this calls soons work into question. You really need to grasp at straws to believe that. He failed to release info that his employer purposely blocked him from due to confidentiality? Doh! The work either stands on its own merit or not. Attempts to discredit someone in this manner should instead call into question the intents of those pointing at Soon. Further any attempts to discredit anyones work should be based on the work in question.
Its a brave new world.
You hit the nail on the head. This is nothing but a smear campaign that has absolutely nothing to do wtih the quality of Soon’s scientific work. And Smithsonian, remaining in enigmatic silence, thus contributes and even supports that ad-hominem attack. That’s shabby and mischievous. Who will be the next scientist Smithsonian is going to play dirty games with?
At the very worst, all I can see is an accusation of slopiness from Soon. Anyone I know who has actually asked what happened ended up asking “is that it?” Even the pro-warmists I know tend to be baffled by the whole thing. The question is always raised, “well, did he falsify anything?” and no evidence is brought up to support that.
In the end, I think that this may end up hurting the warmists. If their strongest argument is that one of their antagonists didn’t put funding sources down, it’s a pretty blatant ad-hominem, even if it were true. “Pounding on the table” in the old legal adage. It LOOKS like a witch hunt or a heretic burning from almost any perspective, which leads people to question “if this is their strongest point, what does the rest of their argument look like”.
In depth investigation is our best weapon agains alarmism.
BTW, any 1st year Econometrics student could diagnose the problem with these models. Clearly:
1) They have a mis-specified model where an insignificant variable is made significant, and the independent variable (temperature) is made the dependent variable.
2) They are clearly modeling a non-linear variable (temperature) with a linear variable (CO2). That is why CO2 continued higher, the models continued higher, and the observations flat lined.
3) They have an underspecified model that is missing the most significant variables, ie solar, H2O, albedo, etc etc.
4) There is an extreme level of group think in the climate community, resulting in them all forming relatively similar and relatively wrong models. These charts represent a wild goose chase, a CO2 Witch Hunt, where the conclusion, CO2, was reached before the model was created, so they all made the same mistake. They focused on CO2. That represents a bias, not science.
5) Simply running a simple regression on CO2 and Temperature will expose the flaw in their theory. Running a “Stepwise” regression analysis will discover the true drivers of the climate, and I’m 100% certain CO2 won’t be one of the most significant variables in any model developed by an unbiased computer.
6) Given that a computer can prove the CO2 theory pure nonsense as I’ve described above, I would work to keep this “science” out of the courts if I were a warmist.
http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/90-climate-temperature-models-v-observatons-628×353.jpg
7) They cherry picked an unusual and unrepresentative short time period when CO2 and Temperature did correlate relatively well to establish the relationships. They modeled a coincidence, not a causative correlation. Had they used the entire 600,000 year history of CO2 and Temperature data their models would have failed before they started. Not only did they model a coincidence, they created a model similar to lung-cancer causes smoking. They reversed the Y and Xs.
There is no doubt that Dr Willie Soon has been defamed. Forget the Smithsonian. Dr Soon should just go to Court and we will all contribute to his legal fees.
The point of the letter centers on ill-willed gate keeping and unwarranted, unthinking, hurried response. Not okay in my book. Dr. Soon has just as much right to produce a piece of crap as does any other climate scientist. If journals accept it, fine. Doesn’t mean we the consuming public, including other scientists, have to accept its validity and reliability. We have the right, indeed the duty to scrutinize the research. But the issue here isn’t that the work was poorly done. The issue is by what evidence was the response by the institution based on? Seems reasonable that the evidence was pie crust thin and fragile. Dr. Soon has a right to that answer. He does not, and I don’t think claims, to have the right to block criticism of his science.
reliable: the Joe Born’s pavlowic reacting to the ‘irreducibly-simple-model’ running on pocket calculators.
blindly shadow fighting the very satire of themselves:
with their SuperComputers CO2 commands Virtual Climate Reality unreasonable exaggerating temperature trends.
____
so the irreducibly-simple-model must violate basic settled sciences when diverting from the dogma.
____
Why costly models anyway: the solutions are preterminated.
Hans
These attacks on Dr. Soon and others are nothing more than an internet, modern day version of book burning and witch burning.
They can’t find fault with the “book” so they try to burn the “witch”.
Whether in the context of science or freedom of speech and religion, Pitiful.