Do an internet search for nothing simpler than the name “Willie Soon,” or the variant of “Wei-hock Soon,” and uncountable numbers of results pop up repeating some form of the accusation or insinuation that Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysicist Dr Soon was paid industry-sourced money in exchange for falsehoods designed to undercut the certainty of catastrophic man-caused global warming. The following video by Dr Terry Gannon addresses aspects of Dr Soon’s actual funding, which the spectrum of accusers out there never tell their audiences about, and it mentions a name of one of the most prominent accusers that loyal readers of GelbspanFiles will readily recognize, Kert Davies:
We first see Davies at the 1:45 point as a guest on the Democracy Now program …
…. with a few more details spoken about him after the three minute point, and again in a bit more depth a minute later. However, much like any other aspect of the ‘crooked skeptic climate scientists’ accusation, I’m compelled to say, “but wait, there’s more …..”
Dr Gannon was of course constrained by time limits in this video. At the 1:30 point, he speaks of how the corruption accusation outbreak against Dr Soon in 2015 is illustrated by a “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher” New York Times article, and then he notes at the 3:10 point how the efforts behind the NYT article were led by Kert Davies.
As I detailed in my February 25, 2015 GelbspanFiles blog post (subsequently reproduced at WUWT), there’s a little more to the story. The prominent accusation eruption against Dr Soon in February 2015 wasn’t just confined to the NYT, it was a trio of hit pieces from unrelated reporters across the span of three consecutive days, February 21, 22 and 23, which included two other very prominent newspapers, none of which bothered to note a particular arguably important ‘conflict of interest’ concerning Davies’ two years-prior work history.
I wasn’t giving it thought at the time, but in reference to my latest set of blog posts under the “What $5 mill might buy” category, that particular 2015 three-day event might fall under the umbrella question of “does nearly $5 million buy the kind of a high level news media coverage which is practically guaranteed to generate exponentially wider negative coverage within just 7 days?”
Dr Gannon isn’t exaggerating when he states at the 4:12 point that the accusation continues right up to the present time. A variant of the insinuation about fossil fuel industry corruption of Dr Soon is seen in paragraph 108 of the current City and County of Honolulu v. Sunoco LP et al. global warming lawsuit filed on March 9th. The Honolulu lawsuit, much like its nine other boilerplate versions, brings up the topic of ‘conflict of interest’ in its footnote citation about Dr Soon in a rather ironic fashion, considering the way the Kert Davies’ own Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files arguably has an undisclosed ‘conflict of interest’ with that law firm.
Regarding CIC’s highly questionable nonprofit status that Dr Gannon speaks of at the 4:15 point, more is seen on that at these two articles: “Climate Investigations Center Utilizes Dark Money Network to Obscure its Funders” / “Climate Change Reporting Website Obscures Its Funding With Dark Money Network.” My own recently heightened personal awareness about the amount of money coming into Davies CIC organization finally prompted me to reexamine his long-term association with Ozone Action co-founder / subsequent Greenpeace USA executive director John Passacantando.
Starting at the 4:48 point of his video, Dr Gannon says that Davies was the chief architect at Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets website project beginning in 2004. True, but it’s more complicated than that. As I also detailed in my above-mentioned February 25, 2015 GelbspanFiles blog post, Davies’ earliest work was at the Environmental Working Group, which produced a Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) report smear effort against Dr Soon ….. and then Davies teamed up with Passacantando at Ozone Action, the place I term the epicenter of the smear of skeptic climate scientists.
Regarding the quip at the 6:30 point that Dr Soon would accept money from anybody so long as he is free from direction to do so. That is also true, a detail that accusers routinely exclude in their accusations against Dr Soon.
One more detail, to illustrate an overall point. “What about how Dr Soon’s work for Exxon was described as ‘deliverables?’,” enviro-activists yell. Dr Gannon says at the 3:42 point that there was no such list of “deliverables.” On top of that, even if the label was applied to something out of Harvard-Smithsonian, at least one dedicated Soon-hater at the Desmogblog smear site called out the folly of putting any stock in the word “deliverables” as evidence of corruption.
The goal behind pushing the accusation against Dr Soon and others is to distract the public away from answering a question Dr Soon himself succinctly posed to one of his critics: “Is what I say beyond the boundaries of reasonable discussion?” When the public perceives his and other scientists’ climate assessments to be reasonable, the global warming issue doesn’t look the least bit settled ….. and that perception is what Al Gore and his mob knew early on had to be suppressed by any means possible.
When Dr Gannon speaks of the entire false corruption accusation against Dr Soon as defamation, serious consideration should be considered regarding the possibility of taking legal action against Kert Davies and others intertwined in these ongoing character assassination efforts. The smear has potentially not only harmed Dr Soon personally as a violation of civil law, it may have strayed into the far larger arena of criminal libel/slander, with widespread harm to the public from the waste of time, money, and resources spent on fighting a supposed ‘climate catastrophe’ which is very likely nothing more than natural climate variation that humans have no power to control.
Charles! You have unearthed some of the slimy “muck” that gives credence to the term “Muckrakers.”
No surprise here, as the Great Dr. Soon is one of the magnificent torchbearers of Climate Realism and Scientific Excellence. No amount of sleaze and corruption can mask the truth of dedication and NON-corruption that Willie brings to hard research and insightful discovery.
E pur si muove (And Yet it moves!) can be attributed to Willie Soon as it was to Galileo, with Copernicus not far behind.
Just remember – Do we remember the names of the mindless fools that house-arrested Galileo, or the morons who mocked Copernicus and Leeuwenhoek???
No! It is Willie Soon and his illuminating Solar research and Climate Realism that will light the minds and spark the interest of generations to come!!!
The muckrakers have succeeded in diverting attention from the real issue.
What exactly is wrong with the research that Willie Soon published? Details. If he altered his findings to produce lies, show us those lies. Make verifiable claims about the science.
After all the shouting all these years, I have not seen a shred of information about the content of those studies, only character assassination.
Stop whining and sue. That’s the problem with the sceptic group, we whinge and whine about the injustices but we’re too damned good to take the bull by the horns and sue ! Where has the Queenbury Rules got us in the pat 2 decades ? Nowhere in a hurry.
Follow Dr Peter Ridd’s example.
Lawyers are expensive.
So is not taking the charlatans head-on.
We can always crowdfund through this site to finance the best lawyers.
Yes, can you organize it? That is what needs to be done.
Jerry
Not if they work on a contingency with a big payout for success. Soon could sue a primary target or three and add in another 30 defendants who would settle (with their insurance coverage if they had it) and leave the primary defendants looking like the goat in Jurassic Park.
That’s actually how patent trolling used to work. That would be a good model, except this would be for the right reasons.
The Climate Science Defense Fund should pay for his suit.
Now now, stop laughing!
Ask Mark Steyn how well his lawsuit with serial fraudster Michael Mann is going ?8 years and counting.100’s of thousands of dollars.As Mark has said the prosess is the punshment .
Often wondered how people like John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli get away with carefully orchestrated character assassinations of scientists like Roger Pielke Snr. It’s not a case of trying to settle science in the court room, these people are acting like the Gestapo, a taste of totalitarian rule .
Dr. Soon a speaker of truth. We need more true scientists like him.
they can’t attack the science so they use innuendos about financing, the problem they have is that works both ways
Off with all this high-handed moral high ground baloney!
Skeptics NEED to go in low and nasty too — stoop to conquer!
Set-up your own smear campaigns, invest in legions of robotic cyber bullies to infect twitter, youtube, blogs and MSM comment pages with yards of spurious claims of feelings of ‘hurt and offense felt’.
I’m sure outfits like Desmogblog, skepticalscience, etc., would appreciate a good long test of their cyber security as a few million ping/finger/etc. request per second head their way. Coupled with a few thousand request for funding information and FOI per day.
I’m glad to hear that so many who defame Dr. Soon are seeking psychological help, and most are no longer physically violent to children (though some say kittens still are not safe).
🙂
Their is little point in ‘going in low and nasty’ when the main media across the World refuse to cover what we write. The shame of the unbalanced media coverage, by ignoring the sceptics viewpoint, is the very reason the warmists and environmentalists have got away with their hoax and lies for so long and which has brought us to why we are discussing it on this and other sceptic sites. Whilst sceptic sites have some purpose, they are unknown to probably 90 per cent of the population who accept anything the main media write. This is the reason that liars like Gore and Mann can lie knowing that only a small percentage of the population will know that they are lying.
Cloud Fund. I will put 50 dollars in the pot.
Crowd Fund. I’ve supported Peter Ridd all the way through and so have many others. I’d contribute to defamation/libel suit against these people. It’s the only way to stop the bastards.
I had a nice email chat with Willie recently – we did not talk about all this nasty stuff – it was a social call, on the need to get together again, chill and drain some cold ones on a sunny patio. Willie is a remarkably intelligent and honorable man, a great conversationalist, and a ton of fun.
So I’m not speaking for him, but you have to understand that someone has to be willing to set aside years of one’s life to launch a lawsuit – and these years will be costly, stressful and non-productive.
In Canada, lawyers are allowed to publicly persecute you and harass you – ask anyone who has been through a bad divorce – and lawyers and witnesses (especially cops) are allowed to lie with impunity. Federally-appointed Justices up to and including our Supreme Court are often political hacks who display little apparent knowledge of the most basic elements of the law, including our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Rules of Evidence, and even Innocent Until Proved Guilty (aka “Just believe the woman, even when Ms Ford is obviously making it up”).
In Canada, there is no real Rule of Law and no protection when someone chooses to persecute you – the one with the deep pockets wins.
Anyone who thinks it is better in the USA should follow the General Flynn case – if anything, it’s worse there – deeper and dirtier.
So a wise person will not willingly enter a lawsuit. Much better to cultivate a false reputation for extreme anger, a nervous twitch-on-demand, and a publicly-known fondness for automatic firearms – that is your best defense in the absence of Rule of Law. 🙂
Actually Allan, you soon (sic) learn to not be stressed. I was in a 10 year phony lawsuit as the corporate representative and, after three years or less, figured out how it worked. You just get on with your life and a week before the next hearing date, get back up to speed, give your lawyers some bazookas and rip the guts out of the adversaries who are generally clueless and not prepared to handle such, making it obvious to the Judge who are the frauds. I actually found it to be fun, especially when their evisceration and realization how much of their own money they had lost, was approaching.
I aslo found I could get on with my scientific work on planes and at nice hotels.
also
Hi Phil and Russell:
You assume your judges are honest and competent. I know many of mine are not.
Check out the US judge who just blocked the dropping of charges against General Flynn. Same.
The judge is apparently a friend of Obama’s “Wingman” former attorney general, Eric Holder.
It sounds like this judge should not be hearing this case. His bias against Flynn is obvious, having called him a traitor to his country at one point during the trial. He didn’t explain how an innocent man can also be a traitor. The judge has since backed off this charge a little because it was broadly seen as “over the top”, but the judge’s sentiment is obvious.
The only thing I can figure this judge is doing is trying to prevent Flynn from speaking publicly for as long as he can because no doubt, Flynn has some very damaging things to say about the Obama administration, once given his voice.
The judge can hold up the show a little, but I’m not sure for how long. I wouldn’t think long. And there’s nothing the judge can do as far as Flynn’s guilt or innocence because the Judge can’t try the case himself. So he is in legal limbo. Unfortunately, he’s keeping Flynn in limbo, too.
It’s really a travesty of justice. A blatant, obvious travesty of justice. The Swamp in Washington DC is deep and wide and this judge looks like he is a member in good standing.
HOW IS THE USA GOING TO CLEAN UP THE FBI AND THE REST OF THE CORRUPT US JUSTICE SYSTEM?
The FBI and the criminal justice system view the Rule of Law as their personal playpen, to abuse as they see fit.
I view it as the very basis of our safety, security and prosperity. It must be repaired without delay.
_____________________________________
The latest playpen move from this “bent” judge:
JUDGE SULLIVAN APPOINTS RETIRED CLINTON-ERA JUDGE TO THWART DISMISSAL OF FLYNN CASE, EXPLORE NEW CHARGE
May 14, 2020
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/05/14/judge-sullivan-appoints-retired-clinton-era-judge-to-thwart-dismissal-of-flynn-case-explore-new-charge-920604
WHISTLEBLOWER CLAIMS OBAMA’S TREASURY DEPT. SPIED ON FLYNN, MANAFORT AND TRUMP FAMILY REGULARLY
May 18, 2020 | Jon Dougherty
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/05/18/whistleblower-claims-obamas-treasury-dept-spied-on-flynn-manafort-and-trump-family-regularly-922670
The Treasury Department regularly spied on retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s financial records and transactions during Barack Obama’s presidency, beginning in December 2015 and continuing well into 2017, Star Newspapers reported, citing claims by a whistleblower.
@Allan MacRae: If I may respectfully disagree – a foolish man like Dr Michael Mann would enter a lawsuit if his chances were marginal on an outright win and more dependent on victory through some kind of settlement resulting from his opponents running out of cash and stamina. A wise man would willingly enter a lawsuit if he knew the defendants are crossing their fingers hoping that nobody notices how worthless their libelous accusations are or how conspiratorial they and their associates actions have been. Dr Mann sued pundit Mark Steyn over a basic case of subjective name-calling. Skeptic climate scientists stand accused of being corrupted by industry money that paid for industry-approved lies and the accusers claim to have evidence to back up the accusation. They, in fact, do not. I posit that it is more than wise to go on the offensive and point out this fatal political part of the AGW issue for all the world to see. It would be one more exercise in holding the mainstream media accountable, in asking why reporters have NEVER questioned anything about the overall ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation, when crippling problems within it are so easily found no matter which angle the accusation is approached.
No need to look dangerous to win, when your opponents are exposed to the world as ‘all show and no go’ who fold like cheap suits when they are finally challenged to stand and deliver on evidence that supports their empty accusations.
lawyers and witnesses (especially cops) are allowed to lie with impunity.
Allen–I think that is universal, not just in Canada. In fact, I suspect (based on some personal experience) that “effective lying” is one of the required courses both at law school and the police academy.
You are correct. I have witnessed the lies personally. I’m sure from this story, you have as well.
Once the state has decided your fate, truth and justice are truly blind.
Can’t someone just point out that these slimers are going to great efforts to commit the genetic fallacy? I will agree that I’m in cahoots with Satan if you’ll explain what that has to do with my argument.
You failed to mention probably the most salient point. Dr. Soon received funding from Harvard-Smithsonian, not directly from other funding groups. There was no conflict of interest to declare.
Where the hell are Harvard and the Smithsonian in this? If I had been publicly accused of some sort of misconduct in doing my job, I would expect my employer to 1) investigate and, 2) defend me to the hilt if they found the accusation to be false. As far as I can see, both “great institutions” have seriously let Dr. Soon down by not issuing forceful statements refuting the accusations and supporting their employee. They certainly should have clearly explained their funding process and demanded that the news outlets who published the smears retract their stories.
Exactly. Harvard-Smithsonian has done exactly the opposite, as seen in my screencapture of the citation source of what the Honolulu v Sunoco and 9 other global warming lawsuits use in their filings:
http://gelbspanfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/HarvSmiths-Soon-discl.jpg
“… Dr. Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon failed to disclose to journals the funding sources for his climate change 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.”
“They certainly should have clearly explained their funding process and demanded that the news outlets who published the smears retract their stories.”
Then is it not reasonable that their internal investigation found the accusations to be correct and have kept quiet to avoid further embarrassment?
SI or anyone at Harvard is not defending Willie. How the FOIA request was honored by them is more than questionable, and someday they hopefully will have to answer that question. That is about all that can and should be shared at this point.
“Then is it not reasonable that their internal investigation found the accusations to be correct and have kept quiet to avoid further embarrassment?”
Not it is not – nice smear, you rat.
Macrame:
When you have no argument you resort the ad hom.
Which is (of course) perfectly OK when it comes from the 99% of denizens who are rapidly ideologically opposed to climate science.
If I were to do that then …..
But, whatever, you have revealed the kind of nasty rabid hatred that is a disgrace to this website and to humanity in general.
Well done in furthering the future of both.
Anthony Barton, you could also dismiss reason and the universe while you are at it. Do Anthony step back in a moment of reduced emotion and ponder the following question: are you sure about climate change is a correct assessment of the world as we know it? And are you ready to commit everyone’s future to the policies being proposed? You are after all highly invested in what you have been told to believe in. And perhaps you see all of the shenanigans in Congress to thwart Trump are just and fair and righteous. Skip democracy and scientific debate right?
Typo:
NO it is not – nice smear, you #$%^&* rat.
“Then is it not reasonable that their internal investigation found the accusations to be correct and have kept quiet to avoid further embarrassment?”
Dr. Soon received his finding from Harvard/Smithsonian. THEY received funding from various sources, at least one of which was from fossil fuel companies. How H/S distributed those funds is up to them. Dr. Soon had nothing to declare except that his finding came from H/S and that’s what he did.
We first see Davies at the 1:45 point as a guest on the Democracy Now program …
The irony. But yet, that’s just manufactured double-speak we hear all the time.
“Democracy Now” = dictatorship forever. As Rush Limbaugh often laments, “If only the far-left could be intellectually honest with themselves and to the public ….”
“The irony. But yet, that’s just manufactured double-speak we hear all the time.”
Just like every communist country has “Democratic” or some variation in their name.
Charles thanks for digging deeper. I put this video together with Willie so the info is first hand. The length of the video (still too long and detailed for some) is a constraint. The question becomes as we dig into other topics, both scientific and political, is how to cover a topic and raise concerns, even beyond the skeptical community.
It is great to see all of the support for and recognition of Willie for his many contributions. He is steadfast and brilliant, a true warrior.
The web of the alarmist movement is deep, well financed and intent on the power grab, as most know. In putting this story together to see how the NYT article was issued along with other orchestrated messages using similar language, even to this day, bespeaks of a sinister effective organization, none of which is a surprise to the readers of this blog.
We just need to keep highlighting the abuses in all categories: personal attacks, broken peer review, bad science and destructive policies. More to come as I update climate illuminated website. Not easy to do this as quickly as I would like. It would be nice to have the budget of the NYT art department, etc. So far like many if not most who do post here, it is just me alone.
Willie’s the best.
As well the Wikipedia content describing Willie is also a scam. Those in the fight in any avenue, for science or just facts matter, see this kind of religious dedication to keeping this scam alive. Willie in the past tried, with the help of 3 people, and tried to correct the Wikipedia content, but alas a few minutes later it would be changed back. I will at some point soon take this content on Wikipedia and post it on one of my websites with corrections.
The level of activism operating here, most reading this are aware. But to some this would shock you as to how every step taken by skeptics is demonized. I had two talks on Stanford campus cancelled because someone realized that I was trying to broaden the discussion on climate, not only be a anti-AGW advocate. Both were cancelled immediately. How some can spend so much effort thwarting open and thoughtful discussion is beyond my comprehension, but it happens all of the time.
These folk need to go back and study the trial of Socrates!