Dr. Willie Soon Interviewed by Professor Franco Battaglia: October 7, 2022 La Verita Newspaper

All the replies to these seven questions can also be studied in the video form at:

https://www.ceres-science.com/post/the-weaponization-of-science-politics-vilification-and-the-climate-debate-dr-willie-soon

The full interview in English is given below.

1. Is Dr. Willie Soon in the pay of the fossil fuel industry?

No.

This was a fabrication invented by Greenpeace activists and others to discredit me because my research was contradicting their fundraising narrative.

Since 1991, I was employed by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA for short). Throughout my scientific career, my research at CfA was funded by grants from NASA, NSF, US Airforce Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) among others. In the early 2000s, I noticed that it was becoming more difficult   to get taxpayer-funded grants unless the research proposal supported the politically correct narrative on climate change. For this reason, from 2001-2015 the CfA’s funding for my research included corporate groups as well as government grants. When you add up all the funds from these sources that CfA received over this period, it comes to more than $1.2 million. My total salary from the CfA over this period was only 60% of this (before tax). In other words, over the period my average annual salary was between $40-75k per year (before tax).

To be honest, I was making far more money when my salary was drawn purely from government grants. I wrestled hard in choosing my scientific path. Should I get rich with a cushy full-tenured professorship at an Ivy League university by abandoning scientific integrity and following my colleagues down the “manmade global warming” money trail? Or should I keep my soul? In the end, I chose my soul and happily I was able to continue to pursue true science.  

We need a proper discussion on how science should be funded. This current model

of only funding research that supports the required political narrative is

shutting down genuine scientific research. We are trying a new approach at

CERES-Science.com.

Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/EcXzZwo8_qg

2. Why Greenpeace is looking for a piece of your green?

Greenpeace activists have been very unhappy with my hard-earned scientific results and understanding.  So, they have been carefully and systematically trying to smear me and my scientific integrity. They were somewhat “successful” in that they were able to supply a well-prepared narrative and details for NYT to print their hit-job on me at the front page of NYT on Sunday February 22, 2015.

I became very curious about Greenpeace and with my colleagues, including Dr. Patrick Moore formerly of Greenpeace, we published this detailed report documenting the strategy and operating principles of Greenpeace in 2018:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329680852_Analysis_of_Greenpeace’s_business_model_philosophy_Greenpeace_wants_a_piece_of_your_green

The bottom line is that Greenpeace has transformed from initially being an altruistic and passionate organization seeking to save the whales and to prevent the mutual self-destructive path of total nuclear war to their anti-human environmental actions and money-gaining campaigns today. We documented specifically that Greenpeace is a very cash-rich enterprise with about two thirds of their $200-300 million dollars assets in cash form. We have also shown that Greenpeace spent on average of $34 million dollars per year from 1994-2015 interval on their campaign to demonize CO₂-climate change issue as a very sound fund-raising investment from their point of view. While Exxon-Mobil, according to   Greenpeace’s own analysis only spent about $1.8 million dollars per year from 1998-2014. It is clear from such statistics that if one were to worry about the influence of Exxon-Mobil, as a fossil fuel company and industry, in swaying public opinion on the topic of climate change, then one should be even far more concerned about the impacts from Greenpeace massively funded media campaigns.

Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/anAt4o1043o

3. Why “97% consensus on climate change” claims are wrong?

This idea and notion that science operates through consensus agreements is indeed the most anti-scientific aspect of the whole puzzle. Demonizing CO₂, which is so essential for life on earth, as the satanic gas that is destroying the environment and humanity is bizarre.

In 2013, a group of activists led by John Cook published a rather strange paper announcing the now popular notion that there is a “97% consensus on climate change” being caused by rising anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. Such pronouncement, unchecked and unchallenged, has even led to the then President of the United States to openly declare that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree. Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

Around the same time, my colleague Professor David Legates of the University of Delaware and I and Professor William M. Briggs and Lord Christopher Monckton, researched this question that led to the publication of our investigation in a 2015 peer-reviewed paper in Science & Education: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11191-013-9647-9  

We reanalyzed Cook et al. (2013) underlying database and we found that they were very misleading in how they described their results. 2/3 of their abstracts offered no opinion on the causes of climate change. Of those that offered an opinion most simply implied that human activity could be a factor. According to their results, only 64 of their 11,944 abstracts (or 0.5%) explicitly said that climate change was mostly human-caused. We examined those 64 and found only 41 (so only 0.3%) actually endorsed the claimed “consensus”.

This is a rather shocking result, and we urge anyone who may still be willing to spread this untruthful claim to stop parroting this most damaging and anti-science campaign.

Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/-ExrTgigXzE

4. Are the UN’s IPCC climate reports scientifically objective?

Briefly, no.

But it may be easier to understand why IPCC’s reports are not scientific efforts if we recognize that according to the IPCC their primary objective is “to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies.”  That is, their goal is to help governments in international negotiations – not to advance the “scientific understanding of climate change”. They provide “regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change…” [if we define “regular” as every 6 or 7 years!] But, as a scientist actively publishing in the field, I also “provide regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change”.

Another important contrast between IPCC’s approach and a scientist is that IPCC requires uniform “scientific consensus” on all issues to prevent the development of  “climate action hesitancy”. A scientist performs open-minded scientific inquiry on all issues in order to prevent the development of “confirmation biases”.

Another important “acid test” on science is the fact that when any scientific disagreements are identified they need to be investigated or at least openly acknowledged rather than being ignored, downplayed, or dismissed as already resolved, a technique that is often used in IPCC reports. At least two of my own scientific publications were incorrectly treated in this manner in the most recent IPCC AR6 report (2021).

              Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/Go1l1TQCJ0U

5. The “hockey stick” debate: Was there a Medieval Warm Period?

Yes there was a well-documented Medieval Warm Period across the world.

In 2003, I published two papers that disagreed with the conclusions of a very prominent study from 1999 that was commonly known as “the hockey stick graph”: Soon and Baliunas (2003) and Soon et al. (2013) . The nature of Medieval Warm Period has now also been confirmed and clarified in the latest study by Luning and Lengsfeld (2022).

“The hockey stick graph” by Mann, Bradley & Hughes (1999), had applied some non-standard statistical techniques to a selective collection of “temperature proxy” records. Temperature proxies are indirect temperature measures from e.g., tree rings, ice cores. They claimed to have proven that from 1000 to 1900, temperatures had been almost constant, but then they sky-rocketed, like “the blade of a hockey stick” in the last 100 years. They claimed that the 1990s were the hottest in at least 1,000 years! Mann was a lead author of IPCC AR3 (2001)and his hockey stick graph featured prominently in the AR3 report.

So, my colleagues and I decided to check how realistic the hockey stick graph was. We concluded in our two papers that there was clearly an identifiable Little Ice Age interval from about 1300-1900 and a Medieval Warm Period from 800-1300 AD. In addition, we documented that the 20^th century warming was neither the warmest nor the most extreme in the last 1000-2000 years.

The ensuing political and scientific corruptions were also recently documented in a talk in Washington, DC on April 11, 2022 by me.

Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/O8QVylaGnWo

6. How much of a role does the Sun play in climate change?

The role of the Sun on recent climate change has been comprehensively reviewed

 in a paper by Connolly, Soon et al. (2021). We objectively discuss both the detailed

quality of the temperature records and the Total Solar Irradiance estimates if  

this question is to be answered seriously and correctly.

Briefly, we pointed out that the issue of whether one uses the temperature record

containing both the rural and urban thermometer records or just the rural-only

weather stations must be raised and resolved. In addition, we discussed the wide-

ranging of TSI reconstruction products, minimally sixteen different estimates, that

can be classified into low-amplitude and high-amplitude estimates. We highlight the

fact that the high-amplitude TSI results were somewhat selectively dismissed in the

IPCC reports while favoring their “consensus”-driven low-amplitude TSI records.

In our invited review paper, we showed that the IPCC’s conclusion that nearly all the

recent temperature change can be explained by the rising anthropogenic CO2 in the

air, only works  if:

a. you use the combined rural and urban temperature records and

b. if you only use the low-amplitude TSI estimates.

In a sharp contrast, you can conclude that the recent temperature rise is entirely

natural if you:

a. use only the rural temperatures

b. use one of the available high-amplitude estimates of TSI.

Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/dZF4mDmKs_w

7. Are “fact checks” checking facts or checking narratives?

This is based on a direct experience we recently encountered after we have published Connolly, Soon et al. (2021) when a journalist from The Epoch Times, Mr. Alex Newman, decided to report on our findings and compare and contrast with the latest IPCC AR6 report. Mr. Newman asked IPCC’s press officer some straightforward questions concerning why our invited review paper were not included in the last AR6 report (2021) and why at least two of our previously published papers were either cited incorrectly or mis-represented in the AR6 report.

Apparently such an objective inquiry and press communications have offended the narrative defender of the big tech platforms, so a “fact-checking” group called Climate Feedback wrote an extremely negative (but wrong) review of Alex Newman’s article and deemed the article to be “Incorrect”.

As neutral and objective observers, we do not find Climate Feedback’s hit piece to be credible plus we have uncovered several additional issues and problems in their reporting. So we have decided to issue an open letter to the publishers of Climate Feedback. Thus far, we have received no reply.

Indeed, I want to alert and openly discuss here the rather dangerous new fashion in the media and technology platform of invoking fact checking and fact checkers to try to silent debate or discussion. Big technology platforms like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia seem to have lost their way. They are increasingly limiting public information access to narrative-approved “facts”, rather than allowing free discussion & research.

Please study this video clip for more details: https://youtu.be/yCjMUOUMje0