Bishop Hill Another witchhunt
Feb 22, 2015 Climate: Sceptics Greens Media So the usual suspects in the green-tinged media are running another of their witchhunts. This time they have returned to the attack against Willie Soon, with the New York Times' Justin Gillis and the Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg in the front line.
As far as I can see, the story is that Soon and three co-authors published a paper on climate sensitivity. At the same time (or perhaps in the past - this being a smear-job it's hard to get at the facts) he was being funded by to do work on things like the solar influence on climate by people that greens feel are the baddies. They and the greens feel he should have disclosed that baddies were paying him to do stuff on a paper that was not funded by the baddies.
I guess you can make a case that he should have done, but I'm struggling to get very excited about it as a transgression.
And as a fairly ugly attempt to poison the well the articles in the New York Times and the Guardian are an indictment of the standards at those once respected publications. Their failure to discuss the contents of the Soon paper speaks volumes.
Reader Comments (109)
As usual, the fact that orders of magnitude more money (including close to 100% of government money) is channelled into alarmism, and that government stands to hugely gain from public alarm, is completely ignored.
Totalitarianism by stealth.
Tuppence
They got government billions during the dynasty of that great Defender of the Planet, George W Bush. Yes and Big Oil, not just the loonies but the scientists too. Isn't this what Naomi said ?
Mick Kelly UEA-Tyndall
Shell International would give serious consideration to what I referred to in the meeting as a 'strategic partnership' with the TC, broadly equivalent to a 'flagship alliance' in the TC proposal. A strategic partnership would involve not only the provision of funding but some (limited but genuine) role in setting the research agenda etc.
Shell's interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to 'real-world' activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.[Clean Development Mechanism]
source uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc 11 September 2000
download here
http://www.libertyandpeace.org/wiki/climategate/uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc
'I am more disposed to credit his judgement than the collective taste in climate proxies of mining statisticians and astrophysicists.'
Musical chairs and circular Seitz.
Climategate - the gift that keeps on giving.
Mick Kelly UEA-Tyndall
Shell International would give serious consideration to what I referred to in the meeting as a 'strategic partnership' with the TC, broadly equivalent to a 'flagship alliance' in the TC proposal. A strategic partnership would involve not only the provision of funding but some (limited but genuine) role in setting the research agenda etc.
Shell's interest is not in basic science. Any work they support must have a clear and immediate relevance to 'real-world' activities. They are particularly interested in emissions trading and CDM.[Clean Development Mechanism]
source uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc 11 September 2000
download here
http://www.libertyandpeace.org/wiki/climategate/uea-tyndall-shell-memo.doc
Anyone who believes the oil companies would spend money on protecting their existence by "deliberately speading misinformation" is over generalising a special case and obviously doesn't understand how businesses and capitalism create efiencies by using their own self-interest. If you go back to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" you'll find he cautions that businesses need to be reined back from time to time. For Melvyn Bragg radio discussion see
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b052ln55
I suggest that tobacco is a special case. The manufacturers didn't have a legal alternative to tobacco. However, when I look at the research by anti-smoking activists, it's just as appallingly bad as the tobacco companies research (particularly about secondary smoke). As more and more people are saying these days, by framing the question appropriately, you can always get the statistical answer you want – and then smooth over the fact that statistics don't prove causation.
Compare to the food processing companies when we were all told by governments to stop eating saturated fats. They just upped their research into how to make margarine taste like butter and increased production of it, while reducing their exposure to butter and milk. They were agnostic to the science, merely making sure that their company stayed alive.
The fact that we're now told that the saturated fat research was of poor quality and saturated fat is not dangerous after all makes me appreciate that the precautionary principle should follow medicine and include "First do no harm". This wasn't followed by the anti-butter activists – harmful trans-fats were used in margarine until recently (at least in UK) .
In Europe, all the energy companies have been spending money on research into renewables at least since the 70s and 80s. They wanted to be in on the latest technology. I remember working for BMW where they had BP as their research partner on hybrid cars. I seem to remember that Shell were working with Ford. Hydrogen fuel was perceived as the way forwards in Europe. While in North America with it's large amount of farming land, growing corn for ethanol was the way to go. I'm sure they're also spending on research into alternatives for plastics manufacturing and power-stations.
So I don't believe the conspiracy theory for anything except tobacco. There's always been a prediction that coal, oil, etc will become uneconomic and the company's duty is to make sure that their company will survive - not necessarily still with oil technology.
Like tobacco, organisations against cheap energy (Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Club of Rome, etc) don't have any alternative to survive apart from stoking up conspiracy theories. They've improved so much over the years …
Russell was mighty quick there to whip out the Argumentum ad Verecundiam card. Not too surprising I suppose when one considers how weak his hand is.
Compare and contrast Steve's factual, informative and even-handed post with Russell's implicit position that it's alright to use – or rather, in this case, bungle – precipitation proxies and records to reconstruct past temperature when it gives the answer Russell likes, but not to examine precipitation proxies – as Soon did as one of three simple proxy diagnostic tests – when it doesn't.
In Sallie Baliunas' Orwellian Wikipedia entry, it notes the SB03 publisher saying critics said the conclusions of the paper "cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided" and that the journal "should have requested appropriate revisions prior to publication."
If ever these observations were true about a paper published in an academic journal, they are true of MBH98/99 (and M08 for that matter). But what do we see instead? Virtually an entire (and now vast) academic community misusing their position of trust in pursuit of the reasonable and in defence of the indefensible.
Not heard has yet anyone say what is wrong in Soon's et al work , can one of the trolls help us in this or do they just 'know' its wrong even if they cannot tell us why?
Is that the sad plaintive bleat of a wannabe shadow web owner? A mockery of science web site whose primary job is to spread falsehoods and misinformation?
That is all you've managed to post here. Dropping twisted smears that have as their origin a smidgeon of possibility. Useless twaddle without any facts behind them posted by someone who feeds his shadow mockery site by hawking misinformation.
Apparently an unusual coincidence of multiple organizations and people are trying their worst to smear an honest scientist doing honest science; and you 'just' happen to join the smear campaign... riiighht.
Just for your information Russell, we don't care how many editors and publishers are forced from their jobs by the anti-science 'climate' team. Sooner or later those organizations will install honest journalists who investigate research, publish facts and solidly defend their articles with facts, not nonsense.
Maybe, if you try real hard you can get yourself fired for failing so grotesquely to sway us skeptics.
Try quoting the truth next time.
Given that Russell's comments are invariably devoid of facts and arguments, and are mostly unintelligible because of his execrable English (I apologise if English is not his first language but he shows no sign of any familiarity with it), it is well worth just ignoring the drivel that oozes on the screen above his name. Academics should be left to pursue their incomprehensible vendettas behind closed doors. When it gets into the real world, the triviality of academic discourse is, all too often, pathetic to behold.
In my earlier comment, I made no mention of Hans von Storch. I discussed Seitz' false comments about precipitation proxies. Once again, rather than refuting my comments about precipitation proxies or conceding that he was talking on matters without knowledge, Seitz has changed the topic once again to von Storch and Climate Research - a different issue than whether Mann, rather than Soon, used precipitation proxies to reconstruct temperatures. This is a topic on which I have detailed personal knowledge.
Seitz states:
Von Storch's resignation was extraordinarily damaging to Willie Soon's career. I've looked closely at the documents, and, in my opinion, von Storch owes Soon an abject apology. I realize that this assertion requires documentation. I've been thinking about this topic for a while and it seems that it's time to write about it in detail.
Rather good one bullocky!
It has that ring, perhaps Josh can illustrate?
Is Russell Nick Stoke's long lost, identical twin?
They both have a gift for telling porkies.
@ Seitz
"the collective taste in climate proxies of mining statisticians and astrophysicists"
You're quite right, infinitely more to one's taste for their intelligence, diligence, rigour and dignity.
All those qualities to which you will never hope to lay claim.
I pointed out to von Storch on his blog that the Mann-led criticism of Soon/Balliunas 2003 seemed to depend entirely on a redefinition of the word 'climate' as if it only referred to temperature rather than all long-term weather records. So having just read him criticizing Manns work, I then asked him if he would now finally admit he was wrong about SB2003 since the disjointed criticism of it by the clearly biased Mann et al seemed to be the only spark for these mass resignations.
He haughtily replied that he was able to determine by himself the worth of a paper regardless of the who else objected to it. He did not answer the further question of what could be so bad about a paper that merely supported the overwhelming scientific consensus prior to the error-laden hockey-stick fiasco.
Of course climate scientists rarely admit to being wrong. They don't need to when the media doesn't care. We live in a world where it is far more important to be politically correct than factually correct.
My condolences to the Bish on his being seconded by so many on the losing side in the war against cliche'.
Steven McIntyre errs in averring : " In my earlier comment, I made no mention of Hans von Storch. I discussed Seitz' false comments about precipitation proxies."
As can be seen above, I made none for him to discuss.
Igsy's parroting argumentum ad vericandum likewise fails the test of coherence: the problem hereabouts is
Quid rides ?
Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur !
A thorough and scientifically rigorous fisking of Soon's recent work can be inspected at Stoat-- you will find the link on the sidebar.
Dear Russell
May I call you Jack? So WUWT has a copy of the contract between the Smithsonian and Southern Company Services. That's the real WUWT. Beware shabby imitations that bubble away in the darker corners of the web. So it says:
"The Charter of the Smithsonian Institute carries a mandate for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men". Therefore, any grant or contract that may be awarded as a result of this proposal must be unclassified, in order not to abridge the Institution's right to publish, without restriction, findings that result from this research project."
So Jack, why did you say this?
"Soon's problem is that his contract with Southern Energy gives them the right to preview and review the science in what he terms his 'deliverables'."
Soon doesn't have a contract with Southern Energy and the Smithsonian's contract gives them the right to publish the results without any prior vetting by Southern, or even "Stoat", who doesn't appear to be any kind of practising climate scientist. I wonder if the Smithsonian may want to commission more research into the way tiny bubbles help scum rise to the surface, in cauldrons or other containers.
For the jerk, Russell of Vatsupwiththat:
Long List Of Warmist Organizations, Scientists Haul In Huge Money From BIG OIL And Heavy Industry! http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.gPge2EW8.dpuf
Still no accusations of cannibalism !
It would be fascinating to know on average how many climate science journals the Bishop's flock subscribe to , and to learn how many of them have actually perused an issue of one in the last month, year, and decade?
What we've seen today of the connection between what they write and what the literature contains militates for the null hypothesis .
Seitz seems to be suffering from Alzheimers. He says:
here is my original comment on Seitz' false comments about precipitation proxies, responding to Seitz' original false comments about precipitation proxies. It's isn't very interesting talking to someone with Alzheimers, who's forgotten what he said a few minutes ago. The moral with Seitz is that you do not merely have to watch the pea with him, but it would be best to attach a name tag to him, in case he gets lost.
A couple of Elephantine problems with the narrative :
1. If Soon was corrupt, he'd have gone for the big easy money from alarmists.
2. What about the payer . You are saying Southern corp is corrupt ? That it paid to distort science?
::: thats big big allegation
::: was it a big smokescreen that they paid a much higher percentage of their grants to declared warmist scientists ? out of the millions of dollars they award each year ?
- If the investigation is just, Soon will win, but he might be sacrificed as part of a bigger political game .. Ie like the fact the Smithsonian might lose big government grant money if they dont get the "right result" .or threat of blackballing by activist scientists or leverage against the Republican temperature record investigations
- "The contract is between the Smithsonian and Southern Company Services — SCS is a holding and administrative company for the Southern Corp SoCo, 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."
I bet SoCo benefit from loads of green subsidies and regulations that both push up prices (and profits) and make it difficult for new large supply competitors to enter the market .
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 )
5 New Articles on Breibart
Including letters of support from Carter and Monckton sent to Dr. Alcock and other colleagues of Soon’s, defending his professional integrity against the misleading charges brought by NYT
Another
The haters "have modified the famous phrase that Evelyn Hall used to summarise Voltaire’s attitude towards freedom of speech. The recast aphorism now reads: “I disapprove of what you say, and will pursue to the death every way of preventing you from expressing it.”
Russell still waiting for you to tell us what was wrong in Soon et al work , any chance at all that you could drop the smear and start the science?
KnR
Don't hold your breath!
What is wrong with Soon et al (which I think properly ought to be described as Monckton et al) is that it blows a hole in the models and that cannot be allowed.
The history of this rather grubby little farce has been well-documented by William Briggs on various sites and the reason Willie Soon is in the firing line from Greenpeace and its assorted stooges is that he is the only one that they can get at.
What these brainless twats never ever realise is that when the fuss dies down that paper will still exist, they have given it credence simply the vehemence of their attack on it, and that in the end it will stand or fall on whether or not its methodology and conclusions are justifiable.
What particular axe Seitz thinks he's grinding in all this I don't know but watching him prove that the ability to gain a degree in physics does not necessarily imply any sort of acquaintance with reality or common-sense is rather amusing. In any other branch of science he would be an embarrassment but climastrology is so lacking in anything resembling hard science that any loudmouth prepared to support the True Faith is more than welcome.
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.
Russell Seitz is a masochist, he enjoys getting bitched slapped by Steve McIntyre. Bish, hope you don't edit this. Russell is a Justin Gillis fan boy who knows squat about the science, as evidenced by him never talking about it. He is a socialist who is very committed to making sure the government money keeps flowing.
Also, you refer to McIntyre as a mining statistician as if that disqualifies Steve from commenting. Actually, what it shows is that your hero Michael Mann knows squat about his field of research. So keep up the political snipes Russell, you can't refute the research.
A corrigendum : five, not three editors of Climate Research resigned in protest over the publication of Soon's paper;
To see what's wrong with it, and the rest of Willie's pay for play deliverables , just follow this link.
Comrade Cadbury and the rest of the proletarian vanguard can catch up with my agitprop in such socialist must reads as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal , Reason, and National Review
Russel (and the Real Climate post that he is referring to) is being very careful not to mention or to discuss the paper by Lord Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates and William Briggs and published by the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences: "Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model"
I wonder why? Could this:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/02/23/left-panics-over-peer-reviewed-climate-papers-threat-to-global-warming-alarmism/
...explain the fact that instead of addressing the science in that paper, Russel and Real Climate focus on shooting one of the four messengers.
No, Pethefin, it could not , because considered both as physics
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/the-designers-of-our-climate/
and as a predictive tool
https://quantpalaeo.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/was-china-6-8-k-warmer-in-winter-6000-years-ago/
the model in question is a crock whose response to radiative forcing is arbitrarily constrained by a physically unrealistic limit on feedback .
Russell, this is an opinion, not a fact: "the model in question is a crock whose response to radiative forcing is arbitrarily constrained by a physically unrealistic limit on feedback ."
the models you support are unconstrained by physically unrealistic upper bounds of positive feedbacks.
So Russell, 5 editors or 50% of the editorial board remained at Climate Research. So half the board felt Michael Mann was full of shit. Go ahead and keep supporting Michael Mann. Matter of fact go ahead and keep supporting all of Obama's totalitarian policies. I bet you believe his 330 page, embargoed net neutrality bill is brilliant. Keep it up, we enjoy continually taking political seats from the socialist party.
The modus operandi of Russell is quite amusing. He is just trying to generate traffic for his worthless website, which is a blatant attempt to pass himself off as WUWT . He never displays knowledge, instead trying to generate traffic for Connelley, a person perhaps even more egotistical and deprived of language skills than Russell. Now he tries to generate traffic for the rather pathetic quant palaeo guy, who has just been reamed by Latimer Alder. Russell's incoherent style of argumentation has been described eloquently as that of a victim of Alzheimer's, which seems a good diagnosis. He is unable to explain the science. Perhaps he needs lessons from Lewandowsky. He tosses in random and pointless Latin tags from Horace , presumably so that we think he is knowledgeable. The question is, can he tie his shoelaces? Who reads his paper for him? Who wipes the drool off his face?
Russel, your reply Feb 24, 2015 at 9:14 PM was quite a joke. I was referring to a peer reviewed paper, published in a journal of the Chinese Academy of Science, and you refer me to two blogs of and for AGW-faithful, where the science was not really even discussed. Surely you can do better than this? Or maybe not, since your fellow faithful are already focusing on smearing one of the authors of that paper due to the fact that attacking the journal or its editors (the first two options in the AGW-playbook as revealed by Climategate) are no longer an option.
I never thought that Lysenkoism would be resurrected during my lifetime with a touch of McCarthyism in it:
http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/24/campaign-to-out-climate-denier/
what a sad day for science and for western civilizations, those who do not know history truly are bound to repeat it.
Onbyaccident said "W Soon of Soon and Baliunas fame (circa 2003)? The "researcher" who caused the mass resignations of editors at Climate Reserach and whose publisher eventually agreed that his paper should not have been published? That one? Surely not!? The man who of whose work it was written “The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless” - Gavin Schmidt (Head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan)."
Having read the Soon and Baliunas paper, I can say with absolute certainty that a review quoting the original research of some 200 other authors was a perfectly valid piece of research. The fact that the review found ~200:1 that the world had been warmer in the Medieval Warm Period than today, and thereby showed conclusively that the IPCC had originally been right, and that the Hockey Stick was wrong, got the editor fired and the staff resigned honorably in protest. The sad saga was clearly revealed by Climategate and Onbyaccident is shown to be true to his nic.
The_Iceman_Cometh
I had it in mind to do a similar comment last nigh but it was late and I reckoned I'd done enough arguing with boneheaded idiots for one day.
A large number of people made the same argument when SB03 first hit the fan. This was not original research; this was a perfectly legitimate review of a number of papers which concluded that MBH98 was total crap. Unfortunately, as Climategate demonstrated six years later, everyone except Michael Mann already knew that but if Soon and Baliunas had been allowed to escape unscathed the whole premise that the warming from 1975 (which had in any event come to a halt by 2000 and the Climateers knew or at worst suspected that to be the case) was "unprecedented" possibly in the history of mankind and certainly within the brain of Mannkind would have been blown wide open.
As you correctly point out, the revisionists (led this time by Seitz) have been hard at work. The Climategate emails once again are the source. The Climateers bullied von Storch until he recanted (tortured him in some unspeakable dungeon underneath Norwich cathedral for all I know) and was only allowed to return to his loved ones if he declared that SB03 was totally our of order (it wasn't) and should never have seen the light of day (wrong on that count as well).
And half the staff resigned in protest — against the treatment of von Storch, NOT against the publication of SB03.
The Climateers (along with their useful idiots) continue their attempt to re-write history to serve their own nasty little ambitions in ways that would make Stalin proud while Orwell looks on and shakes his head in disbelief.
The witch-hunt continues to get worse.
Here are the letters sent by Arizona congressman Raul M Grijalva (I'm not sure if the M is for McCarthy) to the heads of the universities of 7 scientists including Pielke Jr, Curry and Lindzen, insinuating that they are secretly funded by Koch brothers and big oil, demanding funding details.
The list of wider partner network for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change is interesting...
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/grantham/postgraduate-training/science-and-solutions-for-a-changing-planet/partners/
Pethefin writes: "I was referring to a peer reviewed paper, published in a journal of the Chinese Academy of Science, and you refer me to two blogs of and for AGW-faithful, where the science was not really even discussed. Surely you can do better than this?"
Why would any serious scientist waste time on a refutation? For the most part, rubbish science is just ignored. Check back in 4 or 5 years time and see how many citations the Monckton, Soon, Briggs, Legates paper has. My guess is that it will be very, very few.
There is no land on an aqua-planet. Do you really need to know any more than that to dismiss Wei-Hock Soon?
Perhaps you prefer the term "watery planet"
Perhaps also you would care to point out the substantive errors rather than simply engage in the usual hand-waving which is the Climateers' second standard response (after ad homs) to any paper that they cannot refute but would prefer to admit just might have something different to say on the subject they appear to think they own.
Which Kevin O'Neill are you, by the way? I've identified 27, none of whom appear to have any better climatological qualifications than either Soon or Briggs.
Or me, come to that.
So Kevin, who are you to declare a peer-reviewed paper published in a Springer journal sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Chinese as rubbish, without any explanation? Your hand-waving and smearing only works with the AGW-faithful.
"my agitprop in such socialist must reads as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal , Reason, and National Review"
A summary of deceit(s).
Something else interesting about the NYT narrative spinning; it isvso passionate that in 2010 Climategate reporting in practiced REVISIONISM by going back later and rewriting the story to remove Judith Curry quotes.
Diogenes had better wipe his lantern to see the difference between " random and pointless Latin tags from Horace " and deliberate parody of Christopher "Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci" Monckton.
What we need to remember is that Dr. Soon is border line incompetent and we only need to support him as long as it is politically expedient for us to do so.
Anything past that damages our goal of promoting carbon based fuels.
Wait a minute, I recognise that style of writing... why, hello Dr Peter (Peter Pelke) Gleick . It's great to see you here. Always nice to be trolled by an honest to goodness, real-life fraudster. ;-)
Laurie, shoud the courts give Peter the jail cell Heartland Science Director Jay Lehr occupied in 1991, after pleading guilty to defrauding the EPA ?
"shoud the courts give Peter the jail cell Heartland Science Director Jay Lehr occupied in 1991, after pleading guilty to defrauding the EPA ?"
Possibly; but undoubtedly, Peter Gleick will appreciate the comparison.
Russell,
Yes. Absolutely. A crime is a crime is a crime. Gleick should have been prosecuted. As a Brit, I've barely even heard of Lehr, but if he did the deed, then he deserved the rewards.