Sunday, April 5, 2015

A DAY LATE AND TWO HUNDRED PAPERS SHORT

My  shirtmaker, the Viscount, writes of his  crackerjack toy climate model coauthor:

Willie Soon – has been under relentless  and  vicious attack...on the ground that in 11 of his hundreds of papers published from  2008  to  the  present  he  had had grants from Southern Company but had not declared a conflict of interest. The facts are that, although he had approached Southern Company for grant aid for his research, the contract and all terms therein were negotiated between Southern Company and his employer, the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory, without any involvement from Willie. One of the terms of that contract – a term to which the Smithsonian should never have agreed – was that the identity of Southern was not to be published.

Could the right honorable lord's account of this publishing prodigy be somewhat exaggerated?

Bibliography search engines like Academica report Soon as coauthor of a  grand total of 17 papers since 2008, of which 15  thus far appear on Soon's own Heartland Institute webpage :



Armstrong, J.S., K.C. Green, and W. Soon, 2008: Polar bear population forecasts: A public-policy forecasting audit, Interfaces 38: 382–405 [plus 3 comments and authors’ reply].
Dyck, M., W. Soon, et al., 2008: Reply to response to Dyck et al. (2007) on polar bears and climate change in western Hudson Bay by Stirling et al. (2008), Ecological Complexity 5: 289–302.
Liu, J., B. Wang, Q. Ding, X. Kuang, W. Soon, and E. Zorita, 2009: Centennial variations of global monsoon precipitation in the last millennium: Results from ECHO‑G model, Journal of Climate 22: 2356–2370.
Soon, W., 2009: Solar Arctic-mediated climate variation on multidecadal to centennial timescales: Empirical evidence, mechanistic explanation, and testable consequences, Physical Geography 30: 144–184.
Green, K.C., J.S. Armstrong, and W. Soon, 2009: Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making, International Journal of Forecasting 25: 826–832.
Soon, W., 2009: Comments on HESS Opinion “A random walk on water” by D. Koutsoyiannis,  Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions 6: C2852–C2856.
Soon, W. and D.R. Legates, 2010: Avoiding carbon myopia: Three considerations for policy makers concerning manmade carbon dioxide, Ecology Law Currents 37: 1–9.
Armstrong, J.S., K.C. Green, and W. Soon, 2011: Research on forecasting for the manmade global warming alarm, Energy & Environment 22: 1091–1104.
Agnihotri, R., K. Dutta, and W. Soon, 2011. Temporal derivative of total solar irradiance and anomalous Indian summer monsoon: an empirical evidence for a Sun-climate connection, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 73: 1980–1987.
Soon, W., K. Dutta, D.R. Legates, V. Velasco, and W. Zhang, 2011: Variation in surface air temperature of China during the 20th century, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 73: 2331–2344. 
Legates, D.R. and W. Soon, 2011: Chapter 4: Sea level changes in Bangladesh: observational constraints on human, geologic and weather-climate variability related factors, in Climate Change‑ Issues and Perspectives for Bangladesh, Rafique Ahmed, and S. Dara Shamsuddin (Eds). Dhakar, Bangladesh.
Legates, D.R., W. Soon, and W.M. Briggs, 2013: Learning and teaching climate science: The perils of consensus knowledge using agnotology, Science and Education 22: 2007–2017.
Legates, D.R., W. Soon, W.M. Briggs, and C. Monckton of Brenchley, 2013: Climate consensus and ‘misinformation’: A rejoinder to ‘Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change,’ Science and Education (August).
Soon, W. and D.R. Legates, 2013: Solar irradiance modulation of equator-to-pole (Arctic) temperature gradients: empirical evidence for climate variation on multi-decadal timescales, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 93: 45–56.
Legates, D.R., W. Soon, W.M. Briggs, and C. Monckton of Brenchley, 2015: Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate modelScience Bulletin, Vol. 60  Issue (1): 122-135; DOI: 10.1007/s11434-014-0699-2
That's 11 out of 15  payola papers as a matter of record, So Monckton is prevaricating when he continues:
Willie Soon, therefore, is entirely blameless in this affair. As an employee of the Smithsonian he was bound by that contract whether he liked it or not, and it is significant that the only papers for which he did not disclose the source of funds were the 11 papers (not including ours, which we all did on our own time) that were funded by Southern Company.
In an aside that may distinctly interest the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, the noble lord goes on to complain :
That is the highly-charged environment in which we have all been having to operate ever since we first published our paper, against which no serious scientific argument has yet been made.... those of us who have tried each in our fumbling way to uphold scientific integrity and truth against the exaggerations and dishonesties being peddled by the profiteers of doom have been subjected to continuous...inappropriate and sometimes downright unlawful attacks, 
...a Princeton professor, furtively cowering under a pseudonym, accuses us not once but twice of lying...In the UK, there  is  a  presumption long established in case law that if you accuse someone of  “lying”  and are unable to prove they have lied you have perpetrated the tort of libel –If I could ...find out who that “professor” is and have him up for professional misconduct as well as libel,