A week ago, we were telling you about Wei-Hock Soon, an aerospace engineer turned climate scientist; mister Soon, known as “Willie”, is one of the most well known and quoted climate change deniers – he’s also one of the only climate change deniers. So recently, it was revealed that Willie has received 1.2 million from oil companies in exchange for his “science”. According to leaked documents, the papers were simply “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe a testimony he prepared for Congress. Now, he has turned on the defensive, claiming that he is treated unfairly by scientists and the media.
Image via Common Dreams.
“In recent weeks I have been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups. This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming.”
Needless to say, ZME Science and the countless other media outlets that have covered this issue are neither radical environmental groups nor politically motivated. The NY Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, The Verge, Think Progress and all the other sources that covered it… they’re not politically motivated. Sure, some sources may have hidden agendas, but that’s only a clear minority – and that doesn’t excuse Willie himself from having a hidden agenda. When you receive over 1 million dollars to produce “deliverables” you call science papers, you don’t get to play the victim. When you cheat scientific journals and don’t disclose a conflict of interest (such as an oil company funding you to claim that climate change isn’t man made), you don’t get to call people shameless for revealing what you’ve done. That’s just rude and insulting.
Writing for the Journal Gazette, Christer Watson explained one episode which highlights what kind of papers mister Soon published:
“In his published papers, he was accused of being selective about what sort of analysis he chose, not always justifying his choices and always seeming to make the choices which led to minimizing the effects of carbon emissions in climate change. These sorts of mistakes can be obvious to many in the field, but they are also dreadfully boring to those of us outside the field. When he published a paper in 2003 related to this work, several editors of the journal resigned, basically in protest. The editors believed Soon’s paper so flawed that it did not deserve to be published.”
To add insult to injury, the statement wasn’t released by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics – where Willie is an associate (he’s not employed there and doesn’t receive money from the Smithsonian, but he can work there and is responsible for his own funding). No, this statement was released by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute are a conservative group with the aim of disproving climate change, or at the very least make it seem like humans have no part to play. They finance climate change denial books, try to rewrite school books, and place advertisements that liken climate scientists to serial killers.
The Heartland Institute portrayed Dr. Soon as a martyr, again, insulting those who pointed out his wrongdoings.
“He’s a brilliant and courageous scientist devoted entirely to pursuing scientific knowledge,” the organization’s president, Joseph Bast, said this week in a statement. “His critics are all ethically challenged and mental midgets by comparison.”
So the vast majority of the scientific community, everybody who’s claiming, with solid arguments, with thousands upon thousands of peer reviewed studies that climate change is happening, and we are causing it are wrong – they’re ethically challenged and mental midgets, compared to Willie. I guess only people like senator Inhofe, who claims that only God can change the climate can stand up to him.
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