The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has launched an
inquiry into one of its researchers, solar physicist and global warming
sceptic Willie Soon, following the release of documents that detail
research funds he and the institution received from the energy
industry and a conservative foundation.
Obtained by Greenpeace through a Freedom of Information Act
request and released by an affiliated group, the documents include
research contracts and describe specific commitments that Soon
and the CfA, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made to corporate
funders. CfA officials say they are now investigating whether Soon properly reported the funding — he has received more than $1.5 million in private funding since 2001 —
to journals that have published his research.
The institution has no explicit policy requiring its researchers
to disclose funding sources when they publish, says CfA director
Charles Alcock, but they are expected to comply with journal rules,
which typically require that authors report potential conflicts of interest.
“We want to get the facts straight,” says Alcock. “If there is evidence
of failure to disclose, yes, we have a problem.”
Soon did not respond to multiple phone calls and emails.
Still, Physical Geography published the 40-page study in 2009 after peer reviewers gave a green light, and Harden persuaded Soon to “adjust some of the wording… and take out some pretty toxic language” involving climate research. At the time, however, she didn’t inquire about Soon’s funding sources or potential conflicts of interest. The journal’s publisher had “no specific disclosure form that I know of,” she says. “It was pretty much the honor system.”
Above, the Climate Reanalyzer image for North America temperature anomalies. Currently minus 17° F, or minus 27°C, here where I am.
UPDATE: and whoa, baby!! that’s freaking cold out there. I was just out shooting the sunrise. Still counting my fingers and toes, and my iphone is giving me a temperature error I’ve never seen before.
Note above the cold blues and purples over eastern North America, and the bloody reds flooding the arctic.
Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath.
Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue in the west, with the first-ever rain-free January in San Francisco; bitter cold hangs tough over the upper Midwest and Northeast; and New England is being buried by a seemingly endless string of snowy nor’easters.
Yes, droughts, cold and snowstorms have happened before, but the persistence of this pattern over North America is starting to raise eyebrows. Is climate change at work here?
Wavier jet stream
One thing we do know is that the polar jet stream—a fast river of wind up where jets fly that circumnavigates the northern hemisphere—has been doing some odd things in recent years.
Rather than circling in a relatively straight path, the jet stream has meandered more in north-south waves. In the west, it’s been bulging northward, arguably since December 2013—a pattern dubbed the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” by meteorologists. In the east, we’ve seen its southern-dipping counterpart, which I call the “Terribly Tenacious Trough.” (See picture, below.)
These long-lived shifts from the polar jet stream’s typical pattern have been responsible for some wicked weather this winter, with cold Arctic winds blasting everywhere from the Windy City to the Big Apple for weeks at a time.
We know that climate change is increasing the odds of extreme weather such as heatwaves, droughts and unusually heavy precipitation events, but is it making these sticky jet-stream patterns more likely, too? Maybe.
One of the most odious and dishonest practitioners of climate disinformation is Dr. Willie Soon. See above for a good example of what Exxon, the Koch Brothers, and others have been getting for their generous financial support. (good stuff starts at 2:20)
But, as in physics, often in the affairs of men, what goes around comes around.
It would appear that a rather awesome come-uppance is in the works for Dr. Soon. The New York Times is reporting on Soon’s forgetfulness in disclosing his ties to coal and oil barons when submitting “studies” to science journals.
He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.
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The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.
The issue here is not that Dr. Soon took money from fossil fuel corporations – that happens all the time, and big corporations fund a lot of stuff.
A correspondent emails me –
If Soon did bad research, it can be criticized. It has been. That is part of the process. IT IS NOT WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERE.
If Soon got money from Big Fossil, fine. Lots of research is funded by industry, even industry with an interest. It happens. But it has to be done right.
If Soon got money from Big Fossil and didn’t disclose, even if the research was fine, and even if the industry did not have an interest, that is an ethical violation, and that is what #WillieSoonGate is about.
I still see discussions here and there, suggesting that it is somehow impolite to refer to climate deniers as climate deniers. Calling a tumor or a turd something other than it is does not clean it up or cure it.
More than disgusted by the attitude of Fran Lebowitz here, and Maher’s failure to stomp on her.
But Bill Nye makes it relevant.
The Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite acquired these two natural-color views of the Jaguari Reservoir in Brazil. Jaguari is one of five reservoirs in the Cantareira System, which supplies water to roughly half of the people in the São Paulo metropolitan area. NASA
In one of the world’s largest Metropolises – the future is now.
Imagine the implications as water shortages spread to other key mega-cities, some of them in countries that are politically unstable, or, like Pakistan, nuclear armed.
“We’re witnessing an unprecedented water crisis in one of the world’s great industrial cities,” said Marússia Whately, a water specialist at Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian environmental group. “Because of environmental degradation and political cowardice, millions of people in São Paulo are now wondering when the water will run out.”
For some in this traffic-choked megacity of futuristic skyscrapers, gated communities and sprawling slums, the slow-burning crisis has already meant no running water for days on end.
“Imagine going three days without any water and trying to run a business in a basic sanitary way,” said Maria da Fátima Ribeiro, 51, who owns a bar in Parque Alexandra, a gritty neighborhood on the edge of São Paulo’s metropolitan area. “This is Brazil, where human beings are treated worse than dogs by our own politicians.”
Some residents have begun drilling their own wells around homes and apartment buildings, or hoarding water in buckets to wash clothes or flush toilets. Public schools are prohibiting students from using water to brush their teeth, and changing their lunch menus to serve sandwiches instead of meals on plates that need to be washed.
Officials are promising ambitious solutions, like new reservoirs. But they are a long way off, and many people in this vast metropolitan region of 20 million are frightened by forecasts at Brazil’s natural disaster monitoring service that São Paulo’s main reservoir system could run dry in 2015.
Experts say the origins of the crisis go beyond the recent drought to include an array of interconnected factors: the city’s surging population growth in the 20th century; a chronically leaky system that spills vast amounts of water before it can reach homes; notorious pollution in the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers traversing the city (their aroma can induce nausea in passers-by); and the destruction of surrounding forests and wetlands that have historically soaked up rain and released it into reservoirs.
Deforestation in the Amazon River basin, hundreds of miles away, may also be adding to São Paulo’s water crisis. Cutting the forest reduces its capacity to release humidity into the air, diminishing rainfall in southeast Brazil, according to a recent study by one of the country’s leading climate scientists.
Military and Security specialists around the world, in both corporate and governmental organizations, know that more chaos is coming.
Jeff Goodell’s current article in Rolling Stone is one of the best summaries so far.
Before climate change became taboo for Republicans, it was possible for even conservative politicians to have rational discussions about the subject. In 2003, under Donald Rumsfeld, former President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, the Pentagon published a report titled “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.” Commissioned by Andrew Marshall, who is sometimes jokingly referred to within the Pentagon as Yoda — and who was a favorite of Rumsfeld’s — the report warned that threats to global stability posed by rapid warming vastly eclipse that of terrorism. Some of the climate science in the report was flawed, but the broader conclusions were not. “Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the report stated. “Once again, warfare would define human life.”
A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual lunar phase and libration videos have asked what the other side of the Moon looks like, the side that can’t be seen from the Earth. This video answers that question. The imagery was created using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data.
