Bishop Hill Conflict of interest
Jul 1, 2011 Journals The AGW upholder community is all a-quiver with the news that Willie Soon received a lot of money from the oil industry. Even Monbiot himself is on the case, with a stream of tweets on the subject:
Secret funding of climate change deniers exposed again: bit.ly/m6Yjlp. Key issue here is that interests never declared.
In fact, they were flatly denied. Funny how the same story keeps recurring, just with different names.
Is there a single prominent denier who won't turn out to have been funded by an oil or coal company, or by the Koch brothers?
@nemof: That's just what we're not going to get. CC deniers go to great lengths to keep their sources of funding secret.
In response, Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, notes that COI disclosures are now the norm for medical journals.
Now obviously there's a bit of Monbiot "puff" going on here, but I think we should look on this enthusiasm for disclosure of conflicts of interest as an area in which widespread agreement should be possible.
Perhaps George would like to consider a joint call (a) for the IPCC to activate its COI policy for all AR5 working groups with immediate effect and (b) for climate journals to require disclosure of conflicts of interest in the way that medical journals do. I'll write and ask him.
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony...
Bishop Hill
George Monbiot has issued a correction/apology noting that Willie Soon has in fact disclosed sources of funding.
Reader Comments (68)
Is there a single prominent IPCC working-group leader who has zero ties to Greenpeace? WWF? or similar political action organization?
It seems a shame that Monbiot could not come on here to apologize
"GeorgeMonbiot GeorgeMonbiot
I got something wrong abt Willie Soon. I suggested he'd never declared his fossil fuel funding. Unlike many, it turns out he has. Apologies.
http://twitter.com/#!/GeorgeMonbiot!
Lapogus,
Moonbat did say that "denier" was unacceptable but he's probably suffering from what I call 'Alarmist's Tourette's Syndrome'. He's a nice upper-middle class lad and the words a*se and sh*t just aren't appropriate in polite company. "Denier! Denier! Oh, I feel better now!"
Or perhaps he likes nylon stockings. I like the sheer quality of 10 denier but they snag on the rough skin of my heels so I compromise and go for 25 denier, myself
'GeorgeMonbiot GeorgeMonbiot
I got something wrong abt Willie Soon. I suggested he'd never declared his fossil fuel funding. Unlike many, it turns out he has. Apologies.'
since his original remark was 'key issue here is that interests never declared', and he has now admitted that they were so declared, it doesn't really leave him very much substance at all.
Poor George. All his certainties of only twenty months ago are crumbling around his ears. If I weren't an evil cynical sceptical bugger I'd almost bring myself to feel sorry for him. He will never find that bright confident morn again.
Tee Hee
What is it with the Moonbat and the other true believers?
It's as if someone has poked a stick in a wasp's nest.
So why did the Guardain editor run the story (link below)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-change-sceptic-willie-soon?CMP=twt_fd
basically a rehash of greenpeace allegations... ie they have 'found' evidence of funding, when the interest/funding was declared in his published work...
A total non story designed to smear by inuendo, considering how many pro-agw climate scientists have received similar funding.
ie Why no headline - IPCC scientists receive millions in funding from BP, Shell, Exxon, etc,etc...
The guardian 'environmental' journalists twittered this guardian inuendo article to all their followers
http://twitter.com/#!/john_vidal/status/85766986700824576
http://twitter.com/#!/leohickman/status/85775050061524992
Damian Carrington - Head of Environment
http://twitter.com/#!/dpcarrington/status/85723752620498944
Guardian Eco - 45,000 followers
http://twitter.com/#!/guardianeco/status/85769314937995264
Guardian Science - 141,000 followers
http://twitter.com/#!/guardianscience/status/85766066210484224
I see the 'independant' resource for journalists/media - The Carbon Brief have been 'fact checking' their stories again, twittering this link from De Smog blog, of all places..
http://twitter.com/#!/carbonbrief/status/86017315572957184
Another 'fact checked' twitter from the Carbon Brief, straight from Greenpeace
http://twitter.com/#!/carbonbrief/status/85706226335354880
Where is the article by George Monbiot, I clicked the link and searched for an hour, nothing !
Has it been taken down ?
Well he sooner than later, apologized. :)
Sorry, it wasn't an article, it was a tweet, whatever that is..
Should have gone to Specsavers.
Of course Monboit and Co have no issues at all with money from oil companies going to CRU , IPCC etc nor people like Gore sitting on oil company boards . That of course is 'different '
In other words you can do what you like if you support AGW and Monboit & Co will always tell you how sweet your farts smell.
To my mind this flawed attack on Soon by Monbiot and his alarmist chums just shows how desperate they are getting. There's another example in today's Independent -
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/extreme-weather-link-can-no-longer-be-ignored-2305181.html
It seems that Stott and Trenberth are now content to link extreme weather events and average hurricanes like Katrina and this year's flood in Queensland to AGW.
Monbiot's 'stream of tweets' into the wind conjures up a magnificent Josh rudery.
I agree, Pharos ... I see a sea of straws ... Monbiot, Mann, Bradley et al grasping wildly from beneath, and each straw breaking as soon as it's been grasped :-)
Catch the joke in the first part of this video: Stewart Lee on tweeting, living in the city
Gee,if we total all the money spent by the Koch brothers and Scaife and compare it to the money spent on politics by Soros, Ted Turner, Ford foundation, MacArthur foundation, Carnegie foundation and the rest of the vest web of entities and NGOs which fund left-wing causes and lobby governments for even more spending on left-wing causes, which money total would be greater?.
I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Soon for the first time today at the conference in Washington and spending a few minutes chatting before going in for the very nice sit-down breakfast (the meals were worth the price of admission alone.... well, almost). Dr. Soon struck me as a very sincere, dedicated scientist. He even remarked that he was not interested in publishing for its own sake, in fact he kind of disliked it, but felt it as a sort of duty if he thought he'd happened on something new. He is not the caricature we see emanating from the likes of Monbiot. I liked him.
Dellingpole was there to flog his book, as well (I would have bought it and gotten a free author's signature, but meals in D.C. are expensive....) but I did take the opportunity to mention that I'd visited his blog by way of His Grace and George Monbiot's Climate Skeptic Blog Alerts. He opined that George was simply attempting to give him a little more traffic, nothing sinister in that at all.
Bob Carter was also very impressive.
Somewhat rich - I am still asking for alarmists to name one person who supports the warming scare and is not paid by government (with supporting evidence since I have been given names of people who turned out not to support catastrophic warming or not to be independent). Nobody so far.
The result is normally that the alarmist site refuses to answer on the grounds that anybody asking for indepednent scientists' opinions must be a "nutter" or something more obscene and moves on to simple censorship. I have been censored from 7 of the "scienceblog" sites so far where the redefinition of "science" clearly does not include any commitment to scientific principles.
By comparison there is not 1/1,000th as much money, government or otherwise, for scientific sceptics.
I admit it, when I was 16 I worked pumping gas for the summer. From then on I was bought and paid for by big oil (sarc off in case Monbiot can't tell).