The New York Times published a very interesting article on Saturday…
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher
The NY Times article describes evidence uncovered by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, that Dr Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a prominent climate change denying researcher, failed to disclose that much of his work is funded by corporate interests.
Apparently, Willie Soon is almost entirely funded by various coal and oil interests, including the Koch Brothers. This is richly ironic considering the phony “climategate” scandal, likely orchestrated by the same coal and oil interests, to discredit climate scientists. On second thought, maybe it’s tragic. Let’s call it “Deniergate”. You heard it here first folks.
Link to the actual documents describing Dr Soon’s funding
Dr. Soon is an aerospace engineer, but somehow published extensively on climatology. His work tried to link changes in solar activity with a changing climate; work that has been widely discredited.
Of course, that didn’t stop some disingenuous politicians, like Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, from holding up Dr Soon as a shining example of a contrarian climate scientist. A “climate scientist” (my quotes) who was exposing the “greatest hoax” ever perpetrated on the American people, according to Inhofe.
While there may be room to debate the finer points of climate science, some things are clear…
- the earth’s atmosphere is warming
- the Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet
- Arctic sea ice and glaciers worldwide are rapidly melting
- the oceans are becoming acidic
- plants and animals are on the move
- disease vectors such as ticks and mosquitoes are on the move
- those plants and animals that can’t move fast enough are going extinct
- the southwest is in a perpetual state of drought
- forest fires are more destructive due to drying out of western forests
- an apocalyptic pine beetle epidemic is destroying western forests from New Mexico all the way to British Columbia (and around the world)
- extreme winter storms are becoming the norm in the mid-latitudes… and on and on and on.
These are directly observed changes, not fancy prediction in some arcane computer model, but real things happening now!
(More on fancy predictions from arcane models in an upcoming post this week.)
So if we use our Occam’s Razor, we can see the most likely cause of climate change is the 35 gigatons of carbon dioxide humans put into the atmosphere every year, which traps heat by a mechanism that has been well-known for over 150 years, leading to all the changes that I list above, and more. It should be clear to most folks, and soon it will be to all — whether we’d like to admit it or not.
Whether we admit it or not, debate it or not, it IS happening, and it’s getting worse. So let’s not argue about it while the world burns; let’s do something about it. Let’s switch to alternative energy, cut back on our carbon emissions, divest from fossil fuel, and begin adapting ourselves and our communities to cope with climate impacts. These are the guiding principles of this blog.
Link to the NY Times article…
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher