On climate, Ron Johnson's defender at center of ethical storm

[Updated from 12:25 a.m. Sunday] Wisconsin's Tea Partier Ron Johnson made waves in his 2010 US Senate race when he said sunspot activity and not human-created greenhouse gas emissions were responsible for climate change.

Eight scientists, led by Willie Soon, shortly thereafter came to Johnson's defense in a public letter in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They said Johnson's argument pointing to natural causation for climate change was "correct."

And they added that the human-caused climate change conclusion reached by the thousands of scientists working under the coordination of the United Nations was a political statement disproved by "objective science" and "peer-review" publications. 

Leading conservative climate change deniers in the Senate and on talk radio continue to cite Soon's.

Soon, an aerospace engineer affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution is the subject of a long investigative piece in today's New York Times that documents his failure to disclose as required to scientific journals that published his articles his receipt of funding from fossil fuel-related sources, including a foundation tied to Charles Koch:  

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.

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. 

Ironic, isn't it, that right-wingers have long attacked scientists whose work affirms a link between human activity and climate change as money-grubbing grant-writers.

The Times could not reach Soon for comment, but did find experts who discount the value of his work.

Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA division that studies climate change, said that the sun had probably accounted for no more than 10 percent of recent global warming and that greenhouse gases produced by human activity explained most of it. 

“The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless,” Dr. Schmidt said.