Sallie Baliunas & Willie Soon
Part of the A Rundown of the Skeptics & Deniers series
From Logical Science



        Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon currently work for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  Soon is a paid consultant and Baliunas is a senior scientist for the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank partially by Exxon Mobil, Olin Chemical, Gulf Oil Corporation, and the White Star Oil Company.  The Marshall Institute opposes limits on carbon dioxide emissions and disputes man's role in global climate change.  Baliunas & Soon are also contributing editors to World Climate Report which is ran by Pat Michaels and funded by the Western Fuels Association.  Baliunas has also written papers for the Oil and Tobacco funded Heartland Institute.  Baliunas works for numerous think tanks which have a conflict of interest due to funding by big oil yet she claims it is the mainstream scientists that are twisting the science for monetary gain.  In an interview with ABC news she said: "It's the money! ... If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn't be as much money to study it."

Ozone Depletion: From Skeptic To Scapegoat

        In 1995 Sallie Baliunas testified in from of Congress against the Ozone depletion argument.  She testified that natural variability and ozone depletion were due to the Sun's decreasing ultraviolet output as well as other factors.  Even though the science behind ozone depletion is well understood Baliunas has never retracted her skepticism.  However, in 2000 Baliunas and Soon wrote a paper for the Heartland Institute claiming that ozone depletion is responsible for global warming.  This is again at odds with the current scientific consensus.

The Claim: 'No warming in 50 years'

In a Marshall Institute paper Baliunas and Soon originally claimed the earth was not warming:
"But is it possible that the particular temperature increase observed in the last 100 years is the result of carbon dioxide produced by human activities? The scientific evidence clearly indicates that this is not the case... measurements of atmospheric temperatures made by instruments lofted in satellites and balloons show that no warming has occurred in the atmosphere in the last 50 years. This is just the period in which human made carbon dioxide has been pouring into the atmosphere and according to the climate studies, the resultant atmospheric warming should be clearly evident."
The problem with satellites is that their orbit around the earth is not perfectly stable.  Over time the satellites fall toward the earth.  This orbital decay, among other things, caused sensor problems that needed to be corrected for.  Baliunas trusted faulty satellite data over the much more robust ground station data.  Once these problems were fixed Baliunas eventually retracted her statement on the lack of warming.  However, she still disputes that the observed warming was caused by human influence.

The Sun, From Decreasing to Increasing

ozone arguments coming soon

Data Snooping The Medieval Warming Period

        Mainstream science works by creating a hypothesis and then testing that hypothesis with an experiment.  Testing is preferably done in what is called a double blind study.  Politically driven scientists will often review vast quantities of data and then cherry pick any pattern that happens to fit thei political ideology.  This is called data snooping.  Data snooping is an extremely powerful tool for politically motivated scientists because even if the pattern you are looking for only has a 0.5% chance of occurring due to random noise you will only need to review 200 tests to find something that supports your cause.  The politically motivated scientists will then find some obscure peer-review journal that has an editor sympathetic to their political causes to publish their data snooping paper.  When it comes to filtering out bad science peer review is only a good first filter and in some cases there isn't even a filter at all.  Once the paper is published political groups will lionize the paper and use it in every way imaginable to support their ideology.
        This technique was the hallmark of the tobacco lobby and sympathetic thinktanks and has subsequently been adopted by many other political interest groups.  American journalist Chris Mooney claims this technique is the hallmark of  not only intelligent design proponents attack on evolution but Harvards Baliunas and Soon's attack on the concept of man driven climate change.
The Skeptic The Journal The Whistleblower
Chris de Fritas Climate Research Journal Hans von Storch

Scientific American describes the logic of the paper:
"if a proxy record indicated that a drier condition existed in one part of the world from 800 to 850, it would be counted as equal evidence for a Medieval Warming Period as a different proxy record that showed wetter conditions in another part of the world from 1250 to 1300."
Obviously consistency is not Soon and Baliunas's strong suit.  

Soon and Baliunas had specifically sent their paper to Chris de Freitas who was and editor at Climate Research.  Chris de Freitas was known for opposing curbs on carbon dioxide emissions.  He published the paper despite objections from other editors.  Two of the editors of Climate Research started to receive numerous complaints were received from leading members of the scientific community.   When these complaints intensified some of the editors approached Chris de Fritas.  Fritas accused the objecting editors of ‘a mix of a witch-hunt and the Spanish Inquisition’.  Soon mainstream climate scientists fought back. Thirteen scientists wrote what is often called a "devastating critique" of Baliunas's work in the AGU's peer-review publication Eos.  These 13 scientists were authors of the papers Baliunas and Soon cited refuted her interpretation of their work.  After seeing the critique, Climate Research editor-in-chief Hans von Storch decided he had to write an editorial describing the current status of peer review at the journal. But when Storch's editorial was blocked by Chris de Fritas he resigned.  Several other Climate Research editors followed Storch's lead and subsequently resigned over the Soon and Baliunas paper. Eventually journal publisher Otto Kinne admitted that the paper suffered from serious flaws,  basically agreeing with its critics.

Dr. Malcolm Hughes of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona:
"The Soon et al. paper is so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all."
Dr. Michael Mann:
“Serious scientists will tell you over and over again that this was a deeply flawed study that should never have been published,”  “Scientifically this study was considered not even worthy of a response. But because it was used politically, to justify policy changes in the administration, people in my field felt they had to speak out.”
Dr. Claire Goodness, an editor that resigned in protest from Climate Research, makes an accusation of whitewashing:
"Some journalists are digging even deeper – into the sources of Soon and Baliunas’s funding. Their Climate Research paper includes acknowledgements to NOAA, NASA and the US Air Force, as well as to the American Petroleum Institute. Yet NOAA flatly deny having ever funded the authors for such work, while the other two bodies admit to funding them, but for work on solar variability – not proxy climate records, the topic that has caused such a storm." 
Dr. Hans von Storch:
"After a conflict with the publisher Otto Kinne of Inter-Research I stepped down on 28. July 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research; the reason was that I as newly appointed Editor-in-Chief wanted to make public that the publication of the Soon & Baliunas article was an error, and that the review process at Climate Research would be changed in order to avoid similar failures. The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS by Mann and several coauthors. (The problem is not whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the 20th century, or if Mann's hockey stick is realistic; the problem is that the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given.)"
Dr. John Holdren president of AAAS:
“It’s unfortunate that so much attention is paid to a flawed analysis, but that’s what happens when something happens to support the political climate in Washington.”
Professor Daniel Schrag of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences:
“The bottom line is that this paper is suggesting that the unusually warm weather we’ve been having for the last 100 years is part of natural variability,” .. “We have observations to show that that’s not the case.”
James McCarthy, a Harvard climate scientist says:
"It was sham science," ... "It's almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record."
Soon and Baliunas referenced work by Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.  As for the quality of their "consensus debunkin"g work he responds:
"The fact that it has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away,"
The Bush administration tried to include references to the study in the agency’s report on the state of the environment. To block this move, EPA staffers deleted the global warming section from its report. Inhofe said. “The powerful new findings of this most comprehensive of studies shiver the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd.”

The Oregan Deception Project

        The "Oregan Deception Project", as Professor Eli Rabet calls it, was a highly controversial effort to get scientists to sign a document claiming human driven climate change wasn't going to be "catastrophic".  Due to some ambiguity within the document the National Academy of Science (NAS) felt the need to make a public statement declaring they had nothing to do with the petition which was being distributed by tobacco lobbyist and NAS member Frederick Seitz.  Today, Seitz admits that "it was stupid" for the Oregon activists to copy the National Academy of Science's format.  A review paper that claimed the earth wasn't warming was attached to the circulating petition.  Typically papers that refer themselves as a research review are called reviews because they cover all of the published research relevant to the topic at hand.  Many scientist depend on reviews to bring them up to speed on the current state of the science in a particular field.  Even though this report was called a review, it left out a lot of relevant research.  Soon and Baliunas were authors of this research review.  For more on the Oregan Deception Project please go here.

The Solar Scapegoat

Baliunas and Soon have often blamed the Sun for global warming:
"Changes in the Sun can account for major climate changes on Earth for the past 300 years, including part of the recent surge of global warming," claims Sallie Baliunas [snip] "We're not saying that variations in solar activity account for all of the global rise in temperature that we are experiencing," cautions [snip] Willie Soon. "But we believe these variations are the major driving force. Heat-trapping gases emitted by smokestacks and vehicles -- the so-called greenhouse effect -- appear to be secondary."
But peer review journals including one from the Royal Society have shown that every indicator of solar activity has either decreased or remained the same while the temperatures have continued to rise.  For more information on this please go here.

'CO2 will fertilize the plants'

Soon and Ballianus published a paper through the OISM think tank.  In this paper they claimed:
As atmospheric CO2 increases, plant growth rates increase. Also, leaves lose less water as CO2 increases, so that plants are able to grow under drier conditions. Animal life, which depends upon plant life for food, increases proportionally.
However, universities and research labs around the world have participated in what is called FACE or Free Air CO2 Enrichment experiments since a least 1992.  These experiments show that "any elevation of productivity is likely to be short-lived and is unlikely to significantly offset any gradual, long-term increases in CO2 due to human activity".  This is due to other bottlenecks such as a limited supply of Nitrogen and Phosphorous in the soil which quickly become limiting.  Recent review papers state that there is "serious doubt .... that rising [CO2] will fully offset losses due to climate change."   For more information on this topic please go here.
Locations of FACE Experiments Free Air CO2 Enrichment @ Duke 
Source: Oak Ridge National Lab Source: Duke FACE

Plant Life as a Carbon Sink

Coming soon


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