I see plenty of ‘reputations tarnished’, and ‘editorial boards resigning’ but not one fact. Lots of important sounding journals, hungry for funding and advertising dollars, but where’s the beef?

Where is your argument, besides making this somehow about Dr’ Soon’s socio-economic status, and social standing amongst a funding cabal of liars and data fudgers who construct whatever model they need to sell at the next global climate conference.

I’m with the intelligent, meaningful discussion from these two men, and I’d bet anyone who took the time to listen to this would agree.

Besides, if CO2 is a pollutant, then we should all just kill ourselves before we wreck the planet.

Thank you for taking your time to write. What would be helpful should you write again is to provide some commentary and justification for the view you are sharing so that guests can discuss it properly. Essentially you are only passing on information from the experts who are perpetuating the dissemination of a one-sided story and systematically shutting down open inquiry by slandering someone’s credibility.

I am drawn to interview people whose voices, stories, life experiences and expertise are important but may be lost in the mainstream thinking and structures. It happens to be that Dr. Soon has raised issues that have not been addressed publicly and his voice has been silenced by most of the main stream media, political and academic circles connected to the official story about this matter.

I welcome continued discourse on this matter but please let’s do it in the context of information-sharing – paradigms in which one side of an issue is vilified and the other upheld as an unquestionable truth do not benefit any of us. We must learn to step back from issues and do our best to examine them objectively, despite the reassurances of publicly- (or politically-) acknowledged experts or institutions.

I look forward to broadening the dialogue on climate change with you.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/peer-review-a-necessary-but-not-sufficient-condition/

“Perhaps the most publicized recent example was the publication of a study by astronomer Willie Soon of the Harvard University-affiliated Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-authors, claiming to demonstrate that 20th century global warmth was not unusual in comparison with conditions during Medieval times. Indeed, this study serves as a prime example of one of the “myths” that we have debunked elsewhere on this site. The study was summarily discredited in articles by teams of climate scientists (including several of the scientists here at RealClimate), in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) journal Eos and in Science. However, it took some time the rebuttals to work their way through the slow process of the scientific peer review. In the meantime the study was quickly seized upon by those seeking to sow doubt in the validity behind the scientific consensus concerning the evidence for human-induced climate change (see news articles in the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal). The publication of the study had wider reverberations throughout the academic and scientific institutions connected with it. The association of the study with the “Harvard” name caused some notable unease among members of the Harvard University community (see here and here) and the reputation of the journal publishing the study was seriously tarnished in the process. The editor at Climate Research that handled the Soon et al paper, Dr. Chris de Frietas, has a controversial record of past editorial practices (see this ’sidebar’ to an article in Scientific American by science journalist David Appell). In an unprecedented (to our knowledge) act of protest, chief editor Hans von Storch and 3 additional editors subsequently resigned from Climate Research in response to the fundamental documented failures of the editorial process at the journal. A detailed account of these events are provided by Chris Mooney in the Skeptical Inquirer and The American Prospect, by David Appell in Scientific American, and in a news brief in Nature. The journal’s publisher himself (Otto Kline) eventually stated that “[the conclusions drawn] cannot be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper”.