Next up in our series based on Canary in a Climate World Vol. 3 is Dr. Willie Soon, formerly an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory who studied the sun-climate connection and tenuously held his position there in the belly of the beast from 1991 to 2022 despite continuous efforts by outside groups to have him fired, and his own university to censor him, because his climate research didn’t support the preferred narrative. And no, it wasn’t because of any of the silly and unfair disparagements flung against him over the years, to which he was never afforded the right of reply. Eventually he started his own research institute to which he decamped a few years ago and is now free to write and say what he thinks, and this chapter provides a very clear and well-reasoned summary of what he has learned over the course of his career. The sun matters. How the temperature data are collected matters. CO2? Not so much.
Soon discusses the way urbanization contaminates global temperature data sets. We all know that measurements collected in Urban Heat Islands are biased towards too much warming. The IPCC deals with it by blending the urban with rural data, then claims without proof that any remaining bias in the warming trend is less than ten percent. But, Soon points out, all that approach does is spread the bias out to rural data. When he and his coauthors have assembled rural-only data sets, surely the obvious way to eliminate urban distortions, about eighty percent of the warming over the last century or so disappears.
Soon also discusses the difficulty of reconstructing solar variability prior to the satellite era. There are over two dozen such reconstructions in the literature, some of which imply the sun contributed nothing to climate change and some which imply the sun can explain almost all of it. He and his colleagues have compiled the range of estimates and documented how the IPCC narrowed the list of which ones they cite down to those that, of course, show no influence of the sun on climate.
He also discusses the way biased climate science feeds directly into faulty climate policy. And how the connection to politics leads to self-reinforcing corruption mechanisms in climate science. And, he wisely cautions:
“This does not require malicious intent. It requires only normal behavior within constrained systems. Young scientists quickly learn which questions are ‘safe’ to ask and which are not. Entire disciplines begin to self-censor, not through explicit prohibition, but through career survival... The result is a form of scientific monoculture.”
These observations are not merely sensible. They are the result of harsh experience, from someone who experienced it all on the inside and lived to tell about it.
