The scientist at the center of a controversy over fossil-fuel funding for climate research denounced his critics on Monday and said that he would be “happy to comply” with possible additional disclosure requirements from scientific journals publishing his papers.
In his first detailed public statement since the controversy erupted more than a week ago, the scientist, Wei-Hock Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, complained that he had been the subject of unfair attacks in the press. He ascribed them to “various radical environmental and politically motivated groups.”
Dr. Soon, who is known as Willie, added, “This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy” on global warming.
Monday’s statement was not released by Dr. Soon’s employer, the Smithsonian Institution, which has responded to the controversy by starting an inquiry into his activities and a review of its disclosure and ethics policies for scientific research.
Instead, the statement was released by the Heartland Institute of Chicago, which supports and publicizes the work of scientists like Dr. Soon who deny the scientific consensus on climate change. Jim Lakely, a spokesman for the Heartland Institute, said Dr. Soon would not answer further questions.
Based on documents the Smithsonian released at the request of Greenpeace, the environmental group, several news organizations reported recently that Dr. Soon had failed, in a string of scientific papers, to disclose his funding from a coal-burning utility and other fossil-fuel interests, from which he has received at least $1.2 million over the past decade. Dr. Soon said in his statement that he had “always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally.”
A majority of the journals in which Dr. Soon published in recent years require disclosure of any funding that could represent a conflict of interest. Several of those journals have said in recent days that they are reviewing Dr. Soon’s papers in light of the lack of disclosure revealed by the Greenpeace documents.
“If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply,” Dr. Soon said in his statement. “I would ask only that other authors — on all sides of the debate — are also required to make similar disclosures.”
Democrats on Capitol Hill responded to the initial revelations by demanding information about funding from a handful of other scientists and scores of energy companies. But that drew a backlash from mainstream climate scientists, who for years have had to endure critics’ poring over their emails and other internal documents using public records laws.
The Heartland Institute portrayed Dr. Soon as a martyr.
“He’s a brilliant and courageous scientist devoted entirely to pursuing scientific knowledge,” the organization’s president, Joseph Bast, said this week in a statement. “His critics are all ethically challenged and mental midgets by comparison.”
- http://bit.ly/1wFMchX
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu