Monckton ridicules allegations of ‘conflict of interest’ against Dr. Willie Soon

Special to Climate Depot

Dr Zhang Li, Editor, Science Bulletin

29 January 2015

Dear Dr Zhang Li,

I have had your letter asking about Dr Soon’s alleged “conflict of interest”. I had already written to Rui An.

Dr Soon, like all eminent scientists, has in the past received various grants from several governmental and non-governmental agencies. The rule at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as it is at most other such institutions, is that every grant received must be for a specific purpose – usually a named research project. Furthermore, every grant received must be not only disclosed to the institution but also approved by it, and the purpose for which it is to be used must also be approved.

Dr Soon is traveling at present, but he has told me that every grant received by him, and every project for which that grant was given and to which it was applied, was approved by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Dr Soon did not receive any grant or other payment for the researching and writing of our paper, which, like all of us, he researched and wrote in his own time.

As for Dr Legates, he is paid a salary to study hydroclimatology and other geographical matters at the University of Delaware, and this interest is by custom declared simply by identifying him as a member of the University, which we did. He, too, received no grant or other payment of any kind for the researching or writing of our paper, and did the work in his own time. As for Matt Briggs, he is a statistician in private practice. He, too, received no grant or other payment of any kind for the researching or writing of our paper and did the work in his own time. As for me, I am long retired on grounds of ill health and nobody pays me anything for any of my work on climate change. I have received no grant or payment of any kind for the researching or writing of our paper, which I did in my own time.

The only sum we received – and only then after the paper had been published – was to meet the costly open-access fee. We declared that we had received assistance with that fee at the earliest possible moment – namely, in the draft press release we sent to you.

The organization at whose …

New excuse for ‘pause’ – A fluke! Scientist Explains Why Its Not Warming Like The Computers Predict –>It’s A Fluke

Scientist Explains Why Its Not Warming Like The Computers Predict –It’s A Fluke

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/NWlS/~3/YG3qQvgGZ0M/scientist-explains-why-its-not-warming.html

Well they have finally done it. For years the forces behind the climate change hypothesis have been trying to explain why all their computer models say its supposed to be getting warmer when the real climate hasn’t changed in over 18 years. Their explanation…it’s a fluke. Their models are perfect..and the pause is just chance occurance. No really that’s what they are saying.An article called “Are climate models really reliable?” on the Deutsche Welle (DW) website claims, “For years, meteorologists have been observing a discrepancy between climate models and global warming in the real world. But an international team of researchers claims this is just a fluke.” There was a specific problem that puzzled Marotzke [Jochem Marotzke, director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg] and his British colleague Piers M. Forster. “We knew that the surface temperature of the earth has been stagnant for 15 years, whereas the models show progressive warming,” said Marotzke, referring to the problem. Were the current climate models therefore wrong? Was there a systematic error in the models? Is global warming just a nightmare? Jochem Marotzke didn’t start this research to prove or disprove anything. “We just wanted to grasp where this discrepancy between models and observations is coming from,” explained the meteorologist, when asked about the motivation for his most recent study. Just a fluke? The research team has just published his results in the journal Nature. With the help of a multi-step calculation, Marotzke and Forster ruled out systematic errors in the models. Instead, the researchers now blamed serendipity for the current lull in global warming. On the basis of their calculations, they say there is no reason to doubt current forecasts detailing strong global warming. For laymen this may sound overly simplistic. Are the scientists just blaming chance because they can’t find another explanation? Marotzke has no problem with his latest findings. “As meteorologists, we know that chance and chaos dominate the weather. You have to face the fact that chance plays a big role here.” “It’s important that you can clearly distinguish between what happens randomly and what can be explained – which also improves our models,” he added. Marotzke is certain that climate models do not overestimate man-made climate change. In his opinion, this means that global warming will have reached a …

Snowfall measurement: a flaky history: ‘Our measuring techniques have changed, and we are not necessarily comparing apples to apples’

http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/perspective/14009/snowfall-measurement-flaky-history

Earlier in our weather history, the standard practice was to record snowfall amounts less frequently, such as every 12 or 24 hours, or even to take just one measurement of depth on the ground at the end of the storm.

You might think that one or two measurements per day should add up to pretty much the same as measurements taken every 6 hours during the storm. It’s a logical assumption, but you would be mistaken. Snow on the ground gets compacted as additional snow falls. Therefore, multiple measurements during a storm typically result in a higher total than if snowfall is derived from just one or two measurements per day.

That can make quite a significant difference. It turns out that it’s not uncommon for the snow on the ground at the end of a storm to be 15 to 20 percent less than the total that would be derived from multiple snowboard measurements.…