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cofounder of the conservative George C. Marshall Institute, Robert Jastrow.
18
The pair suggested that
comparisons of the characteristics of our Sun with families of other stars could be used to relate past
records of sunspot activity to past changes in solar irradiance (the solar quantity that directly
influences climate). They argued for relatively large variations in solar irradiance in past centuries,
such as during the seventeenth-century Maunder minimum of low sunspot activity. Recent assessments
with a larger sample of stars have determined that Jastrow and Baliunas's findings were likely
erroneous and point to substantially smaller variations in solar irradiance on centennial timescales.
19
Willie Soon completed his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California in
1991 and became a protégé of Baliunas at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center in 1992. The two went on
to publish a number of articles analyzing the relationships between records of past solar variability
and climate. Soon was also one of the coauthors of the controversial article that accompanied
Frederick Seitz's Oregon Petition mass mailing in 1998 (see chapter 5).
Soon and Baliunas received considerably more attention for the new study than for their
previous work. Actually, the Soon and Baliunas article took the form of two nearly identical papers
appeared in the journal
Climate Research
while the other (which, it turns out, was simply a longer,
unedited version of the first, but with three more coauthors added) was published in the journal
Energy and Environment
. Duplicate publication of a paper is highly unusual, and in fact is strictly
forbidden by most academic journals. That both the authors and the study had been supported by the
American Petroleum Institute—each of the authors had a long history of fossil fuel industry funding
21
—combined with the highly unusual dual publication of the paper raised some eyebrows.
Questions had been raised, moreover, about the two journals that jointly published the paper.
Climate Research
had in the recent past published a spate of contrarian papers of questionable
scientific merit. Some members of the editorial board
22
had already expressed concern that one editor
at the journal known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry, Chris de Freitas, had been enabling
editor who handled the Soon and Baliunas paper. The other journal, a social science periodical
called
Energy and Environment,
is not recognized by the Institute for Scientific Information, the body
responsible in essence for the accreditation of scientific journals. The journal's editor, Sonja
Boehmer-Christiansen, is an outspoken critic of environmental regulation. In the wake of her
publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper, she quite remarkably confessed in an interview with
a bit, anyway. But isn't that the right of the editor?”
25
The Soon and Baliunas study claimed to contradict previous work—including our own—that
suggested that the average warmth of the Northern Hemisphere in recent decades was unprecedented
over a time frame of at least the past millennium. It claimed to do so not by performing any
quantitative analysis itself, but through what the authors referred to as a “meta-analysis”—that is to
say, a review and characterization of other past published work.
A fundamental problem with the paper was that its authors' definition of a climatic event was so
loose as to be meaningless. As Richard Monastersky summarized it in his article, “under their
method, warmth in China in
A.D.
850, drought in Africa in
A.D.
1000, and wet conditions in England in
A.D.
1200 all would qualify as part of the Medieval Warm Period, even though they happened
centuries apart.” In other words, their characterization didn't take into account whether climate trends
