In light of the earthshaking revelation that leading climate-change skeptic Willie Soon was essentially bought and paid for by fossil-fuel interests, there's one parallel I'm surprised no one in the MSM has drawn. However, I noted earlier today at Liberal America that if this is at all true--and it sure looks like it--then we may have another Andrew Wakefield situation on our hands.
Wakefield, for those who don't remember, is the disgraced doctor who was behind the now-infamous 1998 study that showed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. However, in 2004, The Times of London revealed that lawyers looking to sue vaccine manufacturers had footed part of the bill for the study. Deer's article also revealed that the parents of at least four and as many as five of the kids in the study were litigants. Neither of these conflicts were disclosed when the paper was submitted to The Lancet. When The Lancet's editors learned about it, they bluntly stated that Wakefield's study should have never been published. We all know what happened next. It was eventually revealed that Wakefield had manipulated patient data all over the place, resulting in the paper being fully retracted and Wakefield being banned from ever practicing as a doctor again.
Is there any evidence of this kind of fraud on Soon's part? Not as of yet. But the fact that he referred to some of his papers, as well as much of his congressional testimony, as "deliverables" should be enough by itself that he should be out of a job. Harvard and the Smithsonian will have some explaining to do if this guy is still drawing a paycheck by the end of March.