At http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=609 … there is a post on Willie Soon that has gravitated elsewhere around the blogs. He is a climate scientist that dared to disagree with CAGW mainstream consensus prognostications and as such, he has been attacked personally and relentlessly and is generally regarded as a heretic of the one true faith – co2 climate alarmism. His detractors did not discuss the science he proposed – it was largely ignored. He was considered a thorn in the flesh of the environmentalist message, a socio political derived theory rather than a fact based theory. Instead, they concentrated on him – accusing him of accepting monies from Big Oil to fund his research. Sling a spade full of mud and some of it will stick. In this case the whole spade full got stuck. Go to any alarmist blog and the mention of his name, Willie Soon, will always be qualified by the 'oil shill' suiffix and anything he says, or has said, will be ignored – or ridiculed. This attitude is completely contrary to the facts – there is little evidence of oil funding for sceptics and mountains of evidence of Big Oil bankrolling NGOs and CAGW orientated organisations.
Willie Soon is a seeker after the truth – this is why the CAGW lobby do not like him. Truthfulness is a foreign commodity to them. Manipulation of facts is the order of the day. Global warming is not about truthfulness, or integrity, or anything as old fashioned as that – it is a politcised football driven by dreams of changing the world and ushering in a new kind of Utopian wonderland. In other words, a socio-political form of millennarianism. No wonder it gained such prominence as we approached the year 2000. Only in a millennarianist society (people of the Book) could CAGW have launched so successfully and gained such a following (but not among the great unwashed). In a truly secular society it would have been laughed into touch.
This is the pulse of expectation that Willie Soon traversed – and the link provides a nice video of his point of view. It also includes the sort of accusation he has repeatedly had to face – no debate, just vitriol. It provides a window on the emotions that are generated by CAGW – emotions that hopefully will diminish and come more in line with sceptics. The tactic was always to demonise the honest and outspoken – and the stickler for accuracy (and such is Willie Soon).