An undercover investigation by environment group Greenpeace has found some of the world’s most vocal climate science denial groups were willing to accept cash from fossil fuel interests in return for writing articles and reports that reject the impacts of greenhouses gases.

Greenpeace operatives posing as representatives of coal and oil companies were told that while the reports could be produced, there were ways that the sources of funding could be hidden.

Academics affiliated with leading US academic institutions Princeton and Penn State universities are implicated in the Greenpeace research.

According to a report on the investigation at Greenpeace's EnergyDesk website, Princeton's Professor William Happer had revealed he had accepted cash from coal company Peabody Energy in return for providing testimony to US congress but had routed the cash through a climate denial group. Happer also offered his services but said that a new climate science denial group, CO2 Coalition, should be used to channel the funds.

Groups including the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Donors Trust are also alleged to have been complicit in providing "peer review" services for fossil fuel clients and, in the case of Donors Trust, in providing an untraceable route for the fossil fuel payments. 

The story comes as Happer is preparing to give evidence to a congressional hearing of the Senate Subcomittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, chaired by Republican and presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. That hearing is scheduled for Tuesday December 8 and also calls fellow "sceptics" Dr John Christy, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr Judith Curry of Georgia Institute of Technology and conservative commentator Mark Steyn.

A DeSmogBlog investigation into Donors Trust and its partner group Donors Capital Fund found that between 2005 and 2012, some $479 million of income to the two groups was untraceable. Of the amounts that were traceable, DeSmog found that $7.65 million had come from the Knowledge and Progress Fund (KPF). 

On the KPF board are oil billionaire and major Republican benefactor Charles Koch, his wife Liz and son Charles Chase Koch. Richard Fink, a Koch company director and long-standing aide to Charles Koch, is also a KPF director.

The Greenpeace investigation raises questions about the use of the Donors funds in financing climate science denial groups.  Donors Trust, together with oil giant Exxon, have also funded the work of Harvard-Smithsonian affiliated researcher Dr Willie Soon, who claims carbon dioxide cannot change the climate. 

Greenpeace also claims that CO2 Coalition board member William O'Keefe, a former Exxon lobbyist, had suggested in an email to Happer that Donors Trust be used as a route to conceal cash from a fictional Middle eastern oil and gas company.

The investigation also targeted Happer's work with the London-based contrarian group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, founded by former UK chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson. Greenpeace wrote: 

Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal. He added: “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”

Asked for comment by Greenpeace, the GWPF said in a statement that it rejected Greenpeace's investigation, saying any claims it had offered to put a fossil fuel commission report through its own version of peer review were a "fabrication".

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Thanks to a bombshell investigation reported over the weekend by The New York Times, The Guardian, Inside Climate News and more, we now know that the prominent climate denialist Willie Soon, oft-cited by climate denying politicians and industry figures, calls his publications “deliverables” to his fossil fuel funders.

Some of these “deliverables” have even found their way into the reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), generally regarded as the most comprehensive evaluation of the current state of climate science.

After years of research and information requests, The Climate Investigations Center and Greenpeace have unearthed incontrovertible proof that Soon, of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), has received more than $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry, and referenced many of his papers as “deliverables” in emails to funders.

According to the Times, at least 11 of the papers Soon has published since 2008 fail to disclose the fossil fuel industry funding. [Read Inside Climate News' breakdown, "11 Times Willie Soon Failed to Disclose Fossil Funding."] 

Even more troubling, Soon’s industry-funded research has also turned up in the IPCC’s vital work. DeSmogBlog has searched all five of the IPCC’s major assessment reports for references to research and papers by Soon.

In all, seven papers that Soon co-authored have been referenced and/or cited in IPCC assessment reports. Two of the seven were papers referred to by Soon as "deliverables" in the correspondences just made public by Climate Investigations Center and Greenpeace. Some of the papers acknowledge research funding from various arms of the fossil fuel industry. But others do not. Some of the papers cited by the IPCC predate the Harvard Smithsonian Center involvement, but Soon's long history of taking fossil fuel industry money is well established. In fact, as far back as 2003, years before the release of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), documents revealed that Soon was actively working to "undermine" the report. 

For the historical and academic record, here are all of the papers co-authored by Willie Soon that have been referenced or cited by the IPCC in its periodic assessment reports. Soon's papers were cited in the third, fourth, and fifth installments. 

1) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group One (WGI) Chapter 5, page 462

In the text: “These simulations suggest that solar and volcanic forcing (Fan et al., 2009; Liu et al., 2009a; Man et al., 2012) may exert only weak regional influences on monsoon systems.”

Citation: Liu, J., B. Wang, Q. Ding, X. Kuang, W. Soon, and E. Zorita, 2009a: Centennial variations of the global monsoon precipitation in the last millennium: results from ECHO-G model. J. Clim., 22, 2356–2371. (PDF)

Comment: This is one of the papers that Soon referred to as a "deliverable" to Southern Company funders, though Soon himself does not disclose any funding in the paper. According to DeSmogBlog contributor Dr. John Mashey, this appears to be “one of those innocuous papers that Soon and Baliunas have done to generate publications and credibility.”  

Note: Three different papers co-authored by Soon, including one "reply to responses" to a 2007 paper, are all referenced in the same sentence in Working Group Two's portion of IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. They are as follows. 

2) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group Two (WGII) Chapter 28, page 1576

In the text: “Use of terrestrial resources by polar bears was suggested as adaptive (Dyck et al., 2007, 2008; Dyck and Romberg, 2007; Armstrong et al., 2008; Dyck and Kebreab, 2009; Rockwell and Gormezano, 2009; Smith et al., 2010).”

Citation: Armstrong, J.S., K.C. Green, and W. Soon, 2008: Polar bear population forecasts: a public-policy forecasting audit. Interfaces, 38(5), 382-395. (PDF)

Comment: No funding acknowledgement or disclosure from Soon or co-authors, though this is another paper that Soon referrered to as a "deliverable" in a report to his funders at Southern Company. 

3) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group Two (WGII) Chapter 28, page 1576

In the text: “Use of terrestrial resources by polar bears was suggested as adaptive (Dyck et al., 2007, 2008; Dyck and Romberg, 2007; Armstrong et al., 2008; Dyck and Kebreab, 2009; Rockwell and Gormezano, 2009; Smith et al., 2010).”

Citation: Dyck, M.G., W. Soon, R.K. Baydack, D.R. Legates, S. Baliunas, T.F. Ball, and L.O. Hancock, 2007: Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change: are warming spring air temperatures the “ultimate” survival control factor? Ecological Complexity, 4(3), 73-84. (PDF)

Comment: Fossil fuel industry funding of research is acknowledged: “M. Dyck and W. Soon initiated this scientific study around 2002–2003 without seeking research fundings and both have contributed equally. W. Soon’s effort for the completion of this paper was partially supported by grants from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, American Petroleum Institute, and Exxon-Mobil Corporation.”

4) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group Two (WGII) Chapter 28, page 1576

In the text: “Use of terrestrial resources by polar bears was suggested as adaptive (Dyck et al., 2007, 2008; Dyck and Romberg, 2007; Armstrong et al., 2008; Dyck and Kebreab, 2009; Rockwell and Gormezano, 2009; Smith et al., 2010).”

Citation: Dyck, M.G., W. Soon, R.K. Baydack, D.R. Legates, S. Baliunas, T.F. Ball, and L.O. Hancock, 2008: Reply to response to Dyck et al. (2007) on polar bears and climate change in western Hudson Bay by Stirling et al. (2008). Ecological Complexity, 5(4), 289-302. (PDF)

Comment: This is a reply to responses to the paper cited above (Dyck, et al, 2007), published in the same journal. There is no funding acknowledgement or disclosure from Soon or co-authors.

5) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group One (WGI) Chapter 6, page 466

In the text: “The ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of Mann et al. (1999) has been the subject of several critical studies. Soon and Baliunas (2003) challenged the conclusion that the 20th century was the warmest at a hemispheric average scale. They surveyed regionally diverse proxy climate data, noting evidence for relatively warm (or cold), or alternatively dry (or wet) conditions occurring at any time within pre-defi  ned periods assumed to bracket the so-called ‘Medieval Warm Period’ (and ‘Little Ice Age’). Their qualitative approach precluded any quantitative summary of the evidence at precise times, limiting the value of their review as a basis for comparison of the relative magnitude of mean hemispheric 20th-century warmth (Mann and Jones, 2003; Osborn and Briffa, 2006). Box 6.4 provides more information on the ‘Medieval Warm Period’.”

Citation: Soon, W., and S. Baliunas, 2003: Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years. Clim. Res., 23(2), 89–110. (PDF)

Comment: This is the infamous case that lead to the resignation of multiple editors of the Climate Research journal in protest over a flawed peer review process that allowed publication of the paper. Funding from the American Petroleum Institute was acknowledged: “This work was supported by funds from the American Petroleum Institute (01-0000-4579), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant AF49620-02-1- 0194) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant NAG5-7635)”

6) Third Assessment Report (TAR) Working Group One (WGI) Chapter 6, page 382

In the text: “An alternative approach which has been used to reconstruct TSI (Reid, 1997; Soon et al., 1996) is to assume that time variations in global surface temperature are due to a combination of the effects of solar variability and enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations and to find that combination of these two forcings which best combine to simulate surface temperature measurements. However, these authors did not take natural climatic variability into account and a TSI series derived by such methods could not be used as an independent measure of radiative forcing of climate.”

Citation:  Soon,W.H., E.S. Posmentier, and S.L. Baliunas, 1996: Inference of solar irradiance variability from terrestrial temperature changes, 1880-1993: An astrophysical application of the Sun-climate connection. Astrophys. J., 472, 891-982. (PDF)

Comments: Funding from fossil fuel industry is acknowledged: “This program was supported by the Electric Power Research Institute, Mobil Foundation, Inc., Texaco Foundation, Inc., Scholarly Studies Program, and Langley-Abbot Fund of the Smithsonian Institution, American Petroleum Institute, and Richard C. Lounsbery Foundation. This research was made possible by a collaborative agreement between the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Mount Wilson Institute.

7) Second Assessment Report (SAR) Working Group One (WGI) Chapter TK, page 130

In the text: “A recent paper by Zhang et al (1994) helps to bracket the range of variability observed in sun-like stars and hence the likely past and future variability of our Sun. They noted that empirical models based upon sunspots and faculae do not account for all irradiance variations observed over an activity cycle (see also NRC (1994)) and base their con-elation on an observed relationship between brightness and excess chromospheric emission, using the Ca II H and …”

Citation: Zhang, Q., W.H. Soon, S.L. Baliunas, G.W. Lockwood, B.A. Skiff and R.R. Radick, 1994; A method of determining possible brightness variations of the Sun in past centuries from observations of solar-type stars. Astrophys. J., 427, L111-L114. (PDF)

Comments: The authors acknowledge funding from the fossil fuel industry: “The work at Mount Wilson Observatory was supported by the Mobil Foundation, Inc., Electric Power Research Institute, Scholarly Studies Program, and Langley-Abbot fund of the Smithsonian Institution, American Petroleum Institute and Richard C. Lounsbery Foundation. The work at Lowell Observatory was supported by the Lowell Research Fund and the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory. This research was made possible by a colloborative agreement between the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Mount Wilson Institute."

Willie Soon's Failure to Disclose Conflicts of Interest Hoodwinks IPCC  

According to the IPCC (see Annex 2 of the IPCC principles document, page 17), the lead authorship team of any given assessment report section, "is required to critically assess information they would like to include from any source. Each chapter team should review the quality and validity of each source before incorporating information into an IPCC Report."

If authors of journal publication fail to acknowledge potential conflicts of interest, when the IPCC lead authors review the material, they lack a crucial piece of information that impacts the "quality and validity" of the source.

By hiding funding disclosures from the publications themselves, Soon effectively hoodwinks the IPCC. And so the world's most comprehensive assessment of climate science is forced to at least consider pseudo-science fully paid for by the fossil fuel industry. 

Additional research by John Mashey.

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