---
title: "Soon and Baliunas controversy"
chunk: 6/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:22.543337+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In November 2009, emails and documents which had been hacked from a server belonging to the University of East Anglia were distributed on the internet.  Many of the emails included communication between climatologists in East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and other scientists, including Michael E. Mann. Several of the emails included conversations about Soon and Baliunas' paper as the controversy was ongoing in 2003 and 2004. In an 18 December 2009 column in The Wall Street Journal, Pat Michaels alleged that pressure from Jones and Mann was responsible for the resignations at Climate Research.  On 22 December 2009 von Storch responded in the Wall Street Journal that his resignation as editor of Climate Research had nothing to do with any pressure from Jones, Mann, or anyone else, but instead he "left this post on my own, with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper—a skeptic's paper, at that."
The Independent Climate Change Email Review, an independent review funded by the University of East Anglia and chaired by Sir Muir Russell, examined allegations that the emails showed attempts to undermine normal procedures of publication. Phil Jones gave evidence that he believed the paper showed self-evident errors and the reaction was both proper and proportionate: the review noted that the publisher Otto Kinne had admitted that the paper had problems, and considered that Jones could not reasonably be criticised for his reaction. A paper prepared for the review by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, showed that strong responses were not uncommon in the peer review process. The review concluded that the strong reaction to the Soon and Baliunas paper "was understandable, and did not amount to undue pressure on Climate Research.
In petitions to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the Ohio Coal Association, Peabody Energy, the Southeastern Legal Foundation, and the State of Texas argued that emails from March and April 2003 showed scientists discussing a boycott of the journal Climate Research and trying to get de Freitas removed, leading to the resignations of editors. They quoted Phil Jones writing that "I will be e-mailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor", and Mann's email response that "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal." Tom Wigley wrote that von Storch "is partly to blame — he encourages the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work." The EPA noted that the publisher Kinne had later agreed that the peer review process was flawed, and editors had then resigned as they could not get him to agree corrective action. The emails expressed displeasure but did not show that any action was in fact taken, and it is "expected and appropriate that researchers choose in which journals to publish, as well as recommend to their peers journals in which to publish or not publish. In this case, the bottom line is that the underlying science at issue has been shown to be flawed. The scientists' actions were focused on this lack of scientific merit and the process that lead to it, and not an attempt to distort the science or the scientific literature." The EPA considered that "If anything, their actions aimed to police the peer review process and rectify a problem that threatened its scientific integrity."

== References ==

Pearce, Fred (2010). The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming. Random House UK. ISBN 978-0-85265-229-9.

== Further reading ==
"Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal" (abstract), by Soon W.; Baliunas S.; Idso C.; Idso S.; Legates D.R:  Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2–3, 1 May 2003. Full text. The companion paper to the controversial Climate Research paper discussed here.