It sure does to my mind – why would you collaborate on a research project with a person (Monckton) who lacks any qualification in the area but who does have a very long history of making inanely false assertions?

I mean, what was there again…
– allows himself to be misrepresetned as a “scientist”.
– falsely claims to be a mathematician
– claims to have been a science advisor to Margaret Thatcher (who herself was an actual science graduate)
– makes up some bizarre lies about having to sell his house, apparently in order to seek attention from the media
– claims to have invented a cure for AIDS and a raft of other diseases
– lied to the US Congress about being a member of the UK House of Lords.

…and Soon wants this idiot’s name on his “deliverables”?

In the following passage, Pirsig’s protagonist encounters Aristotle for the first time:

“Rhetoric is an art, Aristotle began, because it can be reduced to a rational system of order.

“That just left Phædrus aghast. Stopped. He’d been prepared to decode messages of great subtlety, systems of great complexity in order to understand the deeper inner meaning of Aristotle, claimed by many to be the greatest philosopher of all time. And then to get hit, right off, straight in the face, with an asshole statement like that! It really shook him.”

Reminds me one of the best Jack in the Box commercials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRO9Uwm1tes

It’s funny cause it’s true.

Re. the paper, which I haven’t read:

“It matters not whether Soon, or indeed any of the others in the gang of four, have any scientific credentials whatsoever. The truth is the truth, and the paper was peer reviewed and published in an accredited scientific journal.”

Christopher Monckton doesn’t have any scientific credentials, but he does have a fairly consistent track record.
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/lord-moncktons-rap-sheet/

“Briefly, Mr. Monckton makes a number of scientific assertions about (1) the efficacy of warming from CO2, (2) the benefits of elevated CO2, (3) the relationship between CO2 and ocean acidification, (4) recent global temperature trends, (5) and the sensitivity of the climate to CO2. He has also claimed that (6) there is no need to take quick action to address the changing climate. In all cases, Mr. Monckton’s assertions are shown to be without merit – they are based on a thorough misunderstanding of the science of climate change.”
CLIMATE SCIENTISTS RESPOND
Response to the Written Testimony of Christopher Monckton In Connection With the May 6, 2010 Hearing Before the Select Committee On Energy Independence and Global Warming
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton-response.pdf

Wouldn’t Monckton’s participation call into question the seriousness of any scientific project with which he was associated, and wouldn’t a collaboration with Monckton reflect poorly on Soon’s scientific judgement?

The paper was reviewed by and published in the Chinese Science Bulletin. Does anyone know whether the Bulletin and its reviewers have any expertise in the paper’s subject matter? Does anyone know how the reviewers were selected? Does anyone know if the authors attempted to have their paper accepted by another journal, before approaching the Chinese Science Bulletin?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/clouds-over-peer-review.html

It’s figure 1 that immediately sets the tone and shows that the authors are biased. In the figure they compare supposed predictions to the actual observations. Let’s for a moment ignore the error of describing the observations as being from a lot of different temperature records – in reality they only showed an average of the UAH and RSS satellite temperature series. Why take those two, when the projections (I will get back to that) actually look at the surface temperatures, not at the lower troposphere temperatures?
This can be shown using the following graph, which plots the trends of the two satellite series (UAH and RSS) and two of the main surface temperature records (GISTEMP and HADCRUT4)
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/to/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to/trend/offset:0.14/plot/uah/from:1979/to/trend/offset:0.24/plot/gistemp/from:1979/to/trend/offset:-0.11

Notice anything in the trends? Those of the satellite series are clearly smaller than those of the surface series. There are other surface records (JMA, NCDC) which are very similar to GISTEMP and HADCRUT4.
So, we have our first cherry pick: the satellite series, even though the model projections are all compared to the surface series. This inflates the difference.

Then there is a much more blatant example of bias: the “predictions” they claim in their figure 1 are actuall projections, i.e., they are conditional on various scenarious. Hansen scenario A, for example, projected a much faster increase in forcing than happened in practice. His scenario B was much closer to reality. And yet, they only show scenario A. Why? Obviously because it increases the difference between the (conditional) prediction and the observation. A very similar story goes for the FAR ‘prediction’, where again the most extreme scenario is taken, while reality came much closer to other scenarios, which would cut the predicted temperature by more than half. Again this artificially inflates the difference between (conditional) prediction and the observation.

That is, each and every selection in this graph is misleading and designed to artifically inflate the difference between model predictions and the observations. None of this is explicitly acknowledged. Figure 1 alone would be enough for the journals I am involved in on the Editorial Board to request a thorough investigation by the academic institutions and/companies involved in the paper. That investigation would need to find out whether this selection bias was conscious (i.e., did the authors discuss which series and predictions to select and did they provide solid academic reasons), or unconscious (i.e., a result of confirmation bias, which must have been very strong here).

And leaded gasoline. Good shit, that stuff: when inside the young human brain, it inhibits the superego and unleashes the id to wreak havoc. Increase environmental lead, and violence will increase about 14 years later as infants become strong enough and unsupervised enough to maim and kill and not know why.

I wonder how many people were murdered and maimed due to environmental lead that would not have been if the scientists who said lead isn’t a problem had not said so.

Dr. Mann suggested that some anti-reality pro-free market scientists might be sociopaths who just don’t care about human life. I wonder if Dr. Soon is one of them.

Typically, advances in science and understanding could have been made centuries earlier if people hadn’t been overly influenced by Aristotle’s opinions.

There are even a few books on the subject, with many examples. The complete works of Aristotle (that are known) are available for free in several formats, and I have a copy for my Kindle Paperwhite reader. Perhaps in ancient Greece some of his teachings were cutting-edge: he said nothing my grandparents didn’t tell me.