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WRIGHT CURRY DOE BS STUDY LISTS SOLAR EG SOON

How a major DOE report hides the whole truth on climate change

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The Heritage piece is one example of some of the DOE authors’ current and past affiliations with conservative groups that have tried for years to undermine climate regulations placed on polluting industries.

The author biographies in the DOE report primarily emphasize academic and government experience.

But they largely avoid mentioning the authors’ affiliations with groups that advocate against climate policy.

“Any current or past affiliations with other organizations do not define any of our perspectives on climate science,” said Curry, a climatologist and professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She added, “The policy preferences of these organizations are not relevant in any way to our perspectives on the science.”

Other than Koonin, who worked as chief scientist for BP, the authors’ actual research has not been directly funded by the fossil fuel industry. But some of them have been paid by industry groups and conservative think tanks to opine on how their findings raise questions about mainstream science.

Spencer, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has held roles at the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute. Both groups promote climate misinformation and have pushed to eliminate fossil fuel regulations. They have received funding from foundations linked to Exxon Mobil and Shell, and the Koch brothers network.

Koonin is a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, whose scholars have downplayed climate science and argued against regulations.

McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, is also listed as a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, a right-wing think tank in Canada that is critical of climate policy. Fraser has received funding from the Koch brothers network, Exxon and foundations that oppose regulations.

‘Scientifically invalid’

The DOE report amplifies supposed conflicts among climate scientists — even when there isn’t any.

For example, it’s not true that there is “substantial debate” within climate science over whether the sun could be a primary driver of global warming.

But the DOE report makes that claim nevertheless. The idea has been pushed for years by Willie Soon, a researcher favored by industry groups and promoted by Republican lawmakers.

There’s no dispute among scientists that the sun affects the Earth’s climate. But the idea that it’s responsible for the warming observed over the last 50 years is “considered scientifically invalid,” said Theodosios Chatzistergos, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

Curry said the DOE authors were planning to “modify some of the text” because the group did not have time to review all the references on the topic.

“The impact of solar variations on the climate is uncertain and subject to substantial debate, something that is not evident in the IPCC assessment reports.”

DOE Report

Influence of Total Solar Irradiance on the Earth’s Climate

Biktash (2019)

On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth

Feulner & Rahmstorf (2010)

What influence will future solar activity changes over the 21st century have on projected global near-surface temperature changes?

Jones et al. (2012)

Could a future “Grand Solar Minimum” like the Maunder Minimum stop global warming?

Meehl et al. (2013)

Impact of a potential 21st century “grand solar minimum” on surface temperatures and stratospheric ozone

Meehl et al. (2013)

Twenty-First-Century Climate Change Hot Spots in the Light of a Weakening Sun

Spiegl & Langematz (2020)

Possible impacts of a future grand solar minimum on climate: Stratospheric and global circulation changes

Maycock et al. (2015)

Earth's energy imbalance and implications

Hansen et al. (2012)

Solar influences on climate

Gray et al. (2010)

Solar Irradiance Variability and Climate

Solanki et al. (2013)

The report cites a Soon paper to suggest that it’s the sun, not the burning of fossil fuels, that has contributed to global temperature rise.

But that’s just one paper from one researcher. Study after study by climate scientists have debunked that claim over the years.

Research by Soon is cited three times in the report and features prominently as evidence that the sun could be a driver of climate change.

Soon has no formal training as a climatologist — he has a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering — but has repeatedly appeared before Congress as a Republican witness to attack climate science, made frequent appearances in conservative media, and traveled to state capitals with the message that great uncertainty exists about humanity’s role in global warming.

In 2015, the environmental group Greenpeace obtained documents revealing that Soon was secretly paid more than $1.2 million by fossil fuel groups, including Exxon, Southern Co., the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Soon’s research is now funded by the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Science, an LLC he founded that does not disclose its donors.

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About | CERES Science OFF BS BOGUS

PRETTY WATER PIX MOVING

Our Mission

In recent years, the scientific community appears to have prioritized defining a "scientific consensus" on any scientific topic - especially politically-charged topics. We believe this obsession with "forming a consensus" contradicts the ethos of true scientific inquiry and open-ended scientific research.

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Instead, our approach to scientific research is driven by a deep curiosity to continually expand and revisit our understanding of important scientific topics.

The CERES team is led by Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. Ronan Connolly and Dr. Michael Connolly. DIED 2025

We work with many researchers from around the world on multi-disciplinary environmental and Earth science projects.

CERES began in 2018, and has been growing steadily since then.

Dr. Ronan Connolly

I am an independent scientist, environmentalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland. I have been actively researching climate change since 2009. In 2018, I joined CERES.

I am an independent scientist, environmentalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland. I have been actively researching climate change since 2009. In 2018, I joined CERES.

About

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Peer-reviewed publications
With CERES
  1. V. M. Velasco Herrera, W. Soon, S. Knoška, A. Özgüç, G. Velasco Herrera, H. Yeşilyaprak, N. Babynets, M. Švanda, J. Muraközy, S. Qiu, D. Riveros-Rosas, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, A. Tlatov, L. Cappellotto (2025). "Solar Flare Activity, 1937–2024: Introducing the New Hemispheric Solar Flare Index (hSFI) in the Context of 2024's Major Solar Storm Events". Space Weather, 23:11, e2025SW004515. _https://doi.org/10.1029/2025SW004515_.
  2. G. A. Quinn, R. Connolly, C. ÓhAiseadha, P. Hynds, P. Bagus, R. B. Brown, C. F. Cáceres, C. Craig, M. Connolly, J. L. Domingo, N. Fenton, P. Frijters, S. Hatfill, R. Heymans, A. R. Joffe, R. Jones, G. Lauc, T. Lawrie, R. W. Malone, A. Mordue, G. Mushet, A. O’Connor, J. Orient, J. A. Peña-Ramos, H. A. Risch, J. Rose, A. Sánchez-Bayón, R. F. Savaris, M. C. Schippers, D. Simandan, K. Sikora, W. Soon, Y. Shir-Raz, D. A. Spandidos, B. Spira, A. M. Tsatsakis and H. Walach (2025). "What Lessons can Be Learned From the Management of the COVID-19 Pandemic?" International Journal of Public Health, 70:1607727. _https://doi.org/10.3389/ijph.2025.1607727_.
  3. Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon, Michael Connolly, Rodolfo Gustavo Cionco, Ana G. Elias, Gregory W. Henry, Nicola Scafetta, and Víctor M. Velasco Herrera (2024). "Multiple New or Updated Satellite Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) Composites (1978–2023)". The Astrophysical Journal, 975 (1), 102, _https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad7794_. (_Open access_).
  4. Michael Connolly, Orla Dingley, Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon (2024). "Comparing different tropopause estimates from high-resolution ozonesondes". Earth and Space Science. 11 (5), e2024EA003584. _https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EA003584_. (Open access​).
  5. Gerry A. Quinn, Michael Connolly, Norman E. Fenton, Steven J. Hatfill, Paul Hynds, Coilín ÓhAiseadha, Karol Sikora, Willie Soon and Ronan Connolly (2024). "Influence of Seasonality and Public-Health Interventions on the COVID-19 Pandemic in Northern Europe" Journal of Clinical Medicine, 13, 334. _https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm13020334_​. Open access.
  6. W. Soon, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, S.-I. Akasofu, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, A. Bianchini, W.M. Briggs, C.J. Butler, R.G. Cionco, M. Crok, A.G. Elias, V.M. Fedorov, F. Gervais, H. Harde, G.W. Henry, D.V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D.R. Legates, A.R. Lupo, S. Maruyama, P. Moore, M. Ogurtsov, C. ÓhAiseadha, M.J. Oliveira, S.-S. Park, S. Qiu, G. Quinn, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, J. Steele, L. Szarka, H.L. Tanaka, M.K. Taylor, F. Vahrenholt, V.M. Velasco Herrera and W. Zhang (2023). "The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data", Climate, 11(9), 179; _https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179_. Open access​.
  7. R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, C.J. Butler, R.G. Cionco, A.G. Elias, V. Fedorov, H. Harde, G.W. Henry, D.V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D.R. Legates, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, V.M. Velasco Herrera, H. Yan and W.J. Zhang (2023). "Challenges in the detection and attribution of Northern Hemisphere surface temperature trends since 1850". Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. _https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e_. (🗄️​​). Supplementary Materials.
  8. G. Katata, R. Connolly and P. O’Neill (2023). Evidence of urban blending in homogenized temperature records in Japan and in the United States: implications for the reliability of global land surface air temperature data. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. _https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1_. (🗄️​​)
  9. C. ÓhAiseadha, G. A. Quinn, R. Connolly, A. Wilson, M. Connolly, W. Soon and P. Hynds (2023). Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) for Population Health and Health Inequalities. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(7), 5223. _https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20075223_. (_Open access_).
  10. V.M. Velasco Herrera, W. Soon, Š. Knoška, J.A. Perez-Peraza, R.G. Cionco, S.M. Kudryavtsev, S. Qiu, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, M. Švanda, J. Acosta Jara & G. Pietro Gregori (2022). The New Composite Solar Flare Index from Solar Cycle 17 to Cycle 24 (1937 – 2020). Solar Physics, 297, 108. _https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-022-02035-z_. Read-only access to full article. Pre-print version. Supplementary Materials​.
  11. O. Dingley, M. Connolly, R. Connolly and W. Soon (2022). A comparison of different metrics for analyzing the troposphere/stratosphere transitions using high-resolution ozonesondes. Environmental Science Proceedings, 19, 14. Proceedings of The 5th International Electronic Conference on Atmospheric Sciences. _https://doi.org/10.3390/ecas2022-12807_. (_Open access_).
  12. P. O'Neill, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, W. Soon, B. Chimani, M. Crok, R. de Vos, H. Harde, P. Kajaba, P. Nojarov, R. Przybylak, D. Rasol, Oleg Skrynyk, Olesya Skrynyk, P. Štěpánek, A. Wypych and P. Zahradníček (2022). Evaluation of the homogenization adjustments applied to European temperature records in the Global Historical Climatology Network dataset. Atmosphere 13(2), 285; _https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13020285_. (_🗄️_)
  13. M. Connolly, R. Connolly, W. Soon, V. M. Velasco Herrera, R. G. Cionco and N. E. Quaranta (2021). Analyzing atmospheric circulation patterns using mass fluxes calculated from weather balloon measurements: North Atlantic region as a case study. Atmosphere 12(11), 1439; _https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12111439_. (_🗄️_)
  14. R. Connolly, W. Soon, M. Connolly, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, C. J. Butler, R. G. Cionco, A. G. Elias, V. M. Fedorov, H. Harde, G. W. Henry, D. V. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D. R. Legates, S. Lüning, N. Scafetta, J.-E. Solheim, L. Szarka, H. van Loon, V. M. Velasco Herrera, R. C. Willson, H. Yan and W. Zhang (2021). How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate. Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 21, 131. _https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131_. (_🗄️_)
  15. C. ÓhAiseadha, G. Quinn, R. Connolly, M. Connolly and W. Soon (2020). Energy and climate policy — An evaluation of global climate change expenditure 2011–2018. Energies, 13, 4839. _https://doi.org/10.3390/en13184839_. (_🗄️_)
  16. R. Connolly, M. Connolly, R.M. Carter and W. Soon (2020). How much human-caused global warming should we expect with business-as-usual (BAU) climate policies? A semi-empirical assessment. Energies, 13, 1365. _https://doi.org/10.3390/en13061365_. (_🗄️_)
  17. R. Connolly, M. Connolly, W. Soon, D.R. Legates, R.G. Cionco and V. M. Velasco Herrera (2019). Northern hemisphere snow-cover trends (1967-2018): A comparison between climate models and observations. Geosciences, 9(3), 135. _https://doi.org/10.3390/geosciences9030135_ (_🗄️_)

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Previous publications
  1. W.W-H. Soon, Ronan Connolly, M. Connolly, P. O’Neill, J. Zheng, Q. Ge, Z. Hao and H. Yan (2019). Reply to Li & Yang’s comments on “Comparing the current and early 20th century warm periods in China." Earth-Science Reviews. 189, 102950. _https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2019.102950_. (_🗄️_).
  2. W.W-H. Soon, Ronan Connolly, M. Connolly, P. O’Neill, J. Zheng, Q. Ge, Z. Hao and H. Yan (2018). Comparing the current and early 20th century warm periods in China. Earth-Science Reviews, 185, 80-101. _https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2018.05.013_. (_🗄️_).
  3. Ronan Connolly, M. Connolly and W. Soon (2017). Re-calibration of Arctic sea ice extent datasets using Arctic surface air temperature records. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 62, 1317-1340. _https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2017.1324974_. (_🗄️_).
  4. W. Soon, Ronan Connolly and M. Connolly (2015). Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century. Earth-Science Reviews, 150, 409-452. _https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2015.08.010_. (🗄️_). Supporting Dataset_​.
  5. Ronan Connolly, G. Bellesia, E.G. Timoshenko, Yu.A. Kuznetsov, S. Elli and F. Ganazzoli (2005). “Intrinsic” and “topological” stiffness in branched polymers. Macromolecules, 38, 5288-5299. _https://doi.org/10.1021/ma0477246_
  6. S. Elli, F. Ganazzoli, E.G. Timoshenko, Yu.A. Kuznetsov and Ronan Connolly (2004). Size and persistence length of molecular bottle-brushes by Monte Carlo simulations. Journal of Chemical Physics, 120, 6257. _https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1651052_
  7. Ronan Connolly, E.G. Timoshenko and Yu.A. Kuznetsov (2004). Monte Carlo simulations of amphiphilic co-dendrimers in dilute solution. Macromolecules, 37, 7381-7392. _https://doi.org/10.1021/ma049638b_
  8. Ronan Connolly, E.G. Timoshenko and Yu.A. Kuznetsov (2003). Monte Carlo simulations of infinitely dilute solutions of amphiphilic deblock star copolymers. Journal of Chemical Physics, 119, 8736. _https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1610445_
  9. E.G. Timoshenko, Yu.A. Kuznetsov and Ronan Connolly (2002). Confirmations of dendrimers in dilute solution. Journal of Chemical Physics, 117, 9050. _https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1514571_
Non peer-reviewed publications
COVID-19
  1. G.A. Quinn, C. ÓhAiseadha, Ronan Connolly and P. Hynds (2021). “A tale of two scientific paradigms: Conflicting scientific opinions on what ‘following the science’ means for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic”. OSF Preprints. August 11. doi:10.31219/osf.io/s9z2p.
Open Peer Review Journal articles
  1. Ronan Connolly and M. Connolly (2014). Urbanization bias III. Estimating the extent of bias in the Historical Climatology Network datasets. Open Peer Review Journal, 34 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.1 (non peer reviewed draft) _http://oprj.net/articles/climate-science/34_.
  2. Ronan Connolly and M. Connolly (2014). Urbanization bias II. An assessment of the NASA GISS urbanization adjustment method. Open Peer Review Journal, 31 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.1 (non peer reviewed draft) _http://oprj.net/articles/climate-science/31_.
  3. Ronan Connolly and M. Connolly (2014). Urbanization bias I. Is it a negligible problem for global temperature estimates? Open Peer Review Journal, 28 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.2 (non peer reviewed draft) _http://oprj.net/articles/climate-science/28_.
  4. M. Connolly and Ronan Connolly(2014). The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere III. Pervective power. Open Peer Review Journal, 25 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.1 (non peer reviewed draft) _http://oprj.net/articles/atmospheric-science/25_.
  5. M. Connolly and Ronan Connolly (2014). The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere II. Multimerization of atmospheric gases above the troposphere. Open Peer Review Journal, 22 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.1 (non peer reviewed draft) _http://oprj.net/articles/atmospheric-science/22_.
  6. M. Connolly and Ronan Connolly (2014). The physics of the Earth’s atmosphere I. Phase change associated with tropopause. Open Peer Review Journal, 19 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.1 (non peer reviewed draft) _http://oprj.net/articles/atmospheric-science/19_.
  7. Ronan Connolly and M. Connolly (2014). Global temperature changes of the last millennium. Open Peer Review Journal, 16 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 1.0 _http://oprj.net/articles/climate-science/16_.
  8. Ronan Connolly and M. Connolly (2014). Has poor station quality biased U.S. temperature trend estimates? Open Peer Review Journal, 11 (Clim. Sci.), ver. 0.1 (non peer reviewed draft). _http://oprj.net/articles/climate-science/11_.
Other climate science and environmental science articles
  1. W. Soon, R. Connolly, M. Connolly and others (2021). “‘Fact Checks’ by Non-Experts Are Shutting Down Genuine Scientific Inquiry”. The Epoch Times, 22 September 2021. Link to article.
  2. M. Connolly, R. Connolly, W. Soon, P. Moore and I. Connolly (2018). Analysis of Greenpeace’s business model & philosophy: Greenpeace wants a piece of your green. (_Researchgate_)
  3. R. Connolly, M. Connolly, I. Connolly and W. Soon (2017). Some key climate infographics. Prepared for the Heartland’s 12th International Conference on Climate Change, March 23-24, 2017, Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
  4. M. Connolly and R. Connolly (2017). Scientific opinions on climate change. Irish Farmers Journal, 17 June 2017, p30-31 (_Paywalled_).
  5. M. Connolly, R. Connolly and I. Connolly (2014). Yellow River wind farm: Assessment of Environmental Impact Statement.

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11 24 cmd

In a coordinated effort to undermine climate science and slow environmental progress, prominent American climate change denial organizations recently teamed up with a conservative Austrian trade union known as the Union for Sovereignty and the German climate denialist European Institute for Climate and Energy to strategize on defeating climate solutions that threaten the fossil fuel industry or are otherwise deemed too radical.

The Heartland Institute, one of the leading climate denial organizations in the U.S., and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a longstanding libertarian group, hosted the 16th International Climate Change Conference (ICCC), which took place from June 13–15 in Vienna — a new stronghold of the far right. It was the first time the conference had been held in Europe in almost a decade. According to CFACT, their intention was “to make the case for ‘climate realism,’” a phrase used by right-wing organizations to delegitimize climate change and downplay the urgency of the crisis.

Over the past few years, Europe has become a prime target for climate denialists, with fossil fuel lobbyists effectively peddling climate disinformation to far-right parties that oppose climate mitigation policies.

James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute,pointed out that the new political climate in Europe — where the far right has been gaining traction in recent years — presents an opportunity to strengthen a global conservative “coalition” to push back against climate-friendly policies.

Spreading Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

At the conference, speakers shared strategies for combating both “climate alarmism” and the growth of renewable energy. Craig Rucker, president of CFACT, participating in shareholder meetings to propose anti-green initiatives, drafting model bills against renewables, and drawing more attention to whale deaths to ramp up public opposition to offshore wind farms — using what experts have called a misinformation campaign.

Many presenters, including Taylor and Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, framed climate change as an anti-democratic, left-wing plot to consolidate global power, echoing conspiracy theories associated with recent Covid-19 measures.

Morano further claimed that sustainable farming policies would force American farmers to sell their land to tech-world billionaires such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos due to rising compliance costs. He also painted net-zero policies like restrictions on gas-powered cars as “corporate government collusion” aimed at benefiting the Chinese EV industry — a claim that echoes the rise in anti-China rhetoric used by Republican politicians and other conservatives. Morano further criticized Natural Asset Companies (NACs) — a boogeyman to conservatives for valuing ecosystems and natural resources — as a Wall Street plot to “take away available land from private citizens.”

The Supporting “Science”

The scientists who presented at the conference, including a Nobel laureate in physics and a former Trump administration scientific advisor, promoted denialist rhetoric by casting doubt on scientific evidence of global warming and the impact of greenhouse gasses. Some reiterated the fringe argument that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather “plant food,” while others questioned mainstream climate models such as those used by the United Nations.

Many of the scientists who presented at the conference have ties to oil industry money and have been criticized for accepting but not disclosing industry funding for their research.

Willie Soon, an astrophysicist formerly associated with the ​​Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, failed to disclose that he had accepted more than $1.2 million in research-related donations from corporate fossil fuel funders, including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and DonorsTrust, according to reporting by the New York Times.

William Happer and John F. Clauser, both of whom kowtowed to the fossil fuel industry by downplaying the role of carbon emissions on climate change, are members of the Koch-funded CO2 Coalition, which also receives funding from the Bradley Foundation, the Mercer Family Foundation, The 85 Fund (run by right-wing legal firebrand Leonard Leo), the Scaife Foundation, and other far-right donors. Additionally, Happer received $8,000 from Peabody Energy in exchange for testimony at a 2015 Minnesota state hearing claiming that carbon dioxide makes a positive impact on society, a Greenpeace investigation revealed.

Host Groups’ Industry Ties

Heartland and CFACT also receive significant funding from the fossil fuel industry. In 2019, a coalition of 19 U.S. Senators accused these groups of creating a “web of denial” to mislead the public about climate change and stymie legislative action. Heartland has received funding from fossil fuel companies such as Murray Energy and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. Since 2014, it has also received over $15 million from Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, identity-scrubbing operations that give Big Oil a way to fund climate misinformation while avoiding bad press. These donor-advised funds have increasingly supported climate denial organizations as the traceability of funding from Big Oil has decreased, a correlation documented by Greenpeace.

Donors to CFACT have included ExxonMobil as well as the Scaife and Koch family foundations, which are largely funded by fossil fuel fortunes. Despite claims by its senior policy advisor that the group stopped accepting fossil fuel money as of 2010, data collected by DeSmogshows small grants from Charles Koch’s foundation and Murray Energy between 2014 and 2018. CFACT has also received more than $8 million from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund over the past 20 years.

While these organizations claim to be “climate realists,” they play a major role in elevating and promoting arguments against net-zero initiatives and climate mitigation strategies critical to addressing the climate crisis. By reconnecting with their counterparts in Europe, they are expanding their global reach in ways that threaten serious efforts to radically reduce carbon emissions before it’s too late.

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Fox Business host Larry Kudlow claims climate change is a hoax because it's cold in Iowa

01/12/24 4:22 PM EST

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Former Fox host Tucker Carlson is platforming disgraced climate denier Willie Soon, an aerospace engineer known for accepting over $1 million from fossil fuel companies for writing publications he referred to as “deliverables.”

Carlson invited Soon, a former researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, on his exclusive program on X (formerly Twitter) for an interview on January 9. The two amplified long-debunked hypotheses about what is causing climate change, and clips from the interview have already been viewed over 1 million times on TikTok, likely by a young audience that might not be familiar with Soon’s controversies, which came to light back in 2015.

The spread of these videos highlights TikTok’s ongoing climate misinformation problem, even as it has begun implementing a new policy banning content that “undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

Though experts dismissed Soon’s false claims, clips of his interview with Carlson have gained traction on TikTok, a social media platform popular with young users
The interview is part of a larger trend of major right-wing media outlets relying more on long-debunked climate deniers
Willie Soon has been exposed for unethically promoting flawed science
Soon has for years been a go-to source for media and lawmakers keen on protecting fossil fuel interests

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Right-Wing Media Rush To Defend Industry-Funded Climate Denier Willie Soon | Media Matters for America

Right-Wing Media Rush To Defend Industry-Funded Climate Denier Willie Soon

02/24/15

Conservative media have been quick to rush to the defense of climate science denier Willie Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has recently come under fire for accepting over $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry without disclosing this conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. Among the most impassioned defenses of Soon was an article penned by a writer at the Daily Caller with connections to some of the organizations that funded Soon's research.

Documents obtained by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center detail the extensive and problematic relationship between the fossil fuel industry and Soon, one of the contrarian scientists often cited by prominent climate science deniers like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). The documents reveal that Soon described many of his scientific papers, which largely focus on the claim that the sun is primarily responsible for recent global warming, as "deliverables" produced in exchange for money from fossil fuel interests. The revelations, which were recently covered by several media outlets, reveal a potentially serious breach of scientific ethics in at least eight of the papers Soon has published since 2008, and the Smithsonian Institution has directed the organization's Inspector General to investigate Soon's ethical conduct.

Several right-wing media outlets are already aggressively defending Soon. Shortly after the initial reports, the Daily Caller published an article criticizing the “attack campaign” against Soon by “firm believers in global warming.” The article's author, PG Veer, dismissed the criticisms of Soon, claiming that opponents “are looking for conflicts of interest” rather than challenging Soon on “the facts.”

Yet Veer himself is a former fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, which was created from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation -- one of the organizations that provided money for Soon's research. Veer currently works for the Franklin Center, which has received significant funding from Donors Trust, another organization that bankrolled Soon.

Breitbart has also carried Soon's water, defending him in at least five different articles so far. Columnist James Delingpole defended Soon for “telling the truth” about climate change, writing that the latest news is a “continuation of a vendetta which has been waged for years against an honest, decent, hardworking -- and incredibly brave -- scientist who refuses to toe the official (and increasingly discredited) line on man-made global warming.”

The site also published two op-eds from co-authors of Soon's latest study -- one asserting that the left is “panic[king]” over their paper's “threat to global warming alarmism,” and another claiming that “attacks on independent researchers” like Soon and the “misrepresentation of climate research results” are “an evil every bit as pernicious as direct scientific fraud.” Breitbart also published letters from Soon's colleagues “defending his professional integrity,” and a column criticizing Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak for tweeting a link to the New York Times story on Soon, which the Breitbart author dubbed a “hit piece.”

While Breitbart would have readers believe that Soon has produced "impeccable science," Soon's research has been thoroughly panned by climate scientists for its flaws. His argument that solar activities are primarily responsible for climate change is widely rejected and conflicts with the overwhelming scientific consensus than human activities are to blame. As the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt noted, the sun likely accounts for at most 10 percent of recent global warming, meaning that "[t]he science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless."

It has become increasingly clear that the only point of Soon's research is to “deliver” on climate science denial for his fossil fuel benefactors.

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willie soon 3 yrs ago independent inst

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zrejG-WI3U

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off bs bibliography (even BS ones)

https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~wsoon/

eg

  1. R. Connolly, M. Connolly, Willie Soon, D.R. Legates, R.G. Cionco and V. M. Velasco Herrera. Northern hemisphere snow-cover trends (1967-2018): A comparison between climate models and observations. Geosciences, 9(3), 135 (2019). Journal homepage
  1. C. Monckton of Brenchley, W. Soon, D. R. Legates, W.M.Briggs, Keeping it simple: the value of an irreducibly simple climate model, Science Bulletin, 60, 1378-1390 (2015). Journal homepage

 Monckton of Brenchley, W. Soon, D. R. Legates, W.M. Briggs, Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model, Science Bulletin, 60, 122-135 (2015). Journal homepage

d R. Legates, W. Soon, W.M. Briggs, and C. Monckton of Brenchley, Climate consensus and misinformation: A rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change, Science and Education, 24, 299-318 (2015). Journal homepage

  1. David R. Legates, Willis Eschenbach, and Willie Soon, Arctic albedo changes are small compared with changes in cloud cover in the tropics (Letter), Proceedings of the (U.S.) National Academy of Sciences, 111, E2157-E2158 (2014). Journal homepage
  2. Soon, and D. R. Legates, Solar Irradiance Modulation of Equator-to-Pole (Arctic) Temperature Gradients: Empirical Evidence for Climate Variation on Multi-decadal Timescales, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 93, 45-56 (2013). Journal homepage
  3. D. R. Legates, W. Soon, and W.M. Briggs, Learning and teaching climate science: The perils of consensus knowledge using agnotology, Science and Education, 22, 2007-2017 (2013). Journal homepage
  4. W. Soon, K. Dutta, D. R. Legates, V. Velasco, and W. Zhang, Variation in Surface Air Temperature of China During the 20th Century, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, 73, 2331-2344 (2011). Journal homepage
  5. [more w legates]
  6. ...
  7. W. Soon and S. Baliunas, Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Last 1000 Years, Climate Research, 23, 89 (2003). Journal homepage
  8. J. Lin, W. Soon and S. Baliunas, Theories of Solar Eruptions: A Review, New Astronomy Reviews, 47, 53 (2003). Journal homepage
  9. J. Lin, W. Soon and S. Baliunas, Eruptive processes in the solar atmosphere and the theories, (in Chinese), Chinese Science Bulletin, 47, 1601-1612 (2002). Journal homepage
  10. W. Soon, S. Baliunas, S. B. Idso, K. Ya. Kondratyev, and E. S. Posmentier, Reply to Comments on "Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions: Unknowns and uncertainties" by James Risbey, Climate Research, 22, 187 (2002). Journal homepage
  11. W. Soon, S. Baliunas, S. B. Idso, K. Ya. Kondratyev, and E. S. Posmentier, Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions: Unknowns and un- certainties, Climate Research, 18, 259 (2001). Journal homepage
  12. W. Soon, S. Baliunas, K. S. Demirchan, S. B. Idso, K. Ya. Kondratyev, and E. S. Posmentier, The impact of anthropogenic CO2 emission on climate: Unresolved Problems (in Russian), Proceedings of the Russian Geographical Society, 133, 1 (2001).
  13. ...
  14. C. O'hAiseadha, G. Quinn, R. Connolly, M. Connolly and Willie Soon. Energy and climate policy: An evaluation of global climate change expenditure 2011-2018. Energies, 13, 4839 (2020). Journal homepage
  15. R. Connolly, M. Connolly, R.M. Carter and Willie Soon. How much human-caused global warming should we expect with business-as-usual (BAU) climate policies? A semi-empirical assessment. Energies, 13, 1365 (2020). Journal homepage
  16. ...
  17. J. S. Armstrong, K. C. Green, W. Soon, Research on Forecasting for the Man-made Global Warming Alarm, Energy & Environment, 22, 1091-1104 (2011). Journal homepage
  18. W. Soon and D. R. Legates, Avoiding carbon myopia: Three considerations forpolicy makersconcerning manmade carbon dioxide, Ecology Law Currents, 37, 1-9 (2010). Journal homepage
  19. M. M. Katsova, M. A. Livshits, W. Soon, S. L. Baliunas, and D. D. Sokoloff, Differential Rotation of some HK-Project stars and the butterfly diagrams, New Astronomy, 15, 274-281 (2010). Journal homepage
  20. K. Olah, Z. Kollath, T. Granzer, K. G. Strassmeier, A. F. Lanza, S. Jarvinen, H. Korhonen, S. L. Baliunas, W. Soon, S, Messina, and G. Cutispoto, Multiple and changing cycles of active stars. II. Results, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 501, 701-713 (2009). Journal homepage
  21. K. C. Green, J. S. Armstrong, W. Soon, Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making, International Journal of Forecasting, 25, 826-832 (2009). Journal homepage

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promoted  to bigs 7/13, evil pending cf mercury

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https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/climate-deniers/koch-industries/dr-willie-soon-a-career-fueled-by-big-oil-and-coal/

Of all the climate deniers, one scientist has been particularly closely involved in the campaign against the climate science consensus for the majority of his career: Dr. Willie Soon.

UPDATE Feb. 2015: Newly released documents reveal Willie Soon’s contracts with Southern Company, the Koch Brothers, Exxon Mobil, and DonorsTrust.
See the New York Times expose from February 2015
UPDATE Feb. 2013: New FOIA results show new funding to Willie Soon from secret DonorsTrustnetwork, Koch brothers and Southern Company. 
Click here to see the fossil fuel financiers of Willie Soon’s career.
PolluterWatch.org has more on Dr. Willie Soon.
Introduction:

This investigation shows that Dr. Soon has received substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry for most of his scientific career and heavy corporate funding in the last decade.

After graduating in science (Bachelor and Masters), Dr. Soonreceived his Ph.D in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1991.

His thesis focussed on “Collisional-radiative properties of high-temperature, partially ionized nitrogen, oxygen, helium and hydrogen plasmas at conditions relevant to the Earth’s atmosphere.” He has never had any formal training as a climatologist and stated, in a reply to Sen. Jeffords in 2003 after a Congressional testimony, that one of his main teachers in climate science was denier David Legates.

After graduating, Dr. Soon began work at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The chair of Mt Wilson’s Board of Trustees was climate denier Robert Jastrow, who set up the George C Marshall Institute, the think tank that was arguably the first to engage in active climate denial, as documented by science historian Naomi Oreskes in the book “Merchants of Doubt”.

Dr. Soon is now employed as astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory (SAO). He is most famous for his work with fellow astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, writing the first paper that attempted to challenge the ‘hockey stick’ graph of temperature records published by Dr Michael Mann.

Key findings:

}:

Willie Soon’s Backers:  Big Coal and Big Oil

Since 2001, Willie Soon has received direct funding for his research of $1.033 million from Big Coal and Big Oil interests. In contrast, he received $842,079 from conventional government or university funders in the same period. The last grant he received from a funder with no ties to dirty energy interests was in 2002 (a grant that carried through to 2006). Since then, he has been entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave two grants to Dr. Soon totaling $175,000. The 2005-6 grant for $110,000 from the “Koch Foundation” is titled  “Koch/Mobile [sic] Charitable foundation.” This two year grant came from the Charles G. Koch Foundation according to Media Matters Transperancy.

The 2010 grant for $65,000 is titled “Understanding solar variability and climate change.” Dr. Soon’s acknowledgement in the 2007 polar bear paper published in the Journal of Ecological Complexity says he received funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

American Petroleum Institute(API) gave Dr. Soon multiple grants from 2001 to 2007 totalling nearly $274,000 for research apparently of interest to the oil industry, such as the “Sun’s impact on climate over the last 1000 years.” Additional grants of unknown amounts were given to Dr. Soon from 1994-1997.

ExxonMobil Foundation has heavily funded Dr. Soon in at least four grants between 2005 and 2010 totaling $335,000. The titles for these grants range from “project support” to “Exxon-Arctic climate change.” It is not known whether ExxonMobil is still funding Dr. Soon, but Exxon did note in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report,

“…we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in a responsible manner.”

Southern Company is new to the list of known funders of Willie Soon. Our FOIA request to Smithsonian revealed that Southern Company, the giant coal burning utility, gave Dr. Soon two grants: $110,000 in 2005-06 for “Understanding Arctic Climate Change” and $120,000 in 2008-09 for “Solar variability and climate change signals from temperature,” areas of research that Southern Company appears to have a keen interest in. This funding and relationship with Southern and EPRI might explain Dr. Soon’s “expertise” in mercury (see below), as the EPA finalizes overdue rules on mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations. Oil burning does not result in mercury emissions, but coal burning does.

Willie Soon regularly teamed with the SAO’s other astrophysicist, Sallie Baliunas, to defend fossil fuels and attack climate science. Some grants were split between them. This denier duo has received $1.153 million from dirty energy interests since 2001.

Dr. Willie Soon’s known corporate funding 1994-2012: [much more see s&b

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3 22

watts, apparently half-inspired by denier-for-hire Willie Soon’s latest deliverable, which retreads ground Watts covered a decade ago, about how “the final product” of temperature data that’s been corrected, “is so much warmer than stations that have not been encraoched [sic] upon by urbanization and artificials urfaces [sic] such as asphalt, concrete, and buildings,” Watts blogged.

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ref https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher

Wei-Hock Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose articles have been tied to corporate funding.]

By Justin Gillis and John Schwartz

Feb. 21, 2015

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

Funding That Climate Researcher Failed to Disclose

These documents show that Wei-Hock Soon, a part-time researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., received funding from fossil-fuel interests that he subsequently failed to disclose in a string of scientific papers.

Continue reading the main story

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==

https://www.desmog.com/willie-soon/

just end 521]

...

Key Deeds

September 24, 2020

Soon appeared in Marc Morano’s 2020 film Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy, produced by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).

During a discussion concerning whether the RICO (Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organisations Act), initially intended to combat organised crime, could be used against climate skeptics, Soon stated:

“Yes, if the RICO law apply I think it should apply to them rather than us.” [118]

October 2019

Soon signed the “Realist Catholic Climate Declaration,” drafted by Heartland Institute policy analystWilliam Briggs, which stated, “the earth’s climate has always changed, is changing now, and will never cease changing. The extent to which man is responsible for climate change is not known, only surmised. There is no earthly force capable of stopping climate change,” and that, “the salvation of souls is of more pressing concern than the air temperature. Pray to God and pray for your neighbor, not to the planet.” [116], [117]

The declaration was endorsed by Anthony Watts’ blog Watts Up With That, in a post by Charles Rotter, which stated, “please share this as widely as possible. With the concept of ‘eco-sins’ being bruited, and the return of paganism, this declaration is timely and important.” [115]

According to a post at William Briggs’s website: “This statement is to be in contradistinction to the hyperbolic and inaccurate ‘U.S. Catholic Climate Declaration’,” Briggs wrote of the draft. “The goal is to have something short, sweet, certain, and Catholic.” [114]

September 23, 2019

Soon appeared at a Heartland Institute panel discussion in New York City also featuring Patrick Michaels and David Legates, and moderated by John Stossel. The event was live-streamed to coincide with the UN’s Climate Summit and was announced with the tag line: “It’s time for both sides to make the case: What is happening to our climate and what can we do about it?” [111]

During the discussion, Soon said:

“I’m unable to find out what the carbon dioxide is doing to the atmosphere. It is increasing, but it’s not causing any warming.” [111]

“My message to all of them is that please don’t cry. I mean, I’ll hold your hand and sing lullabies to you. By 2030 I’ll still be here. Please don’t panic. There’s no such thing as climate catastrophe, these people are talking nonsense. It’s unbelievable that we have to answer all this kind of craziness.” [111]

“Carbon dioxide is the greatest gift on planet earth. Put it this way, if we can release more of it, we should have a whole lot more of it, as simple as that. Because according to the satellite data, I mean, we’ve been greening the planet, in a very, very nice way, in a sense, because the planet is a lot greener, the plants are using much more efficient in terms of water, require a lot less use of water. So a drought region becoming green, even in desert, a desert area. These are overall benefits, overall positive effects on the plants, as far as we can tell […] the impact on the temperature, we are unable to find it. I tell you that I’ve been studying this topic very carefully, only wanting to find a result on the impact of carbon dioxide on temperature, let’s say. I really cannot find [it] after 30 years.” [111]

December 14, 2018

The Heartland Institutereleaseda report written by Willie Soon and Patrick Moore among others criticizing Greenpeace, claiming the group promotes “socialist and anti-capitalist ideals.” According to the authors, “Greenpeace are not actually helping to protect the environment, or exposing real problems.” [106]

August 5 – 11, 2018

Soon gave a presentation at Camp Constitution, a group targeting children with the stated mission“to enhance understanding of our Judeo-Christian moral heritage, our American heritage of courage and ingenuity, including the genius of our United States Constitution, and the application of free enterprise, which together gave our nation an unprecedented history of growth and prosperity, making us the envy of the world.” [101]

According to the camp schedule, Soon presented on the Global Warming/Climate Change Hoax” as well ason “Are the Sea Levels Rising?” [105], [101]

Among those listed at the camp’s “Speakers Bureau” isTom DeWeese, founder of the American Policy Center and a promoter of the Agenda 21 conspiracy that contends the United Nations are aiming to establish a totalitarian world government. [102],[103], [104]

Lord Christopher Monckton was also a speaker at the camp.

March 2018

Soon was one of several prominent climate change deniers who offered“friend of the court” briefs as part of a case in which San Francisco and Oakland are suing fossil fuel companies over the costs their cities face due to climate change. [93]

InsideClimateNews noted that the judge requested that the groups each file a statement declaring who paid for their research, whether they received support from anyone “on either side of the climate debate,” and whether any of them were “affiliated in any way (directly or indirectly)” with parties to the litigation. [93]

Soonoffered the following response(emphasis added):

“I have not received any funding for the climate-sensitivity research led by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. In the past, I have received scientific research grants from Exxon-Mobil Foundation, Southern Company and the Charles G. Koch Foundation for my work on various topics, including scientific research on the Sun-climate connection.” (Emphasis added).[98]

*E&E News* reportedthat David Legates, who had worked with Soon on some of his studies, “notified the court that his views have cost him federal research grants but did not mention that some of the studies he conducted with Soon received funding from fossil fuel companies, including Exxon Mobil.” [99]

As of March 19, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said he had received two of the briefs. One group included Soon, Christopher Monckton, David Legates, William M. Briggs, and Michael Limburgamong others submitted by the Heartland Institute’s Peter J. Ferrara. The other group included Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, and Steven Koonin. Koonin has advocated for a “red team, blue team” approach to debating climate science. [93]

Authors also included David Legates, who has received funding by various industry groups such as theAmerican Petroleum Institute, Charles G. Koch Caritable Foundation, Southern Company, and ExxonmobilWilliam M. Briggs, a statistician; Michael Limburg, vice president of the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) that has co-hosted climate change denial events with the Heartland Institute; Dietrich Jeschke from  the University of Applied Sciences in Flensburg, Germany; and James Morrison, whose only listing is as an undergraduate in Environmental Scienes at the University of West Anglia. “It’s unusual to list an undergraduate student as a scientific expert, particularly in a brief related specifically to a tutorial on the scientific evidence underpinning a case,” *Climate Liability News* noted. [97]

ICN described the case—which included a “climate tutorial”—as an “an unusual arrangement, seemingly borrowed from patent litigation, where judges commonly hear initial testimony from both sides on pertinent scientific details,” would take place in a mock classroom and included a set of basic preliminary questions about climate to start the discussion. [94], [95]

Lindzen’s group summarized their message as follows: [93]

“To summarize this overview, the historical and geological record suggests recent changes in the climate over the past century are within the bounds of natural variability. Human influences on the climate (largely the accumulation of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion) are a physically small (1%) effect on a complex, chaotic, multicomponent and multiscale system. Unfortunately, the data and our understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify the climate’s response to human influences. However, even as human influences have quadrupled since 1950, severe weather phenomena and sea level rise show no significant trends attributable to them. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose. As a result, rising levels of CO2 do not obviously pose an immediate, let alone imminent, threat to the earth’s climate.”

Monckton and Soon’s group had their brief submitted by a Heartland Institute lawyer: [93]

“There is no agreement among climatologists as to the relative contributions of Man and Nature” to observed planetary warming, they claimed. As for the consensus view, it “says nothing about whether anthropogenic global warming was, is or will be catastrophic.”

“And why, he asked, did they wait so long to present their documents, limiting the time for others to respond to them?” ICN added. [93]

The case is one of several in which cities havefiled lawsuits against fossil fuel companies regarding knowledge about climate change, and damages related to to their products due to the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.[96]

February 4, 2018

In January 2018, more than 200 scientistsendorsed an open lettercalling on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to remove climate change denier Rebekah Mercer from its board and to “end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation.” *The New York Times* reported that those among the AMNH letter calling for Mercer to step down were Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. [90]

Soon was among a group of climate change deniers whoresponded with their own open letter, calling for the AMNH “not to cave in to this pressure.” The letter was signed by numerous individuals with ties to groups funded by the Mercer Family Foundation such as Will Happer of the CO2 CoalitionRichard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato InstituteCraig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. There are a number of signatories affiliated with the Heartland Institute, which has received over $5.78 million from the Mercer Family Foundation since 2008. [91]

The letter reads: [92]

“The Earth has supported abundant life many times in the geological past when there were much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is quite likely that future generations will benefit from the enrichment of Earth’s atmosphere with more carbon dioxide.

“Make no mistake, the agitators are not defending science from quackery — quite the contrary!”

July 25, 2017

Wilie Soon was listed as a contributor to Climate Change: The Facts 2017,released by theInstitute for Public Affairs (IPA) and edited by Jennifer Marohasy. While investigating the authors, DeSmog noted that one of the IPA‘s listed “leading experts” involved in the book is New Zealand’s Ken Ring, who in addition to being a described “long range weather forecaster” has written “two, possibly three, books about cats” including Pawmistry: How to Read Your Cat’s Paws in 1998. [63],[74]

The book’s editor, Jennifer Marohasy, wrote in the IPA press release: [80]

“However, our understanding of how the climate operates is incomplete and it is critically important to challenge the view that the planet is facing a global warming catastrophe.”

According to the book’s description: [75]

“Climate Change: The Facts 2017brings together contributions on the latest climate science from some of the world’s leading experts in the field including John Abbot, Sallie Baliunas, Paul Driessen, Tony Heller, Craig Idso, Clive James, Pat Michaels,Jo Nova, Ian Plimer, Tom Quirk, Peter Ridd, Ken Ring, Nicola Scafetta, Willie Soon,Roy Spencer, and Anthony Watts.

There are also essays by Matt Ridley, and Bjørn Lomborg on the economics of climate change, and by Simon Breheny on how the freedom to discuss climate change science is under threat.”

Prior versions of the book featured contributions from a range of prominent climate change deniers, and describes mainstream climate change research as “pseudo-science.”[76]

April/May, 2017

Soon is listed as a co-author of a paper in the Hydrological Sciences Journal on the “Re-calibration of Arctic sea ice extent datasets using Arctic surface air temperature records.” Other authors listed were Ronan Connoly and Michael Connolly, with acknowledgement to Professor Genrikh Alekseev of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute for sea ice estimates. The accepted paper was published online on April 29, 2017 and fuly published online May 22, 2017. [78]

The paper concluded that “current climate models are still quite poor at modelling past sea ice trends” after including a graph showing a decline in sea ice starting at the beginning of the “satellite era” in 1979. [78]

While the study by Soon and the other authors noted that they “agree with previous studies that have noted a general decrease in Arctic sea ice extent (for all four seasons) since the start of the satellite era (1979),” they suggest that it followed a general increase in prior sea ice. [78]

The Heartland Institute was quick to republish the paper, putting the initially submitted manuscript online as early as April 30, 2017, pointing to it as proof that “The recent decline in Arctic sea ice is not unique.” [79]

In the disclosure statement section of the paper, it notes that “No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.” [78]

March 23, 2017

Soon was a member of the “Climate Science” panelat the Heartland Institute‘s 12th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC12). He also introduced Lunch Keynotes by Patrick Michaels and Rep. Lamar Smith(R-Texas).[73]

Panel 1B) Climate Science

february 23, 2017

Willie Soon was asignatory of a petition (PDF)organized by Richard Lindzenof the Cato Instituteurging President DonaldTrump to pull the United States out of the United Nations international convention on climate change (UNFCCC).[71]

“In just a few weeks, more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world have signed the petition below,” Lindzen wrote in the letter. [71]

DeSmog investigated the list, and found that only a small handful of the signatories could be considered “even remotely ‘qualified’ or ‘eminent’ — but not in the field of climate science.” The list included individuals “interested in climate,” and one signatory who only identified as an “emailer who wished to sign the petition” while some signers provided no affiliation or address whatsoever. [72]

January 5, 2017

Willie Soon was a signatory to a Cornwall Allianceopen lettersupporting Scott Pruittfor EPA Administrator under the Trump administration. [68]

“Mr. Pruitt has also demonstrated understanding of and open-mindedness toward scientific insights crucial to the formulation and implementation of environmental regulation. He is prepared to hear all sides in debates over the risks and benefits of various activities that come under the purview of the EPA,” reads the letter.

On January 12, 2017,Senate Democrats raised conflict of interest concerns regarding Scott Prutt’s fossil fuel ties. Pruitt had spent years working to combat the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan. [69]

In an open letter to the Office of Government Ethics, members of the Senate’s environmental panel commented:

“During his tenure as Attorney General of Oklahoma, Mr. Pruitt has blurred the distinction between official and political actions, often at the behest of corporations he will regulate if confirmed to lead EPA,” the letter said. “Public reporting based on documents produced by Freedom of Information Act requests illustrate how Mr. Pruitt and members of his staff have worked closely with fossil fuel lobbyists to craft his office’s official positions.”

Pruitt was further grilled on his fossil fuel ties at his confirmation hearing on January 18. [70]

Some notable signatories of the Cornwall Alliance letter, as of January 5, 2017, included:

December 8, 2016

Willie Soon was a speaker at the “At the Crossroads III Energy and Climate Summit,” an event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundationand the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). The event was billed as “the premier energy-and-climate policy event in America,” and attracted a range of prominent climate change deniers as well as a range of names connected to Donald Trump and his transition team. Video and choice quotes below. [65]

“I’ve been living under the dark cloud of censorship and intimidation as soon as I started my post-doc career at the Center for Astrophysics in 1992.“ [60:17\

Speaking of Greenpeace: “But, as my mom taught me as a young kid, that you forgive all the bad people but then you never forget.” [60:26\

Speaking of his 2003 paper:  “Actually, I didn’t really want to write this paper. But as a professional scientist, the phenomenon that happened in between, let’s say, 2001 to 2003 is highly strange. When you tried to publish a paper at those times, if you don’t cite those famous papers like the famous hockey stick paper properly, and you will actually be taken to task, rather seriously actually, or else your paper will be rejected. This is the kind of coercion that should not be allowed in open science. But unfortunately they prevailed, so I decided I had to do something about it and so I wrote a paper.”[64:24\

“I have never said this in public, so I’ll say it for the first time: that ultimately, that version that published in Climate Research was a hoax. […] It is really as if I give a damn about having another paper in publication.” [68:32\

“I’m sick and tired of this system of collusion and coercions.” [69:13\

“And then, you know the real reason why they need some kind of attack on me? It was mainly because guys like this—ok, shall be nameless, you read it yourself [points to slide with images of David Halpern, NASA and Mark Eakin NOAA]—Who at that time was actually working for NOAA and NASA and was funding some of those guys like Michael Mann and all that on paleoclimate study was saying, look man, we need some kind of cogent reply, some kind of serious critical discussion so they could pass on to somebody in OSTP. OSTP, as I hope most of you know, right, Office of Science and Technology of the President. And to say that ‘oh, we’ve got to have something going, let’s go and attack this Willie Soon.’ Really?”  [69:18\

Soon describes the “wall of shame” as “Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, so on and so forth. And then, the most important name I want you to remember is Ellen Mosley-Thompson.” Soon’s presentation slide features Wigley, Jones, Hulme, Briffa, Hansen, Santer, Tenberth, Karl, Bradley, MacCracken, Ellen Mosley-Thompson (editor of Eos), and Pachauri, who he calls the “choo choo train guy.” [70:00\

Speaking on Mann’s rebuttal to his paper: “It doesn’t matter. You see? They still published that with the result in there, because you know Michael Mann was able to presuade all of them, ‘just give me your signature.’ Ok. This is how science works right. Because Wilie Soon is so bad that no matter what the cause is, even a giant bad result you should publish.” [71:18\

“Steve McinTyre of Canada […] actually was able to find out you know, the AR5, which is one of those United Nations reports, was published in 2013, actually was able to confirm that we are kind of right, right? But then of course you must not let anybody know about this. Don’t ever cite Soon and Balliunas or Soon and Legates at all.” [72:44\

“I want to remind you what climate actually is. What kind of expertise [you need to study it]. If you want to study climate just because of carbon dioxide, I’m sorry, it’s still not enough to study only the atmosphere. You’ve got to know all of this bunch of stuff. This is part of the reason why the struggle for answer is so hard. We may never know the answer, but then we’ve got to keep trying and follow the scientific method, please.” [74:28\

“Since 2004, I just consciously do not want to get any more funding from the federal government so I stopped replying to NASA, NSF, and all those things. I quit. Put it that way. I rather seek all my funding from private sources, private donation, then by 2012, this particular reality sink in. In the sense I could no longer work on anything on sun and climate together, but I can work on the sun only. Ok. And this is the reality that sinks in. I fully accept that, but I want to tell you, if you want to study anything about climate, if you don’t study sun-climate, I don’t know, what am I supposed to study right?” [75:15\

“I want to talk about this big bully in the National Academy of Science. In 2015, who are writing a small little note, correcting something that we think is not right. It doesn’t matter the content—if you want to know, of course, ask me and David Legates, and Willis Eschenbach, one of the volunteers actually. He had no proper science title, but he’s a good scientist. So we work on this stuff and guess what happened? We claim, as you know, this is a free time work, of course this only take like only less than a day. So we wrote this letter, it got published. Then you have this editor-in-chief appear, NAS. Sending me some kind of warning. That, you know, but you didn’t tell the truth. You didn’t declare. Let me blow this up [magnifies slide]. Trying to put a yellow star on my jacket. He’s trying to say, you know, we’re going to put this note in by saying you have not disclosed your conflict of interest. That you were funded by funding from Southern Company, for example. Things like that, okay.”[76:00\

“I have never actually been able to have the opportunity to publicly thank my lawyer, which is Gordon Todd […] so this guy work for free for me, of course, obviously—I have no money, please. There’s no legal defense fund. So on and so forth. But then they fire back by saying ‘please don’t do that.’ Because I have told them that this is a short time work, it’s just a letter, it was not funded by anything, it is a volunteer work. Call it a service to science, because I care about science. ” [77:27\]

“Even [Michael] Mann and [Peter] Gleik have published in PNAS and they clearly have conflicts of interest in terms of the subject, in terms of the stuff that they are receiving money for doing what their work is. […] Peter Gleik is another guy that is such a disgraceful, disgraceful guy. ” [78:22\

“In 2004, David Legates and I releazed there’s something seriously wrong with Michael Mann’s Work, another aspect of it, which is the instrumental temperature record,  how he smoothed the data. […] The sweetest thing about this climate gate is that there is proof that Michael Mann did that […] and we caught him with his pants down.” [80:07\

“My basic conclusion is very simple. That you have this dark cloud of censorship and intimidation [that] has really inundated the climate science for a long time now. And climate science as we know it has been dangerously corrupted by scientism, all these bullies of censorship including the scientists, the scientific institution, even the funding agency—continue to hijack science with their own gain. So they must be stopped. I hope we can stop of course. Hopefully, with a political win, which is shown that depends on politics, that we can do something about this.”[82:12\

Doug Domenech, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s “Fueling Freedom” project, wrote about the proceedings at*The Hill.*Domenech outlined the common climate change denial message shared among the speakers: “Is climate change real? Yes, it has happened in the past and will happen in the future. Is man making an impact on the climate? Perhaps but in very small ways. But the overarching consensus remains the climate change we are experiencing is by no means catastrophic.” [66]

Speakers included:

December 3, 2016

Willie Soon is listed as a speaker at Freedom Force International’s “3rd Congress” event titled “Global-Warming; an Inconvenient Lie.” Freedom Force describes the event as “a gathering of the world’s top experts on this subject who will put an end, once-and-for-all, to the myth of anthropogenic (man-caused) global-warming.”[64]

Soon’s speech is titled “Man vs. Sun; Put Your Money on the Sun.” The complete speaker list is below: [64]

August, 2016

Willie Soon is listed as a “Founding Member” of group named Climate Exit (Clexit) led by climate change denier Christopher Monckton. According to Clexit’s founding statement (PDF), “The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.” [59], [60]

Desmog reports on how the group grew in the wake of the UK‘s decision to leave the EU. A key member of Clexit’s “60 well-informed science, business and economic leaders” is Hugh Morgan, a former board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia and former CEO of Western Mining Corporation with close ties to Australia’s Liberal party. [61], [62]

According to Clexit’s founding statement:

“If the Paris climate accord is ratified, or enforced locally by compliant governments, it will strangle the leading economies of the world with pointless carbon taxes and costly climate and energy policies, all with no sound basis in evidence or science […]” [60]

July 8 – 10, 2016

Willie Soon was a speaker at 34th Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, co-sponsored by Access to Energy, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and Physicians for Civil Defense. [55]

Willie Soon’s talk was titled on “Beethoven’s Ice Cream, Tolstoy’s Fire, Happer’s Picosecond Pedestal—and Climate” (video below)

[vid

jane Orient

June 13, 2016

Willie Soon was among individuals listed as creditors in Peabody Energy’s 2016 bankruptcy filings, reports the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD/PRWatch). [51]

While the available bankruptcy documents do not list the scale or dates of funding, they outline Peabody Energy’s financial ties to a large network of groups promoting climate change denial.[52]

Prominent individuals appearing in the documents include climate deniers Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer and Richard Berman. The long list of organizations also includes groups such as Americans for Prosperity, American Legislative Exchange Council, CFACT, Institute for Energy Research, State Policy Network, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and dozens more. [53]

*The Guardian* also analysed and reported on the Peabody bankruptcy findings: [54]

“These groups collectively are the heart and soul of climate denial,” said Kert Davies, founder of the Climate Investigation Center, who has spent 20 years tracking funding for climate denial. “It’s the broadest list I have seen of one company funding so many nodes in the denial machine.”

The company’s filings reveal funding for a range of organisations which have fought Barack Obama’s plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and denied the very existence of climate change. […]

Among Peabody’s beneficiaries, the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has insisted – wrongly – that carbon emissions are not a threat but “the elixir of life” while the American Legislative Exchange Council is trying to overturn Environmental Protection Agency rules cutting emissions from power plants. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity campaigns against carbon pricing. The Oklahoma chapter was on the list. […]

“The breadth of the groups with financial ties to Peabody is extraordinary. Thinktanks, litigation groups, climate scientists, political organisations, dozens of organisations blocking action on climate all receiving funding from the coal industry,” said Nick Surgey, director of research for the Center for Media and Democracy.

“We expected to see some denial money, but it looks like Peabody is the treasury for a very substantial part of the climate denial movement.”

Notable organizations also listed as creditors in the bankruptcy documents include:

April 5, 2016

Despite a new transparency policy by the Smithsonian Institution, Willie Soon obtained $65,000 in “dark money” to fund an undisclosed research project, reports InsideClimate News. Soon obtained the grant form Donors Trust (DT). [56]

The Smithsonian’s new policy requires researchers to disclose the sources of their funding.  Smithsonian officials said the Donors Trust disclosure was sufficient to satisfy its new policy. [56]

“It is as transparent as we can be,” said John Gibbons, the Smithsonian spokesman. “What we ask is: ‘Is the money coming from a legal entity?’” he said. “That’s as far as we can look into it.” [56]

December 7, 2015

Willie Soon appeared at the United Nation’s Conference on Climate Change, COP21, in Paris, France with the Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to “hold a ‘counter-conference’ … called the Day of Examining the Data.” [49] Other notable climate science deniers that were in attendance at the “counter-conference,” included: Robert Carter, S. Fred Singer, Christopher Essex, James Taylor, Patrick Moore, Wolfgang Müller, James Inhofe, and Christopher Monckton. [50]

Watch Willie Soon’s “counter-conference” presentation with the Heartland Institute, below Willie Soon’s presentation begins at 2:01:35/maxresdefault.jpg)):

June 11-12, 2015

Willie Soon was a speaker on Panel 1: “Climate Science,” at the Heartland Institute’s Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC10) in Washington, D.C., with Patrick Michaels and David Legates. [47]

View Willie Soon’s Panel 1 presentation at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC10, below: [48]

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baliunas uses cfa email at heartland 521

2018 still uses cfa affil, tho watts up has disclaimer?

wsoon@cfa.harvard.edu

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/people/willie-soon

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxonmobil-denies-lying-about-global-warming/

Scientific American

Climatewire

ENVIRONMENT

ExxonMobil Denies Lying about Global Warming

A spokesman for the oil giant refuted the basis of the New York Attorney General’s investigation

By Gayathri Vaidyanathan, ClimateWire on November 6, 2015

Exxon Mobil Corp. insisted yesterday that it has not lied to its shareholders about the risks of climate change as it reacted to news that New York’s attorney general is investigating the company’s climate statements to investors.

“Exxon Mobil recognizes that climate risks are real and responsible actions are warranted,” saidKen Cohen, the company’s vice president of public and government affairs, during a press call (E&ENews PM, Nov. 5).

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) has issued a “broad” subpoena dealing with “our assessment of climate change,” Cohen said.

The New York Times reported yesterday that Schneiderman’s office has requested extensive financial records, emails and other documents going back more than a decade, to a time when the Kyoto Protocol, the current climate treaty, was being discussed.

Exxon allegedly funded groups at the time to undermine climate science, according to a Greenpeace investigation.

“We were active in discussions about whether the Kyoto Protocol was an appropriate policy response,” Cohen said. “Our position, [which] continues to this day, [was] that an approach that would exclude the majority of the world’s emitters was not going to be an effective policy response to a global risk.”

Exxon began informing investors about climate risks in 2007 in regulatory filings and corporate citizenship reports. The company also began including a price on carbon in its internal business planning in 2007, which has ranged from $60 to $80 per ton, according to Yale Environment 360.

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Exxon told Congress the same year that it had stopped funding climate change deniers, such as Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But records obtained by the Climate Investigations Center show that Soon received funding from the company until 2010 (ClimateWire, March 23).

Cohen drew a distinction between the company’s policy stance and its research into climate science. The company’s scientists have published numerous studies since the 1970s and have collaborated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception, he said.

Schneiderman has reportedly been investigating Exxon for a year. His office is also investigating Peabody Energy, a large coal company, according to news reports. Beginning in September,InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times have published a series of articles finding that Exxon has a long history of climate research, which contradicts its stance on climate policy (ClimateWire, Oct. 28).

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

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https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/legacy/Global/usa/planet3/PDFs/Donor's%20Trust%20-%20Laundering%20Climate%20Denial%20Funding.pdf

GREENPEACE BRIEFING

Donors Trust: The shadow operation that has laundered $146 million in climate-denial funding

One year ago, in February 2012, internal documents from the Heartland Institute were revealed by a sting operation,

leading to the discovery that Heartland had one significant “Anonymous Donor” who accounted for a vast majority of

their funding revenue.It was then discovered that these checks were being routed through two interlaced trusts in

Alexandria Virginia: Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Over the past year, Greenpeace and other researchers have discovered that Donors Trust, a shadowy funding operation

for anti-government extremists, is laundering millions of dollars in climate denial funding for donors who do not want to

be associated with their pet causes. For the purposes of this report, any funding attributed to “Donors Trust” includes

funding from both Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Donors Capital Fund is the sister organization to Donors Trust,

with the same mission, same leadership, and same office address.

Since the late 1990s, Greenpeace has tracked and exposed the funding to climate denial front groups from Big Oil

donors, including ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers foundations. As these funding connections have been revealed, the

publicly traceable funding to these groups has slowly declined, while the overall revenue and budgets of these groups

has increased in many cases. This has coincided with a sharp increase in anonymous and untraceable funding for denial

groups through Donors Trust.

Greenpeace defines “climate denial” organizations as those that have attempted to undermine and obstruct the

scientific consensus around climate change or policy solutions to climate change, against the recommendations of the

scientific community that countries must act urgently to reduce carbon pollution. Funding of these organizations is only

disclosed on the IRS 990 tax forms of non-profit foundations without divulging individual donors, which means that a

great deal of corporate and industry giving is untraceable. The groups rarely publish their funders on their websites or in

other publications.

  1. KEY FINDINGS

 As traceable funding from big oil (Exxon and Koch) to climate denial front groups has slowly declined over the

last few years, “anonymous” money from Donors Trust has sharply increased.

 Donors Trust was created with the intent of bolstering support to climate denial and anti-government extremists

while hiding the identity of major funders, like Charles G. Koch Foundation and the Koch’s Knowledge and

Progress Fund.

 Donors Trust and its associated organization, Donors Capital Fund, have funded 102 climate-denial organizations

since 2002.

 From 2002 to 2011, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund have provided $146 million to climate denial groups.

 In 2010, a dozen climate denial groups received between 30% to 70% of their funding from Donors Trust,

including the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity, as well as Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

(CFACT)

 Additional climate denial organizations that have received major funding in recent years by Donors Trust include

the Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and the James Partnership (Cornwall

Alliance).

...

  1. KEY TAKERS OF DONORS TRUST MONEY

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)

In 2011, CFACT received 40% of its budget from Donors Trust ($1.2 million). The previous year, CFACT received nearly

half, $1.3 million totaling 45.5%, from Donors Trust. This indicates that Donors Trust may be keeping afloat one of the

country’s most strident and misleading climate denial organizations. CFACT was originally founded to counter the

environmental movement, and anti-environmental programs dominate its agenda today. According to the CFACT

website:9

“In 1985, the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) was founded to promote a positive voice on

environment and development issues...Today, this Washington DC-based group...can be heard relentlessly infusing the

environmental debate with a balanced perspective on environmental stewardship.”

CFACT refuses to accept any scientific evidence, not to mention the consensus, that human activity is causing climate

change. CFACT maintains an FAQ webpage that attempts to refute arguments that the vast majority of scientists say

climate change is human-caused:10

o “While some continue to insist that human ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions are causing potentially

catastrophic changes in climate and weather, growing numbers of scientists say nature, not man, rules

the climate.”

o “Today, the real danger is laws and policies implemented in a misplaced belief that humans can control

or prevent climate change. These policies raise energy costs, kill jobs, andimpose especially heavy

burdens on poor families.”

o “Regulating carbon dioxide may be profitable for certain industries and governments, but will impose

enormous costs on society – while having no effect on our weather and climate.”

o The idea that there is a “scientific consensus” does not hold up. Scientists who are skeptical about

“dangerous man-made climate change” have been speaking out for years.11

Marc Morano, the long-standing climate denier, currently serves as CFACT’s primary climate-denial spokesperson. The

organization also sponsors and produces Morano’s website, ClimateDepot.com. Morano is frequently a “talking head”

on cable television news, casting doubt on the scientific evidence of human influence on the climate. Recently on Fox

News, Morano claimed, “[Climate change action] is now akin to medieval witchcraft, where we used to blame witches

for controlling the weather."12

CFACT’s 2011 financial disclosure form shows that Morano is the most valued employee at CFACT, receiving the largest

salary of $150,000 a year. Morano’s compensation is 40% more than both the Executive Director and the President’s

salaries, whose compensation is roughly $105,000 annually. After Morano’s arrival at CFACT in 2009, CFACT’s revenue

increased significantly, nearly doubling from 2008 to 2009.

 Dr. Willie Soon

Dr. Willie Soon is an aerospace engineer employed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, who is wellknown for accepting funds from oil and coal business interests. Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act inquiries to

Smithsonian Institute reveal that in2011 and 2012, Dr. Soon received nearly $115,000 from Donors Trust.13 Since 1994,

Dr. Soon has received over $1.3 million from ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, American Petroleum Institute, Texaco,

Southern Company, Donors Trust and others.

Even though Dr. Soon is not a trained climatologist and most of his work is not peer-reviewed, his work is still frequently cited by climate deniers. He has been affiliated with a number of climate denial organizations, including the Heartland Institute, George C. Marshall Institute, and Tech Central Station.14 Dr. Soon pretends to be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to scientific expertise.

He has published articles claiming that polar bears are not threatened by climate change, mercury from coal plants is not a public health threat, and variability of the sun is responsible for Arctic changes. In addition to his organizational affiliations, Dr. Soon has conspired to weaken the scientific consensus on climate change. In a letter obtained by Greenpeace, Dr. Soon alerts his colleagues to an upcoming UN climate change report (IPCC Fourth Assessment), and states “I hope we can start discussing to see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment.” He also says “As A-team, we may give it our best shot to…counter some of the chapters,” and “Even if we can tackle ONE single chapter forcefully and effectively, we will really accomplish A LOT!” 15

14 http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/CASE-STUDY-Dr-Willie-Soon-aCareer-Fueled-by-Big-Oil-and-Coal/

15 http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/Willie-Soon-email-to-climate-deniers/

16 http://www.polluterwatch.com/blog/heartland-institute%E2%80%99s-7th-climate-denial-palooza-fewer-attendees-more-fringe-conspiracy-theorie

17 http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/a-new-tactic-for-climate-skeptics/

18 http://www.polluterwatch.com/292934-1-15-2012-2012-fundraising-plan (page 20)

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https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20150227082307275

climate crusader’s profitable link to Harvard exposed

Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education  27 February 2015

Years of using a Harvard nameplate to flog his insistence that polar bears are doing fine, and that sunspots might explain planetary warming better than the Industrial Revolution does, may finally have caught up with Wei-Hock Soon.

This is an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education, America’s leading higher education publication. It is presented here under an agreement with University World News.

Soon, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, endured a barrage of news reports last week detailing his acceptance of US$1.2 million in support from energy companies and others hostile to government limits on fossil-fuel use.

In response, the Smithsonian Institution announced plans to investigate whether he had properly acknowledged his political alliances.

"We’re very concerned to get to the bottom of this, and make sure we have all the facts," W John Kress, the Smithsonian’s interim under secretary for science, said in an interview on Tuesday.

The investigation threatens serious repercussions for Soon, commonly known as Willie. But it may raise an equally tough question for Harvard University, the Smithsonian, and arrangements for their shared astrophysics observatory: How did the scientist trade on Harvard’s name to gain a leading role in climate politics?

In a series of scientific journal articles over the past decade, Soon has routinely listed himself as representing "the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics".

In turn, various reports describing his activities and beliefs – often published by organisations dedicated to opposing government regulations – have short-handed his identification to "Harvard scientist". Even The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student-run newspaper, has referred to him that way.

The problem, according to Charles R Alcock, a Harvard professor of astronomy who also serves as director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is that the "centre" refers primarily to a shared set of physical facilities. Almost everyone working at those facilities, Alcock said, is either an employee of Harvard or an employee of the Smithsonian, a federally administered collection of museums and research centres.

"From a legal point of view," he said, "there is no such entity as the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics." And Soon is employed only by the Smithsonian, Alcock said. "It’s always been that way. He has never had any Harvard appointment."

But confusion over Soon’s relationship with Harvard, even if it bolstered his profitable political alliances, may not be entirely or even primarily his responsibility.

One example is his email address: wsoon@cfa.harvard.edu.

Kress said that such shared identifications reflect the level of scientific partnership felt by Harvard and Smithsonian scientists, whose observatories merged facilities in 1972 (now four locations in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and observatory facilities in Arizona and Hawaii).

He also acknowledged that the blurring might bring "more prestige" to his side of the alliance, in which 200 Harvard scientists are vastly outnumbered by about 700 Smithsonian counterparts. Either way, he said, the email domain is among the matters that the Smithsonian may now re-evaluate as a result of the disclosures about Soon.

Corporate benefactors

:{:{The institutions seem less open, however, to reconsidering the financial arrangements exposed by Soon’s activities. Last week’s revelations were based on records of internal Smithsonian email discussions provided under an open-records request to Greenpeace, the environmental-advocacy group, which supports restrictions on fossil-fuel use.}:

The records showed that Soon and the Smithsonian had received money from groups that included the energy conglomerate Southern Company, the Charles G Koch Foundation, and Donors Trust, a fund for anonymous contributions identified by a 2013 Drexel University study as the largest single provider of money to political efforts to fight climate change policy.}:

:{:{Alcock confirmed through a spokesperson that the donors disclosed by Greenpeace had provided Soon and the Smithsonian with a total of US$1.2 million over a period of 10 years. }::{He also confirmed that, under standard observatory procedures, less than half of that amount was passed through to Soon as salary. Most was kept by the Smithsonian to cover facility operating costs.}:

}:

:{:{Most Smithsonian researchers receive their compensation through such "soft money" payments rather than a salary from the institution, Kress said. But unlike Soon, most of those at the observatory draw funding heavily from government sources, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation, which in turn rely on peer-reviewed award processes.}:

In a typical year, the Smithsonian observatory receives about US$95 million in grant support, said Alcock’s spokesperson, Christine Pulliam. "Only a small fraction of 1 percent of that figure comes from corporate sources," she said.}:

At the same time, the Smithsonian has no policy requiring its researchers to disclose potential financial conflicts of interest in any scientific journal articles they produce.

Instead, its promised investigation of Soon will focus on whether he violated financial-disclosure requirements of the journals themselves. At least one of them, a Chinese journal called Science Bulletin, has promised its own review of the matter.

Before the issue of financial disclosure arose, the scientific quality of Soon’s published work hadlong attracted complaints from experts in the field. Gavin A Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has repeatedly accused Soon of vastly overstating the effect that variations in solar output might have on the earth’s warming climate.

Kress even admitted a lack of confidence in his own employee’s work. "Up until now, it has not been an issue of our scientists' not disclosing their sources of funding," he said.

"As far as we can see, up until just recently, that appeared to be the case with Willie Soon. He was publishing science. He may have interpreted his results in various ways, but the actual data and the results reflected his research, which, although I would say is not the highest-quality research, was research carried out in a scientific process."

Soon did not respond to requests for comment.

A Harvard University spokesperson, Jeff A Neal, provided a written statement saying the institution "takes the appropriate use, and the inappropriate misuse, of the university name very seriously. When made aware of a potential issue related to the misuse of the Harvard name, we communicate our expectations to the relevant individuals or organisations".

Asked if that applied to Soon or the Smithsonian, Neal said he would not discuss specific cases.

The roles played by both Harvard and the Smithsonian in burnishing Soon’s credentials and scientific authority are key to Soon’s saga, said Andrew J Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan. Hoffman is making plans to host a conference in May at his Ann Arbor campus on the risks and benefits for academic scientists participating in public-policy debates.

"Why is anyone even listening to him?" Hoffman said of Soon. "Because he’s got ‘Harvard’ after his name. Once you take that away, who is Willie Soon? He’s nobody."

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.

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Indeed, my heart sank when I heard of the news of Dave’s passing yesterday.

My memory, though not very long, on Dave is extremely positive as I have

watched him from  near and far inhandling our common enemies that defy both science and god alike with such total calm and wholesome grace with no presumptions nor any arrogance of talking down to even our enemies. I know Dave will be watching all of us from the heaven and my deepest sorrow is to know that his family must endure the deepest pains that separate this world of ours and the kingdom of God.

My sincere condolence to Dave’s and the CFACTfamilies.

Dr. Willie Soon, Scientist and fellow freedom fighter

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https://wattsupwiththat.wpcomstaging.com/2015/06/23/dr-willie-soon-on-the-vaticans-repeat-of-its-galileo-debacle/

no lnx

Dr. Willie Soon on the Vatican’s repeat of its Galileo debacle

Alec Rawls /June 23, 2015

Putting papal authority behind yet another failed scientific paradigm

GalileoTrial_1633 pix]

Guest post by Alec Rawls

As Galileo insisted about the perversity of his persecution by the Catholic Church: “[I]t is impossible for a conclusion to be declared heretical while we remain in doubt as to its truth.”

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Now 400 years later, with the Pope’s newLaudato Si’ encyclical,Dr. Soon notes that the Vatican is again engaged in this same error, lending papal authority to highly uncertain scientific views that lie well outside of the Church’s sphere of moral authority.

Willie’s op-ed can be found at the Breitbart News website. I’ll just post a trio of fair-use excerpts here:

The verdict is clear:Any attempt to stop the use of available fossil fuels for life and all human activities will cause far more harm and lead to more deaths than the theological belief in future catastrophic disasters endorsed by the encyclical.Even worse, the church knows that many of the predicted catastrophic disasters from the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide are highly exaggerated if not outright fraudulent. Yet Laudato Si’ gives credence and praise to these predictions by relying on climate models scenarios that have been proven to be false.

Plus:

I fear that this encyclical is driven not by science, but by social motivations and political yearnings.

And again from Galileo:

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“[C]ertainly no one doubts that the Supreme Pontiff has always an absolute power to approve or condemn; but it is not in the power: of any created being to make things true or false, for this belongs to their own nature and to the fact.”

June 23, 2015 in Papal Climate Encyclical.

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Climate Insanity on steroids!

Post navigation? Wild Claim: ‘climate change…could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years’A shift in climate ‘forcing’ led to demise of Laurentide ice sheet 9000 years ago ?

177 thoughts on “Dr. Willie Soon on the Vatican’s repeat of its Galileo debacle”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24022015/willie-soon-too-much-ice-really-bad-polar-bears

willie Soon: 'Too Much Ice Is Really Bad for Polar Bears'

In return for undisclosed funding from a coal utility, the scientist delivered contrarian talks and papers on Arctic melting.

BY SABRINA SHANKMAN, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

FEB 24, 2015

"Too much ice is really bad for polar bears," climate skeptic Willie Soon said in a 2008 speech titled, "Endangering the Polar Bear: How Environmentalists Kill."

Soon later cited the talk as a "deliverable" in return for a research grant from Southern Company Services, one of the largest U.S. coal companies. Under the same grant the contrarian scientist also published two papers questioning whether climate change was dangerous for polar bears and whether the Arctic was warming, without disclosing the fossil fuel companies that funded his work.

The polar bear theories advanced by Soon in these and other works have been discredited by scientists worldwide. Even so, the ideas have sowed confusion about the fate of an iconic species that biologists expect to experience widespread devastation as climate change worsens.

"It plants doubt in the minds of people because of the complex nature of the science," said Juscelino Colares, a professor of law and associate director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. "That's all the industry needs is doubt to delay action."

Soon works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The center houses the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which employs Soon. The polar bear papers were among 11 he published in research journals that failed to disclose Southern Co.'s funding, according to documents made public Saturday. All the papers question the extent, severity, cause or existence of man-made climate change.

Read: A Guide To Willie Soon's Climate Research Funded by Fossil Fuel Companies

The information comes from a trove of public emails and documents obtained by Greenpeace through Freedom of Information Act requests. They were released by the Climate Investigations Center, a watchdog group that tracks the activities of companies and organizations that fight climate action.

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Between 2001 and 2012, Soon received $838,717 from the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation for his research, the documents show. Since 2006, he has received an additional $409,754 from Southern Co. Soon relies on grants from outside funders for his research and salary.

On Monday, the Smithsonian Institution said in a statement that it was "greatly concerned" about the allegations of Soon's failure to disclose his funding sources. The U.S. government-backed museum and research organization said it would initiate a full review of the organization's ethics and disclosure policies.

Soon did not respond to multiple requests for comment and Southern Co. did not respond to a request for an interview. In an emailed response, the company said, "Southern Company funds a broad range of research on a number of topics that have potentially significant public policy implications for our business."

Soon's polar bear research has focused on various issues, from the population ecology of polar bears to the accuracy of models that predict how sea ice loss will affect the bears. The state of Alaska used his polar bear work in a failed attempt to block the listing of polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

2007 Polar Bear Paper

Since 1979, almost 700,000 square miles of sea ice have vanished in the Arctic as global warming caused temperatures to rise. That's roughly the area covered by California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Utah and most of Idaho. Biologists have predicted for decades that as the ice disappears, polar bear populations will decline because they rely on the ice as a hunting platform.

By 2050, two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be gone, with extinction a real possibility by the end of the century, according to biologist Steven Amstrup, a leading polar bear biologist who spent 30 years with the U.S. Geological Survey. He is now chief scientist for Polar Bears International, a conservation and advocacy group.

Scientists are seeing evidence of this decline, especially in Canada's western Hudson Bay, one of the world's most studied polar bear regions. Research there has shown a direct link between the loss of sea ice and the health of polar bears, including a connection between an earlier spring melting of sea ice and lower survival rates for cubs.

One of Soon's polar bear papers, published in 2007 in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Ecological Complexity, focused on this population. The paper questioned whether climate change was dangerous for polar bears and whether the region was warming at all, even as NASA reported that the 2007 minimum sea ice levels were at an all-time low, falling to nearly 40 percent below the 1979-2000 average. (A new historical low-point was reached in 2012.)

The paper suggested alternative theories for population declines, such as stress from interactions with tourists, and predicted that the carnivores would find new sources of food such as berries and vegetation to supplement their diet of seals and other marine mammals.

The lead author was Markus Dyck, a polar bear biologist for the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Among the six other authors were a number of known climate deniers, including Sallie Baliunas, who co-authored a 2003 study with Soon that challenged climate scientist Michael Mann's "hockey stick theory" of global warming.

The authors stated that they began without funding but that "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." No additional funders were listed.

Read: Documents Reveal Fossil Fuel Fingerprints on Contrarian Climate Research]

The paper challenged the work of two longtime, respected polar bear biologists—Ian Stirling and Andrew Derocher. In 2003, Derocher had seen a version of the paper that was submitted to the journal Ecography. Derocher was one of two people asked to peer-review it. Both reviewers recommended against publication, and it was rejected.

"I thought it was heavily flawed," Derocher said in an interview. Derocher decided to sign his review, though typically reviews are anonymous. Derocher said he thought it would be helpful if the authors knew who had written it.

When the paper was published in 2007, Derocher was surprised to see his review referenced—without mention of what he had said.

"We are grateful for the constructive comments on earlier versions of the manuscript from S. Polischuk, S.-L. Han, and A. Derocher, which were critical for the improvement of the final version," the study said.

"It was turned around to be used as an endorsement," Derocher said. "That was not my intent."

'Endangering the Polar Bear'

Almost a year after that paper's publication, a group of polar bear biologists including Stirling and Derocher published a response in Ecological Complexity. [2008]They wrote that Dyck, Soon and their collaborators ignored data from the previous decade that showed that as the climate warmed, the sea ice is melting earlier each spring, sending polar bears ashore for longer periods of time in progressively poorer condition.

Dyck and Soon struck back with a reply in Ecological Complexity that July[2008?], accusing the biologists of using "uni-dimensional, or reductionist thinking, which is not useful when assessing effects of climate change on complex ecosystems."

In a progress report to Southern Co., Soon reported his reply paper as one of seven "deliverables" in return for a grant of $120,000 grant from the coal utility, the documents released by the Climate Investigations Centershow. Neither Southern nor any other funding source is disclosed in Ecological Complexity.

The documents show that Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian granted Southern the right to comment and provide input before the "deliverables" were published. The contract also stated that Soon could not name or identify Southern in a publication without "express written consent of SCS" (Southern Company Services).

In the report to Southern on how he fulfilled his grant, he also lists a number of speaking events, at least two of which dealt with polar bears.

At a July 2008 event in Mesa, Arizona, Soon presented his "Endangering the Polar Bear" talk to the nonprofitDoctors for Disaster Preparedness,which distributes "scientific and defense related information on public health, safety and security issues," according to publicly available financial reports. The group regularly includes climate skeptics in its conferences.

"I really don't think that you can find or argue convincingly that there are any significant worries about the sea ice condition in the Arctic," Soon told the group. "I would suggest that the current condition today is nowhere near optimal for the polar bear, which means it can grow a little bit warmer."

Opposing Protection for Bears

Not long after publication of the first Ecological Complexity paper, [2007 Palin?] Alaska hired Soon for another polar bear-related job. He was to assess the U.S. Geological Survey's forecasting models. These had been used to predict how climate change would affect polar bears, according to Doug Vincent-Lang, who was then the state's Endangered Species Act (ESA) coordinator.Alaska was opposing the federal government's proposed listing of polar bears as threatened under the ESA.

Soon and his colleagues concluded that USGS scientists relied on faulty models in predicting that by mid-century two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be gone.

The state used Soon's work to argue against the ESA listing for polar bears. Designating the animals as threatened would mean increased protections of their habitat, and raised concerns that listing a species based on predictions of future population loss could be a slippery slope, with other ice-dependent species not far behind. Alaska lost the argument. WhenInterior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced on May 14, 2008, that the bears would be listed as threatened, he said it was based on the science of the USGS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"My hope is that the projections from these models are wrong, and that sea ice does not further recede," Kempthorne said in his announcement. "But the best science available to me currently says that is not likely to happen in the next 45 years."

Steven Amstrup, the biologist who led the USGS team, said Secretary Kempthorne held a conference call with all of the scientists involved in the forecasting reports that Soon challenged.

"He very candidly indicated that our science was so compelling he could see he had no other choice than to recognize it and proceed accordingly," Armstrup said.

A few months later, Soon and his collaborators published a paper based on their Alaska research in the September/October edition of Interfaces, a journal that focuses on the science of business and management. The paper acknowledged funding from Alaska—but not from Southern Co. The authors wrote that they had begun the work that led to the paper as consultants for Alaska, for which they were paid $9,998.

"We were impressed by the importance of the issue," they wrote. "Therefore, after providing our assessment, we decided to continue work on it and to prepare a paper for publication. These latter efforts have not been funded."

However, in reporting on his "deliverables" to Southern Co., Soon listed this paper first.

Interfaces does not have a conflict of interest policy unless questions are raised during the peer review process "with respect to suspicion of duplicate publication, fabrication of data or plagiarism," according to Miranda Walker, director of publications at the professional society that publishes the journal.

InsideClimate News reporters David Hasemyer and Lisa Song contributed to this report.

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mojo

https://grist.org/climate-change/2011-06-29-exxonmobil-break-its-promise-stop-funding-global-warming-deniers/

kate s

back in 2008, ExxonMobil pledgedto quit funding climate change deniers. But according to new documents released through a Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act request, the oil giant was still forking over cash to climate skeptics as recently as last year, to the tune of $76,000 for one scientist skeptical of humankind’s role in global warming. This — and much more — came to light in a new report about the funding [PDF] of Wei Hock “Willie” Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Soon has been a favorite among climate skeptics for years, since coauthoring a paper back in 2003 that claimed that the 20th century was probably not the warmest, nor was it unique. That paper, published in the journal Climate Research, was widely criticized by climate scientists for its content, not to mention the funding it received from the American Petroleum Institute. An astrophysicist by training, Soon has also claimed that solar variability — i.e., changes in the amount of radiation coming from the sun — are to likely to blame for warming temperatures.

In 2007, Soon coauthored a paper challenging the claim that climate change harms polar bears. The paper drew plenty of criticism, as it was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, The Charles G. Koch Foundation, and ExxonMobil — groups with a clear interest in the debate over whether the bears merited endangered species protections.

Given that Soon had previously disclosed some of his corporate funding, in December 2009, Greenpeace submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information about Soon’s funders and any conflict of interest forms he may have submitted. In response, Smithsonian produced a list of his major bankrollers, which included more than $800,000 from major energy interests. According to the document, Exxon provided $55,000 for a study on Arctic climate change in 2007 and 2008, and another $76,106 for research into solar variability between 2008 and 2010.

ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers accused Greenpeace of “peddling this discredited conspiracy theory” about its support for climate deniers. He maintained that the company stopped funding Soon in 2009. “We made a decision to discontinue funding groups whose positions on climate change weren’t very constructive. It was distracting,” said Jeffers. “The issue of climate change is so important, it shouldn’t be distracted by the type of things Greenpeace does,” Jeffers said.

Even if Greenpeace and Smithsonian are wrong and ExxonMobil has stopped funding his work, Soon still appears to be getting significant backing from other fossil fuel companies, with thecoal giant Southern Company providing $120,000to look at “solar variability and climate change signals from temperature” in 2008 and 2009, and the Koch Foundation providing Soon another $65,000 last year.

“Dr. Soon needs to make clear what exactly these corporations expected from him,” said Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace. “There’s been a long-term campaign of climate denial for over 20 years, organized by big coal and big oil. This is evidence that it continues to this day.”

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https://wattsupwiththat.com/:{2018/04:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/14/a-conversation-with-dr-willie-soon-on-polar-bears-the-sun-and-earths-climate/

MANY lnx grafs

a conversation with Dr. Willie Soon – on polar bears, the sun, and Earth's climate

Guest Blogger / April 14, 2018

Science, Philosophy and Inquiry on a Galactic Scale

Contributed by Grégoire Canlorbe © 2017 Publised at WUWT by request of Mr. Canlorbe.    These are the opinions of the author and interviewee.

Dr. Willie Soon is an independent solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been studying the Sun and its influence on the Earth’s climate for more than a quarter of a century. A short while ago, he had a conversation with Mr. Grégoire Canlorbe, an independent journalist who is also vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Here Dr. Soon speaks for himself.

Canlorbe: You say polar bears are far less endangered by global warming than by environmentalists dreading ice melt. Could you expand?

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Dr. Soon: Yes, indeed. I have argued that too much ice will be the ultimate enemy for polar bears. Polar bears need less sea ice to be well fed and to reproduce. Why? Think about this for a minute: Polar bears eat a lot. Any large colony will need a great deal of food. The bears’ staple diet is seal blubber. But seals are a long way up the food chain.So a fully functional and healthy eco-system is required. And that means oceans warm enough to support the lower links in the food chain from plankton all the way up to seals.

Indeed, a good puzzle for polar-bear science is to answer the question how polar bears survived during the ice ages, when ice covered coastal zones and large parts of the global ocean. Ice was piled miles deep on land, making it extremely difficult for eco-systems to provide enough food. Of course, areas of relative warmth, which population biologists call refugia, always exist. They may well be the key to explaining how polar bears survived the Last Glacial Maximum about 21,000 years ago.

The so-called “environmentalists”, who seem to allow unreasoning emotion and political prejudice to stand in place of rational thought and sound science, became very angry when I asked them whether they would prefer to see a billion polar bears instead of the 20,000–30,000 living now. The real threat to polar bears was unregulated hunting, which reduced the population to perhaps as few as 5,000 bears in the early 1970s.

After the November 1973 agreement to regulate hunting and outlaw hunting from aircraft and icebreakers, the polar bear population rebounded. By 2017 it was approaching 30,000. In 2016 a survey by the Nunavut government found a vulnerable population in the western Hudson Bay region to have been stable for at least five years.

I should say categorically that this polar bear fear-mongering is evidence of mass delusion promoted by group think. As a physical scientist rather than a biologist, I am generally reluctant to get involved in such topics as the influence of climate on polar-bear population, health and biology. But in 2002, Markus Dyck asked me to examine independently these strange and insupportable claims by environmental extremists that polar bears are threatened with extinction by global warming.

Consider the facts. From 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Earth was considerably warmer than today. Yet the polar bears survived. In fact, they had evolved from land-based brown bears some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and to this day they rear their cubs in land-based dens burrowed into the snow.

Four dead bears found in an aerial survey of the Beaufort Sea (Monnett & Gleason, 2006)]

Readers curious about Al Gore’s false statement that a scientific survey had found polar bears drowning because they could not find ice should see my talk on how environmentalists are the real threat to polar bears: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmoKRz5VcbI. The survey cited by Gore in his sci-fi comedy horror movie in fact found that just four polar bears had drowned, three of them very close to land, and they had died because of high winds and high waves in an exceptional Arctic storm. The authors of the paper were later victimized by their academic colleagues at the instigation of environmental extremists because they had stated – correctly – that it was the storm, and not global warming, that had killed the bears.

What is more, in the dozen years before the survey, the sea ice extent in the Beaufort Sea, where the survey took place, had actually increased slightly. At no point was Al Gore’s story true. In 2007 the High Court in London condemned Gore for his false statements about polar bears, whose Linnaean classification is ursus maritimus – the Bear of the Sea. It is now known that they can swim for more than 100 miles over periods of several days. Al Gore could not even ride a pushbike that far.

One positive aspect of my work in science is that I have befriended many seekers after truth. A polar bear expert, Professor Mitch Taylor of Lakehead University, told me late in 2017:

Just finished up in Davis Strait with 275 DNA samples. The bears were in better condition this year than they were during the 2005–2007 study years. The Wrangel Island bears in the photo are in good condition, but the Davis Strait bears were even fatter. Markus [Dyck] has found the same in the Cape Dyer area. Local people confirm the bears are very fat this year and are also reporting a big increase in ringed seals (immigration, not local productivity).

Keen readers who may want solid information and frequent scientific updates about the overall health and trends of all 19 subpopulations of polar bears should visit the website of another friend of mine,Dr. Susan Crockford: http://polarbearscience.com.

Is climate change naturally cyclical?

Canlorbe: Climate change is surely nothing new. It is a long-established, cyclical behavior of our planet, which has long been oscillating between glaciations and interglacial warm periods. Should we diagnose Mother Nature with a bipolar disorder?

Dr. Soon: Earth’s climate system dynamically oscillates between icehouse and hothouse conditions in geological time or, to a lesser degree, between the glacial and interglacial climates of the last 1–2 million years. But, as with many interesting questions about the Earth’s climate, there is no certain answer. The data do not support over-simplistic accounts.

Sea level rise – mother of all scares

I was fascinated to discover that changing sea levels, including extremely high global sea levels 65–250 feet (20–75 m) above today’s mean, occurred during the “hothouse Earth” era. One does not need an enormous ice sheet for sea level to be high, chiefly because the Earth’s coastal zones and ocean basins may be more porous and capacious than one would imagine. Indeed, deep geological studies proffer good evidence to support my position.I included this empirical evidence in an essay I recently co-wrote with Viscount (Christopher) Monckton of Brenchley. 404 -->  https://web.archive.org/web/20181204045824/https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS_insideDivestment_forum.pdf

In addition to the ever-changing shape and depth of the ocean basins and coastal zone boundaries, one must also bear in mind the “leaky Earth”: There appears to be a continuous exchange of water between the ocean bottom and the Earth’s crust, as Professor Shige Maruyama of Tokyo Institute of Technology has shown.

Sea level has risen by 400 feet over the past 10,000 years. For the past 200 years it has been rising at about 8 inches per century, and that rate may well continue. It has very little to do with global warming and much more to do with long-term climate cycles. In fact, so slowly has sea level been rising that environmental-extremist scientists have tampered with the raw data by adding an imagined (and imaginary) “global isostatic adjustment”, torturing the data until they show a rate of sea-level rise that has not in reality occurred.

The Earth in the solar system in the galaxy in the universe

My own examination of the Earth’s climate system extends beyond the solar system to include our place in the galaxy. When the solar system was born, we were 1–3 kiloparsecs closer to the galactic center than today. We are now 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic center.

The solar system drifts along the spiral density wave that orbits the center of the galaxy about every quarter of a billion years. Sometimes, the solar system has lain above or below the plane of the galactic disk. Also, we need to consider the evolution of the Sun from its thermonuclear-burning core to its outer thermosphere. Furthermore, for 4.5 billion years the planets have continued to push and pull the Sun around the barycenter of the solar system.

It was 13.82 billion years ago that, at the moment of creation that we now call the Big Bang, God said, Let there be light, and there was light. The solar system, including our planet, is thus one-third as old as the known universe. Our place and time in the universe cannot be ignored in assessing the climate. The original proposition to resolve the Faint Young Sun Paradox by WeiJia Zhang of Peking University concerned the relevance of Hubble expansion flow in affecting the mean distance between the Sun and the Earth over geological time. One must even consider our galaxy’s interaction with passing stellar systems, especially the coming merger (in a few billion years) between the Milky Way and the M31 Andromeda galaxy to form the Milkomeda cluster. This very likely event will occur within the next five billion years of the Sun’s lifetime. Gravity rules even over very large distances.

Screenshot of representational images of coming merger of galaxies]

These are just a few of the considerations that lead me to insist on being open-minded in pursuing my scientific study. I study the Sun mainly to improve my own understanding. As A.E. Housman’s Greek chorus used to put it, “I only ask because I want to know.”

It’s the Sun, stupid!

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. The CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth’s magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. Picuted here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. Cropped Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO NASA image use policy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

Canlorbe: You suggest that the Sun’s behavior is the driving force of climate warming, not factory smokestacks, urban sprawl or our sins of emission. Would you like to remind us of the keystones of your hypothesis?

Dr. Soon: For a quarter of a century I have studied the hypothesis that solar radiation is causing or at lest modulating climatic variations over periods of several decades. The most up-to-date report of my sun-climate connection research is in a chapter I and my colleague Dr. Sallie Baliunas contributed to a book in honor of my late colleague Professor Bob Carter of Australia (1942–2016). For the more serious science geeks, a fuller paper, with my two excellent colleagues from Ireland, the Connollys pere et fils, is worth reading. If your readers have any difficulty in finding these works, just contact me.

I have sought the best empirical evidence to show how changes in incoming solar radiation, accounted for by intrinsic solar magnetic modulation of the irradianceoutput as well as planetary modulation of the seasonal distribution of sunlight, affects the thermal properties of land and sea, including temperatures. In turn, temperature change affects atmospheric water vapor as well as the more dynamical components of equator-to-pole insolationand of temperature gradients that vary on timescales of decades to hundreds of years.

Readers may like to follow the original hypothesis of a connection between the Sun and climate advanced by the team led by my excellent colleague Professor Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences at Xi’an, China. Our paper examines how the incoming solar radiation modulates the expansion and shrinkage of the rain-belts in dynamically active regions such as the Western Pacific Warm Pool. A second example shows how the Indian summer monsoonal rainfall is correlated with a specific metric for incoming solar radiation.

A third example would be the research on how incoming solar irradiance influences China’s thermometer temperature records, showing that over periods of many decades the variations in total solar irradiance in the upper atmosphere are matched by variations at the surface.

I regard this empirical result, detectable notwithstanding the complexities of cloud fields within the atmospheric column, as of the highest importance. We are on the right track after all in investigating solar radiation (rather than something else) as the driver and modulator of most things climatic.

The Maunder Minimum

Canlorbe: The Maunder Minimum, also known as the “prolonged sunspot minimum”, was the subject of a book you co-authored with Steven H. Yaskell in 2003. For the layman, would you like to explain the stellar phenomena observed during this period?

Dr. Soon: The Maunder Minimum was indeed a very notable period in the study of sunspot activity or, more specifically, of the Sun’s magnetism. It lasted from 1645–1715, covering most of the reign of the Sun King (Louis XIV, 1638–1715; regnavit May 14, 1643 to September 1, 1715). Indeed, the late Jack Eddy (1931–2009) was fond of popularizing this fact by saying that “the Sun King’s reign appears to have been a time of real anomaly in the behavior of the Sun”.

Another interesting coincidence is the fact that Saint-Gobain, makers of the glass for the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles, also made the mirrors for the 60-inch telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory where my colleagues (especially Dr. Sallie Baliunas) and I used to study the variations in the activity of solar-type stars. From these observations, we were able to confirm the general Maunder-Minimum-like phase of solar-stellar magnetism.

I worked with Steve Yaskell in writing this book as a labor of love. Our first purpose was to honor the insights of the two dedicated observers of our Star, E. Walter Maunder (1851–1928) and Annie Maunder (1868–1947). I also wanted to dismiss the arrogance and poor scholarship I had noticed among climate scientists. Professors Raymond Bradley and Philip Jones, for instance, had said with great certainty in one of their books that the geologist Francois Emile Matthes (1874–1948) had originated the term “Little Ice Age” which is roughly coincidental with the period of the Maunder Minimum. However, a little research (see pp. 208–209 of our book) shows that Matthes had attributed the phrase not to himself but to “a clever journalist”.

Only a few decades before Louis XIV came to the throne of France, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and others had first observed sunspots. During more modern times, the Maunders, re-examining sunspot records kept at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, established the famous butterfly diagram that shows the quasi-symmetrical distribution of sunspots between about 40 °N and 40 °S over the 11-year solar cycle – one butterfly per cycle.

What is special about the Maunder Minimum is the fact that during that period sunspots barely appeared on the Sun’s northern hemisphere and, when they appeared in the Southern portion, the dark spots were very narrowly crowded within a narrow band 20 degrees off the solar equator. This information is uniquely available thanks to the impeccable telescopic observations from L’Observatoire de Paris. My late colleague, Elisabeth Nesme-Ribes (1942–1996), very poetically described this period as that of the “broken butterfly wings”.

The butterfly diagrams of sunspot activity from 1666–1719 (left) contrasted with 1945–1990 (right). From J.C. Ribes and E. Nesme-Ribes (1993) The sunspot cycle in the Maunder Minimum, 1645–1715, Astronomy & Astrophysics 276:549, fig. 6.

It is sometimes said that the Maunder Minimum was merely an illusion or a confusion. However, several colleagues and I, led by Professor Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland, were able to affirm the reality of the Maunder Minimum by summarizing all available evidence, including confirmation from the broader phenomenon of Grand Minima as deduced from cosmogenic isotopes and other proxies for pre-instrumental solar activity.

Astrology vs. Astronomy

Canlorbe: In the view of many, IPCC’s predictions based on computer models are little better than Tarot cards and astrological predictions. Given your expertise in solar and stellar physics, do you see solid reasons not to regard astrology as reliable?

Dr. Soon: I am confused by the question. As a scientist, I do not see either evidence or any mechanism by which the relative positions of very distant heavenly objects can assist us in predicting whether any of us will “meet a tall, dark stranger” or win the lottery. However, an active area of scientific enquiry asks why and how the Sun’s magnetism varies. It may be that it is modulated by inertial oscillations within the plasma body of the Sun owing to perturbations caused by the planets, and chiefly by the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. But that is astronomy, not astrology. Astronomy is clearly within the scientific realm, but divination by means of astrology, just as clearly, is not.

The Sun card from the Tarot of Marseille]

At this point, I wish to say something about the misuse of computer climate models by the United Nations’ IPCC as a supposed “scientific” mode of divining the Earth’s climate over the next 20, 50, 100, 1,000 or even 100,000 years. Dr. Dallas Kennedy has coined the phrase “uncontrolled numerical approximations” for all climate model simulations inconsistent with the observed climate and insufficiently scrutinized.

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The current state of our understanding of the dynamical evolution and variability of the Earth’s climate, in the observational as much as in the theoretical domain, is so immature that, as prudent and careful scientists, we should stop and think. I am confident that, even if we were able to find some “agreement” between the outputs of the current generation of climate models and the available measurements and observations, we ought to be cautious, because we can be almost 100% certain that the apparent agreement is fundamentally incorrect.

Let us heed the caution raised by the world’s most knowledgeable atmospheric physicist,Professor Richard Siegmund Lindzenof the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

The Philosophy of Science

Canlorbe: The Sun has inspired a famous analogy in Plato’s theory of forms: namely, that the Sun, as the sixth book of The Republic says, allows us to see material things in the visible world, just as the Idea of the Good allows us to comprehend incorporeal or abstract concepts in the intelligible realm. Any entity existing in the visible world is intelligible only by virtue of a corresponding Idea that gives it an order, a sense, and an identity. And the Idea of the Good is the divine Sun that allows us, once it is grasped, to know all existing Ideas in the intelligible world. As a debunker of “scientism”, do you recognize some relevance to this Platonic concept of scientific inquiry?

Dr. Soon: I agree with the claim made by Justice Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) that “if the broad light of day could be let in upon men’s actions, it would purify them as the Sun disinfects”. Transparency in all human affairs, including our scientific endeavors, is essential.

Honestly, I am less of an epistemological philosopher than a natural philosopher – a mere humble scientist, or, if you like, a Shakespearean “rude mechanical”. I subscribe to David Mermin’s principle: “Shut up and calculate!” Science starts with quantitatively expressible evidence and applies to that evidence the honest, careful, disciplined manipulation of numbers that we call mathematics. Mathematics, then, is at once the language of science and its currency. In scientific inquiry, fully open and objective transparency (especially concerning the methodology and openness of datasets) is the most important requirement. Unfortunately, after more than a quarter of a century working in climate science, I have seen at first hand that these simple rules of science are too often honoured more in the breach than in the observance.

To bear witness to how damaging the flawed processes have been in climate science, I strongly recommend reading the refined essay by Professor Lindzen titled “Climate science – is it currently designed to answer questions?”

Lindzen12-March-ClimateScienceNOTansweringQ

For more detail on the level of corruption and dishonesty that prevails in global warming science, I recommend my recent talk given at the 2017 meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness: https://youtu.be/aYAy871w9t8. For debunking the popular “scientism”, I recommend a serious article that I wrote with my late friend, Professor István Markó (1956–2017) for Breitbart.

There are scientists and there are mere propagandists. For instance, Bill Nye, the soi-disant “science guy”, is in truth Bill Nye the totalitarian propaganda guy. In telling it like it is about Bill Nye, Luke Barnes said this:

In an age when a number of prominent scientists have said profoundly idiotic things about philosophy, Bill Nye, the “science guy” has produced the Gettysburg Address of philosophical ignorance. It would be hard to write a parody that compressed more stupidity and shallowness into 4 minutes.

Let me close this reply on the philosophy of science by quoting Professor Chris Essex of the University of Western Ontario, from his review of the book The Climate Caper by Garth Paltridge:

Anti-skepticism isn’t science. At best it’s a kind of para-science, because skepticism is inherent to the scientific process. This para-science is the unprecedented, powerful, well-funded force, not the much-maligned skeptics. Even the oil companies go against the cliché and fund it. It’s the skepticism inherent to science that is embattled. Everything else is delusion and lies. That is how the science has been damaged. … Many scientists, including me, are worried that humanity has been paying too high a price in subordinating science to these agendas. Years from now, historians will look back on this period as extraordinary. The great social fervour was over something that only seems like science. It’s of science but lacks the heart of science. It will take generations to pick through the detritus, but this period will ultimately tell us far more about ourselves than Nature. Soon it will be over. If doom has not ensued, the climate science tourists will leave for other errands.

Canlorbe: If I may somewhat reformulate Rudolf Clausius’ statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the total entropy of a sufficiently isolated system, no matter where it be in the universe, tends to a maximum. It is not uncommon to hear that the Second Law is proven wrong by the imagined history of the cosmos, given the universe, from the very first particles and atoms to the most advanced human civilizations, appears to have been evolving steadily towards higher degrees of order and complexity. Another opinion is that the Second Law remains true, although life on Earth, which receives energy continuously from the Sun and which is not, therefore, an isolated system, seems at first sight to violate the Law. As an astrophysicist who specializes in solar activity, how do you react to the arguments against the universality and truth of the Second Law?

Dr Soon: Before I reply, it is interesting that you raise the name of Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), because Clausius’ derivation, together with Emile Clapeyron (1799–1864), of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation between the temperature of the atmospheric space and the capacity of that space to carry water vapor is critical to the construction of a proper theory of climate.

As to the reformulation of the Second Law following its original formulation by Sadi Carnot (1796–1832), Clausius, of all the citizens of the universe, understood that life on Earth is made possible owing to the energy from the Sun. Low-entropy photons begin their journey to Earth at a temperature of about 6,000 K. By the time they reach the upper atmosphere, entropy has already done its work and they keep the Earth at a temperature 20 times lessthan that at which they began their eight-minute journey.

To bring this reply down to Earth (pun intended) and to return the focus to climate, it has long been realized that strict application of conservation of energy alone may not yield to the full understanding of climatic variations. Starting in the 1980s, an active field of scientific research was developed by the gurus of the maximum-entropy principle in climate models, such as imaginative scientists like Garth Paltridge, whose book I mentioned earlier. If one is interested in this esoteric subject, there is a recent paper treating entropy as the emergent primary quantity for describing the nature of couplings and interactions in the climate system.

I should also point out that the theory of greenhouse gas warming does not, as is sometimes thought, in any way violate the Second Law. It is not the theory that is wrong, but the incorrect modeling that leads official climatology greatly to overstate the warming that will occur as we return to the atmosphere some small fraction of the carbon dioxide that came from the atmosphere in the first place.

As you will have gathered, I am a natural philosopher and not an epistemological or moral philosopher. My language is not that of theology or of ideology but of science. I conclude my answer to your query by saying that I am simply happy to be alive, following the strictly unidirectional arrow of time, as proof that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is sound.

Notwithstanding the crazy and highly corrupt atmosphere that exists in the climate science theatre, sensible, solid and active scientists such as Bjarne Andresen and Christopher Essex ask meaningful questions and reach for reasonable answers. I am content to search for topics in which I can add to the scientific understanding of the complex fluid dynamics of the Earth’s climate.

Hotheads and hot weather

Canlorbe: People from South America, Africa, Italy and the Middle East are sometimes thought of as having elevated testosterone levels and, consequently, a propensity to solve political conflicts through violence. These populations are thought of as being warm-blooded, or even hot-headed, owing to the hot climates in which they live. Do you warmly welcome this hypothesis or hotly deny it?

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Dr Soon: I am very happy to receive such a question, for I am always trying to understand the extent to which life is dependent upon and influenced by the Sun.

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Professor John Todd of the University of Cambridge has recently published a paper that focuses on how some 5,135 out of 22,822 human genes studied for immunity and general physiology exhibited seasonal dependence on incoming sunlight. This finding that the Sun directly influences about a quarter of our genome adds a profound insight and possibly legitimacy to the broad statements you list above. But far more importantly, it proffers a proper and scientific approach to such a question.  This is why it is not a complete surprise that the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine  was given for the discovery of “molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.”

Indeed, for what is worth, in 1927 Sir Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), on page 9 of his book Stars and Atoms, remarked that the height of a man (2 m) is about halfway between the diameter of an atom (2 x 10–10 m) and that of the Sun (2 x 109 m): “Nearly midway in scale between the atom and the star there is another structure no less marvellous: the human body”.

Recent statistics from 380 sites in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and the USA show that cold weather kills 20 times more people than warm weather. What is more, 90% of the world’s species thrive in the tropics, and less than 1% exist at the Poles.

We must distill the question to a solvable core and examine it properly through scientific methodology. I recently gave a talk about the powerful relationships among various co- factors including seasonal sunlight, s   easonal temperature change, sea level, and even tectonic activity that extends back to the bipolar Quaternary ice-ages and interglacial warm periods of last 2.6 million years.

Are environmentalists Fascist?

Canlorbe: Although environmentalist and self-proclaimed antifascist movements obviously share the totalitarian dimension of Italian Fascism – at least, in its final version – they may not share the anthropology and the view of nature that were at the heart of Fascist ideology. As Benito Mussolini wrote in The Doctrine of Fascism, published in 1932, “Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies; it wants him to be manfully aware of the difficulties besetting him and ready to face them. … Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (artistic, religious, scientific) and the outstanding importance of education. Hence also the essential value of work, by which man subjugates nature and creates the human world (economic, political, ethical, and intellectual).” Does Trumpian conservatism or green socialism come closest to the spirit of historical Fascism as expressed above?

Dr. Soon (with help from Christopher Monckton of Brenchley): Fascism, National Socialism, International Socialism and Communism are all disfiguring and mutually indistinguishable instances of the totalitarianism that the political philosophers of early imperial China excoriated as “legalism” and the French philosophers as étatisme, intégrisme and dirigisme. The contrasting political theory was and is known to Chinese thinkers as Confucianism and to us as libertarianism and democracy.

Mussolini no more acted upon the fine-sounding sermons he preached than did Hitler, Lenin, Stalin or Mao Tse-Tung. Each of these monsters, whatever they may have preached about the importance of science, showed the same propensity to interfere with it, to politicize it and to wrench it into conformity with some dull but dangerous, ingenious but ignorant, marketable but murderous Party Line as environmentalist International Socialism does today.

A bust of Mussolini in an antique shop in Venice pix]

Such questions, however, are more political than scientific. Beyond saying that science tends to be corrupted by cruel notions such as eugenicism or Lysenkoism under totalitarian regimes, and to prosper in a climate of freedom, I respectfully decline to address your question. I do not do politics, as the environmentalist socialists do. I do science. As Lucretius put it, Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas – happy is he who finds the why of things. Science is my be-all and end-all.

Some 250 million people have been killed by totalitarian regimes of the extreme Left – the Communists, the Nazis and the Fascists – over the century since the dismal October Revolution of 1917. You will understand, therefore, that I disagree with your apparent attempt to assert that President Trump is a fascist: for his supporters would no doubt argue that he has spoken and acted for those working people whom the totalitarian “Democrats”, with their pointlessly costly regime of taxes, charges and regulations intended to destroy the coal, oil and gas industries and the many other industries depending on them, had wantonly abandoned. And it should never be forgotten that modern environmentalist socialism was invented by Hitler in Mein Kampf as a method of exercising that fingertip control over every aspect of people’s lives and work that all totalitarians crave.

Envoi

Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Is there anything you would like to add?

Dr. Soon: I wish to thank you for your excellent questions. You have given me the opportunity to pause and reflect on concepts I have not contemplated in quite some time. I have simply shared my humble but sincere premise that the search for the truth in science must prevail. No religious, social, political or philosophical convictions must be allowed to confuse, corrupt or deny the inherent beauty and purity and truth that subsist in the scientific method to which I have devoted and shall ever devote my life.

Grégoire Canlorbe is the vice president of the French Parti National-Libéral (“National-Liberal Party,” conservative, nationalist, and free-marketist). Apart from his political activities, he has conducted numerous interviews for academic journals, and collaborates with the sociologist and philosopher Howard Bloom.He promotes a new form of liberalism (libertarianism), which he calls “territorial-aristocratic liberalism.”

You may also enjoy his conversation with the late Prof. István Markó and that with Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore.

Related

A conversation with Susan J. Crockford—for Association des climato-réalistes

December 16, 2019

In "Climate News"

A conversation withJohn Christy, for Association des climato-réalistes

June 29, 2019

With 42 comments

A conversation with Prof. Richard Lindzen

June 18, 2018

In "Climate News"

April 14, 2018 in Opinion.

==

ref polar bear lord m 404

https://web.archive.org/web/20181204045824/https://www.nas.org/images/documents/NAS_insideDivestment_forum.pdf

THE ILLIBERAL MOVEMENT TO TURN A GENERATION AGAINST FOSSIL FUELS | 273

Willie Soon and Lord Christopher Monckton: Divestment? Schmivestment! Coal,

Oil and Gas Are the Best Guarantors of Life, Liberty and Happiness

The totalitarian campaign to bully academic and other institutions into selling their shares in coal, oil,

and gas companies owes nothing to science and all to the historical fact that these firms were once the

biggest donors to libertarian parties.

Let us do the science anyway, and let us do it objectively. Dispassion is a prerequisite to forming a view

on whether “divestment” is justifiable – and on whether it will make any difference to anything except the

artificial consciences of a narrow political faction.

Science, intrinsically agnostic on socio-political movements, is the only medicine available to counter the

psychological application of fear factors by the campaigners against fossil fuels.

Coal, oil and natural gas are not our only sources of hydrocarbon fuel. Scientists can now produce oil in

the lab923 abiogenically by mimicking natural conditions in the Earth’s mantle, invalidating the argument

that “fossil” fuels (they are not in fact fossils-based924) will run out unless we restrict their use. Likewise,

mining scarce minerals such as uranium, gold, and silver from sea water925 and volcanic-zone reservoirs926

becomes more profitable as science improves the extraction techniques. This is why the economist Julian

Simon was fond of proposing that the ultimate limit to resource exploitation is not matter but mind. We

think, therefore we can.

Now that science has put paid to the scarcity scare, divestment campaigners turn to the pseudo-scientific

argument that our enrichment of the atmosphere by emitting CO2 from burning coal, oil, and gas may be

dangerous. Recently, for instance, a scientific paper baselessly predicted the total melting of the Antarctic

ice sheet.927 The timing of this and other profitable fictions coincides with the December 2015 UN climate

conference in Paris, France.

Carbon dioxide in the air was once at 20 times today’s concentration. Today, more than a quarter of a

millennium after the industrial revolution, to the nearest tenth of 1 percent there is no CO2 in the air at all.

How proportionate was it, then, for the authors of this latest pseudo-science scare to publicize their paper

by saying: “It is time to stop using the sky as a waste dump”? Plants and trees do not see CO2 as “waste

==

https://climateinvestigations.org/willie-soon-scandal-topics-for-smithsonian-institution/

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climate investigations [ref to orsekes documetery]

https://climateinvestigations.org/willie-soon-scandal-topics-for-smithsonian-institution/

here we update the plot…(with research by Cindy Baxter)

In the wake of this past weekend’s release of documents from our investigation and media attention around climate denier Dr. Willie Soon’s $1.25 million in payments from the fossil fuel industry, his employers, the Smithsonian Institution, launched an investigation by their Inspector General on Monday.

Remember, Willie Soon works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA as they call it) on the Smithsonian side of the building called the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. It helps to have that data when looking through the documents.

The documents we got from Smithsonian during our 5 year investigation definitely don’t contain the full record of correspondence between Soon, the Smithsonian and the corporate funders, but what we do have paints a very clear picture. Every time Dr. Soon made a proposal and then got a grant from the Koch Foundation, from ExxonMobil or Southern Company, CfA Director Alcock and his grants department staff were deeply involved in making it happen, crafting budgets, sending email, signing contracts and letters of thanks.

Willie Soon, the Smithsonian says in its announcement of the IG investigation, was “hired to conduct research on stellar and solar variability. The Smithsonian does not fund Dr. Soon; he pursues external grants to fund his research”

They continued “The Smithsonian does not support Dr Soon’s conclusions on climate change. The Smithsonian’s official statement on climate change, based on many decades of scientific research, points to human activities as a cause of global warming.”

The statement from the Smithsonian raises a number of questions that we hope the Inspector General will look into during his investigation.

From the documents we have received from the Smithsonian during the investigation, it is very clear that the Institute has worked hard to help him get his grants and benefitted from those grants through funding for overhead and staff time other than Dr. Soon.

Let’s start with the ExxonMobil grants.

In 2008, Soon writes to his colleagues at the Smithsonian, asking for help to “stretch” the proposal to ExxonMobil for $60,000.

“Any way you can help me stretch this proposal to maximize my work at SAO would be appreciated,” he wrote.

Two years later, in 2010, the Smithsonian’s “Advancement and External Affairs” officer, Amanda Preston, wrote to colleagues about the $76,106 ExxonMobil grant, of which Soon hadn’t managed to use all of for his project.

Preston talks about the $22,181 that was left over.

“On instruction from [CfA head] Charles Alcock, I asked ExxonMobil to allow us to reclassify that amount as an unrestricted contribution,” she writes.  They wanted to allow the money to be used for “general support” instead of what it was meant for, Willie Soon’s work.

Exxon eventually agrees the documents show.  This was Dr. Soon’s last grant from Exxon, so they probably could have cared less. In 2010, Exxon unceremoniously dropped Soon, telling him that budget priorities had changed.  But in a possible indication of how important the ExxonMobil grant was, and perhaps the naiveté of Ms. Preston, the letter is sent to ExxonMobil thanking them for permission to shift the money and then makes a final pitch to Exxon to support the CfA’s fine telescope program and its research goals including studying star and planet formation and the physics of dark matter.

Little did she know that Exxon is only interested in planets with oil in them and one kind of dark matter…”oil that is, black gold, Texas tea…” (sorry, the Beverley Hillbillies theme song came into my head…back to questions for the Smithsonian)

The Charles Koch grants

Alcock was also heavily involved in sealing Soon’s grant from the Charles G Koch Foundation in 2009, with the $65,000 check sent by the Koch Foundation to Alcock himself on 21 September, referring to a previous conversation and agreement between them.

The letter is addressed to Dr. Alcock and signed by Richard Fink himself, who some describe and Charles Koch’s right hand man.

These are just a couple of examples.

The Southern Company grants

This one is ongoing, and Dr Alcock has acknowledged to reporters that the clause that appears to stipulate a covert relationship is a problem.  Nature’s Jeff Tollefson writes:

The documents also illuminate the CfA’s role in the funding arrangements: in a contract signed in 2008 with Southern Company, a utility in Atlanta, Georgia, the CfA agreed to notify the company before disclosing it as the source of the funding. Alcock calls that “a mistake” and says that the CfA “would not do that again”.

We want to know if anyone at CfA has flagged that potential conflict of interest problem over the years?

We wonder if Smithsonian will query Southern Company officials about their understanding of the relationship and “deliverables”?

And finally the Donors Trust grants

These are also apparently a semi-covert deal.  Donors Trust is not acknowledged as a supporter in any published work of Dr. Soon’s. Yet he reports to them “deliverables” including published studies, similar to the ones he reports to Southern Company.

More problematic is the language in the letter fromWhitney Ball of Donors Trust, (again, addressed to Charles Alcock) stipulating that the identity of the actual donor shall not be known by Dr. Soon or Harvard Smithsonian.

We ask, how can Willie Soon declare there is no conflict of interest in his published work when he doesn’t know what interests his anonymous donor indeed has?

How much did Smithsonian get out of the deal?

Willie Soon has remained quiet this week in the wake of all the publicity about him.  We know, from the Boston Globe’s attempts to talk with him in 2013, that the Smithsonian has banned him from doing interviews on the Harvard campus.

But he did speak to one person: his friend and climate denying blogger, James Delingpole, who mentioned his chat with Willie on Breitbart.com.

“I spoke to Soon last night. He told me that of course he receives private funding for his research: he has to because it’s his only way of making ends meet, especially since the Alarmist establishment launched its vendetta against him when, from 2009 onwards, he became more outspoken in his critiques of global warming theory.

“Harvard-Smithsonian strove to make his life harder and harder, first by banning him from working on anything even remotely connected with issues like climate change or CO2, then by moving his office away from the astrophysics department to a remote area Soon calls Siberia. What the faculty couldn’t quite do was actually sack Soon because it had no cause: he was producing too many quality papers, and he was also bringing in too much money (40 per cent of which goes straight into the faculty coffers).”

While we need to take Soon’s comments to Delingpole with a grain of salt, second hand and paraphrased as they are, but if the Smithsonian did pocket 40 percent from his grants that Soon claims, that would mean the Institute has managed to get $500,000 from the fossil fuel industry – through Willie Soon’s grants – to help run its operations over the past 14 years or so.  We wonder how much research money other astronomers bring in at Harvard-Smithsonian.

So while they have distanced itself from Soon’s climate denial, the Smithsonian has clearly been very happy to take big chunks of the money the fossil fuel industry funds him to do it, through their institution, and has bent over backwards to help him get those grants.

The API grants

We have questions about this relationship which goes quite a ways back to 1994 but ended in 2007.  We did not get all the data on those grants from Smithsonian. Sallie Baliunas, who was Soon’s mentor at CfA, a fellow climate denier and ozone hole denier before that, acknowledged grants from Electric Power Research Institute, American Petroleum Institute, Mobil Foundation, Texaco Foundation in a December 1996 paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.  Proud transparency.  The dollar figures and terms of those contracts may never surface, but if the Smithsonian wanted to, I bet they could release the records they have of Baliunas’ funders too and come clean.

The Smithsonian takes a lot of corporate money. There is the Koch Hall of Origins anthropology exhibit at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.  They renamed the Air and Space museum theater, Lockheed Martin theater, erasing the name Langley, an daviation pioneer. The museums newly renovated Hall of Oceans might have been called the American Petroleum Institute Hall of Oceans if not for the intervention of Sen. Leahy of Vermont and another corporate philanthropist, Roger Sant, then chair of the Smithsonian board and an energy industry millionaire.

But this funding to Soon (and Baliunas before him) is different still.

Another question…what is the total amount of fossil fuel funding that has come to Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics over the years for climate change denial?

What is the total from API from 1994-2007…a long stretch of support?

Soon’s use of the Harvard-Smithsonian affiliation to advance climate denial

We have still more questions that we hope the Inspector General can ask – about Soon’s use of his affiliation with Harvard and Smithsonian.

While he now prefaces most of his denier presentations with a caveat about how he is presenting in his personal capacity,that’s not the case when it comes to his “scientific” papers that have nothing to do with astrophysics, or the sun’s connection with climate change, nor anything else the Smithsonian says he works on while at the CfA.

If you want to get credibility for your pseudo-scientific, climate-denying papers, using the moniker of an institution that has the words “Harvard” and “Smithsonian” is a very good way to do it.  It’s this affiliation that has gained Soon so much credibility in denier circles, for so many years.

The most recent example was his co-authorship of the flawed paper published in Science Bulletin last month that questioned IPCC models. This paper has no acknowledgement of any of Soon’s fossil fuel industry funding, but it does have Soon’s Harvard-Smithsonian CfA affiliation next to his name on the paper.  Meanwhile, co-author Monckton can’t stop saying that none of the authors got paid for the study, essentially doing it on their own time.  Then shouldn’t it say, Willie Soon, citizen of Boston?  That would work.

If the CfA is really trying to distance itself from Soon’s climate denial, and if Soon really does write these papers in his own time, what on earth is the CfA’s name doing next to Soon’s in all these papers?

In an op-ed at the Wall St. Journal from 2011, written with Paul Driessen, another climate denier and not a scientist, Willie Soon’s byline is listed: Mr. Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, is an expert on mercury and public health issues. Clearly that is inaccurate, yet Harvard has taken no apparent action to correct this.  Has Smithsonian?

Has there been any communication of concern between Harvard and Smithsonian about Soon through the years?

Soon has used the Institution’s name on a number of other papers that have nothing to do with sun climate connections: from his 2003 paper supposedly debunking the Hockey Stick, to the 2007 polar bear paper, to one published last year that supposedly “debunks” the groundbreaking study by Cook et al that showed a 97% consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are causing the climate to change.

None of these papers are written based on Soon’s qualifications as an aerospace engineer (as Justin Gillis points out in the New York Times: Soon is not a climate scientist). They are way outside of his area of expertise. He is not a polar bear biologist, not a mercury expert.

Does Harvard or Smithsonian routinely let their scientists wander like this?  Could a marine biologist pen an article about ancient Egypt and sign as a “Smithsonian scientist”?  Could a Harvard Chinese history professor write about Obamacare and sign the article “Harvard healthcare expert”?  Surely there are rules…

Hopefully the Inspector General can answer these and more questions

no lnx

==

https://climateinvestigations.org/willie-soon-scandal-corporate-funding-year-by-year/

kert d

people keep asking how much Soon got from each of his corporate funders year by year, and why some places it says $1.2 million total and others $1.5M…

The total funding since 2001 that we know about from Greenpeace FOIAs to Smithsonian and corporate foundation 990s is $1,573,270, tabulated below.

That total excluding the ‘anonymous’ donation from Donors Trust, leaved known fossil funding at $1,248,471

Funder Grant Description from source Grant Year(s) Grant Amount Source

American Petroleum Institute 1994-1997 ?? Soon published papers

American Petroleum Institute Sun’s impact on climate over the last 1000 years 2001, 2002 $58,380 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute 1000 years of solar variability 2003 $60,053 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute The 11-22 year climate responses 2004, 2005 $50,178 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute Understanding Arctic Climate Change 2005, 2006 $50,000 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute The solar influence of arctic climate change 2006, 2007 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA

API Total $273,611

Charles G. Koch Foundation Koch/Mobile Charitable foundation 2005, 2006 $110,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Charles G. Koch Foundation Understanding Solar Variability and Climate Change 2010 $65,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Charles G. Koch Foundation Understanding Solar Radiation and Climate Change 2010-2012 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Charles Koch Foundation Total $230,000

Donors Trust Understanding Solar Radiation and Climate Change 2011 $50,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Donors Trust A Circum-global Teleconnection View of Regional Sun-Climate Connections 2011-2012 $64,935 Smithsonian FOIA

Donors Trust Wavelet Analysis And Solar Dynamo Theory of Solar Activity Variations 2013 $70,000 Donors Trust 990

Donors Trust Wavelet Analysis And Solar Dynamo Theory of Solar Activity Variations 2013 $49,864 Donors Trust 990

Donors Trust Wavelet Analysis And Solar Dynamo Theory of Solar Activity Variations 2013-2015 $209,864 Smithsonian FOIA

Donors Trust 2014-2015 $90,000 Two 2013 grants subtracted from 2013-15

Donors Trust Total $324,799

Mobil Foundation 1995-1997 ?? Acknowledged in Soon’s published papers

ExxonMobil Foundation listed by Exxon as a grant to SAO 2005 $105,000 ExxonMobil Worldwide Giving Report 2005

ExxonMobil Foundation Listed by Exxon as “project support” to SAO. 2006 $105,000 ExxonMobil Worldwide Giving Report 2006

ExxonMobil Foundation Exxon-Arctic Climate Change 2007, 2008 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA/Exxon Giving Report

ExxonMobil Foundation “Exxon – Soon – Solar Variability” “Understanding Solar Variability and Climate Change: Signals from Temperature Records of the United States” 2008-2010 $70,106 Smithsonian FOIA/Exxon Giving Report

ExxonMobil Foundation Total $335,106

Southern Company Understanding Arctic Climate Change 2006, 2007 $110,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Solar variability and Climate Change signals from temperature 2008, 2009 $120,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Understanding Solar Radiation and Climate Change 2011 $60,003 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Understanding Solar Radiation and Climate Change 2011-2012 $59,942 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company A Study of Solar Activity Variation on Multiple Timescales 2013-2015 $59,809 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Total $409,754

Electric Power Research Institute 1994-1999 ?? Acknowledged in Soon’s published papers

Texaco Foundation 1996 ?? Acknowledged in Soon’s published papers

Free to Choose The sun’s influence on climate change 2008 $19,383 Smithsonian FOIA

Total known grants 2001-2015 $1,573,270

Total known Fossil grants $1,248,471

==

https://www.desmogblog.com/willie-soon

July 3, 2017

Delivering a lecture on the Climate Change Hoax” at Camp Constitution’s 2017 Summer camp in New Hampshire, Soon declared:

“No experimental data exist that support the view that the Earth’s climate is anomalous or changing in a dangerous manner. Instead we know that CO2 is the gas of life. … Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is merely a bit player in climate change.” [100]

==

lindzen open ltr 6/17

Example 6:

ARMSTRONG, J. Scott: ( Ph.D. MIT); Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. My area of expertise involves forecasting methods. I have been involved to preparing and evaluating forecasts relevant to climate change since 2007.

This last cosigner I will discuss is a professor at a business school in the United States. As I understand his expertise, it is in business forecasting. What does that have to do with climate forecasting? Not much. Perhaps there is some crossover though? I recall that JS Armstrong was an author on a polar bear forecasting paper a few years ago. How did that turn out? Not very well. It was strongly rebutted for being incorrect in this paper. The following quote from the abstract tells it all (AGS stands for Armstrong, Green and Soon (the authors of the faulty paper):

We evaluate the AGS audit and show how AGS are mistaken or misleading on every claim. We provide evidence that general circulation models are useful in forecasting future climate conditions and that corporate and government leaders are relying on these models to do so… We show that the allegations of failure to follow the principles of forecasting espoused by AGS are either incorrect or are based on misconceptions about the Arctic environment, polar bear biology, or statistical and mathematical methods. … In summary, we show that the AGS audit offers no valid criticism of the USGS conclusion that global warming poses a serious threat to the future welfare of polar bears and that it only serves to distract from reasoned public-policy debate.

There many are other examples that list no degree, affiliation, or expertise, such as:

BEE, Roger: ();

BEETHAM, Barry: ();

==

The signers of the Open Letter recognize that some radical environmentalists and religious activists oppose Mr. Pruitt because he does not embrace their exaggerated fears of human-induced global warming—fears that go well beyond the empirical evidence crucial to genuine science—or their antipathy to the development of the abundant, reliable, affordable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.

Signers therefore urge President-Elect Trump to stand firmly behind his nominee, as they commit themselves to supporting him in the confirmation process that lies ahead. Signers include:

“Senate Democrats, at the beck and call of environmental activists, are determined to prevent Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation, painting him as a ‘science denier’ or a ‘climate-change denier’, said Cornwall Alliance Founder and National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. “He is neither. He’s a solid, common-sense attorney general who will bring much-needed reform to the EPA.”

==

BACK MAIN TXT

soon720

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promoted  to bigs 7/13, evil pending cf mercury

end html long-term

see SOON 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy

6 eds resigned, incl main

==

2003 bogus paper allowed B43 pivot?

guardian.com/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-review

guard uk no links

...The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.

Here is how it worked in one case.

A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and do scientists interpret it correctly?

In March 2004, Jones wrote to ­Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently rejected two papers [one for the Journal of ­Geophysical Research and one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".

He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist ­formerly of the University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in the journal that year.

Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.

Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.

Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its publication.

Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.

Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is well in scientific peer review.

Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept out of the journals.

In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to ­support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."

Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.

Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."

Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are from a long time ago and the details are not ­terribly fresh in my mind."

Jones did not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.

In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research. He was angry about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. The pair claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, they suggested.

Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost laughable". He said Soon and Baliunas made no attempt in the paper to show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to Guardian requests to discuss the paper.

The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"

But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and Baliunas paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's authors.

Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in the 20th century.

The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. ­Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was ­letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal."

Naturally de Freitas defends his actions during the incident. "I was never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over the Soon and Baliunas paper. All accusations against me were fully investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to be flawless."

But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. There was a revolt. Their chief editor von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer review process. Mann had won his argument.

Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics.

Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt ... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a sceptic's paper, at that."

The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in Climate Research – the Soon and Baliunas paper and another he ­identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4.......

==

8/15

Leaked internal memos reveal a coordinated, decades-long disinformation campaign.

by Elliott Negin

When internal documents revealed earlier this year that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel interests were secretly funding scientifically discredited studies authored by climate contrarian Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, the news didn’t come as a complete surprise.

Back in 2007, a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report identified Soon—an aerospace engineer with little formal training in climatology—as one of a dozen scientists affiliated with more than 40 ExxonMobil-funded think tanks that then constituted the backbone of the climate change–denier PR machine. Soon, who erroneously claims the sun is largely responsible for global warming, produced work for at least five of these ExxonMobil-backed groups, including the now infamous Heartland Institute.

But the latest cache of documents, obtained by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, lays bare a wealth of detail that was not available eight years ago. For example, they show that Soon received his funding exclusively from fossil fuel interests, including ExxonMobil, utility giant Southern Company, and Charles Koch. He described his scientific work and congressional testimony as “deliverables” to his funders. And some of his contracts specifically dictate that the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where Soon works, not disclose the names of his funders. These internal documents, on top of what UCS had already uncovered, indisputably establish Soon’s efforts as part of a calculated climate deception campaign.

Dossiers of Deception

pm dl doc

http://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/fight-misinformation/climate-deception-dossiers-fossil-fuel-industry-memos#.Vc98KflViko

Willie Soon, however, is just a small part of a much bigger story, according to a new UCS report, The Climate Deception Dossiers. After spending nearly a year reviewing and analyzing a wide range of internal corporate and trade group documents, a team of UCS researchers has, for the first time, compiled a broader tale of climate deception. The Climate Deception Dossiers draws upon evidence culled from 85 documents that were pried loose by leaks, lawsuits, and FOIA requests.

Spanning nearly three decades, these documents reveal that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, coal giant Peabody Energy, and Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change but continued to spend tens of millions of dollars to sow doubt and promote contrarian arguments they knew to be wrong. Taken together, the documents show that these six companies, in conjunction with the American Petroleum Institute (API)—the oil and gas industry’s premier trade association—and a host of front groups, have colluded to intentionally deceive the public; their corporate officials have known for at least two decades that their products are harmful; and their disinformation campaign continues today—despite the fact that most of the companies now publicly acknowledge the reality of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change.

A team convened in 1998 by the American Petroleum Institute—the country’s largest oil trade association whose member companies include BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell Oil—outlined a road map for climate deception including a plan to cultivate purportedly independent scientists as climate misinformers. The campaign would achieve “victory,” according to the memo, when “average citizens” believed that the realities of climate science were uncertain.

The collected documents reveal a variety of deceitful tactics, including creating front groups, secretly funding purportedly independent scientists such as Soon, and even forging letters from nonprofit groups to try to influence members of Congress. But you don’t have to rely on UCS’s interpretation. All 340 pages of the documents in seven “deception dossiers” are available online, so you can read them and reach your own conclusions.

A Damning Paper Trail

The 340 pages include not only Soon’s contracts, but also a 1998 API disinformation road map memo as well as a 2014 Western States Petroleum Association memo on creating phony grassroots consumer groups to challenge California’s climate policies.

One eye-opening, formerly secret document reveals that scientific experts commissioned by the Global Climate Coalition (GCC)—a coalition of 50 U.S. corporations and trade groups including British Petroleum (now BP), Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Mobil, and Shell—warned that heat-trapping gases were indeed causing global warming. Regardless, the GCC continued to conduct a multimillion-dollar lobbying and public relations campaign to undermine national and international efforts to address global warming.

One of the GCC’s “backgrounders” for legislators and journalists, for example, claimed “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood” and emphasized that “scientists differ” on the issue. But the 17-page, internal 1995 GCC primer written by the companies’ own scientists states: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied [emphasis added].” The primer’s lead author, Leonard S. Bernstein, a staff scientist at Mobil Oil, would later participate as a lead author of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports in 2001 and 2007.

One draft version of the primer even addressed and dismissed the major arguments made by climate change contrarians, such as the “solar variability” argument touted by Soon. “The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes,” the draft stated, “but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.” This section was deleted from the primer’s final version.

Three years later, the API set up what it called the Global Climate Science Communications Team to try to derail the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international agreement signed by 192 countries—but not the United States—to meet binding carbon emissions reduction targets. A leaked 1998 campaign memo from this team, cowritten by representatives of the API and API members Chevron and Exxon, laid out a road map for climate deception largely based on the tobacco industry’s strategy to stave off government regulation by deceiving the public about smoking hazards.

Echoing that strategy—encapsulated in the notorious internal tobacco industry memo claiming “Doubt is our product”—the API memo states: “Victory will be achieved when: average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” The API team planned to emphasize “uncertainties” in climate science at least partly by identifying, recruiting, and funding previously unaffiliated scientists. After all, the memo notes, such scientists would have more credibility with reporters and the public than those already known to be working with the fossil fuel industry.

What makes the secret API memo so revealing is how closely its instructions seem to have been carried out in the Soon case. One of the API memo’s contributors, RobertGehri, even negotiated one of Soon’s contracts on behalf of his industry backers. All told, Soon received more than $1.2 million from fossil fuel interests over the last decade and failed to disclose that conflict of interest in most of the scientific papers that money underwrote. More than $400,000 came from a subsidiary of the Southern Company, a large utility holding company with a fleet of coal-fired power plants. ExxonMobil gave Soon $335,000. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation kicked in another $230,000. The API, meanwhile, contributed more than $100,000.

What did they get for their money? The papers conclude that solar activity is the main cause of global warming and that carbon emissions have had little or no impact. Despite the speciousness of Soon’s findings, members of Congress—notably Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe—routinely cite his work to argue that climate science is a hoax.

==

iccc 10th

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correction!

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/10062015/willie-soons-fossil-fuel-funded-work-draws-ethics-review-publisher

journal publisher that distributed studies written by a climate skeptic whose work was financed by fossil fuel interests has launched an ethics investigation over undisclosed funding.

The investigation byElsevier, a global network of scientific journals, was prompted by documents showing that Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Willie Soon failed to disclose industry funding in 11 studies published by nine journals.

Six of those papers were published in four Elsevier publications. Elsevier requires its authors to disclose financial conflicts that "could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work."

The documents were obtained by Greenpeace and made public in February by the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental watchdog organization based in Virginia. After the documents were released, the center alerted the journals that the lack of disclosure violates ethical guidelines requiring authors to identify their funders and potential conflicts of interest.

"We applaud your guidelines for ethical behavior in science, but we are concerned that your conflict of interest policy has been ignored and that Dr. Soon may have hidden his funding," wrote Kert Davies, the center's executive director, in letters to the journals. "Violations of ethical norms in scientific publishing may undermine the credibility of your journal."

Elsivier's ethics inquiry was made public in a report issued by the center Wednesday that includes the responses from all nine journals.

"We have referred the matter to Elsevier and they have an ethics team investigating," Rob Hyndman, editor of International Journal of Forecasting, said in a response to Davies. "We will not be taking any action until we have received advice from the Elsevier ethics investigators."

Chris Capot, a spokesman for Elsevier, confirmed the investigation, but declined to discuss the nature of the review or any potential outcomes. "The review is still ongoing. The results of our review will be published in any affected journals," Capot said.

In addition to the Elsevier inquiry, one publication, Journal of Climate, amended a 2009 paper that Soon co-authored to clarify his funding source. The editor of Ecology Law Quarterly, published by the UC Berkeley School of Law, said the school is considering instituting a formal procedure to address conflicts in all of its publications. Others responded with noncommittal acknowledgements thanking the center for the information. One journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics, dismissed Soon's failure to disclose his funding as "irrelevant."

Soon, a well-known climate contrarian, works at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which houses the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Soon has been employed by Smithsonian since 1997, but relies on grants from outside sources for his research and salary.

Soon's 11 papers question the extent, severity, cause or existence of man-made climate change. Many of the studies argue that changes in solar activity are responsible for rising global temperatures. The studies appear to have had limited impact in the scientific world, according to the number of citations by other researchers.

Soon did not respond to a request for comment from InsideClimate News.

The public records show that since 2008, Soon has received more than $800,000 from ExxonMobil, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the electric utility Southern Company Services Inc., and Donors Trust Inc., an organization that facilitates contributions largely toward conservative causes from donors who wish to remain anonymous. The funds were earmarked to pay for research papers, public speaking appearances and presentations. Soon called his studies "deliverable" to funders.

Since the controversy broke, Southern Company, a major coal utility in the southeastern United States and one of Soon's primary funders, has said it will no longer fund his research once his final project is completed later this year.

Smithsonian officials directed its inspector general to examine Soon's ethical practices regarding funders and launched separate internal and independent reviews of its ethics and disclosure policies. Soon remains a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian staff, though Smithsonian has distanced itself from his work, saying it “does not support Dr. Soon's conclusions on climate change.”

Here are the responses from the nine journals:

Ecological Complexity

Publisher: Elsevier

Journal disclosure policy: All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work.

Response: Bia-lian (Larry) Li, editor:

Thank you for your message and mail, Director Davies. I was the Chief Editor when his paper was published. Our journal policies are set up by our publisher Elsevier, not us. The case you presented here, to my view, should be author's responsibility. We generally focus on scientific merit of the research papers. However, your concern is now well noticed.

Ecology Law Quarterly

Publisher: UC Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall

Journal disclosure policy: None found.

Response: Elise O’Dea, editor:

I want to thank you for bringing this issue to our attention; both ELQ and the law school take it very seriously. Your email brings up an important topic not only for ELQ, but for all the law journals on campus. Thanks to your alert, we are exploring the possibility of developing a conflict of interest policy of some nature for our law journals.

Interfaces

Publisher: The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

Journal disclosure policy: None found.

Response: Miranda Walker, director of publications INFORMS:

Thank you for your letter of February 20, 2015 sent to Dr. Srinivas Bollapragada regarding the journal Interfaces and our conflict of interest policy. Maintaining the highest ethical standards is of paramount importance to Interfaces, our editors, our peer reviewers, and of course, those who read the articles published in our pages. We appreciate the information that you and others have shared with us and will ensure that it receives careful and deliberate attention. Please direct all future questions regarding or relating to [this article] to me.

International Journal of Forecasting

Publisher: Elsevier

Journal disclosure policy: All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work.

Response: Rob Hyndman, editor:

We have referred the matter to Elsevier and they have an ethics team investigating. We have also received correspondence from Dr. Soon and from his lawyers which we have passed to Elsevier. We will not be taking any action until we have received advice from the Elsevier ethics investigators.

Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics

Publisher: Elsevier

Journal disclosure policy: All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work.

Response: Robert Strangeway, editor:

I am aware of the New York Times article, and I have contacted the Editorial Office of the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics for guidance as to what the Journal should do in response to the allegations in the New York Times article. I have also forwarded your email and the associated attachments to the Journal Publisher. While we have not yet determined what action the Journal will take, the Publisher of the Journal has made it clear that such allegations are taken very seriously.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Publisher: EDP Sciences

Journal disclosure policy: None found.

Response: Dr. Thierry Forveille, editor:

I am a bit puzzled that you contact me. (The paper) makes no claim whatsoever of any relevance to climate. It therefore clearly falls well outside the purview of Dr. Soon's contract with Southern Company Services for “publication of both original and review papers on solar variability and climate change and various environmental impacts of that related change in leading scientific journals for the advancement of climate and meteorological sciences.” Astronomy & Astrophysics has no funding disclosure requirements, since astronomy is sufficiently removed from any monetary consequences that we have never found that necessary, but had we known about Dr. Soon's contract we would have judged its existence irrelevant to the evaluation of the paper. That Dr. Soon included this totally irrelevant paper in the Year 1 Report, which you forwarded me, certainly does not reflect very well on his ethical standards, but this is an issue that I don't think the journal has standing to act on.

Journal of Climate

Publisher: American Meteorological Society

Journal disclosure policy: All funding sources should be identified in the manuscript. Authors should disclose to the editor any financial arrangement with a research sponsor that could give the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Response: Ken Heideman, director of publications at American Meteorological Society:

AMS has amended the 2009 paper that Willie Soon coauthored with a publisher’s note and an amendment to the acknowledgments that make clear his funding source.

New Astronomy

Publisher: Elsevier

Journal disclosure policy: All authors are requested to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest including any financial, personal or other relationships with other people or organizations within three years of beginning the submitted work that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, their work.

Response: Gianfranco Brunetti, receiving editor:

I received your documents (via mail), thanks a lot. In the last several [months] we had a discussion within the board of editors about this situation, I guess that similar discussions were taken by other boards and journals involved. Obviously I cannot reveal the details of the discussion and the outcome, however I would expect...a "fair note"...from Elsevier.

Physical Geography

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Online

Journal disclosure policy: Authors must declare any potential conflict of interest – be it professional or financial – which could be held to arise with respect to the article. Authors must disclose all sources of funding for the research reported in the paper.

Response: Carol Harden, editor:

Thank you for keeping us informed about this. An important piece of information missing from the letter you sent is that Physical Geography was not published by Taylor & Francis in 2009, and it did not have a financial disclosure policy at that time. That means that Physical Geography cannot make the claim that Dr. Soon violated the journal's policy.

See Also:

A Guide To Willie Soon's Climate Research Funded by Fossil Fuel Companies

Scientific Journals Alerted to Fossil Fuel Funding of Contrarian Climate Studies

Documents Reveal Fossil Fuel Fingerprints on Contrarian Climate Research

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Utility Giant Cuts Ties With Willie Soon

The Southern Company, which generates power for nine states––largely from coal––has decided it will no longer fund the work of controversial climate contrarian and Harvard-Smithsonian scientist Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon.

Read more.

==

Climate scientists tempted by the millions of dollars paid by the oil industry to researchers who happen to come up with the right conclusions have been warned – you would be better off flipping burgers.

Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, has accepted cash from the oil baron Koch brothers, oil behemoth ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute – the troika of industry-funded climate denial.

The New York Times on Sunday revealed that Soon promised “deliverables” including scientific papers and Senate testimony when negotiating terms with energy companies.

But the maverick researcher claims he would have been better off working for a burger chain and is walking on his uppers…

“I am very poor”, he said during an interview at the Heartland Institute conference in Las Vegas last summer. “I would say, if you consider the last three years or four years, I’d say I’m on minimum wage. I could work in McDonald’s and make more money.”

“That’s as simple as that. Even my wife doesn’t know this. I don’t discuss money. She supports me in every way she can about science.” He went on: “I’m doing the science I dream of doing … I am a true scientist. In that rigorous sense. I pursue this happiness.”

Committed to Science

Strangely, Soon said that he was so committed to science that he had even missed his own father’s funeral in order to attend a conference. He also explained his father had left school in China after six years and valued education very highly.

The researcher’s remarks were made to refute claims by the environmental campaign group Greenpeace US that he was attacking climate science after receiving millions in research grants from oil companies.

ExxonMobil cut research grants to Soon at the Harvard-Smithsonian in 2010 after Greenpeace exposed their support – apparently without even thanking him for his years of dedication.

“Exxon do not fund me any more. They have not funded me for many years. I think they are afraid because of public pressure. Money does not guide me in any way. As simple as that, really … They are a very big company and I am a small potato.”

“Please – everyone should know this thing is on the public record. I don’t think I get ever more than $50,000 to $60,000 a year … if you know how much time I spend working. I am embarrassed to tell people.”

The New York Times reported Soon has received $1.2 million in fossil fuel funding in the last decade – while crucially failing to declare any conflict of interest when publishing in scientific journals. Soon took $409,000 from electric utility company Southern Company Services and $230,000 from the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation. Both ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute have stopped their grants.

Big Oil Protégé

Soon completed his PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of South California in 1991 and began working at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where the chair of trustees was Robert Jastrow, founder of the Koch-funded George C. Marshall Institute.

By the following year, he had become a protégé of Sallie Balinuas, an Exxon beneficiary, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre. And it was not long before he was drawing in hundreds of thousands of pounds in research grants from oil interests.

His department has received cash from the Electric Power Research Institute, American Petroleum Institute, Mobil Foundation, Texaco Foundation, ExxonMobil Foundation, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and the mysterious Donors Trust.

The average salary in the United States today is $54,450 while McDonald’s in Britain pays over-22s £5.55 an hour – about £11,544 ($17,800) a year.

Photo and photomontage: Brendan Montague

==

jumped the shark

Science Bulletin  2015, Vol. 60  Issue (1): 122-135    DOI: 10.1007/s11434-014-0699-2

ARTICLES

Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model

Christopher Monckton1, Willie W.-H. Soon2, David R. Legates3, William M. Briggs4

  1. Science and Public Policy Institute, Haymarket, VA 20169, USA;
  1. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;
  1. Department of Geography, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA;
  1. New York, NY 10021, USA

==

sue s:

Last week Fortune magazine named the Southern Company a top utility for the sixth year in a row, citing its "wise use of corporate assets" and "social responsibility." The nation's fourth-largest electric utility is headquartered in Atlanta and serves more than 4.4 million customers in the South through its subsidiaries Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power and Mississippi Power.

But the good press was soon followed by bad: Two days after Southern received Fortune's honor, the news broke that Greenpeace and the Virginia-based Climate Investigations Center obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request revealing that the company was the leading funder of a controversial scientist whose work has been used to raise doubts about the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change in order to stall regulatory action. The Southern Company is the top carbon polluter among U.S. utilities and the eighth-biggest in the world, according to Carbon Monitoring for Action.

The documents show Southern provided more than $400,000 between 2006 and 2015 to fund research by and part of the salary of Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics -- more than a third of Soon's total funding. In return, Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian gave the utility the right to review his scientific papers before publication while promising not to disclose the company's funding without its permission. Other contributors to Soon's work revealed in the documents include oil and gas giant ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute -- corporate funding sources that in some cases Soon failed to disclose in violation of journal policy.

The Smithsonian has asked its inspector general to review Soon's ethical conduct. In addition, three U.S. senators -- Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) -- sent 100 letters to fossil fuel companies including Southern, trade groups and other industry organizations seeking to unearth the extent of what they call "climate denial-for-hire programs."

"We've known for many years that the tobacco industry supported phony science claiming that smoking does not cause cancer," said Boxer, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. "Now it's time for the fossil fuel industry to come clean about funding climate change deniers."

Soon, an aerospace engineer whose work has depended heavily on funding from fossil-fuel interests, has promoted the hypothesis that the sun causes climate change, making him a favorite of the climate change denial crowd. He has served as an adviser to various denialist think tanks and has spoken at denialist conferences.

Soon's scientific work has long been controversial, with a widely criticized 2003 study he co-authored with astronomer and fellow climate change denier Sallie Baliunas leading to theresignations of several editors who were involved in the journal's peer-review process. The publisher eventually admitted that the flawed study should not have been published.

Scientists have pointed out various weaknesses in Soon's work, such as misinterpreting other scientists' data and relying on obsolete information for analyses. Some have noted an even more fundamental problem: Soon's claim that any evidence of a sun effect means carbon dioxide is not driving climate change. For example, in a 2009 article titled "It's the Sun, Stupid!," Soon wrote that because he has assembled evidence supporting the hypothesis that the sun causes climatic change in the Arctic it "invalidates the hypothesis that CO2 is a major cause of observed climate change."

Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Earth Institute at Columbia University, critiqued Soon's claim at Real Climate:

But this is a fallacy. It is equivalent to arguing that if total caloric intake correlates to weight, that exercise can have no effect, or that if cloudiness correlates to incident solar radiation at the ground, then seasonal variations in sunshine are zero. The existence of one physical factor affecting a variable in a complex system says nothing whatsoever about the potential for another physical factor to affect that same variable.

Paying to turn doubt into 'conventional wisdom'

The Southern Company has long been involved in efforts to mislead the public about climate change and to block regulatory action to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In 1998, as the United States was considering signing the international Kyoto Protocol treaty to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, Southern was part of an initiative called the Global Science Communications Team that brought together industry, public relations and think tank leaders to devise a plan to confuse the public about the state of climate science. The company's representative on the team was research specialist Robert Gehri, who was also Soon's contact at the utility.

Though the Kyoto-era communications effort was supposed to be secret, a memo from the group written by an American Petroleum Institute representative became public. It said"victory" would be "achieved" when industry leaders, the media and average citizens "understand" uncertainties in climate science, and when recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the "conventional wisdom."

The draft plan called for spending $5 million over two years to "maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences," the New York Times reported:

It would measure progress by counting, among other things, the percentage of news articles that raise questions about climate science and the number of radio talk show appearances by scientists questioning the prevailing views.

While the United States signed the treaty that November, the Clinton administration did not submit it to the Senate for ratification. The Bush administration rejected it altogether three years later.

A decade after its efforts to block U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol, the Southern Company had become the nation's top lobbyist on federal legislation to address climate change by creating an emissions trading plan, which it opposed. A 2009 investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found the utility had nearly twice as many climate lobbyists as any other company or organization. While the House of Representatives approved the bill, it was defeated in the Senate.

More recently, Southern deployed its lobbying power to block carbon emission limits for power plants proposed by the Obama administration. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to finalize the carbon regulations this summer, but they're now being challenged in court by 12 states and a coal mining company.

In 2013, as the administration was preparing to roll out the rules, a lobbyist with a utility consortium told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Southern Company devotes more resources to lobbying than most utility companies and is "very active in pushing its point of view." Indeed, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics classifies the company as a "heavy hitter" for its generous spending on lobbying (over $12 million in the 2014 cycle alone) and campaign contributions (over $1.4 million in 2014, with most of that benefiting Republicans).

Southern's campaign contributions have helped promote climate science denial in Congress. The top recipient of contributions from the company's PAC and employees in the 2014 campaign cycle was Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), who is part of what Climate Progress has dubbed the "Climate Denier Caucus." Perdue has accused the EPA of "overreaching" in its efforts to address climate change and has echoed the line Southern has pushed, saying that "in science, there's an active debate going on."

And Perdue's not the only leading recipient of Southern's political support to help spread the questionable scientific talking points the utility has paid for: Rep. Gary Palmer, an Alabama Republican who received $18,000 from the company's PAC and employees in the 2014 cycle, last year told WATE that science "says global climate change is more a function of nature and solar activity than it is anything man does."

Chalk it up as yet another "victory" for a company that last year raked in $2 billion in profits.

--

2/15

After finishing a study contending that solar activity is increasing global warming, scientist Willie Soon of theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicsreported his news to a utility company that was a major funder of his work.

"I have a big super-duper paper soon to be accepted on how the sun affects the climate system," Soon wrote in a 2009 email to Robert Gehri, a research specialist with Southern Company Services, a mega utility company in the southeastern U.S. that generates power largely from coal.

Soon, one of few skeptics in the climate science community, described the paper that was published in the journal Physical Geography as "fairly significant scientifically in that this is the first successful formulation of a sun-climate connection." He was writing a follow-up note to Gehri, whose company has provided more than $400,000 from 2006 through 2015 to fund Soon’s research—and part of his salary.

The emails and related documents were obtained by Greenpeace through Freedom of Information Act requests. They were made public today by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, an environmental watchdog organization based in Virginia.

The communications show that Soon called his peer-reviewed research papers "deliverables" in return for funding from fossil fuel companies. In addition, the documents reveal that Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian gave the coal utility company the right to review his scientific papers and make suggestions before they were published. Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian also pledged not to disclose Southern’s role as a funder without permission.

Although the emails don’t show a response from Gehri, an industry executive with a long track record of working behind the scenes to downplay the significance of global warming, they do show Soon sharing a collegial familiarity with industry executives, media skeptics and organizations dedicated to undermining prevailing climate science.

The theory advanced by Soon that the sun is a contributor to recent climate change has been widely discredited by scientists worldwide as well as by theUnited Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading international body on climate science. Nevertheless, the theory has stoked long-simmering public confusion about the sun’s role in global warming that continues to this day.

For decades, the industry has latched on to controversial findings like those advanced by Soon and a small group of contrarian scientists to create the impression that researchers are divided about the cause of climate change. It has pumped millions of dollars into research projects to cast doubt on mainstream climate science showing that the primary driver of global warming is the burning of fossil fuels.

The trove of documents released today offers one of the starkest glimpses yet into the workings of this strategy of peddling scientific doubt. Scientists, academics and policymakers say the strategy has helped the industry in delaying or thwarting decisive steps toward curbing global warming.

"The industry has had a longstanding, rather broad-based campaign to create doubt about the science," said Michael MacCracken, a former program director for the U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Research Program. He is now the chief scientist for climate change programs with the Climate Institute, an independent climate research organization in Washington, D.C.

The campaign "has paralyzed implementation of what could have been a reasonable ramping up of control efforts over the last few decades, putting the nation and the world now into a situation where much more aggressive action to limit emissions is needed," MacCracken said.

One of the first worldwide calls to address global warming resulted in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that mandated greenhouse gas reductions.

In response, the American Petroleum Institute (API) coordinated a plan to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the climate accord was based on shaky science. The institute pulled together a Global Climate Science Communications team to enlist scientists who shared the industry's views. The action plan developed by the team said "victory will be achieved when those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."

Among the 12 people listed as members of the team was Robert Gehri, the Southern Co. executive who was Soon's corporate contact on the 2009 sun study. Others included representatives from Exxon and Chevron and organizations critical of global-warming science.

Today the industry persists in its campaign to muddy the picture of climate change. ExxonMobil, API and the Charles Koch Foundation for years were among the largest funders of research and lobbying intended to cast doubt on the science documenting global warming.

Soon, who is not paid a salary by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center but relies on grants for his wages, has tapped that largess. In addition to the research grants from Southern Co. totaling $409,754 between 2006 and 2015, Soon collected nearly $800,000 in funding from ExxonMobil, API and the Charles Koch Foundation between 2003 and 2012, according to years of public records obtained by Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center.

Soon declined numerous requests for an interview and when reached by phone Thursday after business hours said it was "rude" to be contacted at home.

The 49-year-old scientist earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in science and his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California. Soon has been affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics since 1991. (The group is not officially associated with Harvard University, though it is located on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass.)

Soon and his co-authors have published dozens of papers in top scientific journals worldwide, sometimes without disclosing the source of funding for those projects, a practice that raises ethical questions and often violates the conflict-of-interest policies of the publications.

The reports cover a wide range of climate-denial perspectives. Many of the studies postulate that changes in solar activity are responsible for global temperature trends, such as the 2009 paper that Soon boasted about to Southern Co. The studies all question the extent, severity, cause and existence of man-made climate change.

Questions regarding Soon's credibility and impartiality have circulated for years and have been grist for environmental organizations critical of his research findings and his ethics.

Controversy erupted early this year with the publication of a paper co-authored by Soon in Science Bulletin, a scientific journal cosponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

http://www.scibull.com:8080/EN/volumn/home.shtml

In the paper, Soon and three other climate skeptics attempt to discredit the UN panel on global warming, the IPCC. Soon and his co-researchers contend the IPCC used flawed techniques to calculate changes in global temperature that exaggerated the threat of global warming by as much as 50 percent. The paper has been roundly criticized by climate scientists and academics.

Each of the writers said at the end of the piece that they had no conflicts of interest. But Davies of the Climate Investigations Center challenged that assertion because of the FOIA paper trail showing Soon has long accepted industry money.

The newly released documents show that the dust-up over the Chinese journal echoed a practice Soon engaged in with a variety of less obscure journals that published his work.

Although Soon has at times disclosed the support he received from Exxon, API and the Koch Foundation, the documents show he failed to disclose his special relationship with Southern.

"As further consideration to SCS [Southern Company Services], Smithsonian shall provide SCS an advance written copy of proposed publications regarding the deliverables for comment and input, if any, from SCS," according to a funding agreement signed by

Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said Soon expressed his own opinion. She defended the center's funding agreements and its scrutiny of the research performed.

"The Smithsonian stands by the process by which the research results of all of its scholars are peer reviewed and vetted by other scientists," Pulliam said. "This is the way the scientific process works. The funding entities, regardless of their affiliation, have no influence on the research."

Southern Co. did not make an official available to explain its association with Soon. Company spokeswoman Jeannice Hall issued a brief statement that the company "funds a broad range of research on a number of topics that have potentially significant public policy implications for our business."

Agreements such as those between Soon and Southern raised troubling issues, according to Juscelino Colares, a professor of law and associate director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland.

"It all goes to the matter of credibility," said Colares, who teaches courses on international environmental law. "Why are they hiding something? Why are they giving non-science the weight of science? This is manipulation that gives the funder the last word."

Davies said the close relationship with industry that the Soon documents reveal raises doubts about the impartiality that is supposed to come with scientific research.

"It shows that he is not just being funded to do science but to impact the public policy arena," Davies said.

As part of a final report to Southern in 2011 outlining the papers and presentations he produced for a $60,000 grant, Soon explained the policy relevance of the research he delivered:  "The hypothesized dangerous consequences of rising atmospheric CO2 are too speculative for responsible regulatory policy."

In announcing the completion of his 2009 sun-climate paper to Koch foundation executives, who had contributed $65,000 to fund the study, Soon said his findings were consistent with the hypothesis that the sun causes climatic change in the Arctic.

"It...raises serious questions about the wisdom of imposing cap-and-trade or other policies that would cripple energy production and economic activity, in the name of preventing catastrophic climate change," Soon told the executives in a 2009 email.

One study Soon published—funded by Southern and the Koch foundation—has stirred the debate about the fate of polar bears in the face of climate change and the loss of sea ice. In the study, Soon dismissed the idea that polar bears in the Canadian Arctic were at risk from the impacts of climate change—and questioned whether the region was even warming at all.

Davies said Soon's polar bear research goes to the heart of how the industry employs research like Soon's to deflect attention from the true cause of global warming.

"Climate change isn't something you can go out and see like a polluted river," he said. "But with the polar bears, all of a sudden you could see the results of climate change."

They were starving as their hunting grounds melted away, and people were beginning to connect all of this to the consequences of fossil fuel and atmospheric carbon, Davies said.

"So the companies are happy having Willie Soon out there," he said "These companies are paying him to go out in the world to cast doubt."

InsideClimate News reporters Lisa Song and Sabrina Shankman contributed to this report.

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Astrophysical_Observatory

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is a research institute of the Smithsonian Institution headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it is joined with theHarvard College Observatory (HCO) to form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Contents   [hide]

1 History

1.1 Remote stations

2 The SAO today

3 Directors

4 References

5 External links

History[edit]

The SAO was founded in 1890 by Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Smithsonian's third Secretary, primarily for studies of the sun.[1] Langley is remembered today as an aeronautical pioneer, but he was trained as an astronomer and was the first American scientist to perceive "astrophysics" as a distinct field. Langley invented the bolometer and discovered infrared radiation from the sun.

In 1955, the SAO moved from Washington, D.C. to Cambridge, to affiliate with HCO and to expand its staff, facilities, and most importantly, its scientific scope. Fred Whipple, the first director of SAO in this new era, accepted a national challenge to create a worldwide satellite-tracking network, a decision that would establish SAO as a pioneer and leader in space science research.

Smithsonian and the USAF Project Space Track shared observations and ephemerides throughout the early days of satellite tracking, 1957-1961.

In 1973, the ties between Smithsonian and Harvard were strengthened and formalized by the creation of the joint Harvard-Smithsonian CfA.

Remote stations[edit]

SAO has operated a number of remote stations over the years.[2][3]

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Station Type Latitude Longitude El. (m) Opened Closed Coordinates

Mount Wilson, California Solar 34º13'N 118º56'W 1737 1908 1920

==

a research institute of the Smithsonian Institution headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it is joined with the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) to form the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Currently, more than 300 scientists at the CfA are engaged in a broad program of research in astronomy, astrophysics, earth and space sciences, and science education.

FUNDING

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has received $467,212 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

2005

$105,000 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving

Source: ExxonMobil 2005 Worldwide Giving Report

2006

$105,000 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving

Source: ExxonMobil 2006 Worldwide Giving Report

2006

$50,000 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving

Source: ExxonMobil 2006 Worldwide Giving Report

2007

$55,000 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving

Source: ExxonMobil 2007 Worldwide Giving Report

2008

$76,106 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving

Source: ExxonMobil 2008 worldwide contributions

2009

$76,106 ExxonMobil Corporate Giving

Source: ExxonMobil 2009 Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments

PEOPLE

Sallie Baliunas

Scientist

Source: ExxonMobil 2005 Worldwide Giving Report

Willie Soon

Scientist

Source: ExxonMobil 2005 Worldwide Giving Report

SOURCES

ExxonMobil 2005 Worldwide Giving Report

Public Information and Policy Research

http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=4387

ExxonMobil 2006 Worldwide Giving Report

Public Information and Policy Research downloaded from Exxon website

http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=4381

ExxonMobil 2007 Worldwide Giving Report

http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=download&d=4586

ExxonMobil 2009 Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments

Exxon Mobil Corporation 2009 Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments

http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/files/gcr_contributions_pub-policy09.pdf

ExxonMobil 2008 worldwide contributions

http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=download&d=5899

==

2008 suit: aei, nam, US CoC, Nat'l mining assoc, Am Iron and Steel Inst. (p196) joined pahlin 2007 ltr to kempthorne, ref'd soon paper a week before it was published 197  april 9  kempthorne did not want to list, tho his asst Hall (B2 appt) said no doubt about problem 197 foolme2x

legates and soon had worked together before ; not new data, just cherrypick

2003 soon paper ~ Mann by GCMI; sci figured out how to use tree ring density correlated to temp; mann extended: blue reconstructed, w/ red for actual and grey to show margin of error 199

---

polar bear suit:

greenpeace 2010 on koch:

Case Study 2: Polar Bear Junk Science

In 2007, several prominent climate denial scientists published

a non-peer reviewed article,35 (Dyck, Soon et al, 2007 ??Polar

bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change: Are

warming spring air temperatures the ‘??ultimate????? survival

control factor?”) concluding that polar bears are not being

threatened by anthropogenic global warming. One of the

paper???s authors, Dr. Willie Soon, disclosed in the acknowledgements

section that he had received direct corporate

funding for the work, stating ???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.” (Exxon

grants to Soon

---

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/CASE-STUDY-Dr-Willie-Soon-a-Career-Fueled-by-Big-Oil-and-Coal/

update:

CASE STUDY: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal

On this page

UPDATE Feb. 2013: New FOIA results show new funding to Willie Soon from secret Donors Trust network, Koch brothers and Southern Company.

Introduction:

Key findings:

Willie Soon’s Backers:  Big Coal and Big Oil

Dr. Willie Soon's known corporate funding 1994-2012:

The 1990’s:

Get funding from big coal, become expert in Mercury?

Willie Soon plotted to take down the IPCC AR4 before it was even written.

The Hockey Stick

2003 testimony to Environment and Public Works Committee

Fake science and polar bears

Were the fossil fuel companies working together to fund Dr. Soon?

Dr. Soon and the Free to Choose Network

Dr. Soon's Work with Oil/Coal Funded Think Tanks

The Heartland Institute

The George C. Marshall Institute

The World Climate Report

The Fraser Institute

Tech Central Station

Frontiers of Freedom, The Center for Science and Public Policy and the Science and Public Policy Institute

International connections

SOURCE FOIA DOCUMENTS FOR WILLIE SOON GRANTS:

Of all the climate deniers, one scientist has been particularly closely involved in the campaign against the climate science consensus for the majority of his career: Dr. Willie Soon.

UPDATE Feb. 2013: New FOIA results show new funding to Willie Soon from secret Donors Trustnetwork, Koch brothers and Southern Company.

Click here to see the fossil fuel financiers of Willie Soon's career.

Introduction:

This investigation shows that Dr. Soon has received substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry for most of his scientific career and heavy corporate funding in the last decade.

After graduating in science (Bachelor and Masters), Dr. Soon received his Ph.D in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1991.

His thesis focussed on “Collisional-radiative properties of high-temperature, partially ionized nitrogen, oxygen, helium and hydrogen plasmas at conditions relevant to the Earth’s atmosphere.” He has never had any formal training as a climatologist and stated, in a reply to Sen. Jeffords in 2003 after a Congressional testimony, that one of his main teachers in climate science was denier David Legates.

After graduating, Dr. Soon began work at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The chair of Mt Wilson’s Board of Trustees was climate denier Robert Jastrow, who set up the George C Marshall Institute, the think tank that was arguably the first to engage in active climate denial, as documented by science historian Naomi Oreskes in the book “Merchants of Doubt”.

Dr. Soon is now employed as astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory (SAO). He is most famous for his work with fellow astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, writing the first paper that attempted to challenge the ‘hockey stick’ graph of temperature records published by Dr Michael Mann.

Key findings:

$1.3 Million in corporate funding: The FOIA response from the Smithsonian reveals that more than half (over $1.3 million) of Willie Soon’s total funding since 2001 has come from the oil and electric utility industry (coal). Since 2002, every new grant he has received has been from either oil & coal interests or Donors Trust.

UPDATE FEB. 2013: Willie Soon now gets funding funneled through Donors Trust, the secretive "Dark Money ATM" used by the Kochs and other wealthy elites to obscure their contributions to controversial sources--see the Guardian and Mother Jones. Since 2002, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund have sent $146 million to 102 groups that deny climate science and obstruct policy solutions to global warming.

Polar bear junk science funding revealed: While Dr. Soon revealed in a 2007 non-peer reviewed Ecological Complexity article on polar bears and Arctic ice that his research was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, neither the corporate funders or Dr. Soon have ever acknowledged the extent, dollar figures or timing of those grants.

More Koch Funding: The FOIA response from Smithsonian uncovered an additional grant in 2010 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation of $65,000. UPDATE FEB. 2013: New FOIA results show an additional $55,000 from the Kochs for Willie Soon's work from 2010-2012.

Southern Company dirty coal funding: The Smithsonian documents also revealed two previously unknown grants totaling $230,000 from the Southern Company, one of the largest coal burning electric utilities in the United States and in world. FEB. 2013 UPDATE: New FOIA results show an additional $120,000 from Southern Company for Willie Soon's work from 2011-2012.

Additional corporate funders: Other papers written by Dr. Soon and reviewed by Greenpeace researchers show that the American Petroleum Institute has been funding Dr. Soon since the mid-1990s, a period when he also acknowledged funding from Mobil, Texacoand the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) a research and lobby shop funded by the electric utilities.

Attack on IPCC report: Correspondence uncovered in our investigation reveals Dr. Soon coordinating a plan in 2003 to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 1 report–years before the report was released in 2007.

Willie Soon’s Backers:  Big Coal and Big Oil

Since 2001, Willie Soon has received direct funding for his research of $1.033 million from Big Coal and Big Oil interests. In contrast, he received $842,079 from conventional government or university funders in the same period. The last grant he received from a funder with no ties to dirty energy interests was in 2002 (a grant that carried through to 2006). Since then, he has been entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave two grants to Dr. Soon totaling $175,000. The 2005-6 grant for $110,000 from the “Koch Foundation” is titled  "Koch/Mobile [sic] Charitable foundation." This two year grant came from the Charles G. Koch Foundation according to Media Matters Transperancy.

The 2010 grant for $65,000 is titled "Understanding solar variability and climate change." Dr. Soon’s acknowledgement in the 2007 polar bear paper published in the Journal of Ecological Complexity says he received funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

American Petroleum Institute (API) gave Dr. Soon multiple grants from 2001 to 2007 totalling nearly $274,000 for research apparently of interest to the oil industry, such as the "Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years." Additional grants of unknown amounts were given to Dr. Soon from 1994-1997.

ExxonMobil Foundation has heavily funded Dr. Soon in at least four grants between 2005 and 2010 totaling $335,000. The titles for these grants range from "project support" to "Exxon-Arctic climate change." It is not known whether ExxonMobil is still funding Dr. Soon, but Exxon did note in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report,

"…we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in a responsible manner."

Southern Company is new to the list of known funders of Willie Soon. Our FOIA request to Smithsonian revealed that Southern Company, the giant coal burning utility, gave Dr. Soon two grants: $110,000 in 2005-06 for "Understanding Arctic Climate Change" and $120,000 in 2008-09 for "Solar variability and climate change signals from temperature," areas of research that Southern Company appears to have a keen interest in. This funding and relationship with Southern and EPRI might explain Dr. Soon’s "expertise" in mercury (see below), as the EPA finalizes overdue rules on mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations. Oil burning does not result in mercury emissions, but coal burning does.

Willie Soon regularly teamed with the SAO’s other astrophysicist, Sallie Baliunas, to defend fossil fuels and attack climate science. Some grants were split between them. This denier duo has received $1.153 million from dirty energy interests since 2001.

Dr. Willie Soon's known corporate funding 1994-2012:

(source documents available below)

Funder Grant Description from source Grant Year(s) Grant Amount Source

Electric Power Research Institute 1994-1999 ?? Soon published papers

American Petroleum Institute 1994-1997 ?? Soon published papers

Mobil Foundation 1995-1997 ?? Soon published papers

Texaco Foundation 1996 ?? Soon published papers

American Petroleum Institute Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years 2001, 2002 $58,380 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute 1000 years of solar variability 2003 $60,053 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute The 11-22 year climate responses 2004, 2005 $50,178 Smithsonian FOIA

ExxonMobil Foundation listed by Exxon as a grant to SAO 2005 $105,000 ExxonMobil Worldwide Giving Report 2005

Charles G. Koch Foundation Koch/Mobile Charitable foundation 2005, 2006 $110,000 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute Understanding Arctic Climate Change 2005, 2006 $50,000 Smithsonian FOIA

ExxonMobil Foundation Listed by Exxon as "project support" to SAO. 2006 $105,000 ExxonMobil Worldwide Giving Report 2006

Southern Company Understanding Arctic Climate Change 2006, 2007 $110,000 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute The solar influence of arctic climate change 2006, 2007 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA

ExxonMobil Foundation Exxon-Arctic climate change 2007,  2008 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA/Exxon Giving Report

ExxonMobil Foundation Exxon-soon solar variability 2008-2010 $70,106 Smithsonian FOIA/Exxon Giving Report

Free to Choose The sun's influence on climate change 2008 $19,383 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Solar variability and Climate Change signals from temperature 2008, 2009 $120,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Charles G. Koch Foundation Understanding solar variability and climate change 2010 $65,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Understanding solar radiation and climate change 2011 $60,003 Smithsonian FOIA

Charles G. Koch Foundation Understanding solar radiation and climate change 2010-2012 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Donors Trust Understanding solar radiation and climate change 2011 $50,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Understanding solar radiation and climate change 2011-2012 $59,942 Smithsonian FOIA

Donors Trust Understanding solar radiation and climate change 2011-2012 $64,935 Smithsonian FOIA

TOTAL 2001-2012 $1,322,980

The 1990’s:

Dr. Soon’s alliance with Big Oil began in the 1990s when oil companies began to see the threat of the growing climate science consensus and desperately sought counter information such as Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas’ work on solar variability and its potential influence on the climate.

It would be very convenient for the oil industry if carbon dioxide were not to blame for climate change. The American Petroleum Institute (API) funded four of Dr. Soon’s papers from 1994-1997. The Mobil Foundation (merged with Exxon Foundation in 1998) funded at least three of his papers in the same period, all along with the API. The Texaco Foundation also funded a paper by Dr. Soon. We do not know the size of these grants.

Another major funder in the 1990s was the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a research organization for the electricity industry. In 2009, 45 percent of US electricity was generated from coal. Coal and oil have the most at stake from strong scientific proof of global warming and carbon dioxide emissions impact on the planet. There is a long alliance between the interests of coal and oil attacking climate science and fighting climate policy dating back to the late 1980s as detailed in the Greenpeace report, Dealing in Doubt.

Get funding from big coal, become expert in Mercury?

In May 2011, an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), co-authored by Willie Soon and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow’s Paul Driessen.  Entitled “The Myth of Killer Mercury,” the piece attacked the EPA’s proposed rules for limiting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Dr. Soon’s WSJ byline stated: "Mr. Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, is an expert on mercury and public health issues."

Greenpeace asked both Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) to verify this newfound area of expertise expressed by Dr Soon. Dr Charles Alcock, the Director of the CfA, stated in an email that Dr. Soon was employed an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), which is apparently housed within the CfA, along with the the Harvard College Observatory. Dr. Alcock said in a letter "I cannot comment on Dr Soon’s expertise regarding mercury and public health issues."

Nonetheless, Willie Soon has no affiliation with Harvard University except sharing a building with Harvard students and staff on Harvard’s campus.

As the Wall St. Journal op-ed was re-posted across the web on right wing blogs and think tank websites, Dr. Soon’s byline mysteriously started to morph, turning into: "Willie Soon is a natural scientist who has studied mercury and public health issues for eight years." Yet there is no record of any such public health studying or publishing in peer reviewed journals in his most recent bio and CV, written six years ago.

Dr. Soon also appeared as a quasi-expert on mercury in 2005 in another Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Eat More Fish," republished by the Heartland Institute.

Willie Soon plotted to take down the IPCC AR4 before it was even written.

In 2003, as the IPCC was gearing up for the upcoming Fourth Assessment (AR4) due in 2007, Willie Soon began plotting with colleagues about how to undermine the work. As part of the FOIA documents received by Greenpeace, there was a link to Dr. Soon’s documents. That link led to a directory of Dr. Soon’s files at Harvard. Dr. Soon has also referenced these online files in previous articles published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In a letter in these files (dated after 10 October) Dr. Soon wrote:

“Clearly they [the AR4 chapters] may be too much for any one of us to tackle them all ... But, as A-team, we may for once give it our best shot to try to anticipate and counter some of the chapters, especially WG1---judging from our true expertise in the basic climate sciences ...

Even if we can tackle ONE single chapter down the road but forcefully and effectively ... we will really accomplish A LOT!

In all cases, I hope we can start discussing among ourselves to see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment report or to re-direct  attention back to science …”

Who was this “A Team”? The letter was addressed to “Bob, Randy, Walter, Sallie and Dave”.

From other correspondence, it seems possible that “Bob” is Australian sceptic Bob Carter, as Dr. Soon worked with Carter. “Sallie” is clearly Dr. Sallie Baliunas, “Dave” is likely David Legates.

There is no prominent “A-team” type scientist or climate sceptic called Randy – except ExxonMobil’s lobbyist Randy Randol, who was heavily involved with the Exxon-funded deniers. Randol wrote thefamous memo to the Bush administration recommending that the then head of the IPCC, Bob Watson, be replaced. (Watson was indeed replaced - by the current chair Rajendra Pachauri.  But Pachauri has continued the rigorous scientific work carried out by Watson and has since become the target of deniers.)

Randol was involved in a number of other Exxon plans to undermine climate science, including a plan cooked up in 1998 with other Exxon-funded think tanks to attack the Kyoto Protocol (see his name, bottom of page 4).

Equally, there is no “Walter” in the climate denial field – except Walt Bucholtz, ExxonMobil’s Government Relations & Issues Advisor, the man responsible for doling out Exxon’s funding grants to deniers and front groups. Bucholtz was listed as a “Government relations advisor” to the Heartland Institute in 2005 (as listed in the Heartland Institute’s 2005 990 IRS form).

Regardless of who these “A Team” members truly were, Willie Soon clearly coordinated a plan to undermine the science chapter of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment – before he even knew what science it contained. This is a clear example of the climate denier strategy of undermining climate science, and stands in sharp contrast with accepted scientific methodology.

The Hockey Stick

In 2003, Dr. Soon and his colleague at the SAO, Sallie Baliunas, published a now thoroughly debunked study in Climate Research’ "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years," in the first of a number of denier challenges to Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ study. This study wasrepublished [pdf] by the (then ExxonMobil funded) George Marshall Institute in 2003

While Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas acknowledged the American Petroleum Institute’s funding of the work in the paper, the dollar figure was not known. We now know from the newly acquired FOIA Smithsonian documents that the API gave them a total of $118,443 for this work, over 2002 and 2003, in grants entitled: “Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years” and “1000 years of solar variability.”

The Soon-Baliunas article claimed that the twentieth century was not the warmest century in the past 1,000 years and that the climate has not changed significantly during this time. This sham science kicked off a heavy focus by deniers on the “hockey stick” study first done by Michael Mann, later proven sound by numerous other studies, but viciously attacked by deniers regardless.

Mann himself, in an interview, said of the Soon-Baliunas 2003 paper:

"It really was one of the poorest pieces of scholarship that any of us in the climate research community had ever seen… it was clear that there was an effort by some on the editorial board to compromise the PR (peer review) process and allow through this deeply, deeply flawed paper in the professional literature where it was immediately held up by those in Washington opposed to taking action against climate change… as somehow being the dagger in the heart of the case for global warming, when in fact it was just an extremely bad study that never should have published…"

After the Soon-Baliunas article was published, three of the editors of Climate Research resigned in protest, including incoming editor-in-chief Hans von Storch.  Von Storch declared the article seriously flawed because "the conclusions [were] not supported by the evidence presented in the paper." In addition to the resignations, thirteen of the scientists cited in the paper published rebuttals stating that Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas had misinterpreted their work.

2003 testimony to Environment and Public Works Committee

In 2003, after publishing his ‘hockey stick’ paper, Dr. Soon was invited to give evidence on global warming to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). During the hearing, Dr. Soon was asked by Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT):

“Have you been hired by or employed by or received grants from organizations that have taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto Protocol, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or legislation before the United States Congress that would affect greenhouse gas emissions? If so, please identify those organizations.”

Willie Soon responded:  "I have not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any such organizations described in this question."

It is difficult to accept that Dr. Soon didn’t know that the American Petroleum Institute, one of his funders at the time, had been at the centre of lobbying against action on climate change for over a decade. Nor is it plausible that there were no discussions about Dr. Soon’s research.

Fake science and polar bears

The majority of Dr. Soon’s grants from the fossil fuel industry focus on work relating to the sun and Arctic climate change.

Willie Soon’s recently published articles relating to climate change focus on solar variability and the Arctic (in 2005 and 2009), attempting to prove that it is the sun’s variability that is responsible for Arctic warming in recent years.

In March 2007, Willie Soon co-authored a ‘viewpoint’, published in the journal Ecological Complexity(Vol. 4, Issue 3, pp. 73-84) that announced that polar bears were not under threat from global warming and that Arctic sea ice decline was less severe than stated in recent peer-reviewed literature. Ecological Complexity publishes peer-reviewed research, but “Viewpoints” aren’t subject to such scholarly review.  Dr. Soon was one of the authors of the ‘viewpoint’, joined by well-known deniers Sallie Baliunas, David Legates and Tim Ball.

The paper was rejected some four years earlier by a peer-reviewed journal. But because the peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed reports look almost identical, it would be almost impossible for a casual reader to tell the difference. Also contained in Willie Soon’s Harvard files online was a rejection letter from the Editor of “Ecography” magazine, Linus Svensson, dated June 5, 2003, containing peer review comments supporting the magazine’s rejection of the submission.

The whole affair has been documented in a previous case study in the 2010 Greenpeace report on the Koch Brothers.

Willie Soon acknowledges that the article was partly sponsored “(for Willie Soon’s work) by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation. “

The new FOIA documents from the SAO show the funding in this period, presumably for this study, was as follows:

API:   $50,000, “understanding Arctic climate change”

Koch:  $110,000, “Koch/Mobile (sic) charitable foundation”

ExxonMobil: $55,000, “Arctic climate change”

The new funder to all of this work, not acknowledged in the 2007 Ecological Complexity paper, was the coal utility Southern Company, which appears also to have contributed to this study: $110,000 in 2006 for “understanding Arctic climate change.”

Were the fossil fuel companies working together to fund Dr. Soon?

As Dr. Soon’s work developed, he began focussing on the influence of the sun on the earth’s climate. Given that the papers he wrote questioning the science of climate change – from the ‘hockey stick’ to the polar bears were all funded by the oil industry, the question must be raised: did the companies work together to fund Dr. Soon’s work?

The long collaboration of Big Oil and Big Coal to slow the uptake of climate science is well documented. The close collaboration of the laggards Southern Company, ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute is also known.

In 1998, Robert Gehri from Southern Company, Joseph Walker from American Petroleum Institute and Randy Randol from ExxonMobil met with think tanks and oil companies to come up with the “Global Science Communications Plan.” This document declared that “victory” would be achieved when average citizens “recognize uncertainties in climate science.”

This ‘secret plan’ was revealed on the front page of the New York Times, but many assume the collaboration continued unabated.

Was their joint funding of Dr. Soon’s work to challenge the science on Arctic warming a continuation of that plan?

Dr. Soon and the Free to Choose Network

The Free to Choose Network was founded by the late neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman, who was closely associated with Big Tobacco. Friedman was also a fellow at the Hoover Institution that has received grants from ExxonMobil, Koch Foundations and other right wing foundations such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

In 2008, the Free to Choose network paid the denier duo of Doctors Soon and Baliunas $19,383. The grant was entitled “the sun’s influence on climate change”. That year, Free to Choose produced an “educational” video contending that the sun has more to do with climate change than human interference.

“Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Dr. David Legates of the University of Delaware provide an easy-to-follow review of current climate science, which suggests that the sun's irregular patterns and other natural forces are the major sources of climate change.”

Dr. Soon's Work with Oil/Coal Funded Think Tanks

The Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute lists Willie Soon as a writer/contributor on its website. This is confirmed by Dr. Soon’s own CV that lists him as writing for Heartland’s “Environment and Climate News” from November 1997 to December 2000.

Heartland has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998, in addition to $325,000 from the Scaife foundations and $75,000 from the Koch foundations according to Media Matters Transparency project and Greenpeace research.

The Koch foundations stopped funding Heartland Institute in 2000 and ExxonMobil Foundation dropped Heartland in 2007.

Willie Soon was a speaker and panelist at the Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. The sponsors of this conference are heavily funded by ExxonMobil, Scaife, and Koch.

The George C. Marshall Institute

Dr. Soon was a senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute, writing papers for it along with Sallie Baliunas, from 1997 to 2004. Sallie Baliunas sat on the board of the George C. Marshall Institute. The Marshall Institute (and its associated foundations) have received $840,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998. Since 1985, the institute has also received $3,370,000 from the Scaife Foundations and $310,000 from the Koch Foundations since 1985. Exxon dropped funding to the Marshall Institute in 2008. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, run by the Kochs, still funds the Marshall Institute, according to the most recent information available, a 2009 grant of $70,000.

The World Climate Report

In Dr. Soon’s Curriculum Vitae in 2005 he lists himself as a “contributing editor” to the World Climate Report, a blog run by prominent climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels, published by his company, New Hope Environmental Services. New Hope has been described as a PR company and, while secretive about its funding sources, it received support from the “non-profit fuel supply co-operative” Western Fuels Association which supports coal mining in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and the railroads that transport that coal to the powerplants built to burn it. Between 1997 and 2000, Dr. Soon wrote 21 articles for the website, mostly co-written with Sallie Baliunas.  CRYPTO

Western Fuels itself funded and controlled another similar group called the “Greening Earth Society” which ran a newsletter called “World Climate Alert.” According to his CV, Dr. Soon wrote at least three articles for World Climate Alert.

The Fraser Institute

Willie Soon has written for the Fraser Institute and is listed on its website as an author. His CV describes his involvement as being a member of the Fraser institute’s “CANSTAT” advisory board from 2002 to at least 2005, although in 2001 he wrote a “Guide to Global Warming” for the Fraser Institute.

The Fraser Institute has received $120,000 from ExxonMobil in two $60,000 grants for “climate change” in 2003 and 2004. According to Media Transparency, more than 75 percent of the $403,301 received by the Fraser Institute since 1985 has come from the oil-rich Scaife Foundations ($275,000) and the Koch Foundations ($198,221).

Tech Central Station

Willie Soon was an author for Tech Central Station (TCS), a web-based journalism site established by Washington DC lobbyists, DCI Group, for unknown clients.   Over the four years that he wrote for Tech Central, Dr. Soon wrote on a wide range of issues entirely unrelated to astrophysics - his area of expertise - such as the impact of wind farms on agriculture, regulations on mercury and attacks on various US states for their efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions. According to his 2005 CV, Dr. Soon wrote 43 articles for TCS between 2001 and 2004.

ExxonMobil gave TCS $95,000 in 2003. Up until 2006, TCS's information was published by the public relations firm DCI Group, a registered lobbying firm for ExxonMobil. In 2010 TCS was closed down. TCSdaily.com now jumps to “ideas in action tv” where much of the archive is preserved. Ideasinactiontv.com is now funded by Investors Business Daily. Copyright is co-owned by the George W Bush Institute.

Frontiers of Freedom, The Center for Science and Public Policy and the Science and Public Policy Institute

Willie Soon lists himself as being on the advisory board of the National Center for Public Policy Research, an affiliate of Frontiers of Freedom, from April 2003.  Although Dr. Soon was not listed on the centre's website, in the Wall Street Journal article "Eat More Fish," which he co-authored with Robert Ferguson of the Frontiers of Freedom Center for Science and Public Policy, he is listed as the center’s "Chief Science Researcher."

ExxonMobil gave Frontiers of Freedom a total of $1.272 million in funding since 1998 according toGreenpeace research. In 2003, ExxonMobil gave Frontiers of Freedom a grant of $232,000 to launch a new branch of the organization called the Center for Science and Public Policy. The mission of this new branch deals exclusively with the issue of climate change. The Scaife Family Foundations have donated $135,000 to Frontiers of Freedom, and the Koch Family Foundations have donated$575,000.

The Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI) lists Dr. Soon as Chief Science Adviser until at least 2007. The SPPI describes itself as a non-profit research and education organization which is committed to the advancement of sound, sensible energy and environmental public policies based on rational science and economics. In its mission statement the SPPI asserts that it is "free from affiliation to any corporation or political party."

The president of the Science & Public Policy Institute, Robert Ferguson, is also the executive director of the Center for Science and Public Policy. The link between the two organizations runs even deeper, apparently operating out of the same office. Both the SPPI and the Center for Science and Public Policy are listed at the same address: 209 Pennsylvania Ave. SE Washington, DC 20003.

International connections

Doctors Soon and Baliunas have turned up as founding members of denier groups as far away as Argentina where they are listed as members of the Argentinian Foundation for a Scientific Ecology. Soon’s 2005 CV shows he had papers published in both Russian and Spanish and he appeared at climate denier conferences across Europe.

SOURCE FOIA DOCUMENTS FOR WILLIE SOON GRANTS:

Willie Soon Grants, 2000-2010 (Smithsonian Institution FOIA, SI-000030, 1/28/2011)

Willie Soon Grants, 2010-2012 (with letter from Smithsonian, 8/8/2012)

Willie Soon Grants, 2012-2013 (and letter from Smithsonian, 2/26/2013)

Topics

global warming

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american petroleum institute,

willie soon,

southern company,

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epri

---

extensive greenpeace rept 2011:

CASE STUDY: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal

On this page

Introduction:

Key findings:

Willie Soon’s Backers:  Big Coal and Big Oil

Dr. Willie Soon's known corporate funding 1994-2010:

The 1990’s:

Get funding from big coal, become expert in Mercury?

Willie Soon plotted to take down the IPCC AR4 before it was even written.

The Hockey Stick

2003 testimony to Environment and Public Works Committee

Fake science and polar bears

Were the fossil fuel companies working together to fund Dr. Soon?

Dr. Soon and the Free to Choose Network

Dr. Soon's Work with Oil/Coal Funded Think Tanks

The Heartland Institute

The George C. Marshall Institute

The World Climate Report

The Fraser Institute

Tech Central Station

Frontiers of Freedom, The Center for Science and Public Policy and the Science and Public Policy Institute

International connections

Of all the climate deniers, one scientist has been particularly closely involved in the campaign against the climate science consensus for the majority of his career: Dr. Willie Soon.

Introduction:

This investigation shows that Dr. Soon has received substantial funding from the fossil fuel industry for most of his scientific career and heavy corporate funding in the last decade.

After graduating in science (Bachelor and Masters), Dr. Soon received his Ph.D in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1991.

His thesis focussed on “Collisional-radiative properties of high-temperature, partially ionized nitrogen, oxygen, helium and hydrogen plasmas at conditions relevant to the Earth’s atmosphere.” He has never had any formal training as a climatologist and stated, in a reply to Sen. Jeffords in 2003 after a Congressional testimony, that one of his main teachers in climate science was denier David Legates.

After graduating, Dr. Soon began work at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The chair of Mt Wilson’s Board of Trustees was climate denier Robert Jastrow, who set up the George C Marshall Institute, the think tank that was arguably the first to engage in active climate denial, as documented by science historian Naomi Oreskes in the book “Merchants of Doubt”.

Dr. Soon is now employed as astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory (SAO). He is most famous for his work with fellow astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, writing the first paper that attempted to challenge the ‘hockey stick’ graph of temperature records published by Dr Michael Mann.

Key findings:

$1 Million in corporate funding: The FOIA response from the Smithsonian reveals that more than half (over $1 million) of Willie Soon’s total funding since 2001 has come from the oil and electric utility industry (coal). Since 2002, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.

Polar bear junk science funding revealed: While Dr. Soon revealed in a 2007 non-peer reviewed Ecological Complexity article on polar bears and Arctic ice that his research was funded by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, neither the corporate funders or Dr. Soon have ever acknowledged the extent, dollar figures or timing of those grants.

More Koch Funding: The FOIA response from Smithsonian uncovered an additional grant in 2010 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation of $65,000.

Southern Company dirty coal funding: The Smithsonian documents also revealed two previously unknown grants totaling $230,000 from the Southern Company, one of the largest coal burning electric utilities in the United States and in world.

Additional corporate funders: Other papers written by Dr. Soon and reviewed by Greenpeace researchers show that the American Petroleum Institute has been funding Dr. Soon since the mid-1990s, a period when he also acknowledged funding from Mobil, Texaco and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) a research and lobby shop funded by the electric utilities.

Attack on IPCC report: Correspondence uncovered in our investigation reveals Dr. Soon coordinating a plan in 2003 to undermine the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report (AR4) Working Group 1 report–years before the report was released in 2007.

Willie Soon’s Backers:  Big Coal and Big Oil

Since 2001, Willie Soon has received direct funding for his research of $1.033 million from Big Coal and Big Oil interests. In contrast, he received $842,079 from conventional government or university funders in the same period. The last grant he received from a funder with no ties to dirty energy interests was in 2002 (a grant that carried through to 2006). Since then, he has been entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave two grants to Dr. Soon totaling $175,000. The 2005-6 grant for $110,000 from the “Koch Foundation” is titled   "Koch/Mobile [sic] Charitable foundation." This two year grant came from the Charles G. Koch Foundation according to Media Matters Transperancy.

The 2010 grant for $65,000 is titled "Understanding solar variability and climate change." Dr. Soon’s acknowledgement in the 2007 polar bear paper published in the Journal of Ecological Complexity says he received funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

American Petroleum Institute (API) gave Dr. Soon multiple grants from 2001 to 2007 totalling nearly $274,000 for research apparently of interest to the oil industry, such as the "Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years." Additional grants of unknown amounts were given to Dr. Soon from 1994-1997.

ExxonMobil Foundation has heavily funded Dr. Soon in at least four grants between 2005 and 2010 totaling $335,000. The titles for these grants range from "project support" to "Exxon-Arctic climate change." It is not known whether ExxonMobil is still funding Dr. Soon, but Exxon did note in its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report,

"…we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in a responsible manner."

Southern Company is new to the list of known funders of Willie Soon. Our FOIA request to Smithsonian revealed that Southern Company, the giant coal burning utility, gave Dr. Soon two grants: $110,000 in 2005-06 for "Understanding Arctic Climate Change" and $120,000 in 2008-09 for "Solar variability and climate change signals from temperature," areas of research that Southern Company appears to have a keen interest in. This funding and relationship with Southern and EPRI might explain Dr. Soon’s "expertise" in mercury (see below), as the EPA finalizes overdue rules on mercury emissions from coal-fired power stations. Oil burning does not result in mercury emissions, but coal burning does.

Willie Soon regularly teamed with the SAO’s other astrophysicist, Sallie Baliunas, to defend fossil fuels and attack climate science. Some grants were split between them. This denier duo has received $1.153 million from dirty energy interests since 2001.

Dr. Willie Soon's known corporate funding 1994-2010:

Funder Grant Description from source Grant Year(s) Grant Amount Source

Electric Power Research Institute 1994-1999 ?? Soon published papers

American Petroleum Institute 1994-1997 ?? Soon published papers

Mobil Foundation 1995-1997 ?? Soon published papers

Texaco Foundation 1996 ?? Soon published papers

American Petroleum Institute Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years

2001, 2002 $58,380 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute 1000 years of solar variability

2003 $60,053 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute The 11-22 year climate responses 2004, 2005 $50,178 Smithsonian FOIA

ExxonMobil Foundation listed by Exxon as a grant to SAO

2005 $105,000 ExxonMobil Worldwide Giving Report 2005

Charles G. Koch Foundation Koch/Mobile Charitable foundation 2005, 2006 $110,000 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute Understanding Arctic Climate Change 2005, 2006 $50,000 Smithsonian FOIA

ExxonMobil Foundation Listed by Exxon as "project support" to SAO.

2006 $105,000 ExxonMobil Worldwide Giving Report 2005

Southern Company Understanding Arctic Climate Change 2006, 2007 $110,000 Smithsonian FOIA

American Petroleum Institute The solar influence of arctic climate change 2006, 2007 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA

ExxonMobil Foundation Exxon-Arctic climate change 2007,  2008 $55,000 Smithsonian FOIA/Exxon Giving Report

ExxonMobil Foundation Exxon-soon solar variability

2008-2010 $70,106 Smithsonian FOIA/Exxon Giving Report

Free to Choose The sun's influence on climate change 2008 $19,383 Smithsonian FOIA

Southern Company Solar variability and Climate Change signals from temperature

2008, 2009 $120,000 Smithsonian FOIA

Charles G. Koch Foundation Understanding solar variability and climate change

2010 $65,000 Smithsonian FOIA

TOTAL $1,033,100

The 1990’s:

Dr. Soon’s alliance with Big Oil began in the 1990s when oil companies began to see the threat of the growing climate science consensus and desperately sought counter information such as Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas’ work on solar variability and its potential influence on the climate.

It would be very convenient for the oil industry if carbon dioxide were not to blame for climate change. The American Petroleum Institute (API) funded four of Dr. Soon’s papers from 1994-1997. The Mobil Foundation (merged with Exxon Foundation in 1998) funded at least three of his papers in the same period, all along with the API. The Texaco Foundation also funded a paper by Dr. Soon. We do not know the size of these grants.

Another major funder in the 1990s was the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a research organization for the electricity industry. In 2009, 45 percent of US electricity was generated from coal. Coal and oil have the most at stake from strong scientific proof of global warming and carbon dioxide emissions impact on the planet. There is a long alliance between the interests of coal and oil attacking climate science and fighting climate policy dating back to the late 1980s as detailed in the Greenpeace report, Dealing in Doubt.

Get funding from big coal, become expert in Mercury?

In May 2011, an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), co-authored by Willie Soon and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow’s Paul Driessen.  Entitled “The Myth of Killer Mercury,” the piece attacked the EPA’s proposed rules for limiting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Dr. Soon’s WSJ byline stated: "Mr. Soon, a natural scientist at Harvard, is an expert on mercury and public health issues."

Greenpeace asked both Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) to verify this newfound area of expertise expressed by Dr Soon. Dr Charles Alcock, the Director of the CfA, stated in an email that Dr. Soon was employed an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), which is apparently housed within the CfA, along with the the Harvard College Observatory. Dr. Alcock said in a letter "I cannot comment on Dr Soon’s expertise regarding mercury and public health issues."

Nonetheless, Willie Soon has no affiliation with Harvard University except sharing a building with Harvard students and staff on Harvard’s campus.

As the Wall St. Journal op-ed was re-posted across the web on right wing blogs and think tank websites, Dr. Soon’s byline mysteriously started to morph, turning into: "Willie Soon is a natural scientist who has studied mercury and public health issues for eight years." Yet there is no record of any such public health studying or publishing in peer reviewed journals in his most recent bio and CV, written six years ago.

Dr. Soon also appeared as a quasi-expert on mercury in 2005 in another Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Eat More Fish," republished by the Heartland Institute.

Willie Soon plotted to take down the IPCC AR4 before it was even written.

In 2003, as the IPCC was gearing up for the upcoming Fourth Assessment (AR4) due in 2007, Willie Soon began plotting with colleagues about how to undermine the work. As part of the FOIA documents received by Greenpeace, there was a link to Dr. Soon’s documents. That link led to a directory of Dr. Soon’s files at Harvard. Dr. Soon has also referenced these online files in previous articles published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In a letter in these files (dated after 10 October) Dr. Soon wrote:

“Clearly they [the AR4 chapters] may be too much for any one of us to tackle them all ... But, as A-team, we may for once give it our best shot to try to anticipate and counter some of the chapters, especially WG1---judging from our true expertise in the basic climate sciences ...

Even if we can tackle ONE single chapter down the road but forcefully and effectively ... we will really accomplish A LOT!

In all cases, I hope we can start discussing among ourselves to see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment report or to re-direct  attention back to science …”

Who was this “A Team”? The letter was addressed to “Bob, Randy, Walter, Sallie and Dave”.

From other correspondence, it seems possible that “Bob” is Australian sceptic Bob Carter, as Dr. Soon worked with Carter. “Sallie” is clearly Dr. Sallie Baliunas, “Dave” is likely David Legates.

There is no prominent “A-team” type scientist or climate sceptic called Randy – except ExxonMobil’s lobbyist Randy Randol, who was heavily involved with the Exxon-funded deniers. Randol wrote the famous memo to the Bush administration recommending that the then head of the IPCC, Bob Watson, be replaced. (Watson was indeed replaced - by the current chair Rajendra Pachauri.  But Pachauri has continued the rigorous scientific work carried out by Watson and has since become the target of deniers.)

Randol was involved in a number of other Exxon plans to undermine climate science, including a plan cooked up in 1998 with other Exxon-funded think tanks to attack the Kyoto Protocol (see his name, bottom of page 4).

Equally, there is no “Walter” in the climate denial field – except Walt Bucholtz, ExxonMobil’s Government Relations & Issues Advisor, the man responsible for doling out Exxon’s funding grants to deniers and front groups. Bucholtz was listed as a “Government relations advisor” to the Heartland Institute in 2005 (as listed in the Heartland Institute’s 2005 990 IRS form).

Regardless of who these “A Team” members truly were, Willie Soon clearly coordinated a plan to undermine the science chapter of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment – before he even knew what science it contained. This is a clear example of the climate denier strategy of undermining climate science, and stands in sharp contrast with accepted scientific methodology.

The Hockey Stick

In 2003, Dr. Soon and his colleague at the SAO, Sallie Baliunas, published a now thoroughly debunked study in Climate Research’ "Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years," in the first of a number of denier challenges to Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ study. This study was republished [pdf] by the (then ExxonMobil funded) George Marshall Institute in 2003

While Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas acknowledged the American Petroleum Institute’s funding of the work in the paper, the dollar figure was not known. We now know from the newly acquired FOIA Smithsonian documents that the API gave them a total of $118,443 for this work, over 2002 and 2003, in grants entitled: “Sun's impact on climate over the last 1000 years” and “1000 years of solar variability.”

The Soon-Baliunas article claimed that the twentieth century was not the warmest century in the past 1,000 years and that the climate has not changed significantly during this time. This sham science kicked off a heavy focus by deniers on the “hockey stick” study first done by Michael Mann, later proven sound by numerous other studies, but viciously attacked by deniers regardless.

Mann himself, in an interview, said of the Soon-Baliunas 2003 paper:

"It really was one of the poorest pieces of scholarship that any of us in the climate research community had ever seen… it was clear that there was an effort by some on the editorial board to compromise the PR (peer review) process and allow through this deeply, deeply flawed paper in the professional literature where it was immediately held up by those in Washington opposed to taking action against climate change… as somehow being the dagger in the heart of the case for global warming, when in fact it was just an extremely bad study that never should have published…"

After the Soon-Baliunas article was published, three of the editors of Climate Research resigned in protest, including incoming editor-in-chief Hans von Storch.  Von Storch declared the article seriously flawed because "the conclusions [were] not supported by the evidence presented in the paper." In addition to the resignations, thirteen of the scientists cited in the paper published rebuttals stating that Dr. Soon and Dr. Baliunas had misinterpreted their work.

2003 testimony to Environment and Public Works Committee

In 2003, after publishing his ‘hockey stick’ paper, Dr. Soon was invited to give evidence on global warming to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). During the hearing, Dr. Soon was asked by Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT):

“Have you been hired by or employed by or received grants from organizations that have taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto Protocol, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or legislation before the United States Congress that would affect greenhouse gas emissions? If so, please identify those organizations.”

Willie Soon responded:  "I have not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any such organizations described in this question."

It is difficult to accept that Dr. Soon didn’t know that the American Petroleum Institute, one of his funders at the time, had been at the centre of lobbying against action on climate change for over a decade. Nor is it plausible that there were no discussions about Dr. Soon’s research.

Fake science and polar bears

The majority of Dr. Soon’s grants from the fossil fuel industry focus on work relating to the sun and Arctic climate change.

Willie Soon’s recently published articles relating to climate change focus on solar variability and the Arctic (in 2005 and 2009), attempting to prove that it is the sun’s variability that is responsible for Arctic warming in recent years.

In March 2007, Willie Soon co-authored a ‘viewpoint’, published in the journal Ecological Complexity (Vol. 4, Issue 3, pp. 73-84) that announced that polar bears were not under threat from global warming and that Arctic sea ice decline was less severe than stated in recent peer-reviewed literature. Ecological Complexity publishes peer-reviewed research, but “Viewpoints” aren’t subject to such scholarly review.  Dr. Soon was one of the authors of the ‘viewpoint’, joined by well-known deniers Sallie Baliunas, David Legates and Tim Ball.

The paper was rejected some four years earlier by a peer-reviewed journal. But because the peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed reports look almost identical, it would be almost impossible for a casual reader to tell the difference. Also contained in Willie Soon’s Harvard files online was a rejection letter from the Editor of “Ecography” magazine, Linus Svensson, dated June 5, 2003, containing peer review comments supporting the magazine’s rejection of the submission.

The whole affair has been documented in a previous case study in the 2010 Greenpeace report on the Koch Brothers.

Willie Soon acknowledges that the article was partly sponsored “(for Willie Soon’s work) by ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation. “

The new FOIA documents from the SAO show the funding in this period, presumably for this study, was as follows:

API:   $50,000, “understanding Arctic climate change”

Koch:  $110,000, “Koch/Mobile (sic) charitable foundation”

ExxonMobil: $55,000, “Arctic climate change”

The new funder to all of this work, not acknowledged in the 2007 Ecological Complexity paper, was the coal utility Southern Company, which appears also to have contributed to this study: $110,000 in 2006 for “understanding Arctic climate change.”

Were the fossil fuel companies working together to fund Dr. Soon?

As Dr. Soon’s work developed, he began focussing on the influence of the sun on the earth’s climate. Given that the papers he wrote questioning the science of climate change – from the ‘hockey stick’ to the polar bears were all funded by the oil industry, the question must be raised: did the companies work together to fund Dr. Soon’s work?

The long collaboration of Big Oil and Big Coal to slow the uptake of climate science is well documented. The close collaboration of the laggards Southern Company, ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute is also known.

In 1998, Robert Gehri from Southern Company, Joseph Walker from American Petroleum Institute and Randy Randol from ExxonMobil met with think tanks and oil companies to come up with the “Global Science Communications Plan.” This document declared that “victory” would be achieved when average citizens “recognize uncertainties in climate science.”

This ‘secret plan’ was revealed on the front page of the New York Times, but many assume the collaboration continued unabated.

Was their joint funding of Dr. Soon’s work to challenge the science on Arctic warming a continuation of that plan?

Dr. Soon and the Free to Choose Network

The Free to Choose Network was founded by the late neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman, who was closely associated with Big Tobacco. Friedman was also a fellow at the Hoover Institution that has received grants from ExxonMobil, Koch Foundations and other right wing foundations such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation.

In 2008, the Free to Choose network paid the denier duo of Doctors Soon and Baliunas $19,383. The grant was entitled “the sun’s influence on climate change”. That year, Free to Choose produced an “educational” video contending that the sun has more to do with climate change than human interference.

“Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Dr. David Legates of the University of Delaware provide an easy-to-follow review of current climate science, which suggests that the sun's irregular patterns and other natural forces are the major sources of climate change.”

Dr. Soon's Work with Oil/Coal Funded Think Tanks

The Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute lists Willie Soon as a writer/contributor on its website. This is confirmed by Dr. Soon’s own CV that lists him as writing for Heartland’s “Environment and Climate News” from November 1997 to December 2000.

Heartland has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998, in addition to $325,000 from the Scaife foundations and $75,000 from the Koch foundations according to Media Matters Transparency project and Greenpeace research.

The Koch foundations stopped funding Heartland Institute in 2000 and ExxonMobil Foundation dropped Heartland in 2007.

Willie Soon was a speaker and panelist at the Heartland Institute International Conference on Climate Change in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. The sponsors of this conference are heavily funded by ExxonMobil, Scaife, and Koch.

The George C. Marshall Institute

Dr. Soon was a senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute, writing papers for it along with Sallie Baliunas, from 1997 to 2004. Sallie Baliunas sat on the board of the George C. Marshall Institute. The Marshall Institute (and its associated foundations) have received $840,000 in funding from ExxonMobil since 1998. Since 1985, the institute has also received $3,370,000 from the Scaife Foundations and $310,000 from the Koch Foundations since 1985. Exxon dropped funding to the Marshall Institute in 2008. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, run by the Kochs, still funds the Marshall Institute, according to the most recent information available, a 2009 grant of $70,000.

The World Climate Report

In Dr. Soon’s Curriculum Vitae in 2005 he lists himself as a “contributing editor” to the World Climate Report, a blog run by prominent climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels, published by his company, New Hope Environmental Services. New Hope has been described as a PR company and, while secretive about its funding sources, it received support from the “non-profit fuel supply co-operative” Western Fuels Association which supports coal mining in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and the railroads that transport that coal to the powerplants built to burn it. Between 1997 and 2000, Dr. Soon wrote 21 articles for the website, mostly co-written with Sallie Baliunas.

Western Fuels itself funded and controlled another similar group called the “Greening Earth Society” which ran a newsletter called “World Climate Alert.” According to his CV, Dr. Soon wrote at least three articles for World Climate Alert.

The Fraser Institute

Willie Soon has written for the Fraser Institute and is listed on its website as an author. His CV describes his involvement as being a member of the Fraser institute’s “CANSTAT” advisory board from 2002 to at least 2005, although in 2001 he wrote a “Guide to Global Warming” for the Fraser Institute.

The Fraser Institute has received $120,000 from ExxonMobil in two $60,000 grants for “climate change” in 2003 and 2004. According to Media Transparency, more than 75 percent of the $403,301 received by the Fraser Institute since 1985 has come from the oil-rich Scaife Foundations ($275,000) and the Koch Foundations ($198,221).

Tech Central Station

Willie Soon was an author for Tech Central Station (TCS), a web-based journalism site established by Washington DC lobbyists, DCI Group, for unknown clients.   Over the four years that he wrote for Tech Central, Dr. Soon wrote on a wide range of issues entirely unrelated to astrophysics - his area of expertise - such as the impact of wind farms on agriculture, regulations on mercury and attacks on various US states for their efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions. According to his 2005 CV, Dr. Soon wrote 43 articles for TCS between 2001 and 2004.

ExxonMobil gave TCS $95,000 in 2003. Up until 2006, TCS's information was published by the public relations firm DCI Group, a registered lobbying firm for ExxonMobil. In 2010 TCS was closed down. TCSdaily.com now jumps to “ideas in action tv” where much of the archive is preserved. Ideasinactiontv.com is now funded by Investors Business Daily. Copyright is co-owned by the George W Bush Institute.

Frontiers of Freedom, The Center for Science and Public Policy and the Science and Public Policy Institute

Willie Soon lists himself as being on the advisory board of the National Center for Public Policy Research, an affiliate of Frontiers of Freedom, from April 2003.  Although Dr. Soon was not listed on the centre's website, in the Wall Street Journal article "Eat More Fish," which he co-authored with Robert Ferguson of the Frontiers of Freedom Center for Science and Public Policy, he is listed as the center’s "Chief Science Researcher."

ExxonMobil gave Frontiers of Freedom a total of $1.272 million in funding since 1998 according to Greenpeace research. In 2003, ExxonMobil gave Frontiers of Freedom a grant of $232,000 to launch a new branch of the organization called the Center for Science and Public Policy. The mission of this new branch deals exclusively with the issue of climate change. The Scaife Family Foundations have donated $135,000 to Frontiers of Freedom, and the Koch Family Foundations have donated $575,000.

The Science & Public Policy Institute (SPPI) lists Dr. Soon as Chief Science Adviser until at least 2007. The SPPI describes itself as a non-profit research and education organization which is committed to the advancement of sound, sensible energy and environmental public policies based on rational science and economics. In its mission statement the SPPI asserts that it is "free from affiliation to any corporation or political party."

The president of the Science & Public Policy Institute, Robert Ferguson, is also the executive director of the Center for Science and Public Policy. The link between the two organizations runs even deeper, apparently operating out of the same office. Both the SPPI and the Center for Science and Public Policy are listed at the same address: 209 Pennsylvania Ave. SE Washington, DC 20003.

International connections

Doctors Soon and Baliunas have turned up as founding members of denier groups as far away as Argentina where they are listed as members of the Argentinian Foundation for a Scientific Ecology. Soon’s 2005 CV shows he had papers published in both Russian and Spanish and he appeared at climate denier conferences across Europe.

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Willie Soon

From SourceWatch

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This is part of the Center for Media & Democracy's climate change project.

Dr. Willie Wei-Hock Soon (who is most commonly referred to as Willie Soon) is a physicist at the Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and, since 1992[1], has been an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory.[2]

A biographical note formerly on the website of Tech Central Station, where Soon was listed as "Science Director" between approximately September 2003[3] and May 2007, listed his "areas of Expertise" as "Global warming", "Mercury", "Solar Variability" and the "Arctic".[4] His bio note on TCS stated that "Dr. Willie Soon's views expressed are not necessarily those of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."[4]

A biographical note from 2000 stated that he was "a contributing editor to World Climate Report and member of the American Astrophysical Society, American Geophysical Union, and International Astronomical Union."[5] Two years later, another biographical note stated that he was a former contributing editor to World Climate Report but added that he was then an "Adjunct Professor of the Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies of the University of Putra, Malaysia." It also stated that "for years, he has researched the topic of the orbital theory of climate change, the Milankovic theory for glacial and interglacial changes."[6]

Contents

[hide]

1 Global Warming Skeptic

2 Background

3 Affiliations

4 Books

5 Speaking Engagements

6 Articles and Resources

6.1 Related SourceWatch Articles

6.2 References

6.3 External Articles

6.3.1 Articles and Presentations by Soon

6.3.2 Interviews with Soon

6.3.3 General Articles

Global Warming Skeptic

Soon has long been associated with various U.S. and Canadian think tanks disputing human-induced global warming. Many of the papers he has published on the topic have been co-authored with Sallie L. Baliunas and sometimes with her and other co-authors.

Between December 1998[7] and September 2001[8] he was listed as a "Scientific Adviser" to the Greening Earth Society, a group that was funded and controlled by the Western Fuels Association (WFA), an association of coal-burning utility companies. WFA founded the group in 1997, according to an archived version of its website, "as a vehicle for advocacy on climate change, the environmental impact of CO2, and fossil fuel use."[9] While Soon remains listed on the websites of various think tanks noted for disputing global warming -- such as the Fraser Institute in Canada and the George C. Marshall Institute in the U.S. -- Soon has not written for them for a long time. (For example, the last paper by Soon published on the website of the Fraser Institute dates back to January 2003[1] and for the Marshall Institute the last published paper was in May 2003[2].) (Baliunas was one of the other "scientific advisers").

As of early 2009, Soon's current biographical note states that he "is chief science adviser for the Science and Public Policy Institute".[10] Prior to Bob Ferguson founding SPPI in mid 2007, Soon worked with him from mid-2003 at the Center for Science and Public Policy, a project of Frontiers of Freedom (FOF)[11] funded, at least in part, by Exxon.[12]

Background

Soon received his Ph.D. in 1991 in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California (USC). Both his undergraduate and Masters of Science degrees are also from USC.[13]

Soon received in 2004 the Petr Beckmann Award from Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) for "outstanding contributions to the defense of scientific truth".[14][15]DDP is closely associated with Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Sallie L. Baliunas received the same award in 1997 and other global warming skeptics have been recipients in subsequent years.)

Affiliations

between Dec 1998 and September 2001 he was a "Scientific Advisor" to Greening Earth Society[16]

appropriately 2002: Professor of the Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies of the University of Putra, Malaysia [6]

senior scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute between approximately November 1997 and May 2003[2]; some of these articles were republished by the Fraser Institute.[1]

September 2003 - May 2007 science director for Tech Central Station (TCS)[3][4]

Books

Willie Soon, Sallie L. Baliunas, Arthur B. Robinson, Zachary W. Robinson, Global Warming: A Guide to the Science, Fraser Institute, November 30, 2002, ISBN 0889751870

Willie Wei-Hock Soon, Steven H. Yaskell, Maunder Minimum: And the Variable Sun-Earth Connection, World Scientific Publishing Company, August 2004, ISBN 9812382755

Speaking Engagements

March 2-4, 2008: Speaker at the Heartland Institutes International Conference on Climate Change (2008)

July 13, 2008: "Endangering the Polar Bear: How Environmentalists Kill", 26th Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, a conference in Tucson Arizona co-cponsored by Access to Energy, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and Physicians for Civil Defense.[17]

March 8-10, 2009: Speaker at the Heartland Institutes International Conference on Climate Change (2009).[18]

Articles and Resources

Related SourceWatch Articles

Global warming skeptics

Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine

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GP:

Fake science and polar bears

With peer review having proved problematic, the sceptics took a different approach in 2007.

In March 2007 a ‘viewpoint’ was published in the journal Ecological Complexity that announced that polar bears

were not under threat from global warming and that Arctic sea ice decline was less severe than stated in recent

peer-reviewed literature147. Ecological Complexity publishes peer-reviewed research, but viewpoints aren’t

subject to such review. Because the peer-reviewed and non peer-review reports look almost identical it would

be almost impossible for a reader to tell the difference.

The authors included sceptics well connected with the denial industry: Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, David

Legates148 and Tim Ball149.

They argued that scientific modelling showing that polar bear populations were threatened by climate change

could not be trusted. They went on to question not only the climate science showing that the Arctic was

warming, but also tried to show that things like tourism were a much bigger threat to polar bears than the

disappearance of their habitat150.

The article landed around the time that the US government was making decisions on whether to list the polar

bear as an endangered species, a decision which could have had large knock-on effects in terms of American

climate legislation. It was widely quoted in submissions by Sarah Palin, then Governor of Alaska’s office in her

(unsuccessful) submission against the listing.

Willie Soon acknowledges in the article151 that it was partly sponsored (for Willie Soon’s work) by ExxonMobil,

the American Petroleum Institute and the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation (the Koch Brothers have the

largest privately-owned oil company in the US and regularly fund climate sceptics). Dr. Soon has not disclosed

how much he was paid by these entities or for what period of time.

Nor has he or his funders stated on the record the remit for this research project. Dr Baliunas’ and Soon’s

research institute is the Havard-Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory which received $76 000 from

ExxonMobil in 2007152. ExxonMobil Foundation tax records and company documents confirm a series of grants

from 2005-2008 totalling over $340,000.

One scientist noted at the time it was released that the analysis’s references stopped in 2002, after which the

Arctic experienced four very warm years. The following year leading polar bear experts, Stirling and Derocher,

published a response:

‘[the authors] … suggest that factors other than climate warming are responsible

for a decline in the polar bear population of Western Hudson Bay

… In our examination of their alternative explanations, and the data available to evaluate each,

we found little support for any.’153

Unlike Soon and Baliunas’s article which was conveniently published just ahead of the US government’s

decision on whether to list polar bears as endangered because of global warming, Stirling and Derocher’s paper

couldn’t be taken into account by the decision makers. Three years later, the sceptic viewpoint remains one of

Ecological Complexity’s most downloaded papers.

The viewpoint prompted a letter to ExxonMobil from Brad Miller, Chair of the US House Sub Committee on

Investigations and Oversight, which raised a key question about Exxon’s funding:

‘To people outside the scientific community, one PhD may seem like another.

Certainly Exxon knows better, however. Yet according to Dr Soon, an astrophysicist by profession,

ExxonMobil funded the development of his ‘opinions’ on global warming and

its potential impact on polar bear populations. ….

The Congress and the Public have a right to know why ExxonMobil is funding a scientist

whose writing is outside his area of expertise to create the impression that expert scientists have conducted

vigorous, peer reviewed work that says the problems with polar bears [and climate change]

are unproven or unserious.’154

Exxon didn’t respond to the letter

145 http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy/

146 http://www.pointofinquiry.org/michael_mann_unprecedented_attacks_on_climate_research/ interview with Chris Mooney, 26 February

2010

147 Ecological Complexity, vol 4 issue 3 pages 73-84

148 http://www.desmogblog.com/david-legates

149 http://www.desmogblog.com/climate-change-denier-research-old

150 Ecological Complexity vol 4 issue 3 – page 82: conclusions

151 ibid: page 83 - acknowledgements

152 http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/community_contributions_report_public.aspx

153 Ecological Complexity Vol 5 issue 3, September 2008 pp 193 -201

18

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/planet-2/report/2010/3/dealing-in-doubt.pdf

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Did ExxonMobil Break Its Promise To Stop Funding Climate Change Deniers?

— By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Jun. 28, 2011 5:00 AM PDT

Back in 2008, ExxonMobil pledged to quit funding climate change deniers. But according to new documents released through a Greenpeace Freedom of Information Act request, the oil giant was still forking over cash to climate skeptics as recently as last year, to the tune of $76,000 for one scientist skeptical of humankind's role in global warming. This—and much more—came to light in a new report about the funding of Wei Hock "Willie" Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Soon has been a favorite among climate skeptics for years, since coauthoring a paper back in 2003 that claimed that the 20th century was probably not the warmest, nor was it unique. That paper, published in the journal Climate Research, was widely criticized by climate scientists for its content, not to mention the funding it received from the American Petroleum Institute. An astrophysicist by training, Soon has also claimed that solar variability—i.e., changes in the amount of radiation coming from the sun—are to likely to blame for warming temperatures.

In 2007, Soon coauthored a paper challenging the claim that climate change harms polar bears. The paper drew plenty of criticism, as it was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute, The Charles G. Koch Foundation, and ExxonMobil—groups with a clear interest in the debate over whether the bears merited endangered species protections.

Given that Soon had previously disclosed some of his corporate funding, in December 2009 Greenpeace submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information about Soon's funders and any conflict of interest forms he may have submitted. In response, Smithsonian produced a list of his major bankrollers, which included more than $800,000 from major energy interests. According to the document, Exxon provided $55,000 for a study on Arctic climate change in 2007 and 2008, and another $76,106 for research into solar variability between 2008 and 2010.

ExxonMobil spokesman Alan Jeffers accused Greenpeace of "peddling this discredited conspiracy theory" about its support for climate deniers. He maintained that the company stopped funding Soon in 2009. "We made a decision to discontinue funding groups whose positions on climate change weren't very constructive. It was distracting," said Jeffers. "The issue of climate change is so important, it shouldn't be distracted by the type of things Greenpeace does," Jeffers said.

Even if Greenpeace and Smithsonian are wrong and ExxonMobil has stopped funding his work, Soon still appears to be getting significant backing from other fossil fuel companies, with the coal giant Southern Company providing $120,000 to look at "solar variability and climate change signals from temperature" in 2008 and 2009, and the Koch Foundation providing Soon another $65,000 last year.

"Dr. Soon needs to make clear what exactly these corporations expected from him," said Kert Davies, research director at Greenpeace. "There's been a long-term campaign of climate denial for over 20 years, organized by big coal and big oil. This is evidence that it continues to this day."

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/06/exxonmobil-soon-climate-change-denier

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