Fossil fuel companies and Koch brothers pour cash on climate change 'skeptic' Willie Soon

Document on research funding
of Willie Wei-Hock Soon created by Greenpeace

Astrophysicist and climate "skeptic" Willie Wei-Hock Soon says he's never been influenced by money from fossil fuel companies and climate change deniers like the Koch Brothers in his research. He "would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it," he told Reuters Tuesday. It was Greenpeace's Freedom of Information Act request that turned up more than $800,000 in energy company money for research that Soon conducted.

Soon works for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Although he has in the past received research money from MIT and NASA, since 2002, none of his funding has come from academic or similar sources. As shown in the table above, his top funders have been Southern Company, a coal giant; the American Petroleum Institute; the Koch Foundation, which opposes new pollution regulations; and Exxon-Mobil, the oil behemoth that has for two decades paid researchers to come up with data showing climate change is not happening. Data that, putting the most charitable interpretation on it, distort what the vast majority of climate scientists say.

Willie Wei-Hock Soon

Soon has written that polar bears aren't at risk from Arctic melting because Arctic melting isn't happening, solar variability is the key reason for any climate change that is happening, and most recently, that mercury from coal burning isn't a hazard worth regulating. He is in no way an objective researcher, as proved by Greenpeace's investigation showing his opposition to the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC:

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 ??

If you're hanging around Washington today and Friday, you can catch Soon and a whole boatload of other industry-funded denialists at the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change. Sadly, Sen. Jim Inhofe had to cancel his appearance there to reprise his "Climate Change is a Hoax" stand-up comedy routine.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/wTpzPyDLvGw/-Fossil-fuel-companies-and-Koch-brothers-pour-cash-on-climate-change-skeptic-Willie-Soon-

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