The Hockey Stick graph, one of many climate studies attacked by Willie Soon
A prominent critic of climate change has found himself mired in controversy after a spate of reports linking him to fossil fuel interests became public last week. Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center has authored several papers challenging the scientific consensus on man-induced climate change. But new revelations of big bucks from conservative think-tanks and fossil fuel concerns has put his academic integrity in
serious jeopardy:
Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics , received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, the documents obtained by Greenpeace through freedom of information filings show ... Soon, with his Harvard-Smithsonian credentials, was a sought after commodity. He was cited admiringly by Senator James Inhofe , the Oklahoma Republican who famously called global warming a hoax . He was called to testify when Republicans in the Kansas state legislature tried to block measures promoting wind and solar power. The Heartland Institute, a hub of climate denial, gave Soon a courage award.
Soon was never taken too seriously by the climate science community; there have been signs of bias in his published work for years. But his serial broadsides against climate science and climate scientists played a critical role in the PR effort to downplay anthropogenic climate change. Starting with the work of Prof. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
"Soon played a key role in the early attacks on the now iconic Hockey Stick temperature curve as I recount in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars," Mann noted. "Some of it was touted by Senator James Inhofe. It partly formed the basis of a hearing where I testified back in 2003 and included claims that warmth during the Medieval period was comparable to that of today. It was based on some of the shoddiest work I have ever witnessed. But presumably, it was still good enough to deliver to the Koch brothers and related interests!"
Indeed, Soon's various tropes against climate science were so suspect, for so many years, that many researchers had already long assumed he was in the tank. Now that it's quasi-official, another disturbing question concerns the judgement of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, which may have knowingly or unknowingly enabled at least a decade-long campaign of intentional misinformation, committed in part under their good name.