Greenpeace outs US scientist who received over $1m from Big Oil and Coal

No 213 Posted by fw, July 4, 2011

According to a Greenpeace US investigation, CASE STUDY: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal, Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001. Soon, recognized as one of the leading climate change skeptics, is well known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions.

Moreover, documentary evidence connects Soon with other prominent climate skeptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the prominent oil and gas interests that have funded Soon for “research” are: the Charles G Koch Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute (API), Exxon Mobil, the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.

Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace US, commented in a Guardian article about the Soon affair:

“A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over 20 years by big oil and big coal. Scientists like Dr Soon, who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists, are pawns.”

One could reasonably infer from this concluding paragraph in the Guardian story that Soon may have been less than forthcoming at a 2003 senate hearing:

“In 2003 Soon said at a US senate hearing that he had ‘not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any organization that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.’ “

RELATED VIEWING & READING

Dr Willie Soon on Global Climate Change (video), March 18, 2009

Here are links to the main sections of Greenpeace’s Case Study on Dr Willie Soon

• 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

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