When climate change deniers and right-wing politicians need an “expert” to back up their arguments, they often turn to prominent researcher Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon who vehemently denies that global warming is caused by humans.  And it turns out that he doesn’t just have one reason to say that – he has more than one and a quarter million reasons.  You see, that’s how many dollars soon was paid by US oil company interests to deny climate change.

Willie Soon is a researcher and an aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center.  His position is that it is the sun – not human industrial activity – that is warming the earth, and he produced eleven scientific papers to that effect.  Soon is so popular with the right-wing, that he is frequently called to testify before the US Congress and state legislatures, and billed as a Harvard scientist, although he actually works for the Smithsonian via grants. 

But the New York Times reported that Willie Soon “accepted more than US$1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers.”  The environmental group Greenpeace used the US Freedom of Information Act to obtain Soon’s documentation, and found that Soon himself referred to his research as “deliverables” that were completed in exchange for that sweet oil company money.

The paymasters for this “research” were Exxon Mobil;  Southern Company, a major US electrical utility;  the American Petroleum Institute; and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, named for its notorious US oil baron founder.

It’s not like Soon’s peers respected his research in the first place.  NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies studies climate change for the US space agency.  Its leader Dr. Gavin Schmidt says, “The science that Willie Soon does is almost pointless.”  Dr. Schmidt says the sun accounts for less than ten percent of global warming – greenhouse gases produced by human activity cause the rest.

Greenpeace blogged, “For years, we at Greenpeace have been working to make public the secret paper trails that show what everyone already knows: climate science deniers – #Fakexperts – are few and far between, and most of them are paid by companies most responsible for global warming to downplay the problem.”

The director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, Dr. Charles Alcock, acknowledges it has a problem.  “I think that’s inappropriate behavior,” Dr. Alcock said.  “This frankly becomes a personnel matter, which we have to handle with Dr. Soon internally.”