Tell Them Willie-Boy Really Wasn’t Here

“Willie Wei-Hock Soon (born 1966) is an aerospace engineer and a part-time employee at the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also a receiving editor for the journal New Astronomy. In addition to writing technical papers on the physics of climate change, Soon co-authored The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun–Earth Connection with Steven H. Yaskell (2004)… To further his education he emigrated [from Malaysia] to the United States in 1980 and attended the University of Southern California, receiving a B.Sc. in 1985, followed by a M.Sc. in 1987 and then a Ph.D. [with distinction] in 1991. His doctoral thesis was titled Non-equilibrium kinetics in high-temperature gases. He received the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Graduate Scholastic Award in 1989 and the Rockwell Dennis Hunt Scholastic Award from the University of Southern California in 1991.” Wikipedia. Whew! Smart dude with credentials pouring from every part of his body.

Willie is one of the very, very few scientists who have rejected the notion of substantial linkage between human activities and global warming. He “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.” New York Times, February 21^st.

He is the darling of the religious right, has reinforced many Tea Party advocates, including those in Congress, in their desire to lift what they label as “job-killing environmental regulations,” allow king coal to burn away, generating electricity for the American manufacturing and “growth” machine, encouraging more ways to extract even more fossil fuels from American sources and side-stepping supporting research and subsidies into “alternative energy.” Greenhouse gasses, they scream, are not the problem. And clearly, big business wants an open and unregulated road to find, extract and use any and all energy resources they can find with as few regulatory barriers as possible. They have relied heavily on Willie’s powerful theories that contradict 97% of the balance of expert scientific thought that clearly supports the notion of man-induced climate change.

So if one would take Willie’s opinions out of the mix, you’d be pretty much be left with the ideological right’s opposition to regulation in this environmental space to be based simply on their Evangelical interpretation of the Bible – one that is not shared by most of the balance of Christianity – or the greedy desires of their Congressional representatives’ biggest campaign contributors. If somehow, the bona fides of Willie’s theories could be challenged, if business interests paid him specifically to articulate some scientific basis to reject that “man-induced” part of global warming theory, then his conclusions would be totally suspect and subject to summary challenge.

“But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests. He has accepted more than $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. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

“The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as ‘deliverables’ that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress…

“‘The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,’ said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of ‘Merchants of Doubt,’ a book about such campaigns. ‘Willie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.’

“Environmentalists have long questioned Dr. Soon’s work, and his acceptance of funding from the fossil-fuel industry was previously known. But the full extent of the links was not; the documents show that corporate contributions were tied to specific papers and were not disclosed, as required by modern standards of publishing… ‘What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,’ said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.

“Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on [February 20^th] that Dr. Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals… ‘I think that’s inappropriate behavior,’ Dr. Alcock said. ‘This frankly becomes a personnel matter, which we have to handle with Dr. Soon internally.’” New York Times.

Greenhouse gasses and their impact on global climate change are killing us, changing our quality of life for the much, much worse, and time is not on our side. It’s time for us to battle this malevolence with everything we’ve got… or know that we have decimated our future for a very long time.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the United States is alone in the developed world in having such a huge force in opposition to the scientific fact of man-made climate change.