Willie Soon, the notorious climate denier who has made a career out of attacking the IPCC and climate scientists, has received over $1 million in funding from Big Oil and coal industry sponsors over the past decade, according to a new report from Greenpeace.
The Greenpeace report, "Dr. Willie Soon: A Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal," reveals that $1.033 million of Dr. Soon's funding since 2001 has come from oil and coal interests. Since 2002, every grant Dr. Soon received originated with fossil fuel interests, according to documents received from the Smithsonian Institution in response to Greenpeace FOIA requests.
The documents show that Willie Soon has received at least $175,000 from Koch family foundations (Soon is a key player in the Koch brothers' climate denial machine, as Greenpeace documented previously), $230,000 from Southern Company, $274,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, and $335,000 from ExxonMobil, among other polluters.
Dr. Soon is perhaps most well-known for his work with fellow astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas attempting to challenge the "hockey stick" graph of temperature records, first published by Dr. Michael Mann. 


But the documents reveal that he also fancied himself a ringleader of a coordinated effort to sully the IPCC's fourth assessment, plotting with Exxon staffers years in advance about how to attack the 2007 report.
A letter that Dr. Soon wrote in 2003, uncovered by Greenpeace, states:
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!  Â
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...
Soon has served on the roster of many oil- and coal-funded front groups over the past 15 years, from his role as "Scientific Adviser" at the coal-funded Greening Earth Society in the late 1990s, to his affiliations with a variety of Koch-Exxon-Scaife funded groups like the George C. Marshall Institute, the Science and Public Policy Institute, the Center for Science and Public Policy and the Heartland Institute.
Dr. Soon is among the speakers at the annual Denialapalooza climate denier meeting hosted by the Heartland Institute in Washington DC later this week. Since the theme of that Heartland junk science junket is "Restoring the Scientific Method," perhaps the attendees will query Dr. Soon about the ethics of accepting a million dollars from polluter interests while claiming that climate change is nothing to worry about.
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Willie Soon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Willie Soon on Climate Change | Foundation for Economic Education
Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies ...
CASE STUDY: Dr. Willie Soon, a Career Fueled by Big Oil and Coal ...
But fellow attendees are people like Pat Michaels, who in August 2010 asserted forcefully to Fareed Zakaria that his research funds are "not largely" from petroleum, but when asked to quantify, estimated he gets only about 40% of his research budget from petroleum.It's a shame Fareed didn't think to ask Michaels how much of the remaining 60% of his research budget comes directly or indirectly from coal, and how much more comes from libertarian "think" tanks. So considering the corrupt sub-culture in which he works, I think it's more likely Soon heard a lot of questions between presos about the logistics of acquiring so much oil and coal booty.
And by the way, we do have laws against conspiring to obtain federal funds under false pretense.
In addition to fines, the penalty is up to ten years in prison.
According to the DoJ's own review of case law, Soon's conspiracy against the legitimate science, with the clear motive and provable result of helping coal and oil retain preferential treatment that costs the federal government (handouts) and deprives the federal government of revenue (targeted tax exemptions), is exactly the behavior this statute prohibits.
He and his co-conspirators are felons.
The Heartland Institute is a complete corporate shill. Back in the 80s they cut their teeth on producing studies and lists of doctors that disbelieved the link between cigarettes and cancer. Now it's lists of 500 scientists that supposedly disbelieve in global warming (at least a dozen of the scientists are outraged at being on that list and have demanded to be removed, but Heartland refuses).
Most entertaining to me is the the very last entry on the Institute's website's "faq" page: "For many years, we provided a complete list of Heartland’s corporate and foundation donors on this Web site...After much deliberation and with some regret, we now keep confidential the identities of all our donors for the following reasons: People who disagree with our views have taken to selectively disclosing names of donors who they think are unpopular in order to avoid addressing the merits of our positions." So evidently they were hurt because mean liberals ridiculed the fact that Exxon-Mobil was paying for their research!
To have this news come out the week before this Heartland Institute convention in D.C. is heartening. Good work Greenpeace!