Wei Hock Soon
A U.S. lawmaker is training his sights on organizations mostly associated with climate denial and identified with the fossil fuel industry that provided scientist We-Hock Soon with some $1.25 million to allegedly fund research debunking climate change.
Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat representing Arizona, said Soon must be investigated because his arguments might have been driven by oil companies.
Apart from Soon, Grijalva is interested in the funding sources for six other climate scientists to determine conflicts of interest, according to a story in Tech Times. Grijalva is the top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources and the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.
These climate scientists are Robert Balling from Arizona State University, Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steven Hayward from Pepperdine University, John Christy from the University of Alabama, David Legates from the University of Delaware and Roger Pielke, Jr. affiliated with the University of Colorado.
Grijalva has sent letters to the presidents of the universities employing these scientists and demanded information about funding sources plus funding-related communication involving them.
Reacting to criticisms of overreach, Grijalva's office defended its request for communication to determine if any explicit or implicit promises were made to funders.
Wei-Hock Soon, PhD, a part-time researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is said to have accepted some $1.25 million from the fossil fuel industry over the last decade but failed to disclose this fact.
Soon is a critic of the scientific consensus on climate change. He disputes the consensus view that human activity is a significant contributor to climate change, and argues that most global warming is caused by solar variation. Climate scientists have rebutted Soon's arguments and the Smithsonian does not support his conclusions.
Despite this, Soon is frequently cited by politicians opposed to climate-change legislation. Soon has presented his climate change denials on right wing news programs and has testified before Congress at the invitation of Republican lawmakers that deny anthropomorphic climate change.
The largest single funder of Soon's work is The Southern Company, one of the largest American electricity providers relying heavily on coal, and owned by the Koch brothers.
Fossil fuel industry funding for Soon's work includes $409,000 from The Southern Company; $230,000 from Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and hundreds of thousands of dollars from Donors Trust. Soon also received funding from Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute.
Soon did not disclose these facts in at least 11 papers he published since 2008. Many of the papers might have violated the ethical guidelines of most of the journals where they were published.
