Астрофизик и отрицатель изменения климата: история Вилли Сун

Astrophysicist and climate change denier

Willie Wei Hock Soon (born September 30, 1965) is a Malaysian astrophysicist and aerospace engineer who was long employed as a part time externally funded researcher at the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Soon is an anthropogenic climate change denier, He co wrote a paper whose methodology was widely criticised by the scientific community. Soon co authored The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun–Earth Connection with Steven H. Yaskell. The book treats historical and proxy records of climate change coinciding with the Maunder Minimum, a period from 1645 to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare. From 2005 to 2015, Soon had received over $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry, while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his work. Of this industry funding, over half went on the Smithsonian's facility operating costs, with the remainder going to Soon as his salary. 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.

After completing his Ph. D., Soon took up a post doctoral research position at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. He has since been doing research there in astrophysics and Earth science, now as an externally funded employee. a senior scientist at a conservative think tank, the now defunct George C. Marshall Institute, the chief science adviser to the oil industry funded Science and Public Policy Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of the Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies of the University of Putra, Malaysia. In 2004, Soon received the "Petr Beckmann Award for outstanding contributions to the defense of scientific truth" from the conservative Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, which Bloomberg News describes as a forum on "fringe science topics" such as global warming denial and The Guardian as a "fringe political group" and as a "truly bizarre lobby group". Since 2018 Soon has been a principal of the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), described as a "multi disciplinary and independent research group."

In 2003, Willie Soon was first author on a review paper in the journal Climate Research, with Sallie Baliunas as co author. This paper concluded that "the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium." Shortly thereafter, 13 scientists published a refutation of the paper. They raised three main objections: (1) Soon and Baliunas used data reflective of changes in moisture, rather than temperature; (2) they failed to distinguish between regional and hemispheric mean temperature anomalies; and (3) they reconstructed past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving decadal trends. After disagreement with the publisher and with other members of the editorial board, Hans von Storch, Clare Goodess, and two more members of the journal's ten member editorial board resigned in protest against what they felt was a failure of the peer review process on the part of the journal. Otto Kinne, managing director of the journal's parent company, eventually stated that "CR [Climate Research] should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publication" and that "CR should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication." Soon and Baliunas were also criticised because they did not disclose that their research was funded in part by the American Petroleum Institute.

In 2011, it emerged that Soon received over $1 million from petroleum and coal interests since 2001. Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian documents obtained by Greenpeace under the US Freedom of Information Act show that the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation gave Soon two grants totaling $175,000 in 2005–06 and again in 2010. Multiple grants from the American Petroleum Institute between 2001 and 2007 totalled $274,000, and grants from Exxon Mobil totalled $335,000 between 2005 and 2010. Other coal and oil industry sources which funded him include the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute. Soon stated that he has "never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research" and "would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research." Putting forward health reasons, in 2011 Soon went from full time employment by the Smithsonian at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian to a part time position.

With William M. Briggs, geography professor David Legates, and journalist and British politician Christopher Monckton, Soon co authored a paper published by the Chinese Science Bulletin in 2015. Climatologist Gavin Schmidt described the paper as "complete trash". He said that the model used is not new, "they arbitrarily restrict its parameters and then declare all other models wrong."

Soon, as a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), is a part time employee of the Smithsonian Institution, a government agency covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This funding had exceeded US$1.5 million since 2001; whereas Soon has received very little federal money. The latter was identified by a 2013 Drexel University study as the largest single provider of money to political efforts to fight climate change policy. On February 21, publications including The Guardian and The New York Times reported that Soon had failed to disclose conflicts of interest in at least 11 papers since 2008, and alleged that Soon had violated ethical guidelines of at least eight of those journals publishing his work. Charles R. Alcock, director of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, described the disclosure violations as "inappropriate behavior" that they would "have to handle with Dr. Soon internally". The Smithsonian announced that its Inspector General would investigate, and in addition there was to be a full review of the Smithsonian's ethics and disclosure policies about sponsored research, led by former NSF director Rita R. Colwell. On March 2, 2015, The Heartland Institute conservative think tank released a statement by Soon, which said he had "been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups". He described this as "a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming." Some of the journals that had published Soon's work had begun reviewing the papers in relation to their policies requiring disclosure: Soon said he had "always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally". He would be "happy to comply" if they required further disclosure, and "would ask only that other authors—on all sides of the debate—are also required to make similar disclosures." In April 2015, a Southern Company spokesman said "Our agreement with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory expires later this year and there are no plans to renew it". It still required Soon to produce a study on "Solar Activity Variation on Multiple Timescales" by November 2015.