It's official. After years of research, the Climate Investigations Center and Greenpeace have unearthed incontrovertible proof that long-time denier Willie Soon (who claims variation in the sun's energy is largely responsible for recent climate change) has received over $1.2 million from energy industry and lobby groups. Soon is a favorite amongst deniers for his impressive-sounding credentials as a Smithsonian-employed PhD aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Turns out, Soon's "deliverables" for the likes of ExxonMobil, the Southern Service Company and the Charles B. Koch Charitable Foundation included scientific papers (some of which, according to this DeSmogBlog article, even found their way into the IPCC reports!)
With early coverage in the New York Times and the Guardian, most major outlets in and out of the deniersphere are weighing in. Over at Breitbart, James Delingpole has a piece trying to downplay the significance of Soon's fossil-fuel-funded distortion of climate science (while misrepresenting and exaggerating Soon’s credentials), saying, "Another day, another attack on the integrity of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, this time in the New York Times." Meanwhile, Anthony Watts over at wattsupwiththat has an article comparing "what's happening to Dr. Willie Soon at the hand of green activists and the compliant media," to the wrongful conviction of Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption.
But the exposure of Soon's fossil fuel-funded pseudoscience is not just "another day" in the land of denier falsehoods, nor is Soon even remotely a victim. Since 2008, Soon failed to disclose in at least 11 separate instances that his research, published in peer-reviewed journals and shared in testimonies before Congress, was funded by fossil-fuel interests. Together, Soon and his funders were deliberately undermining the scientific consensus on climate change to create the appearance of scientific doubt and foster public debate over whether global warming is human caused.
We're hopeful this will 'Soon’ put an end to the manufactured public debate on what has long been settled science.
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