Fossil fuel companies and the Koch brothers

Fossil fuel companies and Koch brothers pour cash on climate change 'skeptic' Willie Soon

Jun 30, 2011 - Astrophysicist and climate "skeptic" Willie Wei-Hock Soon says he's never been influenced by money from fossil fuel companies and climate change deniers like the Koch Brothers in his research. He "would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it," he told Reuters Tuesday. It was Greenpeace's Freedom of Information Act request that turned up more than $800,000 in energy company money for research that Soon conducted.

Soon works for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Although he has in the past received research money from MIT and NASA, since 2002, none of his funding has come from academic or similar sources. As shown in the table above, his top funders have been Southern Company, a coal giant; the American Petroleum Institute; the Koch Foundation, which opposes new pollution regulations; and Exxon-Mobil, the oil behemoth that has for two decades paid researchers to come up with data showing climate change is not happening. Data that, putting the most charitable interpretation on it, distort what the vast majority of climate scientists say.

Soon has written that polar bears aren't at risk from Arctic melting because Arctic melting isn't happening, solar variability is the key reason for any climate change that is happening, and most recently, that mercury from coal burning isn't a hazard worth regulating. He is in no way an objective researcher, as proved by Greenpeace's investigation showing his opposition to the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC: {read more}