Willie Soon

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.

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, disputing the scientific understanding of climate change, and contends that most global warming is caused by solar variation rather than by human activity.

He co-wrote a paper whose methodology was widely criticised by the scientific community.

Climate scientists such as Gavin Schmidt of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies have refuted Soon's arguments, and the Smithsonian does not support his conclusions.

He is nonetheless frequently cited by politicians opposed to climate-change legislation.

Soon co-authored The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun–Earth Connection with Steven H. Yaskell.

Willie Soon was born in Kangar, Malaysia, in 1966.

He attended Khoon Aik Primary School in Kangar, Perlis, then Sekolah Menengah Syed Sirajudin Secondary School in Jejawi, Perlis, and Sekolah Menengah Dato Sheikh Ahmad Secondary School in Arau, Perlis.

To further his education he emigrated to the United States in 1980 and attended the University of Southern California, receiving a B.Sc.

in 1985, followed by a M.Sc.

in 1987 and then a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering [with distinction] in 1991.

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.

He also was an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory 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.

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."

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.

Soon, Baliunas and geography professor David Legates published a response to these objections.

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 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".

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.

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.

In 2011, it emerged that Soon received over $1 million from petroleum and coal interests since 2001.

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.

The Center's spokesman said "Willie's opinions regarding climate change are his personal views not shared within our research organization".

Its former director Irwin Shapiro said no attempt had been made to suppress Soon's views, and there had been no complaints from other scientists there: "As far as I can tell, no one pays any attention to him."

Soon has been defended by others agreeing with his views.

In 2013, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in an email to The Boston Globe: "The whole point of science is to question accepted dogmas. For that reason, I respect Willie Soon as a good scientist and a courageous citizen."

Republican Senator Jim Inhofe has cited Soon, and Inhofe's former director of communications Marc Morano said that "Willie Soon is a hero of the skeptical movement. When you are an early pioneer, you are going to face the scrutiny and attacks."

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."