Willie Soon
| Willie Soon | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1966 (age 50–51) Kangar, Malaysia |
| Residence | Malaysia and United States |
| Nationality | American Malaysian |
| Fields | Earth Science, Solar Physics |
| Institutions | Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
| Alma mater | University of Southern California |
| Thesis | Non-equilibrium kinetics in high-temperature gases (1991) |
| Doctoral advisor | Joseph Kunc |
| Notable awards | Petr Beckmann Award (2004) |
Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon (born 1966) is an externally-funded part-time researcher of the Smithsonian at the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is also a receiving editor for the Elsevier journal New Astronomy. 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.
Soon disputes the current scientific understanding of climate change, and contends that most global warming is caused by solar variation rather than by human activity. He gained visibility in part due to scientific criticism of the methodology of a paper which he co-wrote. 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, but he is frequently cited by politicians opposed to climate-change legislation.
Over the past decade, Soon's research and his salary have been funded largely by fossil-fuel interests, which provided over $1.2 million in funding over 10 years, including $409,000 from The Southern Company and $230,000 from Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. These funding sources were not disclosed in a number of papers published since 2008, leading the Smithsonian Institution to investigate whether Soon had violated conflict-of-interest policies. Soon says he has "always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally".
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