Koch Brothers' Leading Climate Change Denier "Scientist" Exposed as Fraud

Wei-Hock Soon - Paid Liar for the Koch Brothers, et al

For years the Koch brothers and others in the fossil fuel industry have disseminated lies disputing climate change and global warming, usually trying to dress up the lies by using "experts" so as to hide the direct link back to major polluters.  Meanwhile, village idiots like GOP Senator James Inhofe blather on and on about climate change being a "hoax."  The real hoax is the propaganda being disseminated by the Koch brothers, et al.  Now,  Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, one of the preferred climate change denier experts has now been documented to have been paid millions of dollars to parrot the story line favored by the Kochs, Exxon and others who put making money ahead of the welfare of the planet.  The Daily Beast has details.  Here are highlights:

For decades, the fossil-fuel industry has been underwriting a huge, successful campaign to lie about climate change. Like the tobacco industry before it, energy companies have created a body of pseudoscience, created by paid lackeys, and successfully co-opted the mainstream of the Republican party to their “point of view.”

This week, that campaign took a serious body blow, as one of its leading pseudo-scientific voices was exposed as a liar and a fraud, having accepted millions of corporate dollars to pose as a climate change skeptic.

To be clear, Climate Trutherism is a conspiracy theory. It’s not just that climate change isn’t real, or isn’t certain—it’s that the world’s leading climate scientists and climate organizations (who are all in agreement about it) are perpetrating what Senator James Inhofe calls The Greatest Hoax.

Yet unlike 9/11 Trutherism, and Obama-is-a-Muslim trutherism, the Climate Truther campaign has an air of respectability, a unanimous adherence among Republican presidential candidates. How is that possible?

The answer is money. Lots of money. Billions of dollars, in fact, spent to create an entire industry of scientists, publicists, think tanks, and legislative organizations.

[Wei-Hock] Soon, for example, should never have been given much credence in the first place. Like nearly all of the Climate Truthers’ scientists, he is not a climate expert. He’s not even an astrophysicist, as he is often presented.
The Heartland Institute, one of the leading Climate Truther think-tanks, put together a poster (PDF) of “58 experts [who] don’t believe global warming is a crisis.”  But a review of those “experts” by The Daily Beast found that only three of the 58 actually have any credentials in climatology or atmospheric science. (16 are conservative political pundits, 11 are meteorologists, six are conservative economists, and the rest a hodgepodge.)

What’s not par for the course is Soon’s history of non-disclosure regarding his funding from the fossil fuel industry, which was only revealed because, as an employee of the Smithsonian, the funding documents were covered by the Freedom of Information Act. Greenpeace obtained those documents and made them public.

[N]ot only individual "scientists", but the entire network of Climate Truther think-tanks is a result of industry funding. Some are focused on climate trutherism specifically.

Today, only 42 percent of Americans believe that human-caused climate change is real. Compare that to 13,926 out of 13,950 peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1991-2012. That’s right, only 24 out of nearly 14,000 peer-reviewed articles reject the scientific consensus that human activity is affecting the climate.   Yes, among actual experts, there is 99.83 percent agreement that climate change is a thing.

Ironically, there’s nearly as much consensus among Republican politicians—on the other side. Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum are all on record as being Climate Truthers. . . . The reason here is obvious: money. With the Koch Brothers alone pledging $900 million to buy the 2016 election, climate change is a clear third-rail for Republican presidential candidates.

So, will the spectacular fall of one of the Climate Truthers’ favorite fake scientists actually derail the campaign? Don’t bet on it. The paid lackey is dead, long live the paid lackey; if not Willie Soon, then someone else will do.