As Breaking Bad has shown us, science isn’t just about four-eyed nerds in a lab – it can also be about four-eyed nerds in a lab doing some nasty, evil stuff.
The New York Times‘s Justin Gills and John Schwartz have put out an article pegging Malaysian-born astrophysicist Wei-Hock Soon, also known as Willie Soon, as having received money from the oil industry in return for writing lengthy academic refutations of human contributions to climate change.
The article alleges that Soon, who is attached to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has received more than USD1.2 million (RM4.4 million) from fossil fuel companies while publishing at least 11 papers arguing that climate change is mostly caused by variations in the sun’s energy, and not by human activities.
Soon did not disclose the possible conflict of interest in being paid by oil and coal companies while refuting human contributions to climate change. In leaked correspondence between Soon and his corporate funders, the scientist also described his climate change papers as “deliverables”, or products he would craft in exchange for payment.
This isn’t even the first time Soon has been accused of putting out skeptical academic papers in return for cold, hard cash. A Reuters report in 2011 alleged that Soon had been paid USD120,000 (RM437,000) beginning in 2008 for writing papers leaning towards keeping human fuel-burning activities off the hook for global climate change.
In that article, Soon defended himself by saying the money he was paid in no way affectd his findings. “I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research,” he said.
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