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Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

Appendix C: Backgrounds of the Contributors to the Programme

9.	He is a Science Roundtable Member of the Tech Central Science Foundation (see http://tinyurl.com/yuf3ld).
10.	He is a Study Author for the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy (See Michaels, P.J., 1998, Global Deception: The Exaggeration of the Global Threat, St. Louis, MO: Center for the Study of American Business, PDF file at: http://tinyurl.com/27o882).
11.	He is an Report Author for the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC (See Michaels, P.J., 2002, Global Warming and the Kyoto Protocol, published by ALEC, PDF file at http://tinyurl.com/yoqtw4).
12.	He is a columnist with the American Spectator (see http://tinyurl.com/ 2t66xp).

C.12 Dr Willie Soon

Dr Wei-Hock (“Willie”) Soon is a research astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (see http://tinyurl.com/32pkbf and Wikipedia: http://tinyurl.com/3dnvex. He has written 40 peer-reviewed papers, but only 10 have been related the Earth’s climate, with the remainder being on astrophysics and plasma physics (ISI WoS).

Although he didn’t speak in the Channel 4 programme, three graphs from papers he has written were used in the programme (see Comment 42, page 35, and Comment 65, page 60). He was also thanked in the credits.

In 2003 Soon co-authored the paper “Proxy climatic and environmental changes in the past 1000 years,” (http://tinyurl.com/2qxg43 PDF), partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, which purported to show that the 20th century was not the warmest in the last millennium. The publication of this paper in the journal Climate Research sparked a great deal of controversy. The Editor-in-chief, Hans von Storch, and four other editors of the journal resigned as a consequence (http://tinyurl.com/2ycuv7 [Von Storch]), citing failures in the peer review process which had allowed such a seriously flawed paper to be published.

C.12.1 Direct Corporate Funding

Soon’s research has been funded by ExxonMobil and Texaco (e.g. see Acknowledgments section of http://tinyurl.com/3bhqho PDF).

C.12.2 Links to Corporate-funded Lobby Groups

[Note: In addition to the seven lobby groups listed below, Dr Soon also has close links with the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine – see the OISM entry on page 154 for details.]

(For information about the following organisations and the funding they receive, see Appendix D: Corporate-funded Organisations Linked to Contributors to the Programme).

He is a Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute (http://tinyurl.com/33vvty).

He has been funded by the American Petroleum Institute (e.g. see Acknowledgements Section of http://tinyurl.com/2qxg43 PDF).

In 2004 he received $60,000 in consulting fees from the Frontiers of Freedom Institute and Foundation (source: http://tinyurl.com/38qn8u PDF).

Continued …

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