Year 4, Month 4, Day 3: Little Willie Leaps

USA Today reprints a story from a Delaware paper about a visit from denialist demigod Willie Soon:

GEORGETOWN, Del. — One of the nation’s more controversial climate-change skeptics dismissed warnings about sea-level rise and global warming as “scare tactics” and “sick” science in a talk here.

Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Professor David Legates of the University of Delaware, a former climatologist for the state, bluntly rejected leading climate change claims during the Monday event organized by two nonprofit groups that promote personal and economic freedoms, the Positive Growth Alliance of Millsboro, Del. and the Caesar Rodney Institute of Dover, Del.

“They’re a very sick group,” Soon said. “They’re not talking about science at all. It is all agenda-driven, science results.”

Sick. Right ho. March 22:

Upton Sinclair pointed out that “it’s very difficult to make a man understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.” Climate-change “skeptic” Willie Soon carries Sinclair’s maxim one step further: Soon’s paycheck depends on the American public not understanding three important things. First, the facts of global warming; second, the truth about his employers’ ties to the fossil-fuel industries whose greenhouse emissions have been incontrovertibly linked to the accelerating climate crisis; third, that he was never formally trained in climatology.

Willie Soon’s lengthy affiliation with the Heartland Foundation is one of the warning signals. Decades ago, Heartland collaborated with big tobacco against the public interest — and they’re employing the same diversionary tactics now, in order to delay action on climate change for as long as possible. In the light of these troubling associations, it’s clear that Soon’s pronouncements on “sick science” are simply callous defensive rhetoric.

Warren Senders