2014 Winner of the Courage in Defense of Science
Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and geoscientist, is a leading authority on the relationship between solar phenomena and global climate. His discoveries challenge computer modelers and advocates who consistently underestimate solar influences on cloud formation, ocean currents, and wind that cause climate to change.
Since 1992, Dr. Soon has been an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory. He is also receiving editor in the area of solar and stellar physics for New Astronomy. He writes and lectures both professionally and publicly on important issues related to the sun, other stars, and the Earth, as well as general science topics in astronomy and physics.
Dr. Soon’s honors include a 1989 IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society Graduate Scholastic Award and a Rockwell Dennis Hunt Scholastic Award from the University of Southern California for Athe most representative Ph.D. research thesis” of 1991. In 2003, he was invited to testify to the U.S. Senate. Also in 2003, Dr. Soon was recognized, with a monetary award, for Adetailed scholarship on biogeological and climatic change over the past 1,000 years” by the Smithsonian Institution.
In 2004, Dr. Soon received the Petr Beckmann award of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness for Acourage and achievement in defense of scientific truth and freedom.” In 2014, Dr. Soon received the Courage in Defense of Science Award, with a monetary award, from the George C. Marshall Institute. The award was presented at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change held in Las Vegas.
Dr. Soon is the author of The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-Earth Connection(World Scientific Publishing Company, 2004). He is the coauthor, with Sebastian Lüning, of Chapter 2: “Solar Forcing of Climate,” in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science (The Heartland Institute, 2013), a comprehensive critique of the Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
