In a candid interview with the German language Weltwoche, astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon asserts that the sun is the overwhelmingly dominant force driving Earth’s climate, not human-emitted CO2. [emphasis, links added]
His decades of research into solar and stellar physics led him to the controversial conclusion that focusing on regulating CO2 is misguided.
“You can’t make laws against the sun,” he argues.
Dr. Soon states that the sun provides 99.99% of the energy that powers our weather and climate, and satellite data confirms that solar radiation is not a constant, but fluctuates, particularly in the UV and X-ray ranges.
He contends that temperature patterns over the last 150 years correlate much better with solar activity fluctuations than with CO2 levels.
According to Soon’s analysis, the CO2 signal is below the detection limit as a primary climate driver.
Challenging the CO2 Narrative
Soon dismisses the “CO2 panic” as lacking a solid scientific basis and highlights the beneficial role of the gas in promoting photosynthesis and causing measurable global greening since the 19th century.
He points to natural climate events like the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), a period of minimal sunspots that coincided with the Little Ice Age, as robust evidence for a direct link between solar activity and climate shifts.
Why the CO2 Focus? The “Iron Triangle”
When asked why the CO2 narrative dominates, Dr. Soon claims it is politically motivated, citing the fact that taxes and regulations can be imposed on CO2, but not on the sun.
He describes an “Iron Triangle Effect” where government funds, science delivers, and media amplifies an alarmist consensus, often marginalizing critics and favoring specific models to create an impression of certainty where uncertainty exists.
Politicized Science
According to Soon:
“Unfortunately, many scientific institutions have adopted an alarmist consensus in recent decades. Critics are marginalized. Climate policy is increasingly serving economic and ideological goals, not objective research.
“However, there is one positive sign: Bill Gates recently realized that the climate cannot be controlled by regulating CO2. Instead, he now wants to focus on adaptation—on mitigating human suffering from extreme cold or heat. That is a welcome development.”
He warns that the political contamination narrows scientific discourse and replaces objective research with ideological and economic goals.
Addressing Criticisms and Recommending New Priorities
Soon rejects claims of being funded by the oil industry, stating his funding comes from diverse sources and is currently supported by voluntary donations to his independent group, Ceres-Science.
The claims of Big Oil funding are meant to distract from the science. He emphasizes that the quality of work, not the source of funding, should be the focus.
For future climate research, Dr. Soon recommends:
- Focusing on long-term, calibrated measurements in rural areas.
- Ensuring open data and code for reproducibility.
- Conducting targeted experiments on the stratosphere, cloud formation, and radiation balance.
- Honestly testing competing hypotheses instead of confirming favored models.
His advice for policymaking is simple: prioritize realism and resilience.
This means adapting infrastructure, strengthening flood protection, investing in technology, and most importantly, exercising humility before the complexity of nature.
He concludes that since we can’t make laws against the sun, policy must be realistic, intelligent, and humane.
Full interview in German here.
Read more at No Tricks Zone
Advocates of the climate change movement will accurately point out that differences in solar radiation as the sun goes through its cycles is not enough to have significant impacts on earth. The mechanism is the sun’s magnetic field, which is stronger during higher solar activity. Real world data shows that carbon dioxide is the not dominate factor. This is shown by the roman warm period, medieval warm period, mini-ice age, the warm period of the 1930’s, and the pause in warming at the beginning of this centenary. Where carbon dioxide fits in nicely is the desire to use climate change for financial gain and social engineering.
The Sun has more effect on our weather than do our Private Cars and Backyard BBQ’s even though the sun is 93 Million Miles away
He and I coauthored the monograph, The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun-earth Connection (I came up with the title) done by me with him at the Harvard-Smithsonian CfA when he was a post doc there. Some other essays, too: one was in The Mercury (PASP’s journal) about how a weakened sun may influence geophysical factors. He must’ve dug through every MIT and Harvard library several times as a Smithsonian officer for that book, and I worked pro bono for him, doing contextual studies of what I asked him to find, at times, for the rounded, multidisciplinary world view I felt we needed. There was no grant money involved in doing it – certainly nothing from oil companies. I wished there had been! Because of the work, I think we’ve helped set the record straight on a badly-neglected area in science research. I get a lot of applause for it on various fora, even now.