Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics questions whether polar bear populations are declining, as claimed by those who declare that declining polar bear populations indicate that something must be done about global warming immediately.

Soon and six of his colleagues have discussed their reservations in a paper in Ecological Complexity, which also casts doubt on climate models’ predictions of how fast the sea ice on which he animals hunt will disappear.

Soon receives funding from Exxon-Mobil, and three of the other authors also have links to the oil industry. A reply to the paper, which is under review, accuses Soon of misinterpreting predictions made by climate models and ignoring data that does not fit his argument.