29.07.23 (29)
Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser is not afraid to go against the flow.
In a July 26 interview with The Epoch Times, Dr. Clauser explained that he carried out his early research on quantum mechanics against opposition from some in the field.
As a young man, he pulled off the first experiment to demonstrate the reality of non-local quantum entanglement—that is, the strange linkage between multiple particles across any physical distance. That groundbreaking work earned him one-third of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Today, the 80-year-old scientist is up against another establishment. This time, though, he’s not just violating a prediction so as to rule out an alternative explanation to quantum mechanics. He’s violating a taboo that has slowly but surely become one of the biggest in science and politics.
“I am, I guess, what you would call a ‘climate change denialist,’” Dr. Clauser told The Epoch Times.
His training in science makes him “a little bit different than some others,” he said.
The physicist, who also won a third of the Wolf Prize for his quantum mechanics contributions, shared some of his views on climate during a recent talk in South Korea soon after his election to the CO2 Coalition’s board of directors.
‘Dangerous Misinformation’
“I believe that climate change is not a crisis,” Dr. Clauser told the audience at Quantum Korea 2023.
He also described the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.”
Dr. Clauser elaborated further on his views in his interview with The Epoch Times.
Contra the IPCC and other major institutions, he argues that climate is primarily set by what he refers to as the “cloud cover thermostat,” a self-regulating process whereby more clouds start to enshroud the Earth when the temperature is too high, and vice-versa. Although he accepts observations showing that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, he believes that gas’s effect on heat transfer is swamped by a great natural cloud cycle.
“It [the carbon dioxide] may or may not be made by human beings,” Dr. Clauser said. “It doesn’t really matter where it comes from.”
The physicist believes that objective science on climate has been sacrificed to politics. The preeminence of politics is all the worse, he said, because so much money has already gone to climate.
“We’re talking about trillions of dollars,” he said, adding that powerful people don’t want to hear that they’ve made “trillion-dollar mistakes.”
Concerns about such mistakes may have been relevant after Dr. Clauser was slated to speak before the U.N.’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) on July 25.
In recent years, the international economic and monetary agency has focused heavily on climate. Officials have laid particular stress on international carbon taxes.
“The latest IMF analysis finds that large emitting countries need to introduce a carbon tax that rises quickly to $75 a ton in 2030,” the agency’s website on climate mitigation states.
Just days before his talk was to take place, the Nobel laureate got some alarming news.
Dr. Clauser told The Epoch Times he’d received an email indicating that the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office Director, Pablo Moreno, did not want the talk to go forward that day.
In an email, an IEO senior official told The Epoch Times that Dr. Clauser’s speech “has been postponed to reorganize it into a panel discussion.”
“We are working to reschedule it after the summer,” the official added.
No New Date Set
For now, a new date has not been set.
Dr. Clauser pointed out that a past attempt at a vigorous, transparent debate over climate change—namely, the “red team, blue team” exercise proposed by Obama administration veteran Steve Koonin in 2017—was ultimately scuttled during the Trump administration. When Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Director Scott Pruitt sought to carry out the exercise, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly shot the idea down.
In the eyes of some observers, the stated postponement looks more like a straightforward cancellation.
“Dr. John Clauser, Nobel Prize Recipient for Physics, 2022, & Board Member of the CO2 Coalition, has been summarily canceled as a confirmed speaker on July 25 at the International Monetary Fund. They say his speech is “postponed”. Don’t hold your breath!” wrote Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace and now a high-profile climate skeptic, on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
Dr. Moore is a former chair of the CO2 Coalition.
“Whatever you do anon, you must not question ‘The Science,’ even if you are a [N]obel laureate,” Joshua Steinman, a cybersecurity entrepreneur who served on the Trump administration’s National Security Council, wrote on the same site.
When and if the IMF’s IEO reinvites Dr. Clauser, his remarks could make a bigger splash than his initially scheduled talk.
Like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., however, Dr. Clauser may find it hard to get his message out there if the opposition remains sufficiently entrenched.
For now, the physicist doesn’t sound likely to yield.
“We are totally awash in pseudoscience,” Dr. Clauser told The Epoch Times.
First published July 29, 2023 by the Epoch Times
By Nathan Worcester Updated: July 29, 2023
Thanks to co2coalition.org