A man walks past the International Monetary Fund (IMF) logo at its
headquarters in Washington on May 10, 2018. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser isn’t afraid to go against the flow.
In a July 26 interview with The Epoch Times, Mr. Clauser explained that he carried out his early research on quantum mechanics against opposition from some in the field.
As a young man, he conducted the first experiment to demonstrate the reality of nonlocal quantum entanglement—the linkage between multiple particles across any physical distance. Many years later, 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 isn’t 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,'” Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times.
His training in science makes him “a little bit different” from 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 speech 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,” Mr. 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.”
Mr. 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 said he believes that gas’s effect on heat transfer is swamped by a great natural cloud cycle.
“[The carbon dioxide] may or may not be made by human beings,” Mr. Clauser said. “It doesn’t really matter where it comes from.”
The physicist said he 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 initiatives.
“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 Mr. 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 the 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 received alarming news.
Mr. Clauser told The Epoch Times he had received an email indicating that the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) director, Pablo Moreno, didn’t want the talk to go forward that day.
In an email, an IEO senior official told The Epoch Times that Mr. Clauser’s speech “has been postponed to reorganize it into a panel discussion.”
“We are working to reschedule it after the summer,” the official wrote.
No New Date Set
For now, a new date hasn’t been set.
Mr. 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 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!” Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace and now a high-profile climate skeptic, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Mr. Moore is a former chair of the CO2 Coalition.
“Whatever you do anon, you must not question ‘The Science,’ even if you are a nobel laureate,” Joshua Steinman, a cybersecurity entrepreneur who served on the Trump administration’s National Security Council, wrote on X.
If the IMF’s IEO re-invites Mr. Clauser, his remarks could make a bigger splash than his initially scheduled talk.
Like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, Mr. 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,” he told The Epoch Times.
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