'We Are Totally Awash in Pseudoscience’: Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist on Climate Agenda
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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Boston mayor bans 'fossil fuels' in new city-owned buildings to advance 'racial and economic justice'
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced that she has banned "fossil fuels" in new city-owned buildings after teaming up with the city's director of the Green New Deal.
The goal is "accelerating climate action by requiring that all new municipal buildings and major renovations operate without fossil fuels." The press release also claimed the move would reduce "emissions from Boston’s building sector while creating high-quality jobs, improving public health and quality of life, and advancing racial and economic justice."
All new buildings in the city must be planned, designed, and constructed using non-combustion for cooking (stoves/ovens), HVAC, and hot water apparatuses.
The mayor claimed that recent weather means that there isn't much time to make quick political changes.
“Week after week, we see the signs of extreme heat, storms, and flooding that remind us of a closing window to take climate action,” said Wu. “The benefits of embracing fossil fuel-free infrastructure in our City hold no boundary across industries and communities, and Boston will continue using every possible tool to build the green, clean, healthy, and prosperous future our city deserves.”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/boston-wu-bans-fossilfuels-govt
****************************************************The sinister truth about the war on cars
Like so much about ecology, there seems a feudal impulse about the encroaching motoring puritanism, be it ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) or LTN (Low Traffic Neighbourhood), which sound like sexy new forms of electronic dance music but which are decidedly anti-fun.
What we are witnessing now is not a war on cars per se; it’s a war on the poor who dare to drive. Those who are rich can pay to pollute with the Mayor’s blessing, just as wealthy Just Stop Oil protestors will continue to have Instagram feeds which make Around The World In Eighty Days look like a stroll in the park.
The shameful squeezing out of the London proletariat from the city they built, into suburbs and satellite towns – despite still largely working in the centre – is being repeated in most cities across the country, so obviously many of those people will need their cars more than ever. But the post-Covid working from home boom has allowed a huge chunk of the middle-class workforce to opt out of having to travel to work; and as they already live near all the shops and doctors and schools they need, they’re more than happy to give up their cars and get on with the important business of virtue-signalling.
In Brighton we’ve just got rid of a Green council after twelve years. I really would advise anyone who thinks that the Greens are ‘good’ — even after the criticism they’ve subjected poor Shahrar Ali to for daring to stand up for women’s rights — or left-wing, come to that, when their disregard for the well-being of working-class people makes Debrett’s look democratic, to consider what happened here. It really seemed that they wanted no one from outside Brighton to ever visit Brighton – apart from all the over-privileged students who kept voting them in, of course. They did everything they could to make people stay home, from threatening to close down public toilets to making the pavements imperilled with overgrown weeds, but their main attack was through the war on cars.
Bella Sankey, the new Labour leader of the council, estimates that parking fees imposed by the Green council cost us more than £1 million in day-tripper revenue over three years. She blames the ‘incompetence’ of Green policies for a £3 million black hole in the city’s finances in which the loss in parking revenue makes up a significant part.
It would be a shame if our anhedonia grew so all-consuming that the simple pleasure of driving towards somewhere nice on a sunny day with someone you love was also put beyond the pale.
The plan to introduce Brighton’s first LTN in the Green stronghold of Hanover is thought to be what gave Labour their first council majority in more than two decades. Pleasingly, with poetic justice, the new council have pledged to re-allocate the £1 million set aside for LTN to refurbishing the city’s public conveniences — literally flushing the LTN fantasy down the toilet.
Let’s hope that more follows — we have long needed a new peasants’ revolt against this creeping Green feudalism. I’m so pleased that the Prime Minister has declared himself an unapologetic motor-lover; he may be the first PM to be richer than the actual king, but as the child of immigrants he understands the literal and metaphorical importance of mobility — of not being condemned to life in the place you just happened to be born in. Because make no mistake, the war against the car is a war against mobility, modernity and freedom.
‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ asked billboards beside the roads of Britain during the war and after, encouraging drivers not to waste petrol — but do we want a life only of necessity? They’ll be taking away the weekend next — after all, nobody had one before capitalism. I’d love to see a motoring culture in which driving is done as a pleasure, every drive a wanted drive. It would be a shame if our anhedonia grew so all-consuming that the simple pleasure of driving towards somewhere nice on a sunny day with someone you love was also put beyond the pale.
Until then, cars are essential to the ever-dwindling allotment of ease and convenience the working-class have left. Bringing in ever more limitations on them won’t save your children’s lives; but it will, unless you’re rich, severely curtail the places they can go and the things they can do. If you want your children to have far more boring and limited lives than yours, carry on demonising the car.
I’ve only voted Tory once in my life, and that was for Brexit; I was aiming to do so again next time until Starmer remembered what a woman is — since when I’ve wavered. But if Sunak stands by his claim to turn the tide in this sinister crusade to turn us into serfs on bikes, pedalling humbly into some drab future in which only the wealthy enjoy themselves, he’s got my vote. And I still can’t drive.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/the-sinister-truth-about-the-war-on-cars/
************************************************Global boiling. Ouch!
It’s been quite the week for overblown climate hyperbole and preposterous exaggerations, so we thought we may as well join in the fun: ‘New Ice Age to arrive by summer 2023. Australia prepares for a White Christmas.’ In reality, our own far-fetched prediction is probably more credible than the nonsensical ‘the era of global boiling has begun’ trotted out by the clownish and increasingly toad-like Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Every politician rightly dreads the moment the public stops fearing them or taking them seriously and instead starts laughing at them, and Senhor Guterres certainly toppled over that particular tipping point this week. Sadly, however, his is not a democratically elected position, so it is unlikely he will disappear from our TV screens any time soon. Thus, we must take his prediction seriously, not so much for what damage our ‘boiling’ planet may do to us all, but rather, the incredible damage such asinine rhetoric is doing and will carry on doing to our economic outlook and future prosperity.
You didn’t have to be a climate-denier or even a climate-sceptic to find the Guterres rant risible. But the problem is that such inflammatory climate language is then regurgitated through all channels of the media and fed directly into our schoolchildren’s daily diet of woke disinformation. Most well-meaning but less-politically engaged people and hard-pressed parents tend to presume that the truth about subjects like climate change ‘lies somewhere in the middle’ and are quite happy for others invested in the culture wars to battle it out. However, by constantly ramping up the extremist language, the left wilfully and deceptively shifted the ‘sensible centre’ further and further away from reality. Even one of the head honchos at the IPCC was forced to admit that Guterres’ ‘global boiling’ was wide of the mark. But of course such cautionary notes gain nowhere near the publicity of hysterical fear-mongering.
Full marks as always to Speccie contributor and South Australian Senator Alex Antic for his suggested future alarmist expressions for the UN to excitedly promote when ‘global boiling’ loses its scare factor, which it shall, including ‘Global Climate Inferno’, ‘Mega Universe Heat Death’ and ‘Super Global Spine Chillingly Hot’.
Equally absurd, and linked, was the claim by both Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that their government had ‘saved’ the Great Barrier Reef. Hilaire Belloc would have adored the twisted logic that has the United Nations not declaring the Great Barrier Reef to be in mortal danger as they had been feverishly plotting to thanks entirely to the one-and-a-bit-year-old Labor government having increased the cost of your electricity bills. Or something like that. Here’s a wildly radical and heretical thought: perhaps it was never in danger to begin with. Because maybe the oceans aren’t actually boiling.
In this week’s magazine, Michael Baume exposes just one tiny but incredibly disturbing aspect of where all this madness is leading us to. It was Alan Jones who used to speak of the ‘national suicide note’ that is net zero. But our foolish Energy Minister seems hell-bent on living up to that promise, as he jeopardises our critical relationship with Japan courtesy of his climate dogma and renewables fantasies. As Michael writes, ‘[Our new emissions laws] are of such major concern that not only have Japanese senior ministers already requested flexible measures under the safeguard mechanism for LNG projects supplying Japan, but PM Kishida has made a similar approach to PM Albanese.’
At the same time, Rebecca Weisser reveals that even the net-zero luvvies have added up the carbon numbers and come to the conclusion that offshore wind farms in NSW are a flat no-no.
No hyperbole there.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/global-boiling-ouch/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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