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.
‘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.
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.”
No New Date Set
For now, a new date hasn’t been set.In the eyes of some observers, the stated postponement looks more like a straightforward cancellation.
Mr. Moore is a former chair of the CO2 Coalition.
If the IMF’s IEO re-invites Mr. Clauser, his remarks could make a bigger splash than his initially scheduled talk.
For now, the physicist doesn’t sound likely to yield.
“We are totally awash in pseudoscience,” he told The Epoch Times.