2022 Nobel winner: Climate change orthodoxy is dangerous corruption of science

Despite media claims that climate change is settled science and represents scientific consensus, the number of prominent scientists breaking from the consensus continues to grow, with the 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize for physics signing onto a World Climate Declaration decrying the existence of any climate emergency.

The declaration now sports the signatures of 1,609 scientists and experts, including that of John F. Clauser, who won the 2022 Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics.

Clauser has also joined the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, which promotes what it says is the vital role carbon dioxide plays in the environment. In joining the coalition, Clauser said the anthropogenic climate change movement poses a serious threat to world economies.

“The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people,” Clauser said. “Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills.”

Clauser said the climate narrative has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists.

“In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis,” he said. “There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”

In June, the Nobel laureate continued his assault on climate change orthodoxy, delivering a withering assessment of the movement in a speech at Quantum Korea 2023, an international event sponsored by the Korean government looking into global trends of quantum ecosystem innovations. 

Clauser said he had been asked to make some brief remarks as inspiration to young Korean scientists, and he quickly wanted them to be aware of pseudosciences sweeping the world.

“The current world I observe is literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation, and what I will call ‘techno-cons,’” he said. “Techno-cons are the application of scientific disinformation for opportunistic purposes.”

Clauser said non-science business managers, politicians, politically appointed lab directors, and the like are very easily snowed by scientific disinformation, but that, in the end, good science is always based on good experiments and good observations. He called on young scientists to observe nature directly so that they could determine real truth. 

“Use the information gained from carefully performed experiments and research to stop the spread of scientific misinformation, disinformation and techno-cons,” he said. “Well-educated scientists can help solve the world’s problems by acting as scientific fact-checkers.”

Clauser then homed in on climate change, saying the Nobel Foundation had recently formed a new panel to address pseudoscience but in his opinion had made a big mistake by modeling the panel on the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: “I think personally that they are making a big mistake in that effort because in my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.”

Clauser went on to say that the peer-review process whereby credentialed colleagues assess each other’s work — the previous system of scientific fact checking —  had broken down. Often, Clauser said, there are “elephants hiding in the room in plain sight,” and yet peer-reviewers somehow do not see them.

One of those elephants is climate change orthodoxy, Clauser told the assembled scientists. 

“I believe that climate change is not a crisis,” he said, adding that in climate change the dominant process has been misidentified by factors of 200.

Beware, Clauser advised the young scientists.

“If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas,” he said. “If you’re a good scientist, you will follow them. I have several I won’t have time to discuss, but I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis, and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events.”

But saying the climate crisis isn’t real can apparently cause people to be canceled: The International Monetary Fund promptly canceled a seminar Clauser was to give on climate modeling the following month, saying it was being postponed and reorganized into a panel discussion.

A declaration

The World Climate Declaration that Clauser signed onto also proclaims in its lead that there is no climate emergency.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the declaration states. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

The Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases, the document continues, with the Little Ice Age ending as recently as 1850. 

“Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are expe­riencing a period of warming,” the declaration states. “Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming.”

The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing, the document continued, while the gap between the real world and the modeled world shows that science is far from understanding climate change.

“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the declaration stated. “They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.”

Perhaps most important, the document asserts, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. 

“It is essential to all life on Earth,” the declaration states. “More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet. Additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also profitable for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide. CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth.”

What’s more, the document contends, there is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent, but there is ample evidence that carbon dioxide ­mitigation measures are as damag­ing as they are costly.

“There is no climate emergency,” the declaration concludes. “Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.”

Critics of the declaration point out that not all of its 1,609 signatories are scientists or climate experts. That’s true but it’s also true that most are such scientists and experts, including another Nobel laureate, Dr. Ivar Giaever, as well as Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate at MIT; and Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, a professor of geophysics and founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks from 1998 until 2007; and others.

Like Clauser, Giaever has been vocal in his dissent from climate change orthodoxy and even resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) because of its climate change agenda.

“In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” Giaever said.

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.