Canceling Skeptical Scientists Is the Real 'Climate Crisis'
“There is no real climate crisis.”
That statement, as well as others against the mainstream climate change narrative of impending doom, led to the cancellation of a speech that was to be given by Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John Clauser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The censorship has been covered in media worldwide and, besides giving the IMF a huge black eye, is leading many to wonder what has gone wrong with climate science that such a prominent expert would be canceled merely for disagreeing with a scientific hypothesis. Let’s dig into this important news story.
Dr. Clauser is an experimental and theoretical physicist and was the joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics in the 1970s. He is now on the board of directors at the CO2 Coalition based in Arlington, Va. Dr. William Happer, chair of the board at the CO2 Coalition, said that “His [Dr. Clauser’s] studies of the science of climate provide strong evidence that there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world.”
Dr. Clauser was scheduled to speak to the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office last week under the title: “Let’s talk — How much can we trust IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] climate predictions?” Because the answer Dr. Clauser was obviously going to give was “not much” and because of his other public statements criticizing the models relied upon by the IPCC, someone inside the IMF must have hit the roof. The CO2 coalition reported:
According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk. Technically, it was “postponed.”
In 2021, Dr. Clauser criticized granting of the Nobel Prize for the development of computer models that predicted global warming. These climate models have been shown to be inaccurate and do not take into account the significant feedback of clouds in the climate system.
Dr. Clauser’s own climate model adds the effect of clouds, which is crucial for understanding the Earth’s climate. After all, cumulus clouds cover one-third to two-thirds of the Earth’s surface and reflect about 90% of sunlight, providing a significant cooling effect. In fact, the role of carbon dioxide is negligible in comparison. Dr. Clauser said, “The IPCC’s detailed analysis of clouds (AR5) and their effect on climate totally misunderstands the effects of clouds, and totally ignores this dominating energy transport process.”
Additionally, increased carbon dioxide will benefit the world, not destroy it. After all, it is plant food, leading to flourishing forests and crops, so too flourishing for the people and animals who live off the land. Carbon dioxide concentrations are now at some of the lowest levels they have been in at least the past 600 million years, certainly nowhere near the crisis warned about by President Joe Biden.
Dr. Clauser stated that the climate change narrative is “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.” This is, of course, an entirely accurate description of the state of the world today. Incompetencies in government and a host of other problems facing the world are erroneously blamed on climate change. By focusing on human-caused climate change, we take our focus away from solving real-world problems, such as helping those in poverty attain cheap and reliable energy and a decent standard of living.
In his speech at Quantum Korea 2023 in Seoul, South Korea on June 26, 2023, Dr. Clauser said that “If you’re doing good science, it may lead you into politically incorrect areas.” The scientific method, the tried-and-true means of scientific inquiry, is based on experimentation and proving hypotheses wrong. By asking questions and proceeding to test a hypothesis through rigorous experiments, a scientist can gain a better understanding of the world. “Good science is always based on good experiments,” Dr. Clauser tells us.
To question, not to state dogma and assume facts, is what true science is all about. We must carefully observe nature and be wary when people use scientific information for opportunistic purposes, often distorting facts to achieve their own ends. “Even the scientific community can sometimes become deluded by pseudoscience,” Dr. Clauser reminds us.
And indeed, it is often scientists themselves, such as those who work with the IPCC, who are most staunchly set in their beliefs. Dr. Clauser tells us that “The IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” We have seen this time and time again in the climate change debate, where facts are distorted, data is cherry-picked, and claims are often based on faulty computer models rather than experimentation and unbiased observation.
Moreover, silencing opposition and actively opposing those who question theories is unscientific and dangerous. We have increasingly seen that those who do not support the mainstream narrative are not only silenced but shunned and threatened. This is not an environment that encourages healthy debate, so we are prevented from striving toward the truth and subsequently making policies based on the truth.
In the climate change debate, this is especially dangerous, for if we are not causing a crisis due to our increased carbon dioxide emissions, then enacting policies that would upturn our society and way of living, putting countless people into poverty, would all be for no benefit.
“The world is awash with someone else’s perception of truth, as an alternative to real truth,” Dr. Clauser added in his speech in Korea. This is often significantly different from the real truth, but when the media and government promote it, it becomes accepted as the real truth. People will claim false truths to push their own ends, which runs counter to the spirit of scientific inquiry. Scientists should be held to the standard of honest inquiry, free from political and social pressures to obtain desired results.
Scientists such as Dr. Clauser who express different views from the mainstream should be celebrated, not silenced, for science only advances when experts are free to think outside the box. Condemnation for non-conventional thinking leads to tyranny, and it is tyranny we must fight in order to live a truly flourishing life. In the meantime, we should remind our leaders that honest, skeptical inquiry is the root of all real science. Canceling experts like Dr. John Clauser is the real crisis, not climate change.
(Mary-Jean Harris contributed to this article. She lives in Ottawa, Canada.)
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