I had a look at Clauser’s Wikipedia page. What is it with some of the best physicists and climate change denial?

John Clauser

Climate change denial

In May 2023, Clauser joined the board of the CO2 Coalition, a climate change denial organization.

In November 2023, Clauser called himself a “climate denier” at an event organized by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of Catholic organizations. He believes that Earth’s temperature is primarily determined by cloud cover instead of, as stated by the scientific consensus on climate change, carbon dioxide emissions. He has concluded that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet, and stated “there is no climate crisis.”

The consensus among meteorologists and climatologists is that low-altitude, thick clouds do have a net cooling effect, but high-altitude, thin ones have a warming effect; there is observational evidence that the overall current cloud feedback amplifies global warming, and does not have a cooling effect.

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Freeman Dyson died in 2020. He also had shitty opinions on climate change.

Freeman Dyson

Climate change

Dyson agreed that technically humans and additional CO2 emissions contribute to warming. However, he felt that the benefits of additional CO2 outweighed any associated negative effects. He said that in many ways increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is beneficial, and that it is increasing biological growth, agricultural yields and forests.

He believed that existing simulation models of climate change fail to account for some important factors, and that the results thus contain too great a margin of error to reliably predict trends. He argued that political efforts to reduce the causes of climate change distract from other global problems that should take priority, and viewed the acceptance of climate change as comparable to religion.

In 2009, Dyson criticised James Hansen’s climate-change activism. “The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers… Hansen has turned his science into ideology.” Hansen responded that Dyson “doesn’t know what he’s talking about… If he’s going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework- which he obviously has not done on global warming”.

Dyson replied that “[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.” Dyson stated in an interview that the argument with Hansen was exaggerated by The New York Times, stating that he and Hansen are “friends, but we don’t agree on everything.”

Since originally taking interest in climate studies in the 1970s, Dyson suggested that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could be controlled by planting fast-growing trees. He calculated that it would take a trillion trees to remove all carbon from the atmosphere. In a 2014 interview he said, “What I’m convinced of is that we don’t understand climate… It will take a lot of very hard work before that question is settled.”

Dyson was a member of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

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Global Warming Policy Foundation

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom whose aims are to challenge what it calls “extremely damaging and harmful policies” envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming.