...is a physicist who has specialised in the study of optics and spectroscopy. He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University. His academic career started at Colombia University where he became a full professor and director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. In 1980, he left to go to Princeton where he was later the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics. In 1991, he joined U.S. department of Energy where he was the director of its research budget of $3 billion. In 1993, he returned to his position at Princeton where he became the chair of the research board in 1995.Writing recently in the US journal First Things "The Truth about Greenhouse Gases - the dubious science of the climate crusaders" he begins...
"The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims...The existence of the little ice age and the medieval warm period were an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel...
