Winning a Nobel prize does not mean you are a smart guy. It means you have a lot of in-depth knowledge about a very specific, narrow scientific domain, and it’s bad news when people treat you as a universal oracle.
I remind people that Jim Watson and William Shockley were horrible racist bigots — they just knew a bit about the structure of DNA or how transistors work. Kary Mullis was a super flaky space cadet who had an insight into DNA replication. Don’t bother asking them how any other aspect of the universe works.
Now I’ve got another example of bad Nobelists: John Clauser. He won a Nobel in 2022 for his work on quantum mechanics, and I’ll trust that he knew his stuff. Unfortunately, now he’s decided that he’s an expert in climate change. Great news! There is no climate crisis!
he says.
During a fiery news conference at the Four Seasons hotel here Tuesday, speakers denounced climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a “global cabal” including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and many leaders of the Catholic Church.
It might have seemed like a fringe event, except for one speaker’s credentials. John F. Clauser had shared the Nobel Prize in physics last year before declaring Tuesday that “there is no climate crisis” — a claim that contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus.
The event showcased the remarkable shift that Clauser, 80, has undergone since winning one of the world’s most prestigious awards for his groundbreaking experiments with light particles in the 1970s. His recent denial of global warming has alarmed top climate scientists, who warn that he is using his stature to mislead the public about a planetary emergency.
Clauser, who has a booming voice and white hair he often leaves uncombed, has brushed off these concerns. He contends that skepticism is a key part of the scientific process.
I like my skepticism informed and based on evidence, thank you very much. You don’t just run around denying things — you have to actually do the work of showing that those things are wrong. This is a case where someone is making “skeptical” claims on the basis of a false authority and ego. So what is Clauser’s argument?
Clauser, who has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change, has homed in on one message in particular: The Earth’s temperature is primarily determined by cloud cover, not carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. He has concluded that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet, so there is no climate crisis.
I had to go looking for the scientific basis for this claim, and I found it. It’s NASA. On a site called Climate Kids, it’s for children who want to know more about climate science, so it’s a good match for Clauser’s level of understanding.
Clouds within a mile or so of Earth’s surface tend to cool more than they warm. These low, thicker clouds mostly reflect the Sun’s heat. This cools Earth’s surface.
Clouds high up in the atmosphere have the opposite effect: They tend to warm Earth more than they cool. High, thin clouds trap some of the Sun’s heat. This warms Earth’s surface.
What about when you look at the effect of all clouds together? Cooling wins. Right now, Earth’s surface is cooler with clouds than it would be without the clouds.
Uh-oh…he’s right? Not really. The site goes on to say,
Climate scientists predict that as Earth’s climate warms, there will also be fewer clouds to cool it down. So, unfortunately, we can’t count on clouds alone to slow down the warming.
I’d also point out that clouds are only one factor in climate, and I’d need a quantitative understanding of the relative contributions of clouds vs., for instance, greenhouse gasses. I’d want to get the opinion of a genuine expert in the field, a real climatologist. Like Michael Mann.
Michael Mann, a professor of earth science at the University of Pennsylvania, said this argument is “pure garbage” and “pseudoscience.”
The “best available evidence” shows that clouds actually have a net warming effect, Mann said in an email. “In physics, we call that a ‘sign error’ — it’s the sort of error a freshman is embarrassed to be caught having made,” he said.
Of course, does Michael Mann have a Nobel prize in quantum mechanics? He does not. All he has is relevant expertise in the actual field in question, but no shiny gold medal.
In other embarrassing revelations, we also learn something else about Clauser.
Tuesday’s event was organized by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of more than a dozen Catholic organizations that argues “those pushing the anti-God and anti-family climate agenda need to be called out and exposed,” according to its website. Clauser, who is an atheist, needed some convincing to be the keynote speaker, a coalition spokesman acknowledged.
Have I ever mentioned that it’s not just Nobelists, but also sometimes atheists can be big fucking idiots?
What’s his malfunction? Grifter getting fossil-fuel-industry bucks? True-believer who think environmentalism is COMMUNISM? What?
On top of all the bullshit described here, these Deposit of Faith clowns seem to hold a position contrary to several Popes’ explicitly stated warnings about the destruction of our environment. (And where did they get that name from anyway? “Deposit of faith” sounds like something disgusting one might leave on an enemy’s doorstep or living-room rug. Seriously, WTAF are they trying to say with that name?)
@ 2
Yeah, my father is like this. LOOOOOOVED Ratzi. HATES Franny because of the “Communism,” that is, when Franny pretends to be kind and “liberal” for the uncritical press.
Extreme fringe Catholics are also idiots.
Many of them are Geocentrists who still believe the sun orbits the earth and Galileo got off lightly.
It’s a Trifecta of idiots.
That is earth is warming isn’t a claim.
It’s an empirical fact backed up by mountains of evidence.
To start with, we take the earth’s temperature with thermometers quite often and you can plot those measurements against time going back over a century.
Then there is that ice melting everywhere phenomenon.
Hasn’t Clauser ever heard of sea ice, Greenland, or Antarctica?
Same for sea level rises.
I guess we all hallucinated the droughts, the extreme heat and the forest fires this past year.
.
BTW they have just discovered yet another bronze age civilization that collapsed 1200 BC – a period with prolonged drought all over the place.
I assume those bronze age warriors were commie wimps who could not take a bit of …slowly starving to death when the climate had a fit ???
“Archaeologists uncover Europe’s hidden Bronze Age megastructures”
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-archaeologists-uncover-europe-hidden-bronze.html
PZ is right. Many achieve great success by having an extremely narrow focus. But, they may be bigoted idiots in all other areas.
Our works have always emphasized ‘quality of character’ and ‘working to achieve the greatest breadth and depth of knowledge and wisdom’.
This might be apocryphal, but badass Enrico Fermi was supposedly once asked whether the Nobelists had anything in common. His reply: “Nothing. Not even intelligence.”
So, because of clouds, the world is not growing warmer and Venus is actually frigid, amiright?
BTW, why are they giving out Nobel Prizes in quantum physics? Al Nobel didn’t believe in that quantum hooey! Largely because quantum mechanics didn’t exist as a framework while he was alive, that came along a few years after he died, but that’s just as irrelevant as CO2 or something otherwise hand wavy.
I say we build a rocket, shoot the lot of them to Venus as our first colony there. Won’t need much along the lines of supplies, just enough to get them there.
Exactly so. Clauser and other denialists should show their work, which clearly they avoid purposely. The physics of CO2 behavior in the infrared spectrum has been pretty well established. How do they wash their hands of that? Also our instruments from space measure that the incoming radiation to Earth exceeds the outgoing radiation by roughly one watt per square meter. Why don’t they open their eyes to that? They purposely ignore the physics and the observations, preferring dirty hands and closed eyes.
Akira MacKenzie@1: What’s his malfunction?
Old age. He received his Nobel in 2022 for work he did in the 1970s — 53 years ago.
He’s just a decaying old shithead who doesn’t know when to shut up, like so many others.
@7:
We know this must be true, because if they shared properties then by the Pauli exclusion principle it would be impossible to get them all into Stockholm at the same time for the award ceremony.
Clauser is a member of the CO2 Coalition, which is chaired by William Happer formerly with the defunded George C. Marshall Institute. Clauser is getting paid to say what he says.
Made me want to cite Lichtenberg’s dictum that skepticism about one thing is usually the result of blind faith in something else.
… a fiery news conference at the Four Seasons hotel …
Obviously a serious booking error. The proper venue for such events, of course, is Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Climate scientists predict that as Earth’s climate warms, there will also be fewer clouds to cool it down.
??? I haven’t seen this addressed in particular, but most climate predictions assert more water in the hotter air…
Hyperskepticism, serial doubting for profit.
With more heat the atmosphere can hold more water before condensation.
Here is what Google says about clouds and global warming.
OK, this is not good news for anything living on the earth.
1. The insulating type of clouds, high clouds, will move higher and amplify global warming.
.2. The cooling type of clouds, low clouds, will decrease. This also amplifies global warming.
Raven @ #18 Clauser is a Merchant of Doubt (see the book or documentary of that name).
He’s lying, it’s not about science. It’s about stopping government action against those businesses threatened by the government action. The George C. Marshall Institute (GCMI) was founded by Fred Seitz who was President of the National Academy of Sciences and a physicist. He hired other physicists and they all lied about tobacco safety and global warming and got paid to do so for many decades.
The GCMI has since disbanded and then reformed as the CO2 Coalition of which Clauser is a paid member. It’s about ethics not expertise.
Ah yes, a “global cabal,” the insecure Nazi’s favorite way of saying “teh Joooooooos.” What’s interesting to me is that they also blamed Catholics, despite being a Catholic group. I’m guessing they mean the “fake” (read: anyone more liberal than Torquemada) Catholics are responsible, and the only way to get things back on track is to bring back the Inquisition and Crusades.
To be clear: I’m not surprised to see Catholics getting blamed- that’s also standard Nazi protocol- just that it’s a Catholic group doing the blaming. A little surprised, that is, not a lot. This kind of infighting isn’t exactly uncommon.
Let me guess: By”anti-God” they mean “Humans think they’re more powerful than Gawd if they think they can affect the environment” and by “anti-Family” they mean preventing overpopulation means Catholics won’t be able to crap out dozens of children from JEEZ-us.”
Another sciency dolt who refuses to even examine the data from other fields, in this case, the lowly field of chemistry, which, to old-school physicists is even lower than biology.
It was chemists who discovered the greenhouse effect, global warming, etc. Two women lab technicians’ experiments in the mid-19th century showed that CO2 absorbs heat. In ca. 1896, Arrhenius (Nobel Prize, equations named after him, “father of physical chemistry”) showed mathematically that CO2 absorbs heat and experimentally that, in the atmosphere, it would warm the earth. In 1912, a chemist put out a newspaper article that warned that if we kept burning coal the earth would warm. In the 1940’s, at least one newsreel warning of CO2 and “global warming”, as they put it.
So, when the meteorologists announced in the late 20th century that the earth was warming due to CO2, the chemists all said “Yeah, we know.”
Great Man syndrome, and getting paid $$$ and flattered by the paymasters, working on an old guy’s mind, producing Dunning-Kruger and the usual refusal to even look at the data of other fields (meterology and chemistry.) Next it’ll be HIV denial, or maybe anti-vaxx.
garnetstar @22:
What? In my Old-School Physicist Hierarchy of Sciences course*, we were taught that nothing is lower than biology, except maybe computer science. Chemistry was almost respectable!
*I can acknowledge the existence of this course now, since my age and that of my last published paper render anything I say plausibly deniable.
The whole clouds will change to block the effect of CO2 changes is a weird can of worms. Calculating clouds is really complicated as you are talking about moisture versus temperature versus altitude over time(does it rain out?) Clauser isn’t the only one, some guy was making a career out of claiming increased low tropical clouds would reflect so much light that the earth would cool, not recognizing that those clouds would change the vertical circulations and change the high altitude clouds further north. The best analyses seem to say any effects are mostly a wash as far as changing the rate heat is retained.
On a more fundamental level which gets ignored, as soon as you say “warming will be small because all the clouds will change” what you are really saying is the weather (clouds) will change hugely but the temperature won’t go up as much. The whole point of worrying about global warming is that we are dependent on the weather patterns we have now for the stability of our civilization and food supply. The “clouds will change” argument switches the frying pan for the fire. The argument is also negated by the terrific success of the standard models in predicting the heating we have seen.
A Krackpot Katholic Koalition of pro-God, pro-Family anti-climate change extremists who engage an atheist to push their agenda are neither experts on climate change nor on Christianity.
Anyone who owns an orchard or a vineyard 100% KNOWS Climate change is real. Unlike other crops, you can’t just plant something different. Developing an orchard or a vineyard takes years, decades even. Vineyard owners in Central California know climate change is real because the grapes are turning into raisins on the vine. Wineries in California are crushing raisins and adding makup water to hit gravity.
Do we have an order of magnitude on the amount of “convincing” he needed? Like, what’s the going rate these days?
@20–
The most amazing thing about the International Cabal is that it is simultaneously run by bankers who want to gorge on money AND communists who want to destroy the economy.
As much as the Christian nationalist Protestant fascists terrify me, I was thinking about the far right hyper traditionalist Catholics today and the bloodbaths the Catholic church traditionally left in its wake and got to figuring they might be even scarier than the evangelicals and born agains.
Anyway, it’s late November and I’m in Alberta but when I went out to get groceries today I was surprised that I had to do up my jacket and put my gloves on. Climate isn’t weather and weather isn’t climate, but I shouldn’t be getting used to not wearing gloves and having my jacket open in late November in Alberta. We’ve only had one dusting of snow so far in Edmonton and growing up having to wear snow pants and winter coats over your costume for Halloween was just part of the night.
At 80, Clauser is not a boomer. In generation-nonsense terms, he’s one of the “silent generation”, generally defined as those born between 1928 and 1945. But that’s not the reason he should shut up.
There were large bush fires burning about two hours drive from where I live. Some days I could taste the smoke in wind. It felt like the Black Summer again.
We’ve had some heavy rain in the last week that has extinguished said fires, but they’re predicting a very dry and hot summer this year. I fear that all this rain will just produce fuel for the next bush fire disaster.Hanrahan was an optimist. I’d like to take people like Clauser to places like Tara and Mallacoota and show him how climate change is impacting people now. But it wouldn’t bother him, he’ll bray his denialism and when things start to really heat up, pun intended, he’ll scuttle off to somewhere nicer.
People like Clauser have money and age to blunt whatever impact climate change has in their lives.
Deniers are all old white rich men aren’t they?
StevoR, have you heard of Gina Rinehart?
@ ^ John Morales : Of course and yeah, okay. Not all Climate Deniers are male here.. There’s always the exception or two that proves proverbially proves the rule I ‘spose.
You forget the rule.
For every rule, there is an exception. Including this rule.
If you feel dizzy, please stagger off of the ride.
Brony… & raven @ #s 17 & 18 – Thanks for the info!
Ticks did not use to be a problem in Sweden as they could not deal with the cold winter. Now they are everywhere.
The height of the tallest mointain keeps being revised downwards, because the glacier on top is disappearing. The tree line is moving upwards, reducing the alpine tundra with lichen that reindeer need as winter food.
And this is somehow an illusion?
On the role of clouds, it seems they ar efeedback victims rather than moderating agents as this article explains :
Source : https://www.quantamagazine.org/cloud-loss-could-add-8-degrees-to-global-warming-20190225/
I’d also imagine Clauser might have heard of Venus and have heard something about the role its atmosphere plays but.
StevoR,
Um, on the role of one particular type of clouds. There are other types.
cf. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Clouds
“As explained below, the high thin cirrus clouds tend to enhance the heating effect, and low thick stratocumulus clouds have the opposite effect, while deep convective clouds are neutral.”
@ ^ John Morales : Fair enough. True.
Thanks for the llnk. Article I linked still says what it says o’course.