Who is Number 1? You are, Number 38.
The National Academy of Sciences, in its official journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has just published a list of scientists whom it claims should not be believed on the subject of global warming. I am number 38 on the list. The list of 496 is in descending order of scientific credentials.
Professor Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society, is number 3 on the list. Dyson is a friend of mine and is one of the creators of relativistic quantum field theory; most physicists think he should have shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Richard Feynman. MIT professor Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist who is also a member of the National Academy, is number 4. Princeton physics professor William Happer, once again a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is number 6.
I’m in good company.
The list is actually available only online. The published article, which links to the list, argues that the skeptical scientists  the article calls us “climate deniers,†trying to equate us with Holocaust deniers  have published less in climate “science†than believers in anthropogenic global warming (AGW).
True.
But if the entire field of climate “science†is suspect, if the leaders of the field of climate “science†are suspected of faking their results and are accused of arranging for their critics’ papers to be rejected by “peer-reviewed†journals, then lack of publication in climate “science†is an argument for taking us more seriously than the leaders of the climate “science.â€Â
Freeman Dyson, for example, was not trained as a physicist but as a mathematician. His contribution to quantum field theory was applying his mathematical skills to showing that Feynman’s work was mathematically rigorous and mathematically equivalent to another formulation due to Julian Schwinger (who shared the Nobel with Feynman). Freeman has spent the fifty years after this work switching from field to field, always making important contributions to these fields, and making them precisely because he has looked at the evidence from a different point of view.
Dick Lindzen actually is an insider in real climate science, but he is an insider who can’t be bought, an insider who follows the evidence rather than the grant money.
Will Happer is mainly an experimental atomic physicist, but a physicist who has a decades-old reputation for investigating extraordinary claims in all areas of physics. Will was one of the experimentalists who exposed the cold fusion scam a number of years ago.
As for myself, I’m a cosmologist, with a special interest in the anthropic principle, as my National Academy of Sciences security police dossier correctly notes. Twenty odd years ago, I co-authored a book, published by Oxford University Press, on the anthropic principle. As my co-author and I pointed out, the essence of the anthropic principle is eliminating human bias from the interpretation of observations, and we focused mainly on eliminating such bias from cosmology.
But human bias is human bias. I myself have looked at some of the raw data from surface stations that measure the Earth’s temperature. The raw data are from selected sites in the USA, in New Zealand, in Australia, and in Sweden. I selected these sites because I’m reasonably sure they will not have bias due to changing human habitation, or human wars, or human politics. These sites show no warming in the twentieth century. So I have to conclude that we don’t even know if there was any warming on Earth in the twentieth century.
Notice that I am not saying that there has been no warming, just that the available raw data that I’ve personally been able to check do not show it. Until all the raw temperature data are placed online, so the data can be checked by anybody, a rational person has to suspend belief in global warming, to say nothing of AGW.
The official government adjusted data for these sites do show a warming trend. All the warming is in the “corrections.†Sorry, I don’t buy it. Especially from “scientists†who are known to “correct’ their raw data to “hide the decline.â€Â
There have been calls to silence the 496 scientists on the list. Besides “climate deniers,’ we have been called “traitors.†We all know the penalty for treason.
So far, no federal agents have come to pick me up. But nowhere in Mein Kampf does Adolf Hitler call for the extermination of the Jews. Hitler does repeatedly refer to the Jews as “tuberculosis bacilli.â€Â What does one want to do with tuberculosis bacilli?
I’m an enemy of the state. It’s an honor.
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press) and the author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity both published by Doubleday.
