The sad thing is that neither liberals nor conservatives will ever address the root problem - population control.
Funny you should bring up abortion and birth control…
There is unfortunately a history of senior physics professors who think they are smart enough to dabble in other fields, and go in with their biases about the theories in that field and try to impose their will because of their stature in physics. It’s a big ego trip, and largely ends up with them embarrassing themselves…not always, but the ones that cross successfully are both brilliant and humble enough to learn about the field before trying to contribute (and they contribute, they don’t try to take it over).
This is just another example, but in this case there’s a big political push behind him, with lots of money and influence, and it’s unfortunately timed just right to give him a real chance to change how government scientists work. It won’t change the science, or the rest of the world (though the Trump administration will push other nations to fall in line), but it will damage science research here over the next couple of years, and maybe long after…we scientists tend to move into areas where we can do the science without obstruction, whether that means moving fields or moving nations. I don’t think the Republicans care, they just want to destroy science in the US that goes against their politics…they don’t realize that they will destroy science research here in the process, as well as critical thinking. I’m sure they figure that’s fine for them, but what made the US such a powerhouse was the very thing they abhor now, and they will make us into a third world shithole if they are successful.
To be sure!
“Now, Happer has his chance…”
…to be more widely known as a science denying clown along with the others he will put on his anti-science “review panel”.
This sort of nonsense will not age well. It’s getting warmer and the weather is getting weirder and progressively more and more dangerous while these nutjobs try to pretend that nothing is happening.
If Happer is 79 now, that means he was just about 50 when he started turning seriously to this crap. Which means basically that he did enough work for a committee at Princeton to think they should tenure him, then spent 10-15 years demonstrating that he couldn’t actually do any useful or interesting research after he was tenured.
(I knew a physicist who started getting into the IQ thing later in his career, but that was after he’d retired, not while he was still nominally on the job.)
Some sort of personality disorder?
Trump specializes in people who are experts in their field and who think that expertise qualifies them to be authorities on anything they damn please. This guy and Ben Carson should be great friends.
It doesn’t look like that, he was tenured at Columbia before he went to Princeton in 1980 and doing serious work there in physics (with a small stint in the GHWB administration that started him thinking about climate research). His research group was still active in 2012 at least, and working atomic physics type stuff, so I’d guess he wasn’t doing much in climate change before that (the first big thing I can find is an editorial in 2013). I don’t think he really did anything on this at Princeton, and Princeton has made it (quietly) clear that they aren’t really happy about this.
He can’t do damage to already described and published data. its already described and published.
This clown is pushing age 80. Five years ago he was anthropomorphizing a molecule. Seriously, anthrpomorphizing a molecule. Can the dementia diagnosis be far away?
American Deutsche Physik
Needs a few “my woman left me, my dog died, I crashed my truck” lines
Gee, another crazy white guy in tRump’s maladministration. This guy probably uses this cockamamie bullshit about CO2 to justify why people should enjoy smelling his farts too. Oh, and thank you for smoking. Can’t we call him what he really is…an unregistered lobbyist for the oil and gas industry and not a real scientist, since he hasn’t done any work that’s been peer reviewed.
He’s a fucking conspiracist and total moron.
He’d later tell The Daily Princetonian that the attitude of climate scientists he spoke in the job was “give me all this money, and I’ll get the answer you like.”
Impressive level of projection going on here. Especially when you get to this part of the article:
In late 2001, a writer named Matthew B. Crawford served briefly as the Marshall Institute’s executive director. He would later write of the experience in his book “Shop Class As Soulcraft”:
“I would quickly discover [the job] was not to my taste. It was concerned more with the forms of inquiry than with the substance; the trappings of scholarship were used to put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise. These positions served various interest, ideological or material. For example, part of my job consisted of making arguments about global warming that just happened to coincide with the positions taken by the oil companies that funded the think tank.”
Job title: Grifter
Exhibit A: Andrew Wakefield.
Nihilism. Nothing but.
And war and communicable disease.