Jan Jekielek:
Dr. John Clauser, such a pleasure to have you on American
Thought Leaders.
Dr. John Clauser:
Thank you.
Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Clauser, first of all, congratulations on winning the 2022
Nobel Prize for physics.
I've always been fascinated with this
realm of quantum entanglement, which has been called spooky
action at a distance. But you have been in the news recently
over another issue, which is
climate change.
How did you become
interested and involved in this?
Dr. Clauser:
I have been interested in climate science for most of its
history, including back to
Al Gore's original movie. I have been
rather distressed about the
poor quality of the science that is
being done.
In fact, back in 2010, there were any number of
requests for comments by the American Physical Society, which I
responded to, and all of which were totally ignored.
When I was in Stockholm and talking to the prize committee who
awarded my prize in physics, I pointed out to them that I
disagreed with the 2021 Nobel Prize that they had given.
I
believe that the dominant process in controlling the climate has
been totally misidentified.
They identify it as due to
carbon
dioxide, and I identify it totally differently...
If you go back
through and read all of the various
IPCC [Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change] reports, the National Academy reports,
and the Royal Society reports, they all are totally clueless.
They frequently even admit to being totally clueless as to the
effects of clouds.
Actually, one of the things that got me interested in studying
this was being a sailboat racer. I raced across the Pacific
Ocean at least a dozen times.
I remember that I had set up my
boat with solar panels to charge the batteries. We were sailing
along, I was lying in my berth, and I had an ammeter on the
power output from the solar panels.
I noticed every time we sailed under a cloud, the output from
the solar panels dropped by 50 percent to half of the value that
it was.
Then we came out from behind the cloud and boom, their
power went back up.
I thought,
"I wonder why it's just about a
factor of two."
Then I spent a fair amount of time staring at
clouds - how they move and how they appear.
Just from sailing
across the Pacific Ocean many times, one needs to study these
things. Therefore, I became very curious as to how clouds work.
When the climate issues came along, I very quickly realized that
cloud cover has a profound effect on the earth's heat input,
that the clouds are reflecting a massive amount of light back
out into space.
I then read all of the various IPCC reports and
National Academy reports on this.
As a physicist, I had worked
at some excellent institutions; Caltech, Columbia, and Cal
Berkeley, where very careful science needed to be done.
Reading
these reports, I was appalled at how sloppy the work was.
In
particular, it was very obvious even in the earliest reports and
on through to the present that clouds were not at all understood
and were very poorly treated, with it simply being bad science.
Mr. Jekielek:
Of course, you're an expert in quantum mechanics.
Has anyone
said to you,
"Hey, stay in your lane. Climate change isn't your
thing."
Dr. Clauser:
What I was told when I was doing the
quantum mechanics
experiments was,
"Everybody knows the results of the experiment,
and it's unimportant. You're wasting your time."
These were the
experiments that I did that won the Nobel Prize.
But I was told
very specifically,
"What a waste of time and effort. You're
wasting money that could be otherwise spent doing some real
physics."
Mr. Jekielek:
That is absolutely astounding. Before we jump into climate
change, please explain to us what your experiment found.
Dr. Clauser:
That was work that I did over 50 years ago that actually started
when I was still a graduate student at Columbia.
I read a
fascinating paper by John Bell, and realized that this was a way
of settling a years-old argument between Albert Einstein and
Erwin Schrödinger on one hand, and Niels Bohr and
John von
Neumann on the other hand.
Number one, I realized that they never resolved the details of
their discussion.
Number two, I realized that I could actually
design an experiment to test and see which side of the argument
was right.
I did exactly that.
It showed that it's a very real
process, that particles remain quantum mechanically entangled,
no matter how far apart they are separated. In my experiment, we
had bare particles separated maybe 20 feet apart, and they were
still entangled.
Now experiments have been done where they are 1000 kilometers
apart, and still remain entangled. Everybody told me at the
time,
"You got the results that everybody expected. We all knew
that Bohr was right and Einstein was wrong."
It got filed away
and took 50 years to be recognized as a rather important feature
of physics.
Quantum entanglement was not only misunderstood up until then,
but was actually very useful.
Once it became useful, that really
got people's attention. There was money coming in from the CIA
and NSA who realized that it could be used for encrypted
communication.
Once money became part of the deal, everybody
took notice.
Mr. Jekielek:
When I first learned about this many years ago, it captured
millions of people's imagination.
You have one particle
thousands of kilometers away, and when it changes its polarity,
and the other particle instantaneously changes as well.
Dr. Clauser:
That's the tricky bit, and you don't know.
There are two
questions.
One is whether or not it has these properties to
start with.
If you want to change the property of one of the
particles, you need to claim that it indeed has the said
properties. Effectively, what quantum mechanics says is that it
does not have these properties before you measure them.
Bohr was
arguing,
"Don't ask why it
doesn't, it just doesn't. Just accept it."
I found that very disturbing and distressing to believe. I
didn't understand it and Einstein similarly didn't buy Bohr's
arguments.
Mr. Jekielek:
In the end, Bohr was vindicated through your experiments, if I
understand that correctly.
Dr. Clauser:
Einstein was clearly wrong. Einstein's whole program appears to
be in shambles, including some of the fundamental pillars behind
general relativity.
But I don't know that Bohr's,
"Don't ask,
don't tell," is particularly satisfying either.
Mr. Jekielek:
Perhaps that's a topic for another show. Let's dive into climate
change here.
Please tell us how
clouds, which are obviously a
very important part of our system, have somehow been overlooked
in these models.
Dr. Clauser:
There is an interesting history behind that.
That goes back to
the original National Academy report in 2003, and then
percolated through all of the various IPCC reports.
One of the
more important things that's happened recently is that Barack
Obama's former science advisor, Steve Koonin, recently published
a very important seminal book called,
Unsettled - What Climate
Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
It's a very important book, and its basic message is that the IPCC has 40 different computer models, all of which are making
predictions, and all of which are being quoted by the press as
predicting a climate crisis apocalypse...
The problem is they are
in violent disagreement with each other in their predictions.
Not one of them is capable of predicting retroactively, and
explaining the history of the earth's climate for the last a
hundred years.
He finds this very distressing, and he then correspondingly says
or believes that there is an important piece of physics that is
missing in virtually all of these computer models.
What I'm
adding to the mix here is that,
I believe I have the missing
piece of the puzzle, if you will, that has been left out in
virtually all of these computer programs - the effect of clouds...
The 2003 National Academy report totally admitted that they
didn't understand it, and they made a whole series of mistaken
statements regarding the effects of clouds.
If you look at
Al Gore's movie, he insists on talking about
a
cloud-free earth...
The only way he can do this is to generate an
image from one from the mosaic of photos taken on a cloudless
day covering the whole earth. That's a totally artificial earth,
and a totally artificial case for using a model.
This is pretty
much what the IPCC and others use:
a cloud-free Earth...
You can
look at pictures of the earth, and there is invisible light,
i.e. real sunlight, the stuff that heats the earth.
The infrared re-radiation is the stuff that cools the earth, and
it's the balance between these two that controls the air's
temperature.
The important piece of the puzzle that has been
left out is trying to do this all with a cloud-free earth, when
the real earth is shrouded in clouds. I have some satellite
pictures of the earth, I don't know if you can show them. These
are all freely available on NASA's website.
They show cloud
cover variations anywhere from 5 to 95 percent.
Typically, the
earth is shrouded in clouds, at least between a third of its
area to two thirds of its area, and it fluctuates.
The cloud cover fraction fluctuates quite dramatically on daily
and weekly timescales.
We call this weather...
You can't have
weather without having clouds...!
It is this fluctuation in the
cloud cover of the earth that causes a sunlight reflectivity
thermostat that controls the climate, controls the temperature
of the earth, and stabilizes it very powerfully and very
dramatically, a mechanism heretofore totally unnoticed.
I call it an elephant in the room, hiding in plain sight, that
nobody seems to have noticed. I can't imagine why not. But there
were similar elephants in the room in quantum mechanics that I
discovered.
The variation in the cloud cover, the importance in
the actual power balance, is 200 times more powerful than the
small effect of CO2 and methane. Methane and CO2 are comparable
in the total heat loss.
Let me give you an example of how this mechanism works.
First
off, you have to notice that the earth is two thirds ocean, and
that's where most of the importance of the clouds comes in.
Sunlight is the heating mechanism.
Clouds appear bright white.
Ground and oceans are very dark and reflect very little light.
But clouds reflect 90 percent of the sunlight that hits them,
and it gets reflected back out into space where it no longer
comes to the earth, and no longer heats the earth.
If you've only got a third of cloud cover, you now have lots and
lots of sunlight impinging on the ocean, which evaporates
seawater, and seawater forms water vapor.
The water vapor floats
up into the sky and forms clouds. It forms lots and lots of
clouds, because the cloud creation rate is very high.
We started
out with a too low set of clouds, then we have an increasing
number, and finally, we end up with very high cloud coverage.
Let's imagine it's two thirds. Let me give you an example. If
you want to read a book on an overcast day, indoors, without
turning the lights on, it's just too dark. You can't do it
without turning the lights on.
The question is where did all
that sunlight go? It's coming in through the window as scattered
light, but boy it's a lot darker now.
Where did it go? There's
only one place it can go. It got scattered back out into space
where it's no longer heating the earth.
We now have the total power input coming into the earth is now
much, much smaller. Okay, this is happening on the oceans too.
If you have large cloud cover, clouds create shadows. You can
see this by watching clouds pass over.
The oceans are now shadowed, and the shadows don't have enough
energy to evaporate anywhere near as much water. We have too
much cloud cover, and then we reduce the evaporation rate of
water. That then reduces the production of clouds.
We now have
these two competing clouds.
The power loss is like 104 watts per square meter when we only
have a one third cloud cover, and 208 watts per square meter of
surface area of the earth when we have a very low cloud cover.
The difference between those is the order of 104 watts per
square meter or a surface area.
That needs to be compared with
this minuscule half-a-watt per square meter of surface area that
CO2 contributes.
The power in this thermostat in terms of what you can refer to
as radiative forcing, this is how many watts per square meter of
surface area are involved, and it is 200 times more powerful
than the effect of CO2, and methane.
I then assert that this is
so powerful.
It's like your house has a huge furnace with a very
accurate thermostat controlling its temperature, and somebody
leaves open a minor, a small bathroom window, and there's a
small heat leak.
Would the rest of the house notice a change in
temperature? It will not if your thermostat is working well.
This is clearly the most important, controlling mechanism for
the earth's temperature and climate, and it dwarfs the effect of
CO2 and methane.
All the government programs that are designed
to limit CO2 and methane should be immediately dropped.
We're
spending trillions of dollars on this.
It's like Everett
Dirksen's famous line,
"A trillion here, a trillion there, and
pretty soon you're talking real money."
Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. Clauser, it's common sense that cloud cover would play a
role in these IPCC climate models, but are you suggesting that
in none of these models the cloud cover is actually included?
Dr. Clauser:
Indeed, and in fact, Koonin mentions this in his book. They
really didn't mention anything like this in the early IPCC
reports.
Finally in 2013, in the so-called
AR5 report, they
finally got a big section on clouds, but none of these
properties that I have just mentioned, the fact that we have
this huge fluctuation in cloud cover, and the fact that the
cloud reflectivity is varying by this huge amount of power loss
out into space.
None of that is mentioned.
With all these models, they've gone to great effort to mention
the Earth's albedo. That's the average reflectivity of sunlight,
if you will, the reflectivity fraction of sunlight.
They all
say,
"What is it?" It's 0.3.
Koonin mentions,
"If somehow it got
raised to 0.31, that would only take a 5 percent increase in
average cloud cover. That would totally wipe out the effects of
doubling CO2."
Nobody seems to notice that this huge variation
from 5 to 95 percent cloud cover is quite visible. I have no
idea how they could have missed that.
Mr. Jekielek:
What I'm hearing strains all credulity.
There's one factor of
the albedo, which is this reflectivity measure. It's just
basically kept the same throughout all these different models,
even though the reality is so dramatically different.
Dr. Clauser:
It is kept the same.
In fact, there have been any number of
worse proposals and totally silly ideas like painting all the
roofs in the world white, and all the highways white. You can't
see any roofs from the satellite pictures.
The total area of the
roof is vanishingly small, and there's no way it's going to
affect the power balance.
Some of these geo-engineering proposals and solar radiation
management proposals are totally silly and outrageously
expensive. For one of the proposals, we're talking about a
trillion dollars a year to spend on solar radiation management.
What I am asserting here is that,
the earth provides its own
solar radiation management. It's built-in, and it occurs
naturally. It works, it's very effective, and it's free...
You
don't need to spend trillions of dollars per year.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you have any idea how there could be an oversight of this
nature around this variable that's so important in this
equation?
Dr. Clauser:
I ran into two other elephants in the room when I was studying
quantum mechanics.
Virtually all of the quantum mechanics
experts and physicists in the world seem to have ignored them.
It's obvious when you see them and think about them, but not
obvious if you haven't.
For example, I discovered a point made by Max Born, about the
difference between the two Schrodinger equations, that they're
working in totally different spaces.
When Bohr was talking to
Einstein, each one was assuming the other was working in a
different space. One was working in configuration space, and one
was working in laboratory space.
For some reason these two very bright guys didn't seem to notice
that they were arguing past each other, then talking about
formulations of the wave function in these two totally different
spaces.
This went on for 80 years until I pointed out in a
recent paper.
Yes, things like this do occur...
Mr. Jekielek:
Are the IPCC modelers rushing to incorporate these changing
variables of albedo according to actual, real measurements?
Dr. Clauser:
Not to my knowledge, not yet.
I haven't talked to any of the
modelers, and no one has yet contacted me. In fact, my comments
to you and others more recently are the first revelation of all
this.
Mr. Jekielek:
It's absolutely of profound significance.
This issue of trying
to mitigate
anthropogenic climate change is becoming a dominant
force in politics, in how entire countries are organizing
themselves.
Dr. Clauser:
I agree the whole world is doing all of this. A lot of the
pressure is actually coming from Europe and all of these various
world conferences.
All of this started out with
Al Gore's movie,
which has a lot of incorrect science built into it.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is an interesting question as well.
When we were talking
offline, you mentioned that in this area there's quite a lot of
pseudoscience, essentially, things that are accepted as true,
but have not been rigorously proven by any means.
This is
actually a general issue in many fields, not just in this one.
Dr. Clauser:
With climate change in particular, there is actually very
dishonest disinformation that has been presented by various
politicians.
One of the most important instances was done by
NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association.
In
2013, there was an article in Physics Today, the standard
technical news journal for physicists. It was written by two
non-scientists, Jane Lubchenco and Thomas Karl.
Lubchenco was the undersecretary of commerce for climate change
and Karl was the director of NOAA for climate change. They
published a very egregious piece of disinformation in
Physics
Today.
How it got past referees, assuming there were referees
for Physics Today, I don't know.
But this was in the era when
climate change was being rebranded. If you recall,
originally,
we referred to this as global warming. All of a sudden,
somewhere around 2013 it got rebranded as climate change...
The question is,
"Why are we changing the name?"
The reason that was
given at the time was,
"Because it's
really more than just warming. Nobody minds if it's a degree
warmer, but it's the effects."
The claimed effects
are that,
we'll have a dramatic increase in extreme weather
events; landfalling hurricanes, hot spells, cold spells, floods,
and droughts. Horrible things and apocalyptic things will occur
as a result of global warming.
We're going to call
it "climate change"...
This Physics Today article produced an extreme weather event
index, which was some weighted average of the number of
droughts, floods, and hurricanes.
They tallied from NOAA
[National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] data what this
index was for 100 years.
Then they presented plots of this index
value that they created for 100 years. In the headlines of their
article, they said that the extreme weather events are all being
caused by global warming, and that their frequency has been
dramatically rising, especially in the last three decades.
When I was working at Cal Berkeley on my various experiments in
quantum mechanics, I became associated with two very important
Nobel laureates, Luis Alvarez and Charlie Townes.
Luis Alvarez
is very famous for having developed the so-called five-sigma
criterion for believability of experiments in physics. Physics
is the only science that uses that.
The standard for believability, especially in medicine, in
economics, and in climate change is far weaker.
These two men
would look at data like those presented by Lubchenco and Karl,
and Alvarez, a rather gruff guy, would growl and say,
"Flattest
line I ever saw."
Charlie Townes was a bit more applied.
He
would say,
"I don't see in the data what you're telling me that
I am supposed to see."
I just simply traced their data printed in the article out of
the graphic.
I plotted it twice, once forwards properly, and
once time reversed. I plotted a hundred years ago with today,
and vice versa so that time was increasing to the left.
You
can't tell them apart. If you can't tell which way time is
going, then it's very difficult to claim that it's obvious that
the climate extremes index is increasing.
My question is,
are you really willing to bet trillions of
dollars that you know which is right? Is it really increasing?
It is clearly not...
Moreover, one of the things I noticed in
reading Steve Koonin's book, which is conspicuously absent in
their list of extreme weather events, is that they left out the
frequency of EF3-plus tornados.
If you add them in, it's actually clearly decreasing. The
frequency of high-energy tornadoes has actually been decreasing,
certainly in the last 50 years.
In my opinion, this is a rather
egregious breach of honesty by the U.S. government and by NOAA,
and it is clearly done by political persuasion...
How the
mechanics of political persuasion works, I have no idea.
All I
have noticed is that the Physics Today article is total crap.
Mr. Jekielek:
Not only are these extreme weather events not increasing, but
our ability to mitigate them has increased, so they're just not
as much of an issue.
Dr. Clauser:
I don't think there's anything we can do. It's there.
Mark
Twain's old line still applies,
"Everybody talks about the
weather, but nobody does anything about it."
That was one of
these geoengineering proposals, which are outrageously
expensive, but they're totally ineffectual. There's no way
you're going to have any effect.
By surprise, people are upset, and that is good news. The good
news is we don't need to worry about CO2, or worry about
methane.
The worry about
global warming is,
all a total
fabrication by shock journalists and dishonest politicians...!
Mr. Jekielek:
There's a huge bureaucratic infrastructure, let's call it an
industry, that has developed. I don't know what it's worth, but
maybe hundreds of billions of dollars or even trillions of
dollars. It's very big.
Dr. Clauser:
Yes, trillions of dollars.
One of the problems that I've been
encountering is that once you have made a decision based on this
incorrect information, you are pretty much wedded to defend it.
People in great power who have made these decisions are very
unhappy having it revealed or being accused of having made
incorrect trillion-dollar decisions.
Mr. Jekielek:
Have you asked other scientists, or especially people involved
in this specific field to look at what you've discovered and
give their opinion on it, from their expert perspective?
Dr. Clauser:
Yes.
Just recently the text of the talk that I was going to give
that I sent you was sent off, and I'm waiting for additional
comments from Will Hopper who was Clinton's science advisor and
runs the CO2 coalition, and Steve Koonin, who was Obama's
climate advisor, who are very bright physicists.
In discussions
with various other physicists I have had no one who's been able
to, or has shown me where I'm wrong, but it will take time to
get studied.
Mr. Jekielek:
You're making a project now of finding different elephants in
the room, so to speak. Is that right?
Dr. Clauser:
That is what physicists do, you notice that the emperor is stark
naked.
One problem that many have is that if you really look at
data, and you follow it carefully, it may lead you to
politically incorrect areas.
Do you really want to go there? It
doesn't bother me, but it bothers others. Personally, I am in
favor of truth. That's what physicists do.
It is to discover
natural truth.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you make a distinction between politically motivated
scientific literature and pseudoscience...?
Dr. Clauser:
Indeed, I gave a talk recently in Korea where I pointed out that
there are really two different kinds of truth.
There is what
physicists do, or at least what we should do; to look, observe
nature and make conclusions from what we actually see from our
observations and experiments.
That constitutes truth. If the
experiments are done carefully and analyzed critically, and
peer-reviewed by others, that's what physicists do.
They cross
check each other's work, and try to come up with new
understanding.
Businessmen, politicians, and journalists, all have a very
different mode of truth, and that is the perception of truth.
Perception of truth is whether or not you can sell it.
If you
can sell it, it must be true.
If you can't sell it, it must be
false...
Now, this has nothing to do with the real truth, which is
what you would get by going out and measuring it, and getting
real data as to what the truth is.
But an important difference between the two kinds of truth is
that perception of truth is malleable, that is, you can change
it. Imagine if you can't sell it, but you still want to sell it.
That's all right, you can just change the truth.
But how do we
do that? By advertising, and we call it product differentiation.
We want to show that there's a difference between our product
and somebody else's product, even though there is none, so we
create this difference, and we can change the truth. Whereas,
with real truth, you can't change it. The experiments and the
observations are the truth.
For example, the IPCC perceives that
the cloud cover is constant, although, clearly it does not agree
with the observations. All you can do is just look at the
satellite pictures, and you can see that it's highly variable.
This could be used in very dishonest ways by intentionally
promoting false information, also known as disinformation. They
call it promotion or advertising. When politicians and
governments do it, they call it spin, and they call it
propaganda.
It really has very little to do with reality.
They
just simply need this to be true to promote whatever product
they're selling, whatever purpose they have in mind, or whatever
wars they want to create. They have been doing this for
centuries with propaganda.
The problem then is that this has all become totally pervasive.
There are no referees.
As of late, politicians are becoming
self-styled scientists and promoting scientific disinformation
where they just simply make up scientific information. This is
very common in climate science, is very common in medicine, and
is particularly common in economics.
One of the problems is that
there are no decent fact-checkers available.
How does a
fact-checker know what is true and what is not?
He can't know.
This has particularly become apparent with these
new programs like ChatGPT. It is better at spreading
disinformation than the program's authors. It just simply makes
up stuff as it needs to.
It can't even do arithmetic. It is so
stupid.
Nonetheless, it can lie, it can cheat, and it can fabricate
references. There was a recent article in the New York Times
where some poor lawyer submitted a brief to a court that was
written by ChatGPT, the judge looked at it, and was a little bit
skeptical.
Then he noticed that virtually all of the citations
in the brief were fabricated.
None of them were true.
I think the lawyer is being disbarred by
the judge for having done so. There's all kinds of scientific
decisions and nobody knows what's right and what's wrong,
because it's all built into the literature.
There seems to be no
way of determining the difference.
Like, for example, everybody
knows you can fly faster than the speed of light. The StarShip
Enterprise from Star Trek does it. All you need is dilithium
crystals, so it's got to be possible.
No, it's actually not...
This has become such a serious problem.
The Nobel Committee has
set up a panel to try to figure out how to deal with it.
Unfortunately, they are modeling it after the IPCC. It's a big
mistake for them to do that. Because the IPCC has become one of
the worst offenders with their proliferation of pseudoscience.
In their case, it's just bad science.
Until more recently, it
was just incorrect science, but now it has become politically
inspired, and it requires being defended.
Mr. Jekielek:
In fact, this is reflected to some extent in the findings of Dr.
John Ioannidis from Stanford, where he saw a lot of contemporary
scientific literature that just isn't checked out under closer
scrutiny.
Dr. Clauser:
For sure.
Nutrition is also another field where all of this is
under the influence of the associated industries. Each one uses
it for competition with the other one.
They say that eating a
particular food is bad for you, but that food is being promoted
by the other foods industry. One of the famous ones is pork,
where they called it the other white meat.
The guy got a prize
for that one.
Mr. Jekielek:
You've started working with the CO2 coalition, presumably
because you want to promulgate your findings there. What is your
vision for what you want to do?
Dr. Clauser:
They invited me to join. I agree with their message. It's not
yet clear that they agree with mine.
Their point has been that
CO2 is actually beneficial. I personally agree with that. In
fact, if you pump CO2 into a greenhouse, you can dramatically
increase the growth rate of the plants inside.
It's actually beneficial in many ways, and it seems silly to try
to limit it...
For example, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth,
the CO2 levels were 10 times higher than what we experience
right now. Dinosaurs could not have survived on this earth with
this low CO2 level, because you don't grow trees fast enough and
foliage fast enough to feed them. They're big, and they have big
appetites and eat lots of stuff.
You need the high CO2 in the
atmosphere just to feed them...!
A college buddy of mine at Caltech was instrumental in this, a
fellow named Art Robinson, who founded the
Heartland Institute,
promoting CO2 as ,
being a beneficial gas...
As far as I
can tell, there's nothing wrong with it. In particular, it is
what I have just mentioned earlier, it is not at all significant
in controlling the Earth's climate.
Mr. Jekielek:
What's the bottom line? What should we be doing here in your
view?
Dr. Clauser:
Number one, all of the programs which pervade virtually every
part of the government, especially EPA policy and energy policy,
all of them are all set to limit CO2 and methane in the
atmosphere and in the environment.
They are a huge, massive
waste of very valuable resources that could be being used for
better humanitarian purposes.
There's a total waste of money, time, and effort. It is
strangling industry. EPA policies are a total disaster. All of
these policies should be stopped immediately, in my opinion.
My
suspicion is that what I am saying here will be totally ignored,
because people don't like being told that they've made big
mistakes of this magnitude...
Mr. Jekielek:
What are policymakers saying to you as you've been reporting
this to them? Have others been sharing what you've been talking
about?
Dr. Clauser:
I had a very brief conversation on my way to Stockholm with
Joe
Biden in the Oval Office. I only had a few minutes to mention
all of this.
His comment was,
"It sounds like right-wing
science."
Beyond that, I haven't gotten very far...
Mr. Jekielek:
Any final thoughts, Dr. Clauser, as we finish up?
Dr. Clauser:
I haven't the faintest idea how you correct the disinformation
problem. That is the most serious problem there is.
I would hope
that government policies regarding climate change get changed.
I
am pessimistic about whether that will happen, but I still want
to paraphrase Everett Dirksen,
"A trillion here, a trillion
there, pretty soon you're talking real money."
This is a very
serious problem that needs to be corrected.
Mr. Jekielek:
I'll just make a final comment on my end. You mentioned that
scientific disinformation is one of the biggest problems, and
that you don't know how to deal with that.
Very often
disinformation is created or distributed in the name of fighting
disinformation, so it gets even more complicated.
Dr. Clauser:
Well, one thing that nobody seems to have noticed in this
regard.
With the rise of information technology, and in
particular in artificial information, there has been another
elephant in the room that no one seems to have noticed.
In the
old days, we used computers to do marvelous things; to balance
our bank accounts, to do accounting, and to do scientific
calculations.
Computers have had millions and millions of applications, and
have totally revolutionized the world. The primary value that
they had was they didn't make mistakes. The arithmetic was
always correct.
The sneaky thing that has somehow been sneaked
through by information technology is our acceptance of computers
that make lots of mistakes. I had a friend who wrote a program
to evaluate very simple formulas for yacht race finish times.
He
put in the formula, and he used ChatGPT to generate this.
ChatGPT couldn't even do arithmetic correctly...
It could not evaluate what its own formula was.
The big problem
with artificial intelligence (AI) is that it makes tons and tons of
mistakes. Even worse, it uses the online data as its source
material, and it hasn't the foggiest idea which is fiction and
which is nonfiction.
The big transition has been from computers
that never made mistakes, through to computers that make massive
numbers of mistakes. It couldn't tell you whether or not it's
possible to fly faster than the speed of light.
Somehow, the big con by the artificial intelligence industry is
conning us into accepting this as,
"Yes, of course, they do make
mistakes, but we're working on that."
That is a very serious
problem that I will blame squarely on artificial intelligence. I
think it's a catastrophe.
Mr. Jekielek:
I do want to ask you one more thing, and artificial intelligence
actually does figure into this.
Over the last several years,
especially during the last three years, there's been a lot of
censorship of scientific opinion.
As one notable example,
Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard's Martin Kulldorf, and
Oxford's Sunetra Gupta co-wrote an alternative view to the
scientific orthodoxy called,
The Great Barrington Declaration.
This was censored and they were called fringe epidemiologists. There is a culture of censorship.
Have you noticed this, and
what is your reaction?
Dr. Clauser:
Some of the work on climate change has been censored.
I was
recently invited to present pretty much what I talked about on
your program by the International Monetary Fund/World Bank Group
in Washington.
Apparently, once they heard my talk in Korea
where I mentioned that I was skeptical of climate change, they
summarily canceled the talk.
This was done by the director of
the independent evaluation office of
the IMF. I was told that he
was under pressure to cancel my talk, or postpone it to some
later date.
To my knowledge, it has not been rescheduled yet.
They wanted to change the format to have somebody around for
rebuttals.
They just simply decided that they didn't want to
hear it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you think that it's okay to censor certain scientific
opinions for political reasons?
Dr. Clauser:
Good Lord, no. That's right out of
Fahrenheit 451, the book
burning. We have been through book burnings in the past. They
have been catastrophic.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay.
Dr. Clauser:
This goes clear back to Galileo who was threatened with being
burned at the stake for disputing
the Vatican's opinion on the
orbital mechanics of the solar system.
Fortunately he decided,
"Okay, given the alternative of being burned alive at the stake,
I'll stop writing about it."
But fortunately, his writings on
the subject survived.
Mr. Jekielek:
Dr. John Clauser, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Dr. Clauser:
Thank you. I'm happy to have been here, and allowed to express
my views.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Dr. John Clauser and me on this
episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
