Trump adds physicist Will Happer, climate science opponent, to White House staff

The climate alarmist targets of the professor’s ‘glassy-eyed cultists‘ jibe won’t take kindly to this. If their chances of selling fast-approaching doom and gloom to the President were low before, they must be close to zero now.

Princeton academic has said carbon dioxide buildup benefits planet.

William Happer, a physics professor and vocal critic of mainstream climate science, has joined the White House as a top adviser, says Sciencemag.

Happer, 79, told E&E News in email that he began serving yesterday on the National Security Council as the senior director for emerging technologies.

NSC officials confirmed Happer’s new role but declined to provide further detail about the appointment, which CNN first reported.

When asked about his new NSC role, Happer said he would do his best to ensure that federal policy decisions “are based on sound science and technology.”

An emeritus physics professor at Princeton University and a former Energy Department official under former President George H.W. Bush’s administration in the 1990s, Happer is well-known for his public criticism of mainstream climate modeling and his ties to the Trump administration.

Happer last year was considered a leading candidate to head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and met with the president in Trump Tower before the inauguration. Happer told E&E News in an interview earlier this year that Trump asked him about Russia during that meeting (Climatewire, Jan. 25).

Happer told The Scientist that the significance of climate change has been “tremendously exaggerated” and has “become sort of a cult movement in the last five or ten years.” Happer also said President Trump, who has referred to climate change as a Chinese hoax, agreed with his assessment.
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Happer has accused both NOAA and NASA of manipulating temperature records and claimed that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would accentuate plant life, citing satellite data showing a greening of the planet.

“The public in general doesn’t realize that from the point of view of geological history, we are in a CO2 famine,” he told E&E News during the interview in January.

Full report here.