“Ivar Giaever” by Silin2005 – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.A Nobel laureate who supported President Obama in his first presidential campaign now says the Democratic president is “dead wrong” on global warming.
Ivar Giaever, a scientist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, challenged Mr. Obama in a July 1 speech at the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany.
“I say this to Obama: ‘Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong.’ He’s dead wrong,” Mr. Giaever said in a video of his 30-minute speech posted on the website Climate Depot, which first reported the story.
His speech, “Global Warming Revisited,” came in sharp contrast to the effort by another Nobel laureate, Brian Schmidt, who introduced the Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change.
“We believe that the nations of the world must take the opportunity at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015 to take decisive action to limit future global emissions,” said the declaration, which was signed by 36 laureates, according to Time magazine.
Born in Montana, Mr. Schmidt shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011.
“Failure to act will subject future generations of humanity to unconscionable and unacceptable risk,” the declaration said.
In his speech, “Global Warming Revisited,” Mr. Giaever cited a statement from Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address on Jan. 20 in which the president said that, “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”
“How can he say that?” Mr. Giaever said, adding, “I think Obama is a clever person, but he gets bad advice. Global warming is all wet.”
His recommendation? “I would say that global warming basically is a non-problem. Just leave it alone and it will take care of itself,” he said.
Mr. Giaever, a Norwegian, was one of more than 70 Nobel laureates in science who signed a letter in 2008 endorsing Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, but has since taken a more skeptical view of the so-called scientific “consensus” on climate change.
He resigned from the Advanced Physical Society in 2011 over its statement that “the evidence is incontrovertible” that “global warming is occurring.”
“Obama said last year that 2014 is the hottest year ever. But it’s not true. It’s not the hottest,” Mr. Giaever said, arguing that the mean global temperature has not risen in nearly 19 years.
He cited data showing from 1898 to 1998, the global temperature increased by about 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit, arguing, “I think the temperature has been amazingly stable.”
He also challenged those who say that climate change has resulted in “extreme weather,” which he dismissed as an effort to “scare people,” and the contention that sea levels are rising unusually quickly, saying that, “There is no unusual rise in sea level.”
Mr. Giaever, an institute professor emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and professor at the University of Oslo, said it was time to scrap the global-warming theory, which he described as a “new religion.”
“If you’re a physicist, for heaven’s sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn’t agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory,” he said.
The consequences of the push to more expensive renewable energy is that resources are being wasted that could go to alleviate what he described as real problems like global poverty. He showed a photo of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
“These people are not fleeing from global warming, they’re fleeing from poverty,” Mr. Giaever said. “If you want to help Africa, you should help them out of poverty, not try to build solar cells and windmills.
“We have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge, amounts of money on global warming,” he concluded.
