WSJ editorial supports Nobel laureate's resignation from American Physical Society

The 19 September Wall Street Journal editorial “'High school physics': Another Nobel laureate breaks from the climate change pack” comments on news that’s reported this way in a Physics Today online “News pick”: “Ivar Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments on electron tunneling in superconductors, [has] resigned ... from the American Physical Society over the society's official statement on climate change. He objects in particular to the statement’s assertion that the evidence in favor of manmade climate change is ‘incontrovertible.’”

The editorial praises what it calls “other dissenters”: “Stanford University physicist and Nobelist Robert B. Laughlin, deceased green revolution icon and Nobelist Norman Borlaug, Princeton physicist William Happer and World Federation of Scientists President Antonino Zichichi.” And it recalls the comparable 2010 resignation of University of California, Santa Barbara emeritus professor of physics Harold Lewis, noting that he called global warming “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud [he had] seen in [his] long life as a physicist.” Among others, Physics World and the New York Times “Dot Earth” blogger Andrew Revkin discussed the Lewis resignation. APS issued comments about it.

The WSJ editorial closes with this key paragraph:

One of the least savory traits of climate-change advocates is how they've tried to bully anyone who keeps an open mind. This is true of many political projects, but it is or ought to be anathema to the scientific method. With the cap-and-trade movement stymied, Mr. Gore and the climate clan have become even more arch in their dismissals of anyone who disagrees. Readers can decide who they’d rather study physics with—Professor Giaever, or Mr. Gore’s list of politically certified instructors.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.