His argument has been in the literature for decades and simply doesn’t comport with actual experience. More proof, as Richard Holbrooke famously said, that “the smartest person in the room is not always right.”
The article about John Clauser and others who deny climate change reminded me of a short conversation I had with Bernard S. Cohen, lawyer for the petitioners in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case. I told Cohen I knew nothing about it, and he asked, “Have you been living in a cave for 40 years?”
Has Clauser been in a cave the past 10 years? Anyone who has lived through the ups and downs of our crazy weather over the past few years — even here in the Washington area, where it has been fairly benign — would have to recognize the bizarre extremes we’ve been subjected to as the world’s climate shifts, as ice packs in the Arctic melt, as hurricanes and tornadoes engulf previously more sedate areas, etc. Do he and his ilk think the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is lying in its yearly announcements of rising mean temperatures worldwide? That is “spooky” science.
David E. Silber, Bethesda
In “‘No climate crisis,’ a Nobel-winning physicist declares,” readers were told that having been rightly celebrated for his groundbreaking achievements regarding the quantum entanglement of photons, physicist John Clauser has been awarded credibility points by some people for his denial of crisis-inducing climate warming.
Though Mr. Clauser’s 1970s work was indeed praiseworthy, hence the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics, conflating his admittedly gifted quantum-mechanical insights with comparable insights in climate science lacks common sense, scientific scrupulousness and logical rigor. An important aspect of science has to do with the confirmation or falsification of hypotheses; in the arena of climate-science theory, unlike in quantum theory, Mr. Clauser seems to have accomplished neither confirmation nor falsification.
In correlating the science of one field to the science of another, as though science were all just one big compatible field, Mr. Clauser commits what’s called a “category mistake.” Such an error is made when pragmatic relationships between two dissimilar things — in this case, successful insights into the realities of quantum mechanics (especially entanglement) and successful insights into the realities of climate science — bump against the categorical boundaries standing between them.
