Ivar Giaever, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics, gave a speech of which Galileo would have been proud — at least on the political bravery front. (On the facts, time will tell.) Galileo, remember, was persecuted in 1633 as a heretic for his conviction that the earth revolved around the sun. Giaever’s latest statement puts him in Galileo iconoclast territory: Giaever says that global warming is nothing to worry about. Like Mark Twain’s death it has been greatly exaggerated, the Nobel Laureate believes. In a speech in early July, Giaever, who supported President Obama politically in the past, said global warming is a “non-problem.”
[The Day My Father Won the Nobel Prize — by Anne Giaever]
The president’s State of the Union claim that “no challenge presents a greater threat to future generations than climate change” is “ridiculous,” according to Giaever. Giaever said Obama is “clever” but that he gets “bad advice.” Giaever has looked at the science — and he believes global warming has been blown out of all proportion by alarmists. The question now is this: is Giaever the Galileo of our age or is he our Ptolemy — a genius who just happened to miss heliocentrism. He is certainly in the minority: NASA reports that 97% of scientists agree that global warming is a major threat. Giaever first made waves with his dissent back in 2011.
