The Washington Post published a piece on Thursday critical of a Nobel laureate scientist, quoting the criticisms of a scientist who has erroneously suggested that he is a Nobel Prize winner.
In its story, the Post quotes Michael Mann, a climate scientist who currently serves as the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, slamming John Clauser’s views on the relationship between climate change and clouds as “pure garbage” and “pseudoscience.” Mann has previously drawn criticisms for his questionable “hockey stick” model projecting sharp increases in global temperatures and for suggesting that he is a Nobel Prize winner, which he is not.
Clauser won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022. Mann, meanwhile, contributed to the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007; the IPCC, as an institution, won the Nobel Prize for “its efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” that year alongside former Vice President Al Gore. The IPCC subsequently released a 2012 statement clarifying that the prize was for the institution rather than to be claimed by individual members and contributors.
Nevertheless, Mann claimed in a 2012 lawsuit against the National Review that he was a Nobel Laureate, but the Nobel committee denied that claim.
“Clauser does actual science, climate physics. He has actual accomplishments, which is why he has actually won a Nobel Prize,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for Energy and Environment legal, told the DCNF. “[The Post] didn’t really even interview Clauser, or ask him to explain his opinions. They just went to Michael Mann to have him denigrate Clauser. It’s really rich for Mann to criticize Clauser.”
Specifically, Clauser and his peers won the Nobel Prize for their work “using entangled photons to test the quantum foundations of reality,” according to Scientific American. The subject of their work is “so counterintuitive and seemingly impossible that Albert Einstein once famously derided it as ‘spooky action at a distance,’” according to the same Scientific American report.
The Post writes that Clauser’s “recent denial of global warming has alarmed top climate scientists, who warn that he is using his stature to mislead the public about a planetary emergency,” before proceeding to quote Mann. The Post also mentions in its story that President Joe Biden reportedly told Clauser that his views on climate change sound like “right-wing science” when Clauser visited the White House in 2022 after winning the Nobel Prize.
“On one hand, you have to give the Washington Post credit for devoting a feature article to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Dr. John Clauser. The paper actually accurately quoted Clauser as he talked about his Oval Office private meeting with President Biden, where Biden smeared his scientific views as ‘right-wing science,’” Marc Morano, who is also mentioned in the Post’s story and works as a POS for Climate Depot, told the DCNF. “But The Washington Post had to descend into their best attempt to smear Dr. Clauser by citing the fake climate Nobelist, Michael Mann, who claims he won a Nobel Prize just by being part of the UN IPCC climate panel, which shared a Nobel Peace Prize for political activism in 2007 with Al Gore— not the science prize that Dr. Clauser won.”
Beyond the controversies over the Nobel Prize and the hockey stick model, Mann also routinely blasts conservatives, according to his feed on Twitter, now known as X. From his account on the platform, he has posted statements like “A Republican takeover of congress in the (2022) mid-terms would be a planetary disaster,” that the Republican Party “needs to be destroyed” and that Republicans “will never let facts get in the way of a narrative that offers red meat to their racist, antisemitic base.”
Additionally, Mann publicly supported former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s successful gubernatorial campaign against Republican opponent Ken Cuccinelli in 2016, at one point deriding Cuccinelli as “anti-science” and “somebody who views science as something to attack if it doesn’t comport with his ideological views.”
The Washington Post did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Nick Pope on November 16, 2023
