By the early 1990s, the man now dubbed the “chief climate change skeptic” in Donald Trump’s White House had already decided he was uneasy with the science that showed humans were heating the planet.
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| William Happer in Trump Tower in 2017. Happer has pushed to challenge the government’s findings that the climate crisis is a national security threat. |
William Happer, the former Princeton physicist now on Trump’s National Security Council, was then in charge of energy research under George HW Bush.
He asked experts at the Department of Energy to discuss their work with him and was displeased with the attitude he sensed from a climate researcher, according to a story recalled by two of his colleagues.
“They were not just defensive; they just weren’t going to entertain questions,” said Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a critic of the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.
Two years later, when Bill Clinton entered office, Happer got into a public disagreement with Al Gore, then the vice-president, over evidence that refrigerant chemicals were eating a hole in the ozone layer. Happer was soon relieved of his government job.
Read the story from The Guardian by Emily Holden - “William Happer: Trump aide pushing climate denial inside the White House."
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