Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever Quits Physics Group over Stand on Global Warming

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society Tuesday, condemning the group's official stand on global warming.

In 2007, the APS adopted an official statement that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities were changing the atmosphere in ways that affected the Earth's climate.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring, the APS stated. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Giaever, an 82-year-old Norwegian, sent an e-mail to APS official Kate Kirby announcing his abrupt resignation. He said he cannot live with the statement on global warming, and said that global temperature had been amazingly stable.

Climate Depot, a site that questions manmade global warming, said it has obtained a copy of the letter.

In his resignation note, Giaever wrote: In the APS, it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?

The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.

Giaever, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973, is an institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and the president of Applied BioPhysics Inc.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Giaever declared himself a dissenter in 2008, I am a skeptic... Global warming has become a new religion.

I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993, he continued.

Moreover, global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money, he added.

Giaever is one of the most prominent scientists named in the 2007 Minority Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (updated in 2009) originally citing support of 400 dissenting scientists, and growing to 700. He was also one of more than 100 co-signers in a March 30, 2009, letter to President Barack Obama which criticized his stance on global warming.