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‘I suspect that people don’t like being told and or having it said that they have made trillion-dollar errors, which is effectively what I’m saying’

The International Monetary Fund has not followed through on its promise to reschedule an event featuring a physicist critical of its positions on climate change.

It appears now the talk is officially “dead” according to the canceled climate change skeptic.

Nobel prize-winning scientist John Clauser was originally scheduled to speak on July 25 via virtual meeting on the predictions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IMF, a UN agency, “postponed” the event and said it would instead host a panel discussion with Clauser after the summer.

An official with the IMF contacted media outlets, including The College Fix, to ask them to clarify the event had not been canceled. That official did not respond to requests for comment sent in the past several months.

Clauser (pictured) won his Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022 for his 1972 experiments on the “entanglement” of quantum particles, which helped “pave the way for quantum computers, quantum networks and quantum encrypted communication,” according to the Nobel Prize website. He won three other prizes in 2011, 2010, and 1982 for quantum physics research.

“Unfortunately, we have not been able to reorganize it, and, at this stage, the seminar has been postponed indefinitely,” the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office informed The Fix in a December 18 email.

It is not because of Clauser, however.

Clauser was initially told the panel would involve a debate but doesn’t expect to be invited back, he said in a phone interview with The Fix. “As far as I know, that’s all dead,” he said.

The IPCC believes the world must eliminate 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 to prevent a projected rise in global temperatures, as noted in a flier for the proposed July talk. The panel currently has 195 member nations, including the United States.

Clauser planned to “explain why the science on global warming is far from settled and argue that extreme caution may be warranted” regarding the IPCC’s analysis, according to the flier. The Nobel laureate has frequently criticized claims that carbon emissions threaten humanity and what he sees as politicized scientific institutions. He also developed his own climate model.

Nicoletta Batini, the former IMF employee who invited Clauser, told The Fix she hoped to promote diversity of thought as part of her watchdog position as lead evaluator at the IEO.

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“I coordinated a seminar series where I liked to feature experts with a variety of views,” Batini said in an email.

“You can verify this by looking at the other seminars I managed to stage. Dr. Clauser seemed to me a good choice in that spirit,” Batini said. “I could not however arrange a discussant – although I [do] not always have discussants – and in this particular case[,] the director of the IEO preferred to rearrange as a panel but this turned out to be impossible.”

Batini and the IEO declined to answer why it was impossible to host Clauser. The physicist thinks he knows.

“The IMF essentially has to set up policies involving trillions of dollars and these are all based on the assumption that the IPCC predictions are correct,” Clauser told The College Fix. “I suspect that people don’t like being told and or having it said that they have made trillion-dollar errors, which is effectively what I’m saying.”

The flier for Clauser’s IMF speech event noted that he would scrutinize “oversimplified views of the Earth’s climate system like the IPCC’s” and “calibrating economic risks based on the scientifically-question assertion that extreme weather events have intensified.”

Clauser suspects his speech at Quantum Korea 2023 in Seoul, South Korea in June was a factor in the cancellation. He described his remarks as an “inspiration talk to young scientists” to help them “be good scientific fact-checkers.”

“I don’t believe there is a climate crisis,” he said at the quantum technology event. “The world we live in today is filled with misinformation. It is up to each of you to serve as judges, distinguishing truth from falsehood based on accurate observations of phenomena.”

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IMAGE: JohnClauser.com

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