Manufacturing Consensus on Climate Change: Appendix

From the start of the climate panic, very prominent scientists opposed the claim that increasing CO₂ was a significant danger to climate due to man’s industrial emissions. A select group of these are listed below:

William Nierenberg: Director of America’s foremost oceanographic research institute, Scripps Oceanographic Institute of the University of California, San Diego. The Institute is located at La Jolla. Nierenberg was also a member of the National Academy, and he chaired the massive 1983 NRC (National Research Council of the National Academy) report on climate. He died in 2000.

Frederick Seitz: Often regarded as one of the fathers of condensed phase physics, he was a professor at the University of Illinois, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and President of Rockefeller University. He died in 2008.

Jerome Namias: Professor of Meteorology at Scripps and former head of NOAA’s long-range forecasting. Namias was also a member of the National Academy. He died in 1997.

Robert Jastrow: First chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Upon his retirement, the bulk of the institute was moved back to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. However, a rump group headed by James Hansen successfully fought to remain in New York. Jastrow continued as Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth College. He died in 2008.

Aksel Wiin-Nielsen: Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Michigan. Director of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather-Forecasting (Europe’s preeminent atmospheric research center), Director General of the World Meteorological Organization, and Professor of Meteorology at the University of Copenhagen. He died in 2010.

Lennart Bengtsson: Head of Research at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Henk Tennekes: Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute. Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. A leading expert on atmospheric turbulence and aviation. He died in 2021.

Reid Bryson: Founder and first chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Meteorology and Center for Climatic Research. He was the first director of the Institute for Environmental Studies (now the Nelson Institute) at the University of Wisconsin. Global Laureate of the United Nations Global Environment Program. He died in 2008.

Robert White:  Director of the United States Weather Bureau, administrator of the Environmental Science Services Administration, the first administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, and president of the National Academy of Engineering. He also was the first chairman of the World Climate Conference in 1978. He died in 2015.

Hubert Lamb: Pioneer in historical climatology, Founding Director of the Climatic Research Unit established in 1972 in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He died in 1997.

Paul Waggoner: Chief Scientist, Soils, Climatology, Ecology, Director, and Distinguished Scientist at The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Member National Academy. He died in 2022.

S. Fred Singer: Professor of Physics and the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia and George Mason University. Founding Dean of the University of Miami School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences. Established the National Weather Bureau’s Satellite Service Center. Deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, and chief scientist for the Department of Transportation. He is credited by many with the first prediction of the Earth’s radiation belts. He died in 2020.

Ivar Giaevar: Nobel Laureate in Physics, member of the National Academy, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, professor at large at the University of Oslo.

Freeman Dyson: Distinguished theoretical physicist and mathematician who played a key role in the development of quantum electrodynamics and mathematical methods of quantum field theory. But he also maintained a strong interest in applied science and was one of the designers of the hugely successful TRIGA nuclear research reactor. Freeman spent most of his career at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. A member of the National Academy, he died in 2020.

Edward Teller: A co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he served as both director and associate director for many years. A professor at Large at U.C. Berkeley, a member of the National Academy, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he is known as the father of the H-bomb. He died in 2003.

Reginald Newell: Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. He served as president of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (IAMAP) International Commission on Climate from 1977 to 1983 and was a member of the IAMAP Commissions on Meteorology of the Upper Atmosphere and Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution from 1971 to 1983. His honors include the 1985 Alexander Von Humboldt Award and the Japan International Science and Technology Agency Fellowship in 1990. He died in 2003.

Robert Adair: Former Chair of the Department of Physics and director of the Division of Physical Sciences at Yale University. A member of the National Academy, he died in 2020.

Sir Basil John Mason, CB, FRS, better known as John Mason: an expert on cloud physics and former Director-General of the Meteorological Office from 1965 to 1983. Chancellor of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) from 1994 to 1996, he died in 2015.

William “Bill” Mason Gray: emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University (CSU) and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences. He was widely regarded as a pioneer in the science of tropical cyclone forecasting and one of the world’s leading experts on tropical storms. He died in 2016.

Mikhail Budyko: Russian climatologist and one of the founders of physical climatology. Director of the Division for Climate Change Research at the State Hydrological Institute in St. Petersburg. He died in 2001.

Yuri Izrael: a Vice-Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until September 2008. Director of the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology, which is a part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a first vice-president of the World Meteorological Organization and helped develop the World Weather Watch. He died in 2014.

Kiril Kondratyev: Professor of atmospheric physics, chief of the Department of Atmospheric Physics, University Vice-Rector and Rector of the University of Leningrad. From 1958-61 he was Head of the Department of Radiation Studies at the Main Geophysical Observatory. He served as a member of the International Programme Committee for the World Conference on Climate Change, held in Moscow in 2003. He died in 2006.

William Happer: An experimental physicist who spent most of his career at Princeton and Columbia Universities. He is the inventor of the sodium guide star that is used in most big modern telescopes to compensate for atmospheric turbulence with adaptive optics. He was a pioneer of medical magnetic resonance imaging with laser polarized noble gases. He was a member of the National Academy and served as the Director of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993. 

William Kininmonth: headed Australia’s National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology from 1986 to 1998. He was Australia’s delegate to the WMO Commission for Climatology (1990) and the subsequent intergovernmental negotiations for the Framework Convention on Climate Change (1991-1992).

Garth Paltridge: Professor and director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies at the University of Tasmania and at the same time, from 1991-2002, he was Chief Executive Officer of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania.

Claude Allegre: Geophysicst, winner of the Crafoord Prize (essentially the Nobel Prize for the Earth Sciences). Founding Director of the Institute for Physics of the Earth, University of Paris. He served as Minister of Education in France and was a Bowie Medalist of the AGU as well as a member of the French Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy.

Hugh Ellsaesser: Atmospheric Physicist at Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory from 1963 – 1997. He died in 2015. Although initially a supporter of climate alarm, the following eventually became a skeptic.

James Lovelock: Father of the Gaia Hypothesis. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, president of the Marine Biological Association, an honorary visiting fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, and commander of the Order of the British Empire. He died in 2022.