Which Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Is Correct On Climate?

The two most outspoken Nobel physics prize winners when it comes to the climate controversy are 1997 winner Steven Chu and 2022 winner John Clauser. Which one makes the better case?

Chu was President Obama’s first Secretary of Energy. He won his Nobel for using lasers to trap atoms, work that was unrelated to climate science. Chu started talking about global warming when he became the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2004.

“For me, it has been a gradual awakening over the last five or six years – a growing realization that global warming is a serious problem. At the Lab, a number of people were increasingly looking at this as one of the major problems that science and technology have to solve. There was already a groundswell, and so when I came in and started talking about it, it wasn’t as though I had to convince a lot of people,” he said.

“There are stronger and stronger indications that global warming is happening, that it’s caused by humans, and its consequences are looking more and more ominous. You can draw a parallel to the early days of [research into] cigarette smoking, the ’50s and ’60s, where scientists said, ‘Hey, there seems to be a link between lung cancer and cigarette smoking,’” he added.

Chu made no mention of doing any independent analysis. He just cites a “groundswell” among “people” at his lab. When he became Obama’s Energy secretary he advocated [exorbitant] “European-style” gas prices for America to reduce combat warming.

And Chu is still at it today. In a December 2025 address to the Chinese Academy of Sciences – of which he is a foreign member – he said: “We haven’t even slowed the ship down in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Like Chu, John Clauser’s Nobel was unrelated to climate. His prize was awarded for disproving  some of Albert Einstein’s beliefs about an aspect of quantum mechanics (i.e., action at a distance).  “I was very sad to see that my own experiment had proven Einstein wrong. But the experiment gave a 6.3-sigma result against him” [a five-sigma result or higher is considered the gold standard for significance in physics], Clauser stated.

Unlike Chu, who simply went with the crowd after he became leader of a government-funded national laboratory in the 2000s, Clauser’s interest in climate was piqued at the beginning of the climate alarmism in the 1980s. His office at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies was near that of James Hansen, the chief climate scientist for NASA. If there is one moment that can be said to have launched climate alarmism, it is Hansen’s Senate testimony about the subject in June 1988.

Clauser didn’t just go with the flow. While climate alarmists carried on about a 97 percent and then a 99 percent consensus about emissions-driven catastrophic global warming, Clauser instead examined their claims as a scientist. He laid out his analysis last week at the Heartland Institute’s 16^th International Conference on Climate Change [Disclosure: I am a member of Heartland’s board of directors.]

The two primary takeaway points from Clauser’s presentation are that: (1) the size of the change in the Earth’s energy flows claimed by climate alarmists (i.e., the “global warming”) is dwarfed by an error range that is an order of magnitude larger; and (2) the alarmists have “fudged” – as Clauser politely referred to the falsification – the uncertainty range to shrink its size by that order of magnitude.

Clauser went on to lament the trillions of dollars that have been spent so far on this “fraudulent pseudoscience.”

So if you are a non-expert who has to choose a side in Chu versus Clauser, who do you believe? You don’t really need to understand the science to make the choice. One Nobel prize winning physicist reached his conclusion by following the crowd. The other reached his decision through his own curiosity and detailed analysis.

Is it just me, or are we overdue for a debate on climate featuring these two eminent scientists?

Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.