President Trump is ready to announce Princeton physicist and leading climate skeptic Will Happer as his senior tech adviser.

According to CNN:

William Happer, a Princeton atomic physicist and prominent skeptic questioning whether humans are causing rapid climate change, is joining the National Security Council as senior director for emerging technologies, according to NSC officials. Happer, 79, is an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton who served in the Department of Energy under President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. He did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. This will be both a tremendously sensible appointment and a superb piece of trolling by the president. Already, greenie heads are starting to explode in outrage:

Hilarious. Trump appoints a 79-year-old climate sceptic as his adviser on “emerging technologies”… “Mr President, I hear that the steam locomotive is now all the rage. Powered by a modern wonder fuel known as coal.”https://t.co/QwRLt0qEvI — Leo Hickman (@LeoHickman) September 5, 2018 This comment by Hickman – formerly a climate activist on the Guardian, now director of the European Union-funded propaganda site Carbon Brief – is depressingly typical of the level to which greenies are prepared to stoop to smear their opponents.

The most significant facts about Happer, of course, are not that he’s old nor that he’s vocally skeptical about climate change but that he is one of the most distinguished figures in American science.

As I reported here when his appointment was first mooted:

Happer’s scientific bona fides, for example, were – and are – exemplary. He got his job in government as a result of his work on a top secret weapons programme involving lasers. My invention of the sodium guide star gave me some credibility in parts of the US government, but since the work was highly classified in the first few years, only a few scientists knew about it. I scrupulously avoided working on related areas with my university students. But based on this classified notoriety, I was elected to be Chair of the JASON steering committee in 1987, and in 1990 I was appointed Director of the Office of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy (DOE) by President George H. W. Bush, where I served under Secretary of Energy, James Watkins, until the election of President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore in the 1992 election. As for his skepticism on climate science – this stems from knowing a lot more about the subject than the vast majority of his critics. As he once said in this excellent long-read interview: I often hear that since I am not a card-carrying climate scientist — that I, and many other scientists with views similar to mine, have no right to criticize the climate establishment. But as I have outlined above, few have a deeper understanding of the basic science of climate than I. Almost all big modern telescopes use my sodium guidestar to correct for atmospheric turbulence. It works. As we will see below, most climate models do not work. The history of science shows many examples of fields that needed outside criticism. A famous example is Andrei Sakharov’s leadership of opposition to Trofim Lysenko’s politicized biology in the Soviet Union.

There is probably no one better qualified for the job of NSC emerging technologies director than Happer. The fact that it will also annoy the hell out of greenies is just a bonus.