If you want to know why President-elect Donald Trump is going to be so great not just for America but also for the causes of honest science, common sense, and weapons-grade trolling, look no further than his gloriously provocative recent meeting with William Happer, the Princeton physicist who argues (rightly, by the way) that ‘global warming’ is good for mankind.

Professor Happer would make a great pick for a senior scientific post in the Trump administration, perhaps replacing the dismal and somewhat terrifying eugenicist John Holdren as Director of the Office of Science and Technology.

First – and perhaps most importantly – it would drive the Greenies to the kind of sphincter-popping apoplexy not seen since Hillary lost the election.

Second, in his courage, his decency, and his understanding of the truth about global warming science, Happer is exactly what America needs to restore a semblance of integrity to the discredited world of US government science after years of corruption, incompetence and neglect.

To understand why I highly recommend taking time to enjoy this long-read interview about his life and highly distinguished career – the last part of which the liars, thugs and bullies of the climate alarmist establishment did everything in their power to ruin.

Short version: Happer knew too much about the truth behind the global warming scam – so the greenies, led by a noisome vice-president by the name of Al Gore, tried to destroy him.

About three months after the beginning of the Clinton administration, Hazel O’Leary called me into her office to ask, “What have you done to Al Gore? I am told I have to fire you.” I assume that the main thing that upset Al Gore (left) was my questioning of blatant propaganda about stratospheric ozone that was his focus at the time: “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” and similar nonsense.

Being sacked by Al Gore is indeed probably the ultimate badge of honour in any true scientist’s career. In the interview, Happer, a modest man, skips lightly over what must have been a hurtful incident, deeply wounding to his professional pride.

But Happer is by no means the only highly talented scientist who has suffered this fate in the last few decades. Basically almost every scientist in a position of public prominence who has dared speak out against the environmental consensus in the US and beyond has been either hounded out of office or, at best, had their life made a misery. Examples include Hal Lewis, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, Pat Michaels and, most recently, Judith Curry.

In no case was it was because their science was at fault, only their failure to fall in line with the correct Lysenko-like, Establishment-approved ideology.

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.

One of the many feeble criticisms against him by Greenies is that “climate change” is not his field – a charge he refutes in the 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.

This is a good point. Happer and his fellow climate sceptical scientists are the Western world’s equivalent of the dissident scientists hounded by the Communist authorities in the Soviet era. We in the West may pride ourselves on having created a world far freer, more open and more just than the one behind the Iron Curtain. But where dissent on matters like climate change is concerned, the treatment of scientists who have differed from the “consensus” has been little less disgraceful.

Happer, for example, was fairly recently subjected to a sting operation by Greenpeace which attempted to smear him as someone who only speaks out against climate change nonsense in order to make money. The sting operation failed but the experience was horrible.

The result of the Greenpeace smear included many hostile, obscene phone calls and emails with threats to me, my family, even my grandchildren. George Orwell wrote about these tactics in his novel, 1984 , when he described the daily, obligatory “Two Minutes of Hate” for Emmanuel Goldstein (Leon Trotsky) and his agents, who were the enemies of Big Brother (Stalin) and his thugs.

It has made Happer more determined than ever to speak the truth about supposed “man-made” global warming:

The predicted warming from more CO 2 is grossly exaggerated. The equilibrium warming from doubling CO 2 is not going to be 3° C, which might marginally be considered a problem, but closer to 1° C, which will be beneficial. One should not forget that the “global warming” is an average value. There will be little warming in the tropics and little warming at midday. What warming occurs will be mostly in temperate and polar regions, and at night. This will extend the agricultural growing season in many countries like Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia. More CO 2 greatly increases the efficiency of photosynthesis in plants and makes land plants more drought-resistant. So, the net result of more CO 2 will be strongly beneficial for humanity.

On the role of government in “combatting” climate change, Happer echoes Ronald Reagan.

Government actions to combat the non-existent problem have blighted the landscape with windmills and solar farms. They have driven up the price of electricity, which has disproportionately harmed the poorest segments of society. Government actions have corrupted science, which has been flooded by money to produce politically correct results. It is time for governments to finally admit the truth about global warming. Warming is not the problem. Government action is the problem.

The fact that Donald Trump is taking advice from this excellent man shows that America’s science future – and by extension – the world’s is finally in safe hands. It also serves notice that the Mafia-bullying tactics of organisations like Greenpeace are in future likely to get extremely short shrift from the Trump administration.