David Shapter writes on Facebook (Quoting Dr. Will Happer)
Albert Einstein would almost certainly have been a global warming skeptic if he were alive today. Many distinguished, contemporary scientists are skeptics, too. We are lucky that Einstein left a rich legacy of pithy quotes that reveal how he would probably relate to today’s cult of global warming alarmists.
Take the oft-repeated propaganda that 97 percent of scientists support global-warming alarmism. Quite aside from the falseness of the claim, Einstein would have remembered the famous attack on himself, “A Hundred Scientists Against Einstein,” published in Germany in 1931. His response was, “If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”
His view of group-think was summarized in another comment:
“In order to be a member of a flock of sheep, one must, above all, be a sheep oneself!”
Or take the oft-repeated statement by climate alarmists, most of whom have little real knowledge about any science: “The science is settled!” Science, and especially a scientific topic as complicated as the Earth’s climate, is never settled. No credible astronomer, for example, would ever say we know everything about the universe.
As Einstein put it, “We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.”
Einstein himself had shown that Isaac Newton’s wildly successful law of universal gravitation had major deficiencies.
For example, Newtonian gravitation had no room for the gravitational waves, whose existence, at exactly the level Einstein predicted, was first demonstrated by my Princeton friends, Joe Taylor and Russell A. Hulse, for which they received a richly deserved Nobel Prize in 1993.
Most importantly, Einstein would have paid close attention to how well the establishment theory of global warming agreed with experiment. He famously stated:
“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right. A single experiment can prove me wrong.”
UPDATE: It turns out that Dave Shapter was quoting part of this article this article by Dr. Will Happer:
Anthony Watts
I definitely see your point, but did you know towels are one big cause of the global warming, They have toxic chemicals to the environment.
What do you think of this? https://bit.ly/2DSFcTb
Einstein was a skeptic about quantum mechanics too. However, the medium at the seance I recently attended told us Einstein now believes in both QM and global warming. /sarc
It’s an interesting topic, but less about what Einstein actually thought than what he “likely would have thought”. The implication of the essay title is that Einstein is nowhere on record commenting about his contemporaries in fields of science that closely overlapped his own.
Einstein was born in 1879 and died in 1955.
Svante Arrhenius was born 1859, and died 1927. According to Wiki:
Milan Milankovich theorized earth’s historical climate was affected by its orbital path and rotation, which affect its relationship to the sun, and thus the solar insolation or radiation it receives. He calculated mathematically that it is the earth’s movement through the galaxy that has caused our ice ages. Milankovich was born the same year as Einstein (1879) and died only three years after him. Einstein would have been familiar with and commented on astronomical theories of climate.
“Rachel Carson’s essays on the seas were appearing in journals across the U.S. in the 30’s, awakening people’s interests in environmental views of the planet.
Wili Dansgaard, 1922-2011
Hans Oeschger, 1927-1998
Hubert Lamb, 1913 – 1997
I think a little digging might reveal what Einstein did think about climate change and its causes. I hope Dr. Happer is planning further – and deeper – investigations into the subject.
A bit late with this, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that Einstein said that.
He has been quoted as saying, when asked how he’d have felt if Sir Alfred Eddington’s experiments had disproved his theory:
“Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.”
It’s a conversion of words for his response to 100 author’s against Einstein or as it was german you will find it under “Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein” which actually is 28 authors and a list of 53 people who claim relativity was wrong.
His rather candid response in german was “Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough”. Over time various editors have altered it to that, you can see the connection with one experiment can prove me wrong.
No. It’s more likely it’s a paraphrase of a passage from “Induction and Deduction”.
or from a note he made in 1922
Reference a comment in Wikiquote.