1. William Happer was born on July 27,1939 and is an American physicist who has specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy.
27 Facts About William Happer
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William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Princeton University, and a long-term member of the JASON advisory group, where he pioneered the development of adaptive optics.
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William Happer was dismissed from the Department of Energy in 1993 by the Clinton Administration after disagreements on the ozone hole.
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William Happer, who is not a climate scientist, rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.
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William Happer spent the years of World War II with his mother in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
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William Happer studied physics at the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1960.
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William Happer earned his doctorate at Princeton University in 1964.
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William Happer joined the JASON advisory group in 1976, and was still active there in 2005.
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William Happer's idea was tested successfully by DARPA but classified for possible military applications.
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William Happer was chairman of the steering committee for JASON, from 1987 to 1990, and was the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton University from 1988 to 1991.
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William Happer served in that position until being dismissed in 1993 for his views on the ozone layer, after which he returned to his position at Princeton.
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William Happer held the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professorship of Physics from 2003 until his retirement in 2014.
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William Happer has served as a trustee of the MITRE Corporation, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Marshall Institute, of which he was chairman from 2006 until it was disbanded in 2015.
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William Happer is a co-founder and board member of an advocacy group called the CO2 Coalition, established in 2015.
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William Happer has described the group as aiming to "educate the public that increased atmospheric levels of CO2 will benefit the world".
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Michael Oppenheimer, co-founder of the Climate Action Network, said that William Happer's claims are "simply not true" and that the preponderance of evidence and majority of expert opinion points to a strong anthropogenic influence on rising global temperatures.
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William Happer has no formal training as a climate scientist, and says that his beliefs about climate change come from his experience at the Department of Energy, at which he supervised all non-weapons energy research, including climate change research.
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In 2014, William Happer said that the "demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler".
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In December 2015, William Happer was targeted in a sting operation by the environmental activist group Greenpeace.
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William Happer declined a fee for his work, calling it a "labor of love", but said that they could donate to the "objective evidence" climate-change organization CO2 Coalition, which suggested that he contact the Donors Trust to keep the source of the funds secret as requested by the Greenpeace sting operation.
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William Happer further acknowledged that his report would probably not pass peer-review with a scientific journal.
22.
In 2017 following the election of Donald Trump into office, William Happer met with Trump to discuss potentially becoming the Science Advisor to the President, and said that he would take the job if it was offered.
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William Happer described Trump as "very attentive" and that the president's concerns "were that of a technically literate person".
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In early September 2018 it was announced that William Happer would be appointed senior director of the National Security Council office for emerging technologies.
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William Happer resigned from the Council in September 2019, reportedly because his plan to review climate science did not receive sufficient support from the White House.
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William Happer was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.
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William Happer received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 1967, the Herbert P Broida Prize in 1997, the Davisson-Germer Prize and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2000.