Joe Rogan Experience #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Our pleasure.

My pleasure. And if you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your, uh, your resume, like what you do.

Oh.

I mean, just a f- a brief-

Yeah.

... version of your-

Uh.

... credentials.

I'm Dick Lindzen and, um, my whole life has been in academia. Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard and I did spend a couple of years, uh, at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado. Then, uh, part of that was because at Harvard, uh, I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations. So, I went to Seattle for someone who did. And then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there about three, four years. Moved on to Harvard. Spent about 10 years there and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013. Um, I've always enjoyed it. I mean, uh, the field of atmospheric sciences, when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable. So, you could, uh, look at phenomena, uh, one of them that I worked on was the sum- so called quasi-biannual cycle. Turns out, the wind above the equator, about 16 kilometers, 20 kilometers, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year and so on. And, you know, we worked out why that happened and there were other things like that, so it was a very enjoyable period, uh, until global warming.

And sir, would you, uh, tell everybody what your credentials are, what you do, where you're from?

(clicks tongue) I'm Will Happer and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton and, uh, like, uh, Dick, I'm a science nerd. (laughs) But I was actually born in India under the British Raj. My father was a army officer in Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American and, uh, that was before World War II. So, when I came to America, uh, as- as a small child, uh, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project, so-

Wow.

... I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge and, uh, that's probably why I went into physics, uh, I thought, "This looks like interesting way to make a living and if I can do it, I'll do it." And, and I have. And I've, uh, done a number of things. I spent a lot of time at universities, at Columbia, at Princeton. I also, uh, served for a couple years in Washington as Director of Energy Research, uh, under President Bush Sr. And, uh, I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here. (laughs) Uh, I first became suspicious when I was Director of Energy Research. I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers' money and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing. And there was one exception, that was the, uh, (laughs) people working on climate and they would always be very resentful. "You know, we work for Senator Gore. We don't work for you." And so I would tell them, "Well, uh, okay, let him pay for your next year's research. I- I can find other people who will come and talk to me, who'll be (laughs) glad to take my money."