Trump's pick to lead a climate change panel once compared 'the demonisation of carbon dioxide' to the 'poor Jews under Hitler'

Donald Trump's pick to lead a new panel on climate change has a documented history of denying scientific evidence on the issue and has made several controversial comments on the topic.

William Happer is a 79-year-old expert in the field of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy, and a former professor at Princeton.

Now, according to a report in The Washington Post, he is going to head up a panel called the Presidential Committee on Climate, which is a new group organised by the Trump administration to investigate whether climate change is a risk to national security.

However, not only is Happer not an expert on the climate in any way and a well-known climate change denier, he has also compared the demonisation of carbon dioxide to the Holocaust.

In a resurfaced interview with CNBC in 2014, Happer was asked about previous comments that he had made where he appeared to compare climatologists and scientists to Hitler and the Nazis.

I get called a denier and anyone who objects to all the hype is a denier, 'is that supposed to make me a holocaust denier?'

I'm getting tired of that. The comment I made was the demonisation of carbon dioxide is just like the demonisation of the poor Jews under Hitler.

Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.

This isn't the only instance where Happer has made such comments. In a 2017 interview with ProPublica he claimed the word 'denier' made him "look like a Nazi sympathiser".

I don’t know. First of all, just the term denier to someone like me is extremely offensive because it’s carefully chosen to make me look like a Nazi sympathiser.

And you know, I dodged Nazi submarines when I was a kid [on a ship carrying immigrants to the United States] and my father fought against them and my mother worked on the Manhattan Project, and I found it profoundly offensive, you know, and many other people feel the same.

Previous interviews has seen him use the Salem witch trials, the French revolution and the Soviet purge as metaphors to defend his stance on the topic.

A report from The Daily Princetonian stated that Happer had compared climate science to a 'cult' and that the evidence provided was 'propaganda'.

This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 per cent carbon dioxide.

To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.

As recently as January 2017 he even compared C02 to 'ISIS slaughtering infidels'.

HT Huffington Post

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