Climate skeptic to join NSC, advise Trump on emerging technologies

President Trump is appointing William Happer, a well-known climate skeptic, to his National Security Council (NSC).

Happer, a prominent atomic physics professor at Princeton University who has questioned human involvement in climate change, will head up the NSC’s office for emerging technologies as senior director, an NSC spokesperson confirmed to The Hill on Tuesday.

CNN first reported the appointment.

{mosads}Happer has publicly questioned how much human activity has contributed to global warming. A decade ago, he requested that the American Physical Society change its position on climate change to one that raised doubts about global warming. The request was harshly rejected.

More recently, in 2013, Happer coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending carbon dioxide production as “a boon to plant life,” saying it “has little correlation with global temperature.”

Happer told CNN last year that carbon dioxide is not the toxic “pollutant” that the public made it out to be.

“The temperature is not rising nearly as fast as the alarmist computer models predicted,” he told CNN in April 2017.

Happer previously served in the Department of Energy under former President George H.W. Bush as a research director. He was reportedly a frontrunner to be President Trump’s science adviser, telling The Guardian that after meeting with Trump in January 2017 that he would accept the post if it were offered to him.

“There’s a whole area of climate so-called science that is really more like a cult,” Happer told The Guardian in February 2017.

“It’s like Hare Krishna or something like that,” he said. “They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science.”

Trump in 2017 announced that he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, a multination agreement that seeks to drastically cut global greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump announced last month that meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier would be his science adviser.

Happer did not return a request for comment.