Ivar Giaever

Norwegian-American physicist

Ivar Giaever is a Norwegian-American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson for discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids. Giaever is an institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and president of Applied Biophysics. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute in 1964. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and drew worldwide attention when he resigned to protest its alarmist statements about climate change.

Giaever has said man-made global warming is a “new religion.” In the minority report released by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in March 2009, Giaever said, “I am a skeptic. … Global warming has become a new religion.” In a featured story in Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, 26 June 2011, Giaever stated, “It is amazing how stable temperature has been over the last 150 years.”

On 13 September 2011, Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society over its official position. The APS Fellow noted: “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”