An email I received this morning included in its thread one from someone saying this:

This morning I got out my little toy telescope and watched Mercury transiting the Sun. The striking fact was not the little black image of Mercury but the total absence of sunspots. I have seen many transits before this one, but never without sunspots. It seems the sun has gone to sleep as it did in the Maunder Minimum in the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century we had the Little Ice Age and now we have the pause in global warming. Evidence getting stronger that the Sun is a big player in the climate story.

The CAGW alarmists’ knee-jerk response would be to say, “Obviously that’s not by a serious scientist. Only a scientific ignoramus could have written something that goes contrary to the 97% consensus that catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming is real and we must, absolutely must, spend $$$Trillion$$$ to mitigate it, even if that means trapping billions in poverty for generations to come.”

Except the one who said it was—drum roll, please—

• English-born American theoretical physicist and
• mathematician,
• known for his work in quantum electrodynamics,
• solid-state physics,
• astronomy and
• nuclear engineering,
• professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study,
• a Visitor of Ralston College,
• member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
• elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1952,
• awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1966,
• Max Planck Medal in 1969,
• J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1970,
• Harvey Prize in 1977,
• in the 1984–85 academic year delivered the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen,
• which resulted in the book Infinite In All Directions,
• in 1989 taught at Duke University as a Fritz London Memorial Lecturer,
• in the same year was elected an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge,
• has published a number of collections of speculations and observations about technology, science, and the future,
• in 1996 was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science,
• in 1993 was given the Enrico Fermi Award,
• in 1995 gave the Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, sponsored jointly by the Hebrew University and Harvard University Press
• that grew into the book Imagined Worlds,
• in 2000 was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion,
• in 2003 was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado,
• and in 2011, received as one of twenty distinguished Old Wykehamists at the Ad Portas celebration, the highest honour that Winchester College bestows—

and altogether one of the world’s most (justly) famous mathematicians/physicists, Freeman Dyson.

 

(Credit to Wikipedia for the list.)

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Gray Lensman QX!, Flickr Creative Commons.