20 November—The front-page-over-the-fold story in today’s Republican-American, in addition to allusively misstating the date of the judge’s decision and not bothering to cite the caption or otherwise identify the civil case, calls the plaintiff the defendant. And so on. So what else is new?

Anyway, Pres. Joe Biden turns 18 today, Msgr. Bob Tucker turns 18 tomorrow, and Dr. John Clauser will turn 18 on 1 December. Big deal, you’re thinking. Lucky The Monitor, unlike the Waterbury rag and virtually every paper and digital publication still in business, has a proofreader and copy editor actually on the job to catch misteaks.

Happy 81^st, then, to Joe, Bob, and John. And many more. So now you’re wondering, who the hell is John Clauser? Well, besides being an old fart, he’s the American theoretical and experimental physicist who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics with two non-American physicists for what the Nobel Committee called “experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.” Whatever that means.

John Clauser was perhaps best known for the acclaimed Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality, familiarly referred to as the CHSH inequality. There is in fact a popular pursuit—among physicists, anyway—called the CHSH game that, cutting through all the crap, is said to provide strong evidence that traditional physics is by its very nature incapable of explaining various quantum phenomena. Whatever that means. The CHSH game is actually a thought experiment. Whatever that means. As opposed to a mind game, presumably. We know what that means.

So now, if you caught the emphasized past tense of Dr. Clauser’s acclaim in the preceding paragraph, you must be wondering just what can have eclipsed the CHSH inequality and Nobel Prize. Wonder no more, for—are you sitting?—John Clauser has just come out of the closet . . . and announced that he is a climate denier.

Heaven forfend! Try not to gasp too hard.

That’s right, a respected Nobel Prize-winning scientist has had the courage—and sheer chutzpah—to publicly break away from the lock-step ranks of climate-alarmist Chicken Littles to join the politically incorrect, disreputable unspeakables who have the effrontery to denounce climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a “global cabal,” as Dr. Clauser puts it.

John Clauser maintains, contrary to the consensus of the flock of politically correct Cassandras, that “there is no climate crisis.” (Just to remind you, consensus isn’t—is not now, nor has it ever been—proof of anything. And a half-century ago, in all events, the climate crisis was global cooling.) It’s no surprise that Dr. Clauser’s recent apostasy has alarmed the alarmists, who, clinging to the empirically deficient global-warming playbook, warn that nasty old atheist Clauser is using his stature to mislead the gullible public about what the self-anointed good guys like to call a planetary emergency.

“Much as it may upset many people,” Dr. Clauser maintains, “my message is the planet is not in peril.” Since that’s totally unacceptable to the fraternity of fear, we can look forward to a knee-jerk hatchet job on John Clauser.

Armageddon?