The Trump administration has brought on Princeton University physicist William Happer to serve as a national security adviser, sources told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
National Security Council (NSC) officials confirmed to TheDCNF Happer would be joining their team as the senior director for emerging technologies, but did not say if Happer had already begun working.
A source familiar with the matter said Happer started his NSC role on Tuesday. The NSC is headed by former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton.
Happer, an atomic physicist and prominent global warming skeptic, joins the national security team after more than a year of speculation the White House would bring him on as a science adviser, including as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Happer interviewed with then President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017, not long before Inauguration Day. Happer said in an interview last year that Trump agreed with his assessment that alarmism over man-made global warming had become a “cult.”
“Climate is important, always has been, but I think it’s become sort of a cult movement in the last five or 10 years,” Happer said in 2017. (RELATED: Here’s Why NYT’s Latest Attempt To Scare Readers About Global Warming Is A ‘Waste Of Time’)
“So in just a sentence or two, I said, ‘That’s my view of it,'” Happer said of Trump’s response. “And he said, Well, I agree with you. But that’s all we discussed.”
Happer is considered a skeptic of the theory that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to catastrophic global warming. On the contrary, Happer believes more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing since it stimulates plant life. He has said the world is in a CO2 “drought” and fought the Obama administration’s labeling it as a “pollutant.”
CNN reported on Tuesday that Trump would appoint Happer as the NSC’s senior director for emerging technologies, but that report did not say whether or not Happer had already joined the NSC.
Happer helped develop “adaptive optics,” which is “technology that helps eliminate distortion and fuzziness when using telescopes, microscopes or other imaging systems, breakthroughs that drew interest for their military applications,” CNN reported.
Happer also served as the director of the Office of Energy Research at the Energy Department under former President George H.W. Bush.
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