William Happer

I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton.

And like Dick, I'm a science nerd.

But I was actually born in India under the British Raj.

My father was an army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American.

And that was before World War II.

So when I came to America as a small child, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project.

Wow.

So I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge and that.

That's probably why I went into physics.

I thought this looks like an interesting way to make a living.

And if I can do it, I'll do it.

And I have.

And I've done a number of things.

I've spent a lot of time at universities, at Columbia, at Princeton.

I also served for a couple of years in Washington as director of energy research under President Bush Sr.,

And I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here.

I first became suspicious when I was director of energy research.

I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers' money, and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing.

And there was one exception.

That was the people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful.