The Washington Post Questions the Climate Change Expertise of Prof. William Happer

That great organ of the Democrat Socialists, the Washington Post, was in a huff in a front page top of the fold story about a new national security panel being formed to consider the possible threats of climate change.  The Washington Post article by Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan on Thursday, 21 February 2019, did its utmost to belittle the purpose of the panel and, in particular, to belittle the head of the panel, William Happer, Professor Emeritus of Princeton University.  The article over and over claimed that the question of catastrophic climate change was settled by the UN and by a number of government reports issued under Obama or by the political establishment (The Deep State) even since Trump became President.

Climate Change can certainly have national security implications.  The African people who lived around the Great Lake Chad which is now the Sahara Desert are testimony to that.  The droughts that so greatly affected both the Anasazi and the Mayan peoples were a national security issue of great magnitude for them.  The change to a much colder climate was a security problem for the Vikings who settled in Greenland when substantial parts of Greenland were green.  None of these problems were caused by man's use of fossil fuels for energy, however.  Today, the Democrat Socialists and the Washington Post want us all to believe that there is an equivalency between climate change and global warming caused by man's carbon dioxide emissions.  They complain that Trump is encouraging increased production of hydrocarbon fuels.

I have pointed out over and over the many errors in the physics upon which the catastrophic man-made global warming advocates have based their claims of drastic warming due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Will Happer has also been a critic of their bad physics and among other issues, he has pointed out one of the ways they exaggerate the effect of carbon dioxide is by ignoring changes in its absorption spectrum as the atmospheric pressure decreases at higher altitudes.  Even though he thinks they exaggerate the temperature increase due to carbon dioxide, he thinks that increase is greater than I do.  However, he also recognizes that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has several good effects, such as increased plant health and a sight warming effect.

The National Security Council has issued a discussion paper on a federal advisory committee

"to advise the President on scientific understanding of today's climate, how the climate might change in the future under natural and human influences, and how a changing climate could affect the security of the United States."

The document notes that reports issued since Trump became President have stated that climate change is a serious threat.

"However these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial scientific peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security."

These statements by the NSC document are absolutely correct, but they frighten the Democrat Socialists and the Deep State.

Hilariously, the Washington Post expects us to take seriously the claim by Francesco Femia, CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security when he claims

"This is the equivalent of setting up a committee on nuclear-weapons proliferation and having someone lead it who doesn't think nuclear weapons exist."

Nonsense!  Will Happer knows that climate change exists.  But unlike the alarmist advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming, he does not see an equivalency between man's carbon dioxide emissions and catastrophic global warming or climate change.  Over and over, the alarmists try to imply an unproven and an actually clearly wrong equivalency.

Keeping with the hilarity:  The Washington Post article says that Will Happer is unqualified because he

"is not formally trained as a climate scientist.  He developed a national reputation for his work on laser technology used in missile defense and on the interactions between light and atoms."

Now on the one hand the Washington Post believes that there is an equivalency between increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and catastrophic climate change, but on the other hand it does not recognize that the physical mechanism by which this is claimed to happen is due to the interaction of light (the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum) and atoms (those of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane primarily).  The laser technology of his expertise includes those that emit infrared radiation and addresses the propagation of that radiation through the atmosphere with its losses due to absorption by molecules in the air.  Prof. Will Happer is exactly the kind of expert most qualified to address the basic physics behind the claims of the physics-ignorant formally trained climate scientists.

The Washington Post is very certain that Will Happer and all other critics of catastrophic man-made carbon dioxide emissions climate change are either idiots or they are bought by the hydrocarbon industries.  They point out that Will Happer once was paid between $10,000 and $15,000 by Peabody Coal to testify before a Minnesota Public Utilities Commission hearing.  I have been accused of taking money from the hydrocarbon industries for the same reason, despite the fact that I have been paid several times as much by so-called green or renewable energy companies as by the hydrocarbon industries.  Of course, the many people in environmental groups and who work for so-called green energy companies are never doubted about their testimony when they act in favor for their much greater dependence on the catastrophic man-made global warming crisis for their livelihoods.

Consider the certainty expressed by the Washington Post in this article and many others over the years that man's carbon dioxide emissions are causing and will cause catastrophic problems for mankind and the animal kingdom.  If they really do not know that the interaction of light, specifically infrared light, and atmospheric molecules is at the heart of the physics of catastrophic man-made climate change, how can they justify any certainty about those claims?  Are they just buffoons?  Or is this more a matter of fraud than buffoonery?  Did they phrase the last quote above with great care because they believe their readers are too ignorant themselves to understand how nonsensical their claim is that Will Happer is unqualified to head up the new advisory panel because he is only a physicist and not a formally trained climate scientist?  Are they buffoons or are they scam artists?  Or are they both buffoons and scam artists?

Will a Warmer Earth Really be a Drier Earth?

According to a recent Popular Science video and article, a 2⁰C increase in temperature will cause the Earth to be a lot drier Earth, but one which also will have increased “extreme precipitation” events, such as the National Climate Assessment says has occurred “in every region of the contiguous states since the 1950s.”  It claims that “droughts and heat waves have also intensified, as is evident in California, which in recent years has seen less rain, drier soil, and the spread of wildfires.”  The United Nations ascribes to this same viewpoint.

It fails to note that for a few hundred years prior to 200 years ago, California was also drier than it has been in the last couple hundred years.  It does note that the world’s surface is 70% ocean.  It fails to note that a 2⁰C temperature increase would cause more water to evaporate from the oceans, which has to be cycled back to the surface as more rain and snow.  It fails to note that much of the warmer land on the Earth’s surface is covered with rainforest, which is hardly dry.  It fails to note that the driest land areas on the Earth are those in very cold regions near the poles.  Is it not logical that warming the polar regions might make them less dry?  And one must not forget that this is the water planet with 71% of its surface covered with water, both ocean and fresh water.

The video and article state that:

“The last time the Earth was as warm as it is now was over 11,000 years ago. Oceans covers 70% of our planet, and it takes a lot of energy to heat up that much water, not to mention the air and land. So a two-degree increase in the average global temperature means that temperature increases across the board are a lot more than 2°C.”

This statement ignores the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warming, and the Minoan Warm Period, which were as warm, or warmer, than the present moment -- a moment brief as yet compared to those much longer periods and one not yet clearly established as climate rather than just weather.  It was not observed that when California was previously drier than in the last couple hundred years, the Little Ice Age was underway.

And what does that foolish third sentence in the quote above mean?  The average is the across the board temperature.  Yes, if the Earth were to warm, the warming would be greater in some areas than other areas.  There is a tendency for the warming to be greater over land areas and to be greater where the temperature is colder than where it is warmer.  The tropics would not warm up as much as would areas of land at higher latitudes because water evaporation tends to limit the temperature increase.  However, the third sentence in the quote does not say this.  It is nonsense.

There are many natural cycles that cause the climate to change.  As I have shown in numerous articles on this blog, the physics used to claim catastrophic effects due to man-made global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions is very wrong.  There is as yet no empirical or experimental evidence that further increases in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause significant global warming.  It may well actually cause an insignificant cooling for reasons I have discussed a number of times.

What we do know for sure is that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will greatly aid plant growth, making it easier for us to feed a growing human population.  Unlike many of the anti-human proponents of the idea that man is destroying the Earth, I think a growing human population is a good thing, at least if we can see to it that most of them are free to use their minds and free to be productive.

Apparently, the increased rain events noted in this foolish article and video are to be the precipitation of anhydrous water, which will create terrible droughts.

Is it perhaps the case that part of the reason the Industrial Revolution got underway when it did is because the Little Ice Age was ending?  Warming on Earth is usually a good thing for mankind, not a bad thing.  But note that those hawking alarmist and catastrophic man-made effects on climate love to start the reference clock at the end of the Little Ice Age.  We are still warming as a result of the end of that cooling period primarily due to the large heat capacity of our oceans.

Thanks to Prof. Howard “Cork” Hayden for bringing this article and video to my attention.

Update on 12 June 2018:  Prof. Howard "Cork" Hayden's The Energy Advocate for June 2018 has a brief discussion of a paper by J. Warren Beck, et al., "A 550,000-year record of East Asian monsoon rainfall from ¹⁰Be in loess, " Science 360, May 25, 2018, that shows that higher rainfall results from higher temperatures.

The IPCC Reports Quickly Evaluated by Prof. Frederick Seitz

"The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence."

Frederick Seitz
President Emeritus, Rockefeller University,
Past President, National Academy of Sciences Past President,
American Physical Society Chairman,
Science and Environmental Policy Project

February 2008

I am far from the only scientist who has not bought into the claims of catastrophic man-made global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use.  There are many good scientists who believe their alarmist claims to be either false or unproven.