Our guest post today is an excerpt from Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth, a newly released book bringing together 38 Climate Canaries from across science, climatology, geology, engineering, economics, medicine, law, journalism, public policy and independent research. The chapter below, by Princeton physicist Professor William Happer, is one of many thought-provoking contributions examining climate science, energy policy, Net Zero and the wider climate debate. Filled with fascinating essays, scientific discussion, investigative analysis and thought-provoking perspectives, Canary in a Climate World is now available on Amazon here.
Fifty years from now, academic treatises will be written about the climate madness that prevailed when these canary songs were written. I hope the songs will clarify the Zeitgeist of this bizarre interval in the history of human folly.
Many people with inadequate scientific knowledge are convinced that Planet Earth is in mortal danger from global warming due to humans. If Planet Earth were really in great danger from humans, any means to protect it would be justified. Some extremists propose reducing Earth’s eight billion population of people to no more than one billion. How this is to be done has always been a bit vague. Genghis Khan made a good start by slaughtering some 40 million people in the 13th century. In our day, Prince Philip, father of King Charles III of the United Kingdom, opined that: “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
The climate alarmism of our time is a malignant alliance of ignorant fanaticism, like that mentioned above, and opportunism: the lust for power, fame and wealth. Like all fanatical movements, climate alarmism is doing great collateral damage, most notably to the reputation of my own profession of science. Generous research grants from governments and private foundations have created a new discipline of ‘climate science’. Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or palaeontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Centre for Saving the Planet’. They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude.
This largess came with strings. If your research did not show that the planet needed to be saved, you would be expelled from the elect. Many credible scientists made no public mention of doubts they had about the party line. But a few refused to accept this new ‘science by consensus’ and remained faithful to the traditional criterion: the validity of a scientific theory is how well its predictions agree with all available observations, and how successfully it predicts previously unobserved phenomena. In the laconically accurate words of Karl Popper: “One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.” By this criterion, climate alarmism is not a scientific theory, since it has made many alarming predictions and none have turned out to be true. Rather climate alarmism is more like astrology or the cargo-cult science described so graphically by Richard Feynman.
Climate alarmism is centred on the dogma is that ‘carbon dioxide is the control knob of Earth’s climate’. This dogma is false, but because of frenzied propaganda for over half a century it is as widely accepted today as was the geocentric universe in the days of Giordano Bruno. In the year 1600, Pope Clement VIII, the Vicar of Christ’s Church of Faith, Hope and Love, had Bruno burnt alive for promoting heliocentrism and other ideas deemed heretical. Less than 50 years later, Galileo Galilei barely escaped the same fate by recanting his heretical promotion of heliocentrism — that Earth moves around the Sun, and not vice versa. Galileo, the inventor of the astronomical telescope, knew perfectly well from direct observation that planets moved about the Sun and planetary moons moved around the planets. Supposedly he muttered “eppur si muove” (and yet it moves) as friends, relieved at his acquittal, hustled him away from the inquisition before he could get into more trouble.
Many of the songsters of this collection, especially those from academia, will recall being the targets of fanatical hatred, similar to that experienced by Bruno and Galileo, for suggesting that carbon dioxide is not the control knob of climate.
The dogma that CO₂ is the control knob of Earth’s climate has the ring of plausibility. Similarly, an immobile Earth, with celestial speres rotating around it seemed obvious to Ptolemaic astronomers. CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, that is, a gas that is nearly transparent to shortwave, visible and near-visible sunlight, but partially opaque to the longwave infrared radiation that dumps excess heat from the Earth into the cold darkness of outer space. Greenhouse gases do little to hinder the heating of the Earth by sunlight, but they readily absorb and re-emit thermal infrared radiation, making it harder for Earth to release thermal radiation directly from its surface to space, and requiring higher temperatures to get rid of the heat than would otherwise be needed if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
But the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, H₂O, not CO₂. When the effects of clouds are included, water in all of its phases, vapour, liquid and solid, has a much bigger influence on radiative transfer of heat than CO₂. And radiative transfer is only part of what controls Earth’s climate. Huge amounts of heat are transported by air and ocean currents from the tropics, where maximum sunlight is absorbed, to polar regions, where much more thermal radiation is released to space than is absorbed from the Sun.
In fact, the climate of the Earth has no single control knob, and all theoretical and empirical evidence points to CO₂ being a relatively unimportant factor. The most important influences on Earth’s climate are the Sun and cloud cover. Neither the Sun nor clouds are understood as well as they should be. What understanding we have has been set back at least 50 years by the manic focus on greenhouse gases.
A particular irony of the demonization of CO₂ is that increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ are benefitting life on Earth. Satellite measurements show a clear greening of Earth, especially of arid areas, due to the modest increases in CO₂ that have already occurred. CO₂ really is plant food, one of the three key ingredients of photosynthesis: sunlight, water molecules, H₂O, and CO₂ molecules. More CO₂ has contributed to the agricultural abundance that has characterised the past 50 years.
Parts of the climate alarm establishment have evolved into protection rackets. According to Wikipedia:
A protection racket is racketeering scheme, usually perpetrated by a criminal organisation, that coerces payments on a regular basis from an individual or group in exchange for agreeing to not harm them (or for supposedly ‘protecting’ them). The threat of harm may be indirectly communicated or implied, and it may include violence, robbery, ransacking, arson, vandalism, etc. The payments are called ‘protection money’ or a ‘protection fee’.
Courts of law have been flooded with lawsuits against fossil fuel companies that have supposedly been knowingly killing the planet for years by providing the coal, oil and gas. It does not matter that these fossil fuels have facilitated the most prosperous economy the world has ever known, with ordinary citizens today living like the nobility of past centuries.
Not only businesses, but every citizen of the world is being hectored to pay up for protection against the non-existent threat of human-induced climate change. Trial lawyers, well-paid expert witnesses, a meretricious mass media and many other hangers-on are benefitting from, or hope to benefit from, this racket.
The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.
Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.
Professor William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University and a distinguished physicist whose work spans atomic physics, optics and atmospheric science. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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I’m not inclined to defer to cult victims who dress in theatrical costumes, dance about in trances and threaten society wholesale with death and destruction. Is this a serious conversation?
When yiu think our national broadcaster, the BBC, stopped broadcasting any sceptics or dissenters from the cult as a matter of policy, because it was ‘settled science’ you begin to see the level of betrayal within our own country. Just the other day, national midwit, Amol Raman, interviews and fawned over Sophie Raworth’s imbecile sister and her (comic) book: Doughnut Economy. More like Dumbnut. It was all about climate change and human rights, because no one ever thinks of these things apparently.. anyway, you get the idea. Hospital can just run on solar panels on their roof etc.It was like listening to someone after their first joint.
It only that, but the cult has been weaponised by the Climate Change Industrial Complex which has developed to funnel taxes to itself via government subsidies, without which it would not be viable.
Its no coincidence that the supposed demon of climate change (CO2) was chosen because it is linked to all forms of human activity, and thus the ideal medium by which to tax and control us.
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Is a Cyrus Fogg Bracket something to do with the climate control knob?
Excellent article, as one would expect.
But I wish scientists would stop perpetuating the Victorian myth of Bruno as a martyr for science. Nobody, indeed, should be burned for their ideas (though they shouldn’t be de-platformed, de-banked or stabbed in the eye, either), but as historians of science like James Hannam have documented, Bruno was merely a magician whose misappropriation of Copernicanism was opportunism, based on his religious reverence for the sun, to give that religious belief some philosophical support.
When in Oxford he persistently harangued the natural philosophy scholars for their ignorance, but as Hannam writes:
The trouble was that the Oxford masters were far from ignorant, They had been discussing Copernicus for at least the previous ten years and had come to the same conclusion as everyone else – he was wrong.
In fact Copernicanism was not declared heretical by the RC church until 1616 – 16 years after Bruno’s death. And of course, as Happer affirms, empirical confirmation of Copernicanism only began to come through Galileo, and then acceptance only really took off when the serious errors in the theory were corrected by Kepler’s use of Tycho Brahae’s data to show that Copernicus’s circular orbits were actually… Read more »
Great comment!
Whilst burning at the stake does seem a little harsh these days, it would keep Mad Ed warm for a while.
Climatism is a religion. It has a style worship, a doctrine and requires faith to accept it.
Everyone has the god shaped hole. We were created to worship someone.
Some fill it with politics, others sport or music.
“Fifty years from now, academic treatises will be written about the climate madness that prevailed when these canary songs were written.” And then there is the diversity madness, And LGBTQALPHABETSOUP madness, including Trans madness, and Covid madness (lockdowns, masks, vaccines,) And illegal immigration madness. So many madness opportunities, our politicians have them all covered.