By Sterling Burnett
The left-wing media’s rumor mill has been rumbling in recent weeks like an upset stomach in need of an antacid at the thought President Donald Trump will soon form a Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS) to objectively examine the science behind the oft-repeated claim humans are causing dangerous climate change.
A PCCS is long overdue, and award winning physicist William Happer, Ph.D., the administration’s senior director of the National Security Council office for emerging technologies, is the perfect person to run it.
Such a committee should have been formed before 1992 when President George Herbert Walker Bush brought the United States into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Bush put the cart before the horse, agreeing to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) despite the fact no comprehensive assessment of the state of climate science had been undertaken.
The IPCC was not charged with examining the causes and consequences of climate change, but rather it was directed from the start to limit its enquiries into the “human causes” of change.
One can’t understand a problem if one is directed to study only one aspect of it. It’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant—if all the blind men had only been allowed to touch the trunk.
Since then many scientists advanced their careers and raked in big government research grants by towing the party line that humans were causing dangerous climate change and we needed a government takeover of the economy, something like the Green New Deal, to fix it. Time and again, data has been manipulated or altered, and research questioning whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has been suppressed or ignored, to make the facts conform to the theory.
Happer at the Helm
Before joining Trump’s National Security Council, Happer had a distinguished career in academia and in government service. He was the Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor of physics at Princeton University, served as the director of the Office of Energy Research at the U.S. Department of Energy, is a fellow the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
With Happer at the helm, the PCCS will assemble a group of qualified scientists to examine and debate the causes of current climate change, and its purported impacts on national security, agriculture, sea level, and extreme weather.
Happer has written previously on two critical aspects on climate change science: the need for quality data, and a fair examination of the potential benefits of increased carbon dioxide.
In 2015, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rushed into publication research announcing “the observational evidence related to a ‘hiatus’ in recent global surface warming” did not “support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.” This claim conflicted with every extant temperature data base, and the findings of many organizations worldwide, including the IPCC, that there had been a lengthy hiatus in global warming.
Along with more than 300 other scientists, Happer objected, noting in an article in Environment & Climate News that in the rush to get their findings published in time to influence the then forthcoming Paris Climate Agreement negotiations, NOAA’s researchers had violated the 2001 Data Quality Act (DQA).
In response, Happer and more than 300 experts signed a letter to the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology criticizing NOAA’s actions and stressing the need for climate research to comply with DQA requirements.
Beneficial Carbon Dioxide
Aside from his strong stand on behalf of scientific transparency, the liberal media has been hyperventilating over Happer’s previous statements on climate change, which he explored in an interview I conducted with him in 2015 for Environment & Climate News:
Doubling the carbon dioxide concentration will probably cause a warming of around 1 degree Celsius. … A warming of 1-2 degrees Celsius will be beneficial in itself by lengthening growing seasons and cutting winter heating bills. … The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “most likely” warming estimate if carbon dioxide is doubled [is] 3 degrees Celsius[, which] is almost certainly much too large.
In addition to the direct beneficial effects of modest warming, there will be a huge benefit to agriculture from more carbon dioxide. By the standards of geological history, … , we have been in a carbon dioxide famine over the past tens of millions of years, with low concentrations of several hundred ppm. More carbon dioxide will increase crop yields, make plants more tolerant to droughts, and will shrink deserts. Yet, we keep hearing about “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is beneficial, not a pollutant.
Thousands of experiments, the actions of greenhouse operators worldwide, and the fact the earth has been greening and crop yields continue to set records year after year, all confirm Happer’s assertions on the agricultural benefits of higher carbon dioxide and a modest warming.
From the perspective of climate alarmists and the print and broadcast media that has adopted their cause, Trump’s big sin in forming the PCCS is to question the claim climate science is settled. And Happer’s big sin is to defend the need for high quality data and to point out a modestly warmer world and increased carbon dioxide will bring benefits as well as costs.
All the panic and hyperbolic gnashing of teeth concerning the PSSC in recent weeks comes down to this: Neither good science nor sound policy can be advanced without an unbiased examination and debate of the facts. This is the cornerstone of scientific discovery. So get to work Dr. Happer, and thank you for your service.
Originally published in The Epoch Times
Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hburnett@heartland.org) is a senior fellow on energy and the environment at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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It is hardly a surprise to find an area that approves of the use of industrial scale ‘smoke and mirrors’ usage, being worried about any ideas of ‘transparency’ .
While if the science is anywhere near as ‘settled ‘ as so often claimed, they should have no worries at all about people judging if it really is so , unless of course, it turns out to be ‘not settled ‘ that is .
When you look at the people leading the area, does ‘good science ‘ come anywhere near the top of the list of the things you think they do ?
What they fear most is having support their ‘settled’ science within the rules of actual science.
An exact parallel is the 50-year smackdown of any dissent from the saturated fat/heart disease dogma of the late Ancel Keyes, which few survived questioning until recently despite the fact that his original research was cherry-picked garbage, rammed into policy by the dietary institutions bought and paid for by Big Sugar and Big Veg. Oil. not to mention the USDA, AHA, and fellow troughers. Long debunked but doesn’t matter, the world is still overrun with “registered dieticians” pushing Obama/DiBlasio’s fat-free lethal swill on the sorry captives of schools, hospitals and jails for the greater glory of the diabesity epidemic. “Settled Science” too big to be questioned, until it’s not. ‘Bout time we threw ALL these clowns overboard . . . first step is to dare to read primary sources for oneself!
“towing the party line”
Was it broken down on the highway?
They could be using the Seattle toe truck.
Good old Roadside America! My (now) wife moved from Redondo Beach CA to Arlington VA five years ago. I drove her Jeep Liberty towing a trailer with all of her remaining stuff the entire distance, while she read from the iPhone Roadside America app. We have never laughed so much in our lives. I highly recommend this one.
That should have been “toeing the party line”
I wondered if anyone caught that besides me. https://grammarist.com/usage/toe-the-line/
Will is a brilliant physicist and total gentleman. His expertise revolves around the understanding of how light waves interact with molecules, the perfect discipline to evaluate the effects of CO2 and infrared light waves.
“A warming of 1-2 degrees Celsius will be beneficial in itself by lengthening growing seasons and cutting winter heating bills.”
How will my heating bill be affected if it’s 1F instead of 0F outside?
A one degree increase in global temperature won’t be uniform over the whole surface of the globe. It is quite likely that night time minimum northern winter temperatures will be several degrees higher. link
The amount of heat radiated from an object depends on the temperature difference. Any change that lessens the difference will decrease your heating bill.
Your thermostat will activate your heating slightly later. In your example, not by much but by some.
The time between activations will increase by a small amount.
Depends. Look up hysteresis.
Jeff
It is calculable on the basis of the number of degrees of heating you require. I’d say about 1% per degree F. It is not linear because of radiation effects from the house, L but it is on that order. A 3 deg F increase would save you (on average) 3% of the fuel.
I might throw an extra medium-size log on the fire. Meh . . .
Please let it be so.
“Hey, Diogenes! We found that fellow you were looking for!”
The commission needs to expose what the global warming scam is really about.
U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
That comment by Figueres was made in Feb 2015.
It is however worth repeating.
It was so, but like a lot of other stuff it’s been covered up.
Not so much “covered up” as simply “not covered”. By the Lame- Stream Media (and I include Fox News among that cohort while still acknowledging they’re not quite as Leftist as all the other cheerleaders for Team Left) that is, on the theory that if they don’t say anything about it, it never happened. Except LSM doesn’t have a monopoly on news distribution anymore.
No matter what Dr. Happer et al find, the alarmists will find a way to ignore and denigrate it. Experts can always find facts to bolster their position.
I became a skeptic when somebody did a really lame defense of Dr. Mann’s hockey stick. It seems reasonable to hope that fair minded people will be driven to skepticism by the eventual over-the-top response of the alarmists to the committee’s findings.
Any word yet on other likely members of the commission? I think they should get a couple of the climate idiots on and give them a dose of reality – Trenberth, Karl and Santer spring to mind immediately. Mann and Schmidt would make great fanfare about not participating if asked.
Yeah he is going down with the Cultural Marxist filth, like a dodgy kipper.
Ha ha yeah:
Will Happer, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Princeton University – bad scientist
Michael Mann – good scientist
Righto then
The difference, I have come to conclude, is that Will Happer probably understands the physics that he was taught, and he knows how to properly apply it, while Michael Mann does not. The PhD’s of these two are NOT equal.
In my early college days, I actually witnessed the advisor of a PhD candidate shaking her head and telling me that this American-born-and-educated, PhD candidate could not perform writing composition skills at a fifth-grade level. I visually inspected one of the papers of this candidate that his advisor had corrected with many red markings.
It’s one thing to make it through educational programs, and, unfortunately, another thing to actually understand what you were learning deeply enough to say that you have really mastered what the degree supposedly stands for.
I don’t mean to be cruel — I’m just reporting one confirmation of my suspicion that there are candidates out there who probably never learned the deep basics properly and well enough to apply them correctly in other fields.
Some of the more sophisticated climate-alarmist experts seem to have a favorite argument that goes something like, “X is not a climate scientist, he does not even understand the basics, he makes so many mistakes that I hardly know where to begin.”
I’ve seen this line of reasoning, for example, with supposed climate “scientists” making such claims about the PROFESSIONAL physicists who point out errors in the basics of the application of physics to climate “science”.
The irony is that this very criticism should be the criticism directed at the climate-alarmist experts, because it is THEY who fail to understand the basics, thus making mistakes at such a deep level that only the true respective experts in a specific field can point them out.
Imagine if a kid read these posts one hundred years from now.
Imagine when a cultural and scientific historian researching the climate scam of the early 21st Century reads these posts.
He/She will see not everyone was duped by the onslaught of climate propaganda.
Climate-alarm skeptics, thus, will be heroes and champions in the future. (^_^)
Joel – what would convince that you’re wrong?
For most skeptics, real world observational data, facts, data not baseless assertions, models built on unproved assumptions, appeals to authority, and insults designed to allude to one of the worst episodes of genocide in history.
What would it take to convince you that you are wrong meteorologist in research?
I didn’t see your reply. I’m proud of the scientific tradition and I haven’t been able to predict the trend of climate change. But we can talk about it. I have decades of experience predicting the Rossby waves.
Finally, the scientific method will be applied to the climate sciences. The overall goal is that we will no longer write the conclusion first (IPCC) but allow the valid data to modify the climate change theory.
The circumference of our planet is 24,000 miles and it is 72% covered with water. In the Marianna trench of the Pacific, the ocean is so deep that if you placed Mt Everest on the bottom there would still be a mile of water above its peak.
On the oceans’ floors there are tectonic plates; always moving, dipping beneath or rubbing against each other causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of CO2.
Ocean currents and tsunamis bring vast volumes of water of ever-changing temperatures to all parts of the world.
The temperature of the earth’s crust is determined by the radioactivity of some of its elements. At +30,000 feet the earth’s atmosphere is colder than a bank manager’s handshake.
Where do the climate change scientists put thermometers to take the planet’s temperature with 0.5 degree accuracy?
Next to roads, carparks, airports, and in deserts.
I think we should track the trends not the temperatures.
How do you propose to track trends without data about the thing for which you are trying to track the trend of?
How do you propose to track trends if you are using garbage data (IE readings contaminated by the issues Greg mentioned)?
Again, I didn’t see your posts. We monitor waves at 30,000 feet.
“Toe” the line, as in “to carefully place your toes right on the line” in exact obedience, like at the start of a race.
Not to “tow” the line, like a boat pulling a rope.
It is helpful to remember that the AGW movement started out with politically motivated deception and suppressing opposing viewpoints. Hence the harsh criticism of any who fail to toe that line.
‘ comply with DQA requirements.’ Yes Sir.
The problem is that we let them sell us bad science before in the ozone hole episode because we fell for the fear factor used to sell it. The same tactics are now being replayed but it’s harder this time around only because the cost of compliance is higher.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/03/12/ozone1966-2015/
I’ll say it again and again…
The Climate Change scammer’s Achilles Heel are the hand-tuned AOGCM outputs. Everything in the climate change alarmism is dependent on an alarmist picture produced with subjective parameter tuning of the water and water vapor physics in the models.
The failure to observe in satellite and radiosonde data the CMIP3/5 AOGCM predicted tropical, mid-troposheric hot spot is damning indictment of the failure of the IPCC model ensemble to adequately predict future warming quantification. For 20+ years, the authors of the NCA and the IPCC WG1 reports have tried to hand-wave away this failure. But now it is a clear failure of model prediction which can no longer be ignored by the science community hat seeks objective truths of nature.
But the IPCC treats the future predictions out to 80+ years of the AOGCM ensemble as if were a truth and hard data. The continuation of the AOGCM CMIP process, with never ending tweaks, to find something that refuses to be found is now bordering on absurd. The AOGCM community’s efforts in this regard is an excellent example of Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science in its most vivid form.
As for the present, there is nothing to suggest that the current modern day, surface warming record:
1) isn’t well within the upper bounds of several multi-century periods of the last 4,000 years based on paleoclimate proxies (Greenland Norse colonies and MesaVerde Chaco-culture agriculture of the MWP as anecdotal examples) despite attempts to claim to the contrary,
2) is mostly a natural warming rebound from the LIA (the coldest 400 year period of the last 11,000 years, with some probably minor anthropogenic-CO2 and land-use change component,
3) a record artifact to a large degree of Urban Heat Island contamination since the 1950’s,
4) has an effect from the loss of rural stations in the GHCN which allows artificial and dubious model infilling to the instrumental record,
5) and has substantial adjustment bias on homogenization, where the bulk effect of the adjustments always go in the same direction, that is, making the past appear cooler and the present warmer with each new published adjustment.
It is far past time to end the Climate Hustle, and begin repairing the ethical and reputational damage that alarmist rhetoric climate scientists (many with clear records of a specific policy activism in their fields) are imparting on all of science.
Yep, most likely a negotiating tactic, but Trump proposing a $5 Billion reduction in the NIH budget. Will real scientists put together how the climate science f-word is affecting all of science (not that the NIH couldn’t use the trimming of some fat – speaking from experience(s), including one today).
NIH funding plays effectively zero role in maintaining the climate hustle.
It’s the NSF spending priorities that this the real culprit. I wouldn’t reduce it. I would just direct it away from climate modelling activities to hard physics and astronomical physics. All that climate monies in the NSF budget should go to gravitational wave observatories, optical -and radio-astronomy, particle physics, solid-state physics, condensed-matter physics, etc.
You misunderstood me. The disdain for crap climate science is spreading across all science and its scientists, whether or not it/they have anything to do with “climate”. Since they haven’t stood up against the pollution of the scientific method, it was a train wreck waiting to happen. Wake up publically-funded scientists – you have had a cancer growing in you for decades now.
Joel O’Bryan
All good points, when understood as you meant. You have left yourself open to misquotation, however – double negatives are always fun. You start your list with ‘there is nothing to suggest…’; your first point starts ‘isn’t’, which keeps the meaning; the rest get grammatically lost, and all literally mean the opposite of what you are trying to say.
I have supervised too many dissertations.
Yours warmly, a sad pedant.
I would hope that the first thing he, or rather his boss, Pres. Trump should
do, is to send out a letter, e mail etc. to all of the government scientists doing
studies into climate matter , asking if they agree that the Science on this matter
is indeed ” Settled” ?
Because if so, and we hear it said all of the time, then that scientist should be dismissed, or at least moved to some other worthy field of study.
If to retain their job he or she says no, then they should be told to find
the natural causes of CO2 production, plus how do thy tell the difference
between a Molecule of CO2 from say a power station , to one from a
bog.
I am pleased that the President is finally doing this, as its long over due
for the Federal Government to counter all of the “Fake ” facts from
the wealthy Climate Lobby.
What about some “Propaganda” from the Federal Government to counter
that from the Climate Lobby.
MJE VK5ELL
“Toeing the line9, not “towing the line”.
The adherence to the The Data Quality Act (DQA) or Information Quality Act (IQA), passed through the United States Congress in Section 515 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2001 could go a long ways to ensuring those who are either adjusting or manipulating data have to be able to prove that the data was collected and processed with honesty and not some ulterior motive that appears to be the case in so many instances.
I can think of a lot of people who would be convicted of outright lying and falsification of data to outright rigging their field of study to ensure they get continued access to funding to continue their study. It is bad enough that so many of these ‘peer’ pal reviewed science papers on global warming/climate change are just straight up word salad now with pre-planned escape qualified clauses like may, might, could, should etc, while presenting no credible evidence that can be repeated. But the ones who set out to deliberately mislead science by manufacturing data are guilty of crossing that threshold from junk science to criminal science, and should be prosecuted as such. When the law is upheld and applied to these charlatans of science who chose to misrepresent it, then we will see a change in this quality of honestly collected data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Quality_Act
Open comment to President Trump.
Dear Sir,
You will be out of office soon and unless you destroy the greens and global warming con artists now by eliminating all programs they rely on the democrats will just fill the coffers up when they are back in power. We have no time for a fair and balanced analysis. Zero everything out now.
Sincerely,
Internet Troll
The Best Outcome of the Review is:
Disestablishment and non-Funding of the National Science Bord.
Disestablishment and non-Funding of the National Academies of Science (Medicine, Science and Technology).
Disestablishment and non-Funding of the National Science Foundation.
With the disestablishment of the National Science Foundation would follow the incarceration of all NSF Program Officers and Administration “Officials and Staffs” for further processing of charges of criminal acts and high crimes and misdemeanors against the legal citizens of the United States of American, the most Hated Enemy of the National Science Foundation.
Ha ha ! 😀
Jolly Good!
Re: “Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS)”
Dr. Happer might start by debunking linguistic constructs like “climate change” or “climate security”. Adjoining “security” with “climate” in ANY sense is a misinterpretation of reality painted by propagandists of the left to impress the gullible which presupposes the earth and its inhabitants can be secured against natural variation of climate. Co-opting the language has been the trademark of the these people. If he’s a scientist worth his salt, he will crush the loaded linguistic creations of the climate catastrophists. I pray for someone with Lindzen’s scientific literacy strip away the illusions and recast the entire discussion about climate in plain language using just enough science to embarrass the charlatans with their bumper sticker aphorisms and protest placard logic. Wish the man luck!
There is definitely major tampering of raw temperature data to keep global surface temp datasets within 2 standard deviations of CAGW’s hypothetical projections to avoid hypothetical disconfirmation.
This is best shown by NOAA’s graph (removed from their website in June 2017) showing the huge amount of warming added to raw temperature data from 1950~2000 (doesn’t include the Karl 2015 temp tampering):
Perhaps the best example of how GISTEMP and HADCRUT4 global temp anomaly datasets are being artificially manipulated upwards are their growing disparities compared to the UAH 6.0 and global Radiosonde datasets, especially given that most scientists agree the lower troposphere should be warming faster than surface temps as that is where most of the hypothesized downwelling LWIR CO2 Forcing is supposed to originate… not so much..
According to UAH 6.0 global temp anomalies, there hasn’t been a statistically signifant warming trend in 23 years, which should be impossible if CAGW were a viable hypothesis.
I hope Dr. Happer puts together excellent team of open-minded physicists, mathematicians, statisticians, and climatologists who can give an honest and fact-based assessment of the efficacy of the CAGW hypothesis.
“Doubling the carbon dioxide concentration will probably cause a warming of around 1 degree Celsius …”.
1C – 2C higher than it would otherwise have been without CO2 forcing.
“t President Donald Trump will soon form a Presidential Commission on Climate Security (PCCS) to objectively examine the science behind the oft-repeated claim humans are causing dangerous climate change.”
Only problem is they are going to set it up as an AD HOC committe not open or transparent or subject to the data quality act.
So no different that how climate science has been doing it all along. so what’s your beef? Afraid government money won’t be flowing to your door?