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.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
“Whom the Gods would destroy, first they make mad”. William Shakespeare.
That applies to you, Mad Ed.
Whom the globalist would destroy, they first call mad.
Friedrich Schiller
Nut zero wants : no meat , no dairy , no POVs , 3 items of clothing per person per year etc.
Nonsense on steroids .
POV stands for “Privately Owned Vehicles”
POV stands for “Privately Owned Vehicles”
I imagined it as Purely Obnoxious Vegans. Shouldn’t Vegans go back to Vega?
Vegan: another word for “poor hunter.”
Conservatives go out and hunt with the goal of being secure at home with food and shelter. Liberals tend to hang out at home, smooze the women, and demand part of the hunt that is brought home, claiming it is their right. Arctic people, I forget which, have the habit of coercing a liberal to go on a hunt and, delightfully, that individual never returns, shrug. Less said the better.
Oh, but those with private planes and yachts, etc. get a pass
Money talks; that’s just the way it is. That said, I always get a chuckle when one of those super yachts springs a leak.
They beg for the kings to come back and to limit their prospects in life and to enslave them and to tell them everything that they can and cannot do.
I wonder, given only 3 items of clothing, how many “go commando.”
Do shoes count as 1 or 2?
Probably 2, as in a pair of shoes…and I’m sure quite a bit of commando.
And in winter, wear a coat or 1 sock?
The climate cult
Archbishop: (mad) Ed Miliband
Cardinals: The Climate Change Committee
Opus Dei (UN): Green NGOs – World Wildlife Fund, Women’s Environmental Network, Stop Climate Chaos, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Justice Foundation, Climate Concern UK, The Environment Centre ad nauseam.
Have you heard the word of god, today?
This afternoon, the south will be warm with lingering showers soon clearing.
Warm? 20C or 21C – stay hydrated, people….
VEGANs: Vegetable Eaters Going Absolutely Nuts.
It’s been a bit chilly today actually. Max 17C. I suppose it’s the middle of June after all so shouldn’t expect too much.
As someone who regularly attends meetings of Opus Dei, I would be grateful for an explanation of the connection betweeen Opus Dei and the UN. Perhaps strativarius has been relying on the Da Vinci Code or some other work of fiction for his “information” about Opus Dei.
Christians are always the first casualties. Probably more along the lines of The Illuminati rather than anything nonfiction, my guess.
With utmost respect for Dr. Happer’s efforts against climate alarm:
“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.”
Let’s be more specific and quantitative. Relative to dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation, the IR absorbing power related to incremental CO2 is negligible – vanishingly weak – inconsequential. The resulting influence on the energy state of the climate system cannot be isolated for attribution of ANY of the reported “warming.”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knv0YdUyIgyR9Mwk3jGJwccIGHv38J33/view?usp=sharing
“We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.”
Agreed. Let’s stop conceding the core claim, which is that incremental CO2 and other IR-active trace gases drive sensible heat gain down here by “requiring higher temperatures to get rid of the heat” directly to space from the surface. This static concept is not wrong in the imaginary case of a motionless atmosphere. But NO ONE KNOWS that rising concentrations of these trace gases must drive the end result (of surface temperatures) in the proper context of the dynamics of the atmosphere as the compressible working fluid of its own circulation.
Thank you for your patience in this most important matter of cause-and-effect.
Exactly.
As the upper tropical troposphere is where this heat (as IR) as supposed to be sourcing (according to the IPCC), there is a big problem with this junk science. This region is about -17 deg C (and gently cooling) and the surface about 15 deg C (always much warmer than above). The upper tropical troposphere simply CANNOT warm the surface, being colder than the surface. Thermodynamically impossible. Any IR radiation from the upper troposphere will be reflected (rejected) by the surface as the energy levels for -17 deg C are already full.
For that matter, CO2 has three IR absorption bands, equivalent to -80, 400, and 800 deg C blackbody radiation. The later two are not used anywhere on Earth as CO2 never naturally becomes this hot and thus they are not used in the troposphere. The first (-80 deg C) is colder than everything on the planet and thus rejected by everything. In fact, CO2 works 24/7 at cooling the planet by sending -80 deg C IR out to space (even the upper tropical troposphere is too warm to absorb this.
Physicists have not been able to get CO2 to warm anything and discovered that it is the world’s best refrigerant, being abundant, cheap, stable, and nontoxic. It is now being used as the primary refrigerant in new ice rinks and Mercedes auto A/C units. Also, computer models are NOT science and do exactly what they are programmed to do.
Furthermore, CO2 in the upper tropical troposphere is just not abundant enough to have the effect claimed. It’s just a nonstarter, like using a picket fence with slats one foot apart to corral mice.
Here in the UK our AGR nuclear power stations used CO2 as their coolant!
So, greenhouses do not work?
Structural greenhouses generally do what they are designed to do, i.e., provide a warmer growing environment for indoor cultivated plants. On the other hand, the so-called atmospheric greenhouse effect (GHE) doesn’t work the way the alarmists say it does.
The Earth is not a greenhouse. It is an open system.
A greenhouse is a closed system with added environmental controls.
Greenhouses work by blocking convective energy.
The very opposite of the atmosphere…
The terminology “greenhouse gas” is scientific nonsense, as there is no gas that blocks convection…
Only H2O alters the lapse rate that controls convection.
From the article: “The most important influences on Earth’s climate are the Sun and cloud cover.”
so says a very smart man, Dr Happer.
A lot of other smart people are saying the same thing.
None of them are on the BBC etc…
Yes, and we know why, don’t we. They can’t stand the truth. It doesn’t figure into their narrative.
The BBC is a government house organ.
Any denier would not be allowed to work there, just as PBS employing only leftist wackos; no RINOs, no Republicans.
Landru was just a projection after all.
are you of the body?
are you here for festival?
Ah, another Star Trek fan. Love it.
“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.”
The above is a true statement, but would be much more defendable from the “thermometer-readers” if you referred to “energy” rather than “heat”, which they are anxious to measure and “average” with their thermometers. While it is true that energy arrives and departs from Earth only by radiation, it is transformed and transported within the atmosphere in many forms. Energy flows as pressure, potential, kinetic, and (most importantly) latent energy, unavailable to those with thermometers who measure only internal (heat) energy. And it is really not helpful to refer to reflected energy at all wavelengths from clouds and other surfaces (albedo) as “thermal (LW) radiation … released to space.”
“Fifty years from now, academic treatises will be written about the climate madness that prevailed when these canary songs were written.”
Lots of assumptions about future culture in that sentence.
Will humans be writing treatises?
Will there be other problems to write about at that time?
Will any humans read academic treatises in fifty years?
Who reads academic treatises today?
Not many people read dissertations or conference proceedings; I think that has always been the case, and I believe it will remain so. It is not really a problem, as long as academic research (even in the humanities, which are fascinating when pursued seriously and without political obsessions) remains rigorous and demanding. That is becoming less and less the case, at least in the West (and more specifically in Europe). Still, I have not given up hope of a welcome reversal and a return to seriousness.
No, another question is troubling me, actually. In a few decades, will human beings still know how to read and write?…
I am only half joking. Today, some children leave primary school with enormous difficulties in reading and writing. My great-aunts were schoolteachers; they began their careers in the 1950s or the early 1960s. Their pupils left school knowing all the tenses of the indicative mood and having a solid grasp of the subjunctive. They did not need to be tyrannical to achieve that result. The students’ respect for their teachers was enough. So was the competence of the teachers. I had a mathematics teacher in middle school who would easily make five or six mistakes per sentence in the exercises he wrote.
Given that over 36,000 papers based on RCP8.5 have been published since 2018 what is the chance that anyone has read them all? 🙂
One can hardly read everything, especially nowadays when it’s a case of “publish or perish.” Students are expected to have published papers before they have even defended their dissertations. It’s astonishing.
Then there was RCP8.5, which, despite being disconnected from reality, was essentially a golden ticket to publication. All you had to do was write a bit of science fiction and, just like that, you were in. Unfortunate, but that’s how it was.
I like to think that in more obscure areas of science, people are more honest (and less prolix as well), because their interests are less politicized. I may be wrong. I certainly hope not, though.
“the chance that anyone has read them all?”
I’d think zero if not for websites (and associated podcasts) like this. Watts, Leuken and the Archbishop wade through all of it so we don’t have to.
When I was in my first year of university, a number of Education students lived in my dorm. After getting to know them, I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, my goodness – these people are going to be teaching my children some day!” I was 18 years old, and I was NOT pleased with the thought.
When I was at university back in the early 60’s the Department of Education was the school of last resort. If you were flunking out anywhere else you could always transfer to Education and easily graduate.
In my country as well, educational sciences—a veritable empire of jargon—are a refuge for the incompetent. Didactics, as it is also called (the idea of “learning how to learn” through dubious theories and tedious grandstanding that seeks to place the child “at the center of knowledge,” while claiming that teachers have “things to learn from their students”), has caused considerable damage. Jean-Paul Brighelli has written some excellent books on the subject, the first of which is The Cretin Factory: The Programmed Death of Schooling. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an English translation, but Brighelli has given quite a few interviews discussing his work. I find YouTube’s subtitles fairly effective (at least from English into French).
Philippe Meirieu, a true icon of the educational theorists (I do not call these people educators, because pedagogy is precisely the ability to make oneself understood by a class, to transmit knowledge, and to help students improve, rather than to state the obvious through obscure formulas and disheartening absurdities), once produced an astonishing remark. To quote him: “[The teacher] is vampirized by a constant demand for individualized interlocution[from students].”
All of this is simply to say that students want attention and support. Why make things simple (and perhaps ordinary) when one can make them complicated (and appear to be a great intellectual)?
Simplicity is, in fact, the hallmark of powerful minds. People who rely on jargon are often incapable of formulating a single original thought, so they take refuge in obscurity and accuse you of being an idiot if you shrug at their lofty rhetoric.
In the early 60’s I was in the pre-engineering section of the junior college division of a teacher college. The pre-engineering math curriculum started with a semester of combined algebra 4 and trigonometry, and then 3 semesters of calculus. There were no teacher college students in any of these classes. You could always identify a teacher student – they were practicing playing their flute-a-phones.
My thought, too. Academics are overwhelmingly wildly progressive (communists without police power).
They will persist and multiply absent the unlikely event that universities are defunded on the grounds that they promote advocacy rather than scholarship and indoctrination rather than pedagogy. The former all forbidden of publicly funded institutions of learning,
Presuming universities of the current stripe exist 50 years from now, academics then will be writing of their heroic defenses of Net Zero, which by then will have been imposed following the success of the propaganda war they are waging now; UN Chief Greta Thunberg presiding.
enough to gag a maggot.
I think you’re correct on all counts. I recently attended a major college reunion. The low light, for me, was listening to the school’s current president pat himself on the back for ‘standing up for academic freedom by opposing the Trump administration’.
“Academics are overwhelmingly wildly progressive”
Hey.. not all of us !!
Keep your head down.
“Climate nonsense will eventually end…”
That must be true, but the important question is when.
I am of the opinion sooner rather than later. There are several independent reasons.
Unfortunately, sooner probably doesn’t mean real soon given all the vested interests in ‘climate nonsense’.
Point #4 may be the decisive one, Its Alinksy’s trap, activists have got in charge of implementing Net Zero, so they are accountable for performance. As it cannot work it will damage their prospects of getting the total power which the agenda is really about.
A basic rule: never advocate policies which are possible to try and implement, never take office other than in a government with complete power, never get put in charge of implementing.
The point of the policies you demand is to use as an organizing principle, the last thing you want is for them to be implemented, it takes the wind out of your sails, you just have to find something else to organize around.
The climate “madness” is well orchestrated and heavily funded mostly by globalist institutions and so called “philanthropists” who make huge amounts of money with it.
It will go on until it is ricognized for what it is : a scam.
Gee, I wonder who paid for all those fancy costumes.
Someone in the Far East?
Story tip!
Stop El Nino with geoengineering!
– – – – – – – – –
Is this the key to preventing a Super El Nino? Scientists want to dim the SUN to shield the oceans from heatwaves
According to computer simulations, this could keep global warming within safe levels and dramatically cut the severity and length of marine heatwaves.
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15900627/super-el-nino-dim-sun-scientists.html
RCP8.5 mentioned!
Climate intervention through stratospheric aerosol injection may partially mitigate marine heatwaves
Marine heatwaves (MHWs) cause significant harm to marine life and ecosystem services, and can intensify hurricanes. Global warming has increased the duration and intensity of MHWs over the last century, and permanent MHWs have been predicted in many areas of the ocean by the end of the 21st century.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ae7b74
(Link to PDF, 32 pages)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2752-5295/ae7b74/pdf
iop….Idiots On Parade ??
😉
Who said the sun causes El Ninos?
I did not click thru- was this the silica powder, the sulfur or the space mirrors?
One has to wonder if there were marine heatwaves before humans got organized into tribes and clans.
Well, here we have an article high on moral self-rectitude. It opens with this statement:
“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.”
Then it proceeds to lecture us about the importance of paying careful attention to data rather than theories which are no better than astrology or cargo cults.
What fatuous hypocrisy! It goes on to say how the author will pay very careful attention to what is observable and can be tested. And then he says, “In the year 1600, Pope Clement VIII, the Vicar of Christ’s Church of Faith, Hope and Love, had (Giordano) Bruno burnt alive for promoting heliocentrism and other ideas deemed heretical.” Anybody who has actually investigated the facts of the case of Giordano Bruno rather than relying on made-up history knows that his sentence had nothing whatsoever to do with heliocentrism.
Anyone with an ounce of sense in their brain should be able to detect something fishy about the notion that Bruno was burned alive for advocating heliocentrism. Neither Copernicus nor Galileo were burned alive for advocating heliocentrism. So why should Bruno?
But just as there are corrupted scientists will tell us that the earth is burning, it would seem that there are corrupted scientists who tell us that people were burned alive for advocating heliocentrism.
Bruno challenged basic religious dogmas, including heliocentrism.
He refused to recant any of his views.
He became a thorn in the side of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
NEVER FIGHT CITY HALL
The mills of the Gods grind slow, but true. We are paying billions in Australia for Hanson in 1968. Hansen is 2026 is setting things back to normal.
So they are so certain that their message is clear that they have to give us little hints like, “Nature defending itself,” one fo the stupidest comments that I’ve ever seen. Nature defends itself every day through evolution, something that will eventually cause them to become nonfunctional and to disappear from the planet. They are just the dumbest of animals announcing their own demise.
Lastly, how much did they pay for those costumes? They don’t look cheap.
How much CO2 was produced in the manufacturing and logistics and delivery and sales of those costumes?
The scientists have been right about climate change all along, says former Vice President Al Gore on the 20th anniversary of the release of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Oscar-winning documentary about Gore’s campaign to educate people about climate change.
https://x.com/ABC/status/2067099001153901022