A White House Role: Physicist Happer *64 Takes Position as Senior Science, Technology Adviser

Irving Langmuir, in 1958, wrote an elegant article on “pathological science.” In case Graham Turk does not know who Langmuir is, he was the first industrial scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Further investigation of Langmuir is worthy of Mr. Turk’s time since he was a dedicated scientist. Climate predictions are well within Langmuir’s definition of “pathological science.”

Another remarkable scientist and author, Michael Crichton, delivered a clear statement on climate predictions at the California Institute of Technology in January 2003 in which he reviewed the famed but totally empty “Drake Equation.” In his analysis, Crichton addressed the question of “scientific consensus” and demonstrated that it is also an empty concept.

The concept of consensus was the same concept that forced Galileo to recant. Being correct had nothing to do with his survival; only agreeing with the consensus allowed him to survive!

Today, a similar consensus is at large in the land via the media. The Rico Act is threatened to punish dissenters. First Amendment freedom of speech is suppressed, particularly in universities, and that is true in nearly all universities, not just Old Nassau. 

After earning a fortune from six best-selling climate-disaster books, James Lovelock of Gaia prominence announced, during a MSNBC interview in 2012, that he recanted his earlier climate-catastrophe predictions. This he did, not from fear but because “Nothing much is happening.” Lovelock said Al Gore and Tim Flannery “were alarmist, and we should be halfway to a frying planet.” Lovelock is an honest scientist who had the strength to admit he was wrong.

Finally, Joseph Silk and Aaron Ellison addressed the pathological-science disease in another context in their December 2014 Nature article. They argued cogently and powerfully that science consists of tested results. Untestable results are not science at all. This reflects Crichton’s statement as well.

Climate-model predictions fall in the category of untestable results. Worse, as the predictions are not fulfilled by results, the predictions continue to be propelled by “consensus.” The “results” never reach the public. Sadly, the “results” have not reached the Class of 2017, either, and that is Princeton’s fault.

This letter is in response to the letter from Graham Turk ’17 and his criticism of Professor William Happer *64. 

Contrary to Mr. Turk’s opinion, Professor Happer is eminently qualified to comment on climate change, its causes, and its effects.  As the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor (Emeritus) of Physics at Princeton; JASON Advisory group; trustee of the Mitre Corp., the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, and the Marshall Institute; chairman and founder of Magnetic Imaging Technologies, where he pioneered the adaptive optics (critically needed for Earth-based astronomy); and presidential adviser, Professor Happer is a critical thinker, a real scientist who follows no one but takes the paths where true science leads. The Earth’s climate is a complex system that is not easy to model, but luckily science does not rely on models without observation and test.  Professor Happer would join me in some of the following observations:

(1) Man has certainly increased atmospheric CO2, but we have no choice except to burn fossil fuels, since we need the energy and there is no alternative right now.

(2) The planet is warming a little (some glaciers do show recession), but the current warming is small (much smaller than most models predicted).

(3) Our CO2 increases cannot cause runaway global heating (as shown below), so we are not on the verge of catastrophe. And contrary to popular belief, the extra CO2 is actually good for plants, not the other way around.  Plants are carbonaceous, and the only source of carbon for them is atmospheric CO2, a necessary plant food. At CO2 levels below about 160 ppm, photosynthesis will not occur and no plants will grow. The atmosphere was very short of CO2 before the Industrial Revolution at 320 ppm (now we are at 400 ppm), fairly close to the critical 160 ppm level for plant growth. Experiments show maximum growth rates occur at CO2 many times our present levels, so although man has certainly increased the CO2 level somewhat in our atmosphere, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth: Plant growth has substantially accelerated (https://farmweeknow.com/story-usda-surprises-trade-again-raises-crop-estimates-new-records-0-179890, and many others).

(4) The Vostok ice cores show that global temperature and atmospheric CO2 content do correlate, but it is the temperature that drives the CO2, not the other way around, as shown by the fact that these cores preserve the time record and temperature changes precede CO2 changes by several thousand years. The effect cannot precede the cause.

Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas for our planet, and it is water vapor that warms us about 60 degrees F to a more livable and comfortable climate (a certain location that has a 50 degrees F average temperature would average -20 degrees F without our water-vapor blanket). CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, but it is not nearly as important as water vapor, since its IR absorption bands are much stronger and H2O concentration in the atmosphere is about 100 times that of CO2. However, things are not that simple. CO2 is always a gas while water vapor condenses as clouds, freezes out as ice, and evaporates into the atmosphere depending on a wide variety of conditions. 

So the operation of our greenhouse system, and the planetary climate it impacts, is very complex. It has not been successfully modeled as shown by the multitude of failed models comparing predictions with actual measurements that are now emerging. To show the complexity of our climate, look no further than El Niño and La Niña, subtle changes in the oceans that greatly affect our climate. There are no models that predict their impact, and this simply demonstrates the complexity of our climate and how difficult it is to model.

How does a scientist address a system too complex to model, or test a model that he has constructed? He does the critical experiments to see what happens (truth is always better than theory!). How do we do such an experiment, one that addresses the impact of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, by direct experiment? We are lucky. Our planet has already done the experiment for us, and we can use those results to evaluate the potential effects of manmade CO2 in the atmosphere: 400 million years ago the CO2 content of our atmosphere was 50 to 100 times higher than it is now but the planet was only slightly warmer, so we do not need to worry about a runaway greenhouse effect due to modest increases in atmospheric CO2 from fossil fuels. Moreover, at that time the planet resembled a tropical rain forest, so it was more like the garden of Eden than a wasteland. The vegetation, growing quite well, produced the fossil fuels we see and use today – the coal, the natural gas, and the oil under what is now Saudi Arabia, which was then lush and green but now a desert.

So the experiment has been done and the results are in: No runaway heating, and plants grow better with increased CO2. It would serve us all better to observe the results of real scientific experience (the historical Earth) and respect the views of real scientists like William Happer, not those who promote an unsupported point of view.

I challenge Mr. Turk to determine for himself the authenticity of the actual process by which the “percent of scientists” number was extracted and embellished upwards to 97 percent of all scientists. Yes, Mr. Turk, that number is challenged and the topic is still an active debate. 

Go back to the ’90s (how old was Mr. Turk?) when an overall value of average Watts per square meter (W/m2) per degree Celsius was proclaimed for global-temperature rise. Individual forcing functions (a very proper term) of W/m2 were estimated for a set of known possible parameters. Anything that was unknown was left unknown, and the difference between the proclaimed overall value and the sum of estimates was attributed to CO2 increases. This was the best that could be done, since direct modeling was poor, but a further official prediction of plus 1.0C per plus 100 ppm of CO2 set off the “calamitology” scare in the media. There was apparently a host of scientists, not part of the inner group of selected scientists, who knew that the linearity claim was nonsense. (While working full time elsewhere — not in climatology – I used a simple Occam’s razor approach to show that the dependence was logarithmic, not linear.) The logarithmic dependence was indeed recognized by the official scientists but the official projections of temperature rise per doubling of CO2 were still ominous, with a huge fan spread of possible calamities. Surprisingly (?), the fan of predictions did not even accurately project backward into the years with lower atmospheric CO2. This failure of authenticity has not been acknowledged. And the constantly revised fan projections are still excessive.

Let’s move farther through the letter. CO2 is certainly a boon, not a pollutant; there would be no plant life (and no animal life) without CO2. And if CO2 were not an infrared absorber the Earth would be about 7 degrees Celsius colder, but now, correctly or not, we complain. The genuine pollutants are the carbon particulates. If CO2 is a pollutant, then oxygen could also be said to be a pollutant because it causes fires and is used in all explosives. The oceans have been rising by one foot a century for centuries, and so it is senseless to set alarms about that.

Present Earth temperatures are increasing by about 0.01C per year (1.0C per temperature). Increased CO2  directly accounts for about 25 percent of the so-called “greenhouse-gases” blanket, H2O atmospheric absorption is less than 25 percent, “other” absorber molecules account for less than 10 percent, and convection from the tropics corresponds to about 50 percent. Without the convection (which is not a greenhouse gas), the temperatures in the temperate zones would be about 7C colder; we would truly be complaining. I wonder if that was mentioned in class. We should recognize a good thing when we have it and not just be making calamity-cum-belief proclamations. And we may be reducing future increases because of coincidental declines within the composite cycles of solar and Earth cycles, and eventually may have a reversal of temperature increases because of a return to another Ice Age. 

The last paragraph in the letter reads “we can reverse global warming if we act” quickly but, if a reversal implies, as it must, a removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, then that is likely another incorrect classroom stuffing of the brain. Reducing CO2 to its C and O2 constituents requires a large amount of energy, more energy than the heat energy released when burning C. As long as any of the energy used to serve human needs employs the burning of carbon, then any energy expended to reduce CO2 – whether from alternative fuels or C burning — will increase the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s a false hope to reduce any CO2 in the atmosphere until all energy needs can be provided by alternative fuel. And if at any time we have the capability to convert all human carbon-based energy to alternative energies, then the (conservative) cost of just the storage batteries alone (for today’s power requirements) will exceed $4,000 trillion.

Finally, I believe Mr. Turk should make an abject apology to Professor Happer.

One need only to use your computer and Google William Happer to find what a distinguished career he has had and to appreciate his expertise in gas  (CO2) spectroscopy. Then one might do a Google search for IPCC fraud, which on Jan. 8 produced about 607,000 results in 0.35 seconds, or a search for global-temperature fraud that produced about 11,600,000 results in 0.47 seconds. The articles clearly cast doubt on a consensus countering Happer’s viewpoints. In regard to CO2 as a greenhouse gas, one might ask how and why does it act. Yes, it reacts with infrared radiation (wavelengths commonly listed as ranging from 0 to 1000uM) in three narrow fingerprint absorption points: 2.9, 4.3, and 15uM. The great bulk of infrared passes by unaffected.

NASA has pointed out that CO2 can protect the Earth from harmful bursts of solar radiation by intercepting it in the upper atmosphere. Again, water in all of its forms (vapor, liquid, and ice) has CO2 absorption bands that overlap that of CO2. The concentration of water vapor is many times that of CO2 in the atmosphere, and in the laboratory, one cannot demonstrate a significant greenhouse effect for CO2 in the presence of water vapor. Hopefully, Trump does pay attention to Happer.

I cannot allow Graham Turk ’17’s letter regarding climate change and William Happer *64 to go unchallenged. In his letter, Turk quotes a government study and writes that climate change will “slash the U.S. economy 10 percent by 2100.” The U.S. economy is expected to be about three times larger on a per-capita basis in 2100 than it is today. Even if you accepted the study’s very aggressive assumptions and the 10 percent impact, that would mean that our economy would be only 2.7 times larger per-person than today’s level. Hardly a “slashing.” Personally, I am skeptical of attempts to predict 80 years in the future with any precision.

Many thanks to those who responded to my Jan. 9 letter for engaging in this important conversation. I believe that conversation is the best way to work through our disagreements. But let us not mistake conversation for debate; facts cannot be debated.

Yet debate is exactly what these alumni erroneously sought. They employed tactics like cherry-picking, misleading claims (e.g. there are no alternatives to fossil fuels; the climate is simply too complex to model), and patronizing derision on the basis of my age (“How old was Mr. Turk in the '90s?”) to distract from the issues at hand.

Tactics like these have been used for decades by fossil-fuel companies to cast aspersion on legitimate research and sow doubt in people’s minds. The false notion of serious disagreement among scientists about the causes of climate change has contributed to the current policy paralysis. The longer we allow people like William Happer *64 to obfuscate the facts, the less time we will have to reverse the damage.

The issue isn’t what I or William Happer say but what such bodies as the National Academy of Sciences or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which truly represent the scientific consensus, have said. The Academy, the IPCC, and nearly every national academy worldwide agree that climate change is happening, human-driven, and a serious threat to our well-being. With such a strong consensus, who should governments listen to? I think the members of the IPCC and National Academy have little self-interest in conveying the dangers of climate change, compared to what those who profit from the fossil fuel industry have in denying its urgency.

On that point, readers should be aware that two of the critics of my article, Charles Hohenberg ’62 and William Hayden Smith *66, are members of the CO2 Coalition, the nonprofit that William Happer founded. In 2017, the group reportedly received $170,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation and more than $33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute, according to federal tax filings obtained by the Climate Investigations Center and cited by The Washington Post. In addition, Happer testified in 2018 that Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world, donated between $10,000 and $15,000 to the CO2 Coalition on his behalf in exchange for his testimony. Emails obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council revealed that the organization was strongly supportive of former EPA director Scott Pruitt’s “red team blue team” plan to stage public debates on the veracity of climate change. As The New York Times reported, Pruitt’s views on climate change (that carbon dioxide is not the primary contributor and that the extent to which humans are responsible is unknown) were refuted in a recent study issued by 13 federal agencies that found that more than half of the temperature rise in the past half-century can be attributed to human activity. It is worth noting that Pruitt was recently reported to be in discussions to consult for coal-industry executive Joe Craft.

Kerry Brown ’74, another critic of my piece, is the director of the Spark of Freedom Foundation, which advocates for natural-gas development (along with, commendably, hydro and nuclear energy). Peter Seldin ’76 is a general partner at a hedge fund called Centennial Energy Partners that has invested in fossil-fuel companies including Compton Petroleum Corp., Tesco Corp., and GMX Resources.

Because I imagine their next move will be to call into question my motivations, I will save them the trouble. I want to ensure that future generations of humans can continue thriving. The extent of my relevant financial interests is as follows: I work at a regulated electric utility in Vermont, where my salary is fixed, and my employer-provided 401(k) plan is an S&P 500 index fund that includes various energy-company stocks.

I stand by my statement that William Happer is a dangerous presence in the White House. This has nothing to do with his character or his distinguished career as a physicist. But his misguided views on carbon now have the potential to shape federal policy in the opposite direction we need to be going, namely toward substantially reduced emissions. Happer is no longer just Trump’s senior science adviser (On the Campus, Oct. 24); he was recently appointed to chair a White House committee tasked with delivering its own assessment on the risks posed by climate change.

Lastly, I was amused that Kerry Brown called my argument “juvenile.” I wondered if he would have used the same word if the number after my name was '67 and not '17. I am not sure what my age has to do with an ability to respect the wisdom of thousands of renowned climate scientists. My age does, however, have a great deal to do with how I will experience the consequences of climate change, the result of attitudes perpetuated by the writers who defended Happer. It’s time to discuss solutions, not the existence of a problem.

I invite these alumni to reach out directly to me at gturk@alumni.princeton.edu if they would like to continue the conversation. I am happy to point them to the relevant peer-reviewed research.