Climate Narratives

Jenny Price ’85’s quote on p. 35 (“Humans as Nature,” April issue) is telling, that the climate agenda’s thought processes and policies are confused and thereby causing difficulty getting public traction. 

Published narratives have outrun climate science maturity ever since the 1970s when the reported fear was a nascent ice age. Unlike the Manhattan Project and the moon launch program, we’ve accepted non-scientists to lead this field. Such leadership has engendered IPCC Rule #2 for policymakers whereby changes to supporting scientific papers “are limited to those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers.”  In other words, politics runs the IPCC show, causing suppression of conflicting research results, and our confusion.

For those interested in learning more about net-zero policy implications, check out three recent debates among top scientists. These are the Koonin-Socolow, Koonin-Dessler, and Happer-Karoly debates (use a search engine). Climate scientific work the last five or so years has exploded in volume.  This work can be found at CO2Coalition.org and RealClearEnergy.org. Emeritus physics professor William Happer *64 lives in Princeton.