"The IPCC effort has stagnated.
The results of the IPCC process were used in the effort to force an agreement upon developing countries to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) in November in Glasgow.
Recognizing that fossil fuels are critical for their economic prosperity, the developing countries, mainly China and India, rightly rejected the false science of the IPCC.
Happer clearly demonstrates that the IPCC science is false because it greatly exaggerates the actual effect that CO2 and other greenhouse gases will have global temperatures.
Further, Happer uses a method for directly calculating the influence of changing greenhouses gases on global temperatures.
Physical Evidence of CO2’s Influence on Temperatures:
... the presentation by William Happer remains very important because he uses a direct approach to estimating how much influence growing CO2 emissions will have on global temperatures for the foreseeable future.
... some of the key points include:
• Don’t Confuse CO2 with Air Pollution.
Photos in articles on pollution are often misleading – if you can see it, it’s not carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, or methane.
For example, a popular photo of Shanghai shows haze.
Some of this haze is due to burning coal [often for heating and cooking].
But a bigger fraction is due to dust from the Gobi Desert.
They have had this type of pollution in Shanghai since the days of Marco Polo and long before.
Real pollution has largely been eliminated in the US and other developed countries.
• There is nothing environmentally friendly about industrial wind.
Many turbines have been abandoned when they no longer work.
Renewable energy is what I would call the inverse Robin Hood strategy—you rob from the poor to give to the rich.
Utilities are permitted to raise rates because of their capital investments in inefficient, unreliable renewables.
They junk fully depreciated coal, gas, and nuclear plants, all of which are working beautifully, and producing inexpensive, reliable energy.
But regulated profits are much less.
Taxpayers subsidize the rich, who can afford to lease land for wind and solar farms.
Tax incentives pander to the upper class who live in gated communities and can afford to buy Tesla electric cars.
They get subsidies from the state and federal government.
• Climate involves a complicated interplay of the sunlight that warms us, and thermal infrared radiation that escapes to space.
Heat is transported from the tropics to the poles by the motion of warm air and ocean water.
We all know about the Gulf Stream that carries huge amounts of heat to northern Europe, even to Russia.
Movements of air in the atmosphere also carry a lot of heat, as we know from regular cold spells and hot spells.
• Convection cells in the atmosphere as well as radiation are needed to get rid of energy.
The heat is eventually released by radiation into space.
But for the first few kilometers of altitude, a good fraction of that heat is not carried by radiation, but by convection of warm, moist air.
CO2 has no direct effect on convection near the surface.
But once you get up to 10 kilometers or so, most of the heat is transported by radiation.
• [Using a CO2 meter,] “at the end of a summer day the CO2 levels on my back porch drop to maybe 300 parts per million, way below the average for outside air.
That is because the trees and grass in my backyard have sucked most of the CO2 out of the local air during the day.
If I get up early the next morning and I look at the meter, it is up to 600 parts per million.
So just from morning to night CO2 doubles in the air of my back yard. Doubles and halves, doubles, and halves.
At least during the growing season that is quite common.
And we have these hysterics about CO2 increasing by 30 or 40 percent.
It is amazing.”
• [From the ground, we cannot measure the radiation exiting to space.
To understand the heat transported to space by radiation, we need to measure it from above the atmosphere.]
• Clouds, which we do not understand, will be recognized as the dominate factor in controlling the earth’s climate.
• Happer uses the idealized Plank curves for showing the radiation transmitted by the atmosphere.
Down-going solar radiation -- about 70 to 75% transmitted from the top of the atmosphere to the surface.
But only about 25% of the outgoing thermal radiation is transmitted from the surface to space.
... “Amazingly, quantum mechanics got its start from greenhouse gas-physics and thermal radiation, just what we are talking about today.
Most climate fanatics do not understand the basic physics.
... If there were no greenhouse gases, the radiation going to space would be the area under the blue Planck curve.
This would be the thermal radiation that balances the heating of Earth by sunlight.
... CO2 absorbs radiation that would otherwise cool the Earth.
... • “The message I want you to understand, which practically no one really understands, is that doubling CO2 makes almost no difference.”
• ... "On the basis of this, we are supposed to give up our liberties.
We are supposed to give up the gasoline engines of our automobiles.
... The (CO2) doubling actually does make a little difference.
It decreases the radiation to space by about three watts per square meters.
In comparison, the total radiation to space is about 300 watts per square meter.
• “So, it is a one percent effect—it is actually a little less than that because that is with no clouds.
Clouds make everything even less threatening.”
• Happer then goes into the beneficial effects of increasing CO2 for vegetation.
He estimates that the optimum CO2 for plants is about 1500 to 2000 ppm.
At the maximum extent of the glaciation period, about 20,000 years ago, there were major dust storms mostly from the high plains of Asia and North America (which were probably devoid of vegetation caused by CO2 starvation).
• Satellite evidence shows a greening of the earth from CO2 fertilization, which is most effective in dry areas, such as arid areas of Africa, North America, and Australia.
This is the only effect we can clearly attribute to human emissions of CO2, and it is not a threat to mankind."