NOTE:
This is the best climate science article I read in the past 24 hours.
It was long, so I am presenting an edited version that preserves every point Dr. Happer made, and every relevant chart. The full article is at the link below, but my edited version is better (my unbiased opinion!).
Ye Editor
FULL ARTICLE HERE:
https://rclutz.com/2022/03/03/dr-happers-advice-from-global-warming-dialogue/
"SUMMARY:
The Earth is in no danger from increasing levels of CO2.
More CO2 will be a major benefit to the biosphere and to humanity.
Some of the reasons are:
• Much higher CO2 levels than today’s prevailed over most last 550 million years of higher life forms on Earth.
Geological history shows that the biosphere does better with more CO2.
• Observations over the past two decades show that the warming predicted by climate models has been greatly exaggerated.
The temperature increase for doubling CO2 levels appears to be close to the feedback-free doubling sensitivity of S =1 K (same as +1 degree C.) , and much less than the “most likely” value S = 3 K (+3 degrees C.) promoted by the IPCC and assumed in most climate models.
• If CO2 emissions continue at levels comparable to those today, centuries will be needed for the added CO2 to warm the Earth’s surface by 2 K (+2 degrees C.) , generally considered to be a safe and even beneficial amount.
• Over the past tens of millions of years, the Earth has been in a CO2 famine with respect to the optimal levels for plants, the levels that have prevailed over most of the geological history of land plants.
There was probably CO2 starvation of some plants during the coldest periods of recent ice ages.
More atmospheric CO2 will substantially increase plant growth rates and drought resistance.
There is no reason to limit the use of fossil fuels because they release CO2 to the atmosphere.
However, fossil fuels do need to be mined, transported, and burned with cost-effective controls of real environmental problems
— for example, fly ash, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, volatile organic compounds, groundwater contamination, etc.
Sometime in the future, perhaps by the year 2050 when most of the original climate crusaders will have passed away,
historians will write learned papers on how it was possible for a seemingly enlightened civilization of the early 21st century to demonize CO2, much as the most “Godly” members of society executed unfortunate “witches” in earlier centuries.
DETAILS:
Some people claim that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, flooding from rising oceans, spreading tropical diseases, ocean acidification, and other horrors.
But these frightening scenarios have almost no basis in genuine science.
This Statement reviews facts that have persuaded me
that more CO2 will be a major benefit to the Earth.
Discussions of climate today almost always involve fossil fuels.
Some people claim that fossil fuels are inherently evil.
Quite the contrary, the use of fossil fuels to power modern society gives the average person a standard of living that only the wealthiest could enjoy a few centuries ago.
But fossil fuels must be extracted responsibly, minimizing environmental damage from mining and drilling operations, and with due consideration of costs and benefits.
Similarly, fossil fuels must be burned responsibly, deploying cost-effective technologies that minimize emissions of real pollutants such as fly ash, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, etc.
Extremists have conflated these genuine environmental concerns with the emission of CO2, which cannot be economically removed from exhaust gases.
Calling CO2 a “pollutant” that must be eliminated, with even more zeal than real pollutants, is Orwellian Newspeak.
“Buying insurance” against potential climate disasters by forcibly curtailing the use of fossil fuels is like buying “protection” from the mafia.
There is nothing to insure against, except the threats of an increasingly totalitarian coalition of politicians, government bureaucrats, crony capitalists, thuggish nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace, etc.
The ratio, RCO2, of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations to average values (about 300 ppm) of the past few million years.
This particular proxy record comes from analyzing the fraction of the rare stable isotope 13C to the dominant isotope 12C in carbonate sediments and paleosols. Other proxies give qualitatively similar results.
Life on Earth does better with more CO2.
CO2 levels are increasing.
It is not true that releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere is a dangerous, unprecedented experiment.
The Earth has already “experimented” with much higher CO2 levels than we have today or that can be produced by the combustion of all economically recoverable fossil fuels.
Radiative cooling of the Earth and The Role of Water and Clouds
Without sunlight and only internal heat to keep warm, the Earth’s absolute surface temperature T would be very cold indeed.
A first estimate can be made with the celebrated Stefan-Boltzmann formula:
... Clouds are one of the most potent factors that control the surface temperature of the earth.
Their effects are comparable to those of the greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2, but it is much harder to model the effects of clouds.
Clouds tend to cool the Earth by scattering visible and near-visible solar radiation back to space before the radiation can be absorbed and converted to heat.
But clouds also prevent the warm surface from radiating directly to space.
Instead, the radiation comes from the cloud tops that are normally cooler than the surface.
Low-cloud tops are not much cooler than the surface, so low clouds are net coolers.
... Most sunlight is absorbed in the tropics, and some of the heat energy is carried by air currents to the polar regions to be released back into space as thermal radiation.
"SUMMARY:
The Earth is in no danger from increasing levels of CO2.
More CO2 will be a major benefit to the biosphere and to humanity.
Some of the reasons are:
• Much higher CO2 levels than today’s prevailed over most last 550 million years of higher life forms on Earth.
Geological history shows that the biosphere does better with more CO2.
• Observations over the past two decades show that the warming predicted by climate models has been greatly exaggerated.
The temperature increase for doubling CO2 levels appears to be close to the feedback-free doubling sensitivity of S =1 K (same as +1 degree C.) , and much less than the “most likely” value S = 3 K (+3 degrees C.) promoted by the IPCC and assumed in most climate models.
• If CO2 emissions continue at levels comparable to those today, centuries will be needed for the added CO2 to warm the Earth’s surface by 2 K (+2 degrees C.) , generally considered to be a safe and even beneficial amount.
• Over the past tens of millions of years, the Earth has been in a CO2 famine with respect to the optimal levels for plants, the levels that have prevailed over most of the geological history of land plants.
There was probably CO2 starvation of some plants during the coldest periods of recent ice ages.
More atmospheric CO2 will substantially increase plant growth rates and drought resistance.
There is no reason to limit the use of fossil fuels because they release CO2 to the atmosphere.
However, fossil fuels do need to be mined, transported, and burned with cost-effective controls of real environmental problems
— for example, fly ash, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, volatile organic compounds, groundwater contamination, etc.
Sometime in the future, perhaps by the year 2050 when most of the original climate crusaders will have passed away,
historians will write learned papers on how it was possible for a seemingly enlightened civilization of the early 21st century to demonize CO2, much as the most “Godly” members of society executed unfortunate “witches” in earlier centuries.
DETAILS:
Some people claim that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, flooding from rising oceans, spreading tropical diseases, ocean acidification, and other horrors.
But these frightening scenarios have almost no basis in genuine science.
This Statement reviews facts that have persuaded me
that more CO2 will be a major benefit to the Earth.
Discussions of climate today almost always involve fossil fuels.
Some people claim that fossil fuels are inherently evil.
Quite the contrary, the use of fossil fuels to power modern society gives the average person a standard of living that only the wealthiest could enjoy a few centuries ago.
But fossil fuels must be extracted responsibly, minimizing environmental damage from mining and drilling operations, and with due consideration of costs and benefits.
Similarly, fossil fuels must be burned responsibly, deploying cost-effective technologies that minimize emissions of real pollutants such as fly ash, carbon monoxide, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, etc.
Extremists have conflated these genuine environmental concerns with the emission of CO2, which cannot be economically removed from exhaust gases.
Calling CO2 a “pollutant” that must be eliminated, with even more zeal than real pollutants, is Orwellian Newspeak.
“Buying insurance” against potential climate disasters by forcibly curtailing the use of fossil fuels is like buying “protection” from the mafia.
There is nothing to insure against, except the threats of an increasingly totalitarian coalition of politicians, government bureaucrats, crony capitalists, thuggish nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace, etc.
The ratio, RCO2, of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations to average values (about 300 ppm) of the past few million years.
This particular proxy record comes from analyzing the fraction of the rare stable isotope 13C to the dominant isotope 12C in carbonate sediments and paleosols. Other proxies give qualitatively similar results.
Life on Earth does better with more CO2.
CO2 levels are increasing.
It is not true that releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere is a dangerous, unprecedented experiment.
The Earth has already “experimented” with much higher CO2 levels than we have today or that can be produced by the combustion of all economically recoverable fossil fuels.
Radiative cooling of the Earth and The Role of Water and Clouds
Without sunlight and only internal heat to keep warm, the Earth’s absolute surface temperature T would be very cold indeed.
A first estimate can be made with the celebrated Stefan-Boltzmann formula:
Their effects are comparable to those of the greenhouse gases, H2O and CO2, but it is much harder to model the effects of clouds.
Clouds tend to cool the Earth by scattering visible and near-visible solar radiation back to space before the radiation can be absorbed and converted to heat.
But clouds also prevent the warm surface from radiating directly to space.
Instead, the radiation comes from the cloud tops that are normally cooler than the surface.
Low-cloud tops are not much cooler than the surface, so low clouds are net coolers.
... Most sunlight is absorbed in the tropics, and some of the heat energy is carried by air currents to the polar regions to be released back into space as thermal radiation.
Along with energy, angular momentum
— imparted to the air from the rotating Earth’s surface near the equator
— is transported to higher northern and southern latitudes, where it is reabsorbed by the Earth’s surface.
The Hadley circulation near the equator is largely driven by buoyant forces on warm, solar-heated air, but for mid latitudes the “Coriolis force”
due to the rotation of the earth leads to transport of energy and angular momentum through slanted “baroclinic eddies.”
Among other consequences of the conservation of angular momentum are the easterly trade winds near the equator and the westerly winds at mid latitudes.
Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity
If increasing CO2 causes very large warming, harm can indeed be done.
But most studies suggest that warmings of up to 2 K will be good for the planet,[ extending growing seasons, cutting winter heating bills, etc.
We will denote temperature differences in Kelvin (K) since they are exactly the same as differences in Celsius (C).
A temperature change of 1 K = 1 C is equal to a change of 1.8 Fahrenheit (F).
If a 50% increase of CO2 were to increase the temperature by 3.4 K, as in Arrhenius’s original estimate mentioned above, the doubling sensitivity would be S = 3.4 K/log2(1.5) = 5.8 K.
Ten years later, on page 53 of his popular book, Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe,[40] Arrhenius again states the logarithmic law of warming, with a slightly smaller climate sensitivity, S = 4 K. (+4 degrees C.)
Convection of the atmosphere, water vapor, and clouds all interact in a complicated way with the change of CO2 to give the numerical value of the doubling sensitivity S of Eq.
Remarkably, Arrhenius somehow guessed the logarithmic dependence on CO2 concentration before Planck’s discovery of how thermal radiation really works.
More than a century after Arrhenius, and after the expenditure of many tens of billions of dollars on climate science, the official value of S still differs little from the guess that Arrhenius made in 1912: S = 4 K. (same as +4 degrees C.)
Could it be that the climate establishment does not want to work itself out of a job?
Overestimate of Sensitivity
— imparted to the air from the rotating Earth’s surface near the equator
— is transported to higher northern and southern latitudes, where it is reabsorbed by the Earth’s surface.
The Hadley circulation near the equator is largely driven by buoyant forces on warm, solar-heated air, but for mid latitudes the “Coriolis force”
due to the rotation of the earth leads to transport of energy and angular momentum through slanted “baroclinic eddies.”
Among other consequences of the conservation of angular momentum are the easterly trade winds near the equator and the westerly winds at mid latitudes.
Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity
If increasing CO2 causes very large warming, harm can indeed be done.
But most studies suggest that warmings of up to 2 K will be good for the planet,[ extending growing seasons, cutting winter heating bills, etc.
We will denote temperature differences in Kelvin (K) since they are exactly the same as differences in Celsius (C).
A temperature change of 1 K = 1 C is equal to a change of 1.8 Fahrenheit (F).
If a 50% increase of CO2 were to increase the temperature by 3.4 K, as in Arrhenius’s original estimate mentioned above, the doubling sensitivity would be S = 3.4 K/log2(1.5) = 5.8 K.
Ten years later, on page 53 of his popular book, Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe,[40] Arrhenius again states the logarithmic law of warming, with a slightly smaller climate sensitivity, S = 4 K. (+4 degrees C.)
Convection of the atmosphere, water vapor, and clouds all interact in a complicated way with the change of CO2 to give the numerical value of the doubling sensitivity S of Eq.
Remarkably, Arrhenius somehow guessed the logarithmic dependence on CO2 concentration before Planck’s discovery of how thermal radiation really works.
More than a century after Arrhenius, and after the expenditure of many tens of billions of dollars on climate science, the official value of S still differs little from the guess that Arrhenius made in 1912: S = 4 K. (same as +4 degrees C.)
Could it be that the climate establishment does not want to work itself out of a job?
Overestimate of Sensitivity
Contrary to the predictions of most climate models, there has been very little warming of the Earth’s surface over the last two decades.
... Benefits of CO2
More CO2 in the atmosphere will be good for life on planet earth.
Few realize that the world has been in a CO2 famine for millions of years — a long time for us, but a passing moment in geological history.
Over the past 550 million years since the Cambrian, when abundant fossils first appeared in the sedimentary record, CO2 levels have averaged many thousands of parts per million (ppm),
not today’s few hundred ppm,
which is not that far above the minimum level, around 150 ppm, when many plants die of CO2 starvation.
All green plants grow faster with more atmospheric CO2.
It is found that the growth rate is approximately proportional to the square root of the CO2 concentrations, so the increase in CO2 concentrations from about 300 ppm to 400 ppm over the past century should have increased growth rates by a factor of about √(4/3) = 1.15, or 15%.
Most crop yields have increased by much more than 15% over the past century.
Better crop varieties, better use of fertilizer, better water management, etc., have all contributed.
But the fact remains that a substantial part of the increase is due to more atmospheric CO2.
But the nutritional value of additional CO2 is only part of its benefit to plants.
Of equal or greater importance, more CO2 in the atmosphere makes plants more drought-resistant.
Plant leaves are perforated by stomata, little holes in the gas-tight surface skin that allow CO2 molecules to diffuse from the outside atmosphere into the moist interior of the leaf where they are photosynthesized into carbohydrates.
In the course of evolution, land plants have developed finely tuned feedback mechanisms that allow them to grow leaves with more stomata in air that is poor in CO2, like today,
or with fewer stomata for air that is richer in CO2, as has been the case over most of the geological history of land plants.
If the amount of CO2 doubles in the atmosphere, plants reduce the number of stomata in newly grown leaves by about a factor of two.
With half as many stomata to leak water vapor, plants need about half as much water.
Satellite observations have shown a very pronounced “greening” of the Earth as plants have responded to the modest increase of CO2 from about 340 ppm to 400 ppm during the satellite era.
More greening and greater agricultural yields can be expected as CO2 concentrations increase further.
Climate Science
Droughts, floods, heat waves, cold snaps, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and other weather- and climate-related events will complicate our life on Earth, no matter how many laws governments pass to “stop climate change.”
But if we understand these phenomena, and are able to predict them, they will be much less damaging to human society.
So I strongly support high-quality research on climate and related fields like oceanography, geology, solar physics, etc.
Especially important are good measurement programs like the satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature (UAH)
or the Argo system of floating buoys that is revolutionizing our understanding of ocean currents, temperature, salinity, and other important properties.
But too much “climate research” money is pouring into very questionable efforts, like mitigation of the made-up horrors mentioned above.
It reminds me of Gresham’s Law:
“Bad money drives out good.”
The torrent of money showered on scientists willing to provide rationales, however shoddy, for the war on fossil fuels, and cockamamie mitigation schemes for non-existent problems, has left insufficient funding for honest climate science."
Dr. William Happer Background:
Co-Founder
and current Director of the CO2 Coalition, Dr. William Happer,
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University,
is a specialist in modern optics, optical and radiofrequency
spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the
atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei. From September 2018 to
September 2019, Dr. Happer served as Deputy Assistant to the President
and Senior Director of Emerging Technologies on the National Security
Council.
He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1966, an Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1976, the 1997 Broida Prize and the 1999 Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society, and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2000.
He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1966, an Alexander von Humboldt Award in 1976, the 1997 Broida Prize and the 1999 Davisson-Germer Prize of the American Physical Society, and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2000.