The Climate Cult's Demise

By William Happer

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. Thus, 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. 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.

Less than 50 years later, Galileo Galileo 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.

CO2 the Control Knob? 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 long-wave, 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 absorb and re-emit IR radiation, making it a little harder for Earth to release IR radiation directly from its surface to space, and requiring slightly higher temperatures to get rid of the energy.

However, below the clouds, the most important greenhouse gas is hugely abundant water vapor, H₂O, not CO2, a trace gas at 0.043%. When combining the radiative effects of water vapor, liquid water droplets, and ice in clouds, H2O has a massive influence on the transfer and absorption of IR radiation; worldwide, at least a 10-15 times greater than CO₂.

The Tropics: The area between the Tropic of Cancer, 23.5 degree N, and the Tropic of Capricorn, 23.5 degree S, is about 40% of the earth surface. The Tropics area is about 78% ocean and 22% land. The tropics area generates 300 to 400 billion metric ton of water vapor each day. The rest of the world area, about 60%, 100 to 150 billion metric ton; thus, a 50% greater area generates water vapor only about 1/3 of the tropics!

The Ocean Surface in the Tropics: The IR photon emission from an ocean surface at 26 C is about 438 W/m^2, the upward radiant energy flux. Near the ocean surface, because the water vapor ppm is about 26,000, much larger than the CO2 ppm at 425, the influence of water vapor on the transfer and absorption of IR radiation of surface photons is about 20 - 25% (109.5 W/m^2), whereas CO2 is about 1% (4.4 W/m^2); this shows CO2 minimally adds to the world’s “baseline” temperature.

The remaining upward radiant energy flux, about 75%, is quickly transferred 5 - 10% by collisions that warm the air molecules (mainly N2 and O2), 65 - 70% by evaporating huge quantities of ocean water each day.

When water vapor and CO2 absorb upward energy flux at the ocean surface, they highly likely collide with abundant N2 and O2 molecules before they have a chance to re-emit a photon at lower frequency. This converts the absorbed radiant energy into kinetic energy, warming the surrounding air mass, causing it to rise.

Because of the frequent collisions, the energy of surface photons is almost completely transformed into sensible heat within the first ~10 meters above the surface. From this point upward, heat is primarily moving through molecular collisions that drive convection and turbulent mixing within the lower troposphere.

NOTE: As ocean temperatures drop from 26 C to 5 C, the H2O ppm drops from 26,000 ppm to 6,746 ppm. H2O transfer and absorption drops from 109.5 W/m^2 to 23.5 W/m^2 (a 79% drop). CO2 transfer and absorption drops from 4.4 W/m^2 to 3.3 W/m^2 (a 25% drop); even at these cold ocean temperatures, the H2O effect is at least 7 times the CO2 effect.

In the lower atmosphere up to the bottom of clouds, as water vapor partially condenses, it releases latent heat, which converts into sensible heat, which by collisions, warms the surrounding air (mainly N2 and O2), causing air to rise. This is a second warming source subsequent to the above upward surface radiant energy flux.

The Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere: Throughout the entire troposphere and stratosphere, the time between collisions remains orders of magnitude faster than the time it takes for CO2 to spontaneously emit a photon. Collisions still dominate.

Neither CO2 nor H20 efficiently absorb 8 to 12 um surface photons, which, if evading collision in the troposphere and stratosphere experience minimal collisions and freely travel to space.

Air density drops exponentially with altitude, which decreases the rate of collisions. The threshold where a molecule is equally likely to emit a photon or collide is called the critical altitude. For the main CO2 absorption band (15 mu), this occurs high up in the mesosphere (about 70 to 80 km).

At the colder temperatures, the atmosphere shifts entirely to longer wavelength (15 um), due to the quantum mechanical structure of the CO2 molecule. CO2 continues to absorb 15 um photon. Radiative transfer is only part of what controls Earth’s climate; one pathway.

Another pathway is the huge quantities of water vapor and warm air transported by air and ocean currents from the tropics, where maximum sunlight is absorbed, to polar regions, where much more IR radiation is released to space than is absorbed from the Sun. CO2, a trace gas at 0.0425%, has a very minor influence.

The Tropics are Hugely Important for the World’s Weather: Globally, about 2.5 to 3.0 trillion metric tons of water evaporate each day; the tropics account for about 2.0 to 2.5 trillion metric tons each day.

Because of the high heat of evaporation of ocean water (2,260,000 J/kg) an enormous quantity of energy is added. The water vapor, along with air warmed by colliding with the water vapor and water surface, is lifted up to about 10,000 - 20,000 ft, where the water vapor condenses to clouds, then all of it is transported by prevailing winds to northern latitudes. The air and water vapor is being replenished by prevailing trade winds and sea currents. In addition, sea currents, such as the Gulf Stream, carry warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to West Europe.

NOTE: Evaporating one metric ton of water requires about 2,442,000 kJ of solar energy; for comparison, 1 metric ton of crude oil is about 41,868,000 kJ. World crude oil consumption is about 14.0 million metric ton per day

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. That means relative to dynamic energy conversion within the general circulation, the IR absorbing power related to annual additions of CO2 ppm 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

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 inane, manic focus on greenhouse gases. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1knv0YdUyIgyR9Mwk3jGJwccIGHv38J33/view

The Greening of the Earth due to CO2. A particular irony of the demonization of CO₂ is that increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ are benefitting life on Earth. Almost 50 years of satellite measurements show a clear greening of Earth, especially of arid areas, due to the modest increases in CO₂ that have already occurred.

CO₂ is plant food, one of the three key ingredients of photosynthesis: sunlight, water and CO₂, which acts as a fertilizer to accelerate photosynthesis, serving as the dominant driver for 70% of the added biomass; the second largest driver is nitrogen at 9%.

Follow-up satellite data tracking from 2000 to 2020 noted that the Earth grew 5% greener in just those two decades, largely led by intensive land-use and agriculture in China and India, which alongside CO2 fertilization, has contributed to the agricultural abundance and increased crop yields to better feed 8 billion people.

The Climate Alarm Establishment is a Racket. 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 by the mass Media 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 loud noise 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 were viciously ostracized 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.