Richard Lindzen & William Happer — Richard 'Dick' Lindzen is a retired MIT atmospheric physicist; William Happer is a retired Princeton physicist and former director of energy research under President George H.W. Bush. Both are prominent scientific skeptics of climate-change alarmism.
The gist
Lindzen and Happer argue that the dominant 'CO2 control knob' theory of climate is wrong and that the field has been corrupted by money, politics, and enforced consensus. They contend doubling CO2 yields only modest warming, that the Earth's temperature has never been static, that rising CO2 has greened the planet and expanded arable land, and that 'extreme weather' became the new talking point only after temperature scares lost force. They tie the dynamic to funding incentives in academia, captured journals and peer review, and politicians who co-opt science's reputation. The conversation ranges across ice ages, the sun, the Navier-Stokes equation, eugenics as a cautionary precedent, and Happer's Cold War invention of the sodium guide-star laser.
Big reveals
- Lindzen says editors who published his skeptical papers (Bulletin of the AMS, and a later NASA 'iris effect' paper) were fired immediately afterward.
- Happer recounts that as DOE energy-research director, only climate scientists refused to answer his funding questions, saying they 'work for Senator Gore.'
- Happer claims Princeton's building program is funded largely by overhead skimmed from climate grants, giving universities a financial stake in the narrative.
- Happer says the manic focus on CO2 has set serious climate science back roughly 50 years.
- They assert the IPCC long found no link between climate change and extreme weather, but political pressure changed the messaging for the 'visuals.'
- Lindzen says a Science editor (Marcia McNutt) declared she'd reject any article questioning climate consensus and was later made president of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Happer says a Nobel laureate colleague stormed in demanding to know who invited Lindzen to give a Princeton talk on climate.
- Happer reveals he invented the sodium guide-star laser for Star Wars missile defense, kept secret ~10 years before declassification.
Things worth remembering
- Doubling CO2 alone gives only about half a degree of warming; the alarming figures depend on an assumed water-vapor feedback.
- Higher industrial-era CO2 has greatly increased arable land and made the Earth greener.
- During ice ages CO2 fell near 180 ppm; below ~150 ppm plant life would die from CO2 starvation, not cold.
- Atmospheric CO2 today is roughly 400-430 ppm.
- Milankovitch orbital cycles, driven by Arctic summer sunlight, are credited with controlling the ice ages.
- The ~100,000-year ice-age cycles only began about 3 million years ago, coinciding with the closing of the Isthmus of Panama.
- No one has proven that discretized climate models actually solve the underlying Navier-Stokes equations.
- Roughly four or five 'once-in-a-hundred-year' extreme events occur somewhere each month, making endless scary visuals trivial to produce.
- There is so little methane in the atmosphere that eliminating all of it would have almost no effect compared to CO2.
- The worst East Coast hurricane on record (final year of the American Revolution) wiped out the British and French fleets and helped trap Cornwallis.