Three more experts denounce the “climate change” disinformation blitz

Two prominent climate scientists recently argued, in testimony, that new Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rules to cut CO2 emissions “will be disastrous for the country, for no scientifically justifiable reason.”

William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) argue, quoting extensive data, that the EPA’s justification of the new regulations are not based on scientific facts but rather political opinions and speculative models that have consistently been proven wrong.

“The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule,” Happer and Lindzen stated. “None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.”

“All of the models that predict catastrophic global warming fail the key test of the scientific method: they grossly overpredict the warming versus actual data,” they stated. “The scientific method proves there is no risk that fossil fuels and carbon dioxide will cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.”

Climate models like the ones that the EPA is using have been consistently wrong for decades in predicting actual outcomes, Happer told The Epoch Times, offering the table below to illustrate his point:

“That was already an embarrassment in the 1990s, when I was director of energy research in the U.S. Department of Energy,” continued Happer. “I was funding a lot of this work, and I knew very well then that the models were overpredicting the warming by a huge amount.”

One popular way to fight the EPA’s climate regulations is cite what’s called the “major questions doctrine”, which argues that the agency does not have the authority to invent regulations that have such an enormous impact on Americans without clear direction from Congress. Happer and Lindzen, however, have taken a different tack, arguing that the EPA regulations fail the “State Farm” test because they are “arbitrary and capricious.”

“Time and again, courts have applied ‘State Farm’s’ principles to invalidate agency rules where the agency failed to consider an important aspect of the problem, or cherry-picked data to support a pre-ordained conclusion,” they explained, referring to the 2003 case of State Farm v. Campell in which the Supreme Court argued that “a State can have no legitimate interest in deliberately making the law so arbitrary that citizens will be unable to avoid punishment based solely upon bias or whim.”

According to Happer and Lindzen’s testimony, “600 million years of CO2 and temperature data contradict the theory that high levels of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming” — and they present the following chart which shows little correlation between historical levels of CO2 and temperature, arguing also that current CO2 levels are at a low point:

“The often highly emphasized 140 [parts per million] increase in CO2 since the beginning of the Industrial Age is trivial compared to CO2 changes over the geological history of life on Earth,” they stated. And in any case, “Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere create more food for people worldwide, including more food for people in drought-stricken areas. Increases in carbon dioxide over the past two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, caused an approximate 20 percent increase in the food available to people worldwide, as well as increased greening of the planet and a benign warming in temperature.”

More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more plant growth and higher farming yields, even NASA concedes this. In addition, synthetic fertilizers, which are derivatives of natural gas, are responsible for nearly half the world’s food production today. However, “net zero” goals would reduce CO2 emissions by more than 40 gigatons per year, reducing the food supply proportionally.

In addition to teaching physics at Princeton, decades of William Happer’s life have been devoted to physics, primarily atmospheric radiation and atmospheric turbulence, and his inventions have been used by astronomers and in national defense.

“Radiation in the atmosphere is my specialty,” said Happer, “and I know more about it than, I would guess, any climate scientists. [My expertise] involves much of the same physics that’s involved in climate, and none of it is very alarming,” he stated.

The global warming narrative argues that as people burn fossil fuels they emit higher concentrations of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which absorbs sunlight and creates a “greenhouse effect,” trapping the Sun’s radiation and warming the Earth.

But one aspect of CO2 emissions that global warming models fail to take into account, Happer explained, is a phenomenon called “saturation,” or the diminishing effect of CO2 in the atmosphere at higher concentrations.

“At the current concentrations of CO2, around 400 parts per million, it decreases the radiation to space by about 30 percent, compared to what you would have if you took it all away,” Happer said. “So that’s enough to cause quite a bit of warming of the earth, and thank God for that; it helps make the earth habitable, along with the effects of water vapor and clouds.”

“But if you could double the amount of CO2 from 400 to 800, and that will take a long time, the amount that you decrease radiation to space is only one percent. Very few people realize how hard it is for additional carbon dioxide to make a difference to the radiation to space. That’s what’s called saturation, and it’s been well known for a century.”

Happer and Lindzen also state that modern datasets have been manipulated to fit the climate-change narrative.

“The most striking example of that is the temperature record,” continued Happer. “If you look at the temperature records that were published 20 years ago, they showed very clearly that in the United States by far the warmest years we had were during the mid-1930s. If you look at the data today, that is no longer true. People in charge of that data, or what the public sees, have gradually reduced the temperatures of the ‘30s, then increased the temperature of more recent measurements.”

One example of misleading data used by the EPA as proof of global warming is seen in the chart below:

“This chart does not actually show ‘daily temperatures. Instead, it show a ‘ratio’ of daily record highs to lows — a number that appears designed to create the impression that temperatures are steadily rising.”

By contrast, Happer and Lindzen presented the EPA’s own data which reveals significantly higher temperatures in the 1930s:

Proponents of the global warming narrative often state that it is “settled science” and that nearly all scientists agree that the planet is warming and human activity is to blame.

According to an official NASA statement, “the vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists—97 percent—agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change. Most of the leading science organizations around the world have issued public statements expressing this, including international and U.S. science academies, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a whole host of reputable scientific bodies around the world.”

While a report by Cornell University states that “more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans, according to a new survey of 88,125 climate-related studies.”

Happer, however, argues that consensus is not science, citing a lecture on the scientific method by renowned physicist Richard Feynman, who said, “if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”

“Science has never been made by consensus,” Happer extrapolated: “The way you decide something is true in science is you compare it with experiment or observations. It doesn’t matter if there’s a consensus; it doesn’t matter if a Nobel Prize winner says it’s true, if it disagrees with observations, it’s wrong,” he said, earnestly. “And that’s the situation with climate models. They are clearly wrong because they don’t agree with observations.”

Physician and author Michael Crichton famously said in a 2003 speech: “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results.”

Professor Happer points to the original catastrophic climate predictions, which had “New York flooded by now, no ice left at the North Pole, England would be like Siberia … Nothing that they predicted actually came true. You have to do something to keep the money coming in, so they changed ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’”–so as to explain-away any climatic eventuality.

Regarding that ‘99.9% consensus’ number cited by Cornell University, many experts counter that today’s academic publications routinely reject those submissions that dare to question The Science of global warming.

“I’m lucky because I didn’t really start pushing back on this until I was close to retirement,” said Happer, who had already established himself at that point as a tenured professor at Princeton, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and director of energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“If I’d been much younger, they could have made sure I never got tenure, that my papers would never get published. “They can keep me from publishing papers now, but it doesn’t matter because I already have status. But it would matter a lot if I were younger and I had a career that I was trying to make.”

In a recent interview with John Stossel, climate scientist Judith Curry said she paid the price for contradicting the narrative, and called today’s global warming science “a manufactured consensus.”

Dr Curry, the former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said that when she published a study that claimed hurricanes were increasing in intensity, “I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star; I was flown all over the place to meet with politicians and to give these talks, and lots of media attention.”

However, after several researchers questioned Curry’s findings, she investigated their claims and concluded that her critics were correct. “Part of it was bad data; part of it was natural climate variability,” explained Curry. But when she went public with these facts, she was shunned and pushed out of academia.

For more on Dr Judith Curry’s shunning, click the link below:

Professor Lindzen recalls a similar fate, once he began questioning the official climate narrative.

“Funding and publication became almost impossible,” he said, “and I was holding the most distinguished chair in meteorology,” (MIT’s Sloan Professorship of Meteorology).

Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Clauser has said that he, too, was abruptly canceled from giving a speech on climate at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on July 25 of this year. Clauser stated during a previous speech at Quantum Korea 2023 that “climate change is not a crisis.” He argued that the climate system a self-regulating process and that more clouds form when temperatures rise, resulting in a compensatory cooling effect. In short, Clauser agrees that atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, but argues that its effect on global warming is swamped by the natural cloud cycle.

Catching wind of these heretic views, Clauser received an email indicating that the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) director, Pablo Moreno, no longer wanted the event to happen. An assistant who was coordinating the event wrote to Clauser: “When I arranged this the Director was very happy about it, but things have evidently changed.”

Note: The IMF’s current policy on climate change is that “large emitting countries need to introduce a carbon tax that rises quickly to $75 a ton in 2030, consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees [Celsius] or less.”

Asked why there would be a need for censorship, Lindzen bluntly replied “because it’s a hoax.”

Clauser said, “We are totally awash in pseudoscience.”

Happer added, “There is this huge fraction of the population that has been brainwashed into thinking this is an existential threat to the planet,” he said. “I don’t blame the people; they don’t have the background to know they are being deceived, but they are being deceived.“

The Epoch Times concludes by addressing what it calls, “The Climate Money Machine”.

The World Bank announced in September 2022 that it paid out a record $31.7 billion that fiscal year to help countries address climate change, a 19 percent increase from the $26.6 billion it paid out over the previous fiscal year.

And according to Reuters, the U.S. is projected to spend about $500 billion to fight climate change over the next decade, including $362 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, $98 billion from the Infrastructure Act, and $54 billion from the CHIPS law.

While research grants to study climate change are offered=up by many government agencies, including the EPA, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as well as by non-profits including Bloomberg Philanthropies and the MacArthur Foundation, which paid out $458 million since 2014.

“Going back to 1988 to 1990, funding went up by a factor of 15,” said Lindzen. “You created a whole new community. This was a small field in 1990; not a single member of the faculty at MIT called themselves a climate scientist. By 1996, everyone was a climate scientist, and that included impacts. If you’re studying cockroaches and you put in your grant, ‘cockroaches and climate,’ you are a climate scientist.”

Today’s ‘Climate Crisis’ is a fabricated crisis, one inorganically steered, i.e. funded, into the fore at the expense of facts and logic, of empirical science — critical, free-thinking components that I fear will die with the Clausers, Lindzens and Happers of this world, who I consider to be among the last bastions of honest scientific inquiry from an era when such an endeavor was the standard, likely taken for granted, and so left undefended.