Princeton's William Happer rebuts myth of carbon pollution

now today we have a very very special guest with us who's come a long way to see us but will happy is also in town to take part in a symposium over at UNC Chapel Hill and his will warn me when when we were talking about this that he might be disinvited before he got here but that's not the case so he will be over at UNC today but dr. hopper is an exceptional scholar he's professor in the Department of Physics at Princeton University and is a specialist in modern optics optical and radio frequency spectra PC of atoms and molecules radiation propagation in the atmosphere in spin-polarized atoms and nuclei and by the way he graduated from the UNC he has his PhD from UNC as well so dr. hopper well go into this received his BS degree in physics from the University of North Carolina I'm sorry it has these pH degree from Princeton I should have known better he began his academic career in 1964 at Columbia University as a member of the research and teaching staff at the physics department and while serving as a professor of physics he also served as co-director of the Columbia radiation laboratory from 1971 through 1976 and director from 76 to 79 in 1980 he joined the faculty at Princeton University and in August 1991 he was appointed director of energy research in the Department of Energy by President George Bush while serving in that capacity Under Secretary of Energy James Watkins he oversaw a basic research budget of some three billion dollars which included much of the federal funding for high energy and nuclear physics material science magnetic confinement fusion environmental science the Human Genome Project and other areas and he remained at the at the department until 1993 to help the Clinton administration during the transition period he was reappointed professor physics at Princeton University on in June of 93 and named the Eugene Higgins professor physics and chair of the university research board from 1995 to 2005 and in 2003 he was named to the Syrus Fogg bracket chair of physics so you can see our guest has extremely distinguished scholar dr. hoppers also done a bit of research on global warming among other things and today he's here to talk with us about the myth of carbon pollution dr. pepper well thanks very much Cory and my brother Ian and my wife Barbara are here with me today they I think got a free meal out of this I hope and I have to say that you know the location is a special meaning to me and my brother because Ian's middle name is Morgan so we're on Morgan Street and because our mother's family Morgan family has been in North Carolina since before the Revolution and we're very proud of that so I'm going to talk to you today about the myth of carbon pollution you know I keep hearing people even President Obama and talking about carbon pollution let me just say right oh if they don't know what they're talking about it's not pollution at all and so anyway carbon dioxide that's what we're talking about normally has been demonized because it's supposedly causes catastrophic global warming but I'll show you in a minute that the observations show that all the computer models that had predicted huge warming from co2 could they could hardly be more wrong it's just unbelievable how wrong they are and it's also pretty clear that what little warming there will be will be beneficial and more importantly there'll be huge increases in agricultural productivity things are going to grow better they'll need less water and so why you should call call something that does this a pollutant just beats me it's not a pollutant well okay I'm only a physicist but Al Gore actually is a Nobel Prize winner for his time in science and this is the cover of his most recent book our choice to save the planet you know the current climate crisis nobody can figure out what the crisis is but he seems to think there is one and this this is a picture that al says comes from a NASA photo well I actually some of the NASA astronauts are my personal friends and so I helped me to find the original and here's the original this is a NASA photo and you can tell it's the same photo al use but there's some obvious differences for example this real photo the earth is covered with clouds they're clouds everywhere you look practically if you step back here's Al's photo so he's erased the clouds as much as he can you wouldn't want people getting the idea that maybe clouds have something to do with the temperature of the earth you know it's all that demon co2 so okay so that's perhaps a minor thing you can tell that's the same picture by simply comparing the cloud patterns are identical it's exactly the same picture but especially around the tropics there are no clouds and in fact this equatorial region is always covered with clouds you know there here it is down here you know there now this is this is the outer cover of the book and you can see there's a fold it folds and there's the binding of the book here so you can open this cover and turn it over and you can see the inner cover where he shows you what will happen if we don't listen to him so here's what will happen so here's the inner cover he says when you unfold the cover the image you see in the earth as we know it today with its deep blue oceans rich soil green forests that's the cover this side reveals that what will happen you know if you don't listen to how basically he just goes on and on he doesn't know when to shut up so I have the same problem but there are several problems with this from a physicists point of view and that's where I come from first of all they're hurricanes all over the place including this one off of North Carolina's coast it's got one it's rotating the wrong way all right all right well this is a hurricane rotating the right way off of Baja California you know you know the rotations of hurricanes are driven by the rotation of the earth so you know there's no way away can rotate this way there's another problem and here you see there's a massive hurricane here off of Ecuador you know Panama has been flooded you know you can you know swim from the Pacific to the Atlantic now you know green Greenland you know it's all melted there there's a big bay in the north of Greenland all sorts of horrible things have happened but it's it's it's made up it doesn't agree it doesn't agree with even the most basic science you know and this is the level of the discussion that we're trying to face it's just nonsense you know it makes good press people get frightened you know we're gonna fry all of this crap but it has nothing to do with science talk about hurricanes remember that hurricane this has observed hurricanes no one has ever seen a hurricane off the coast of Equador never and there's a reason for that I said it's driven by the rotation of the earth so if you're on the equator you can't figure out if your would be hurricane should I rotate to the right or should I rotate to the left so you just don't do anything right you don't point right so uh hurricanes in the northern hemisphere rotate to the right and the ones in the south rotate to the left right so uh that's the level of discourse if you look by the way I'm going to give a much more serious physics talk at 4:30 and at chapel if you really want to go into the physics in detail you're welcome to attend but it will have apparent differential equations and dot Yeti maybe you'll get more out of this talk all right so this is one of my favorite pictures you know here's what the global warming people would like the public to be chicken little run flapping her wings here and here it's the Fox you can guess who the Fox is there are lots of them but you know if you're being panicked and all you see is panicky stories in the media you ought to stop and think for a minute you know is it - somebody's benefit you know bono as they say in the law and lots of people are benefiting from this panic well let's get back to the the basic question decarbonize the world is what we're supposed to do stop emitting co2 but you probably remember there's this famous episode where Faust and Gretchen are sitting in the garden and Faustus wooing Gretchen you know I really love you you know Lola let's get together and Gretchen says well I just have one question and in the story it was what do you think about religion you know but here this question for carbon dioxide is if your whole carbon dioxide constant will that stop climate changing the answer is absolutely not the climate always changes it has never been staple you know as long as we've been able to infer records the climate changes and it's not going to stop changing if we stopped changing co2 and the second question you might ask is this is the right level of co2 that we have today and that's not there by the way I forgot to set it up but because I still have time I have a little co2 meter here which I will put up and we can measure the co2 in the room while we're having our meeting here if I can find a place to plug it in so but you might ask well what is the ideal co2 level you know nobody ever explains that to you you would think well it must been the pre-industrial level but pre-industrial levels have been all over the place and so uh let's see is there a over there yeah here's a plug anybody know what they co2 level is 400 400 parts per million right right so we're going to see what it is in our room here I have managed to break it well have to warm up a little bit let's see well give it a minute here to settle down it's got a little laser what the way that works is the laser probing the yeah well the problem is guys all of you you're enemies of a planet are sitting in here breathing and so this poor meter the reason it's squeaking is that the co2 levels in here were I'm sorry to stop a minute it's it's so frustrated they're so high but it was 1700 okay so the level in this room 1700 that's not unusual for in Princeton lecture room there's typically never lower than 1000 yeah 1800 okay so you might you might think about that this is this pollutant we're sitting here breathing this pollutant you know there's squeaking because this is designed for heating and air conditioning so when it squeaks like that you're supposed to turn off the earth condition get a little more air circulation but that's what it's designed to do okay 1700 will turn it also the squeaking doesn't drive us crazy all right so let's continue what's the optimum co2 level okay is it 400 we're doing fine at 1700 everybody feel okay okay so in fact you know we've studied this issue to death with respect to people because we have people in confined spaces in submarines in spacecraft and so we have quite strict limits on co2 levels in submarines it's uh anyone know what it is five thousand five thousand yeah at five thousand you start you know pumping it out and spacecraft they're a little more forgiving you can get up to seven thousand on spaceflight yeah anyway that but but you know people are going crazy because it's four hundred you know good god the world has never seen four hundred before you know I saw it's insane okay so let's talk about the optimum level well at a hundred fifty parts per million which was not that much below pre-industrial levels plants stopped growing plants need co2 to live and they're not that far from where they are starved to death for co2 so 280 was the levels presumably in 1800 were around 400 parts per million outside today if you go up a few thousand feet and over most of geological history the levels have been more like one thousand two thousand and this is what plants prefer actually plants are actually starved to some extent for co2 now well here's a long-range picture of the so-called stable climate of the earth you see the this is temperature going up and down and this this is the last 800,000 years this is the last five million years and the the immediate thing you see is the climate is never stable there has never been a history and the never been a period in the history of the earth where the climate is stable were recently in an ice age so we just came out of an ice age twenty thousand years ago here we are today zero to the past so this is the Holocene but there was a long a hundred thousand year I say and there was a previous warrant period like now it was actually warmer the previous one there have been other warm periods in the past and this wasn't going on for a long time people are still debating why this is happening it you know that if you go back twenty thirty billion years ago this is not the same picture it's much more stable co2 levels were higher too well just again to point out the instability of climate this is a picture of John Muir John Muir was one of the founders of the Sierra Club he was a smart guy and in 1879 he made a special trip to Alaska to inspect Glacier Bay some of you may have been to Glacier Bay oh I'll show a picture of it but Glacier Bay was first charted I'll show you a picture and talk through it was first charted by Vancouver in the late 1700s 1760 to 1780 so his charts which were extremely good showed the bay full of ice right out to here to the Strait the coast of the Pacific Ocean so the Pacific Ocean is out this way here's a blow-up of the location in Alaska now ice has been rapidly shrinking and John Muir came to Glacier Bay in 1879 when this is when John Muir came so yes indeed the ice in Glacier Bay has melted but it all melted but almost all of it melted by 1879 when John Muir went there so it's true that glaciers are melting nobody's kidding you there but it has nothing to do with the industrial revolution it started a long time before there was an industrial revolution and exactly what has caused this is not clear you know some of it may have been a little temperature change much more likely I think it's changes in snowfall at the headwaters where they had whatever the right word is of the glaciers you know if you get less snow you get shorter glaciers there's nothing to feed them but anyway it's not connected with the Industrial Revolution okay so what's the fuss about the fuss about is co2 is inexorably going up so here's co2 levels I mentioned it's about 400 parts per million now sir about their to 2014 and supposedly this was to cause enormous warming but the blue here is temperature and in fact you know there was a cooling period up until almost 1980 then there was warming till about the year 2000 and then it's been flat or slightly cooling again since then so the actual observed temperatures don't look anything at all like co2 levels by the way this oscillation up and down and up and down is winter and summer when it's summer in the northern hemisphere where most of the land is all the plants start to grow the forests they suck out co2 lower the co2 over the whole world and so you have a summertime of low co2 and winter comes it's dark up there nothing grows the co2 recovers a little bit so there are these oscillations and on top of that is this upward drift some of which may be due to fossil fuel fuel burnings if you put all the fossil fuel that's burnt as co2 into the atmosphere however this would be increasing at twice the rate so about half of it is not making it to the atmosphere no-one most people think it's going into the oceans but even that is not completely clear here's another picture of the summer winter cycle so this is year going this way this is the northern hemisphere this is the southern hemisphere so you see these huge cycles of co2 levels up and down winter summer winter summer in the north much smaller in the south because there's precious little land in the southern hemisphere if you look at the globe most of the land is in the north there's a little bit of land South America Australia but it's mostly ocean in the southern hemisphere which does not have this property okay I mentioned historical levels this is the Cambrian era when we started getting really good fossils hard shell fossils 550 million years ago Ordovician Silurian geological eras and this is co2 the main point to notice here is the scale that the scale is in thousands of parts per million it's not in hundreds of parts per million so for most of the Earth's history co2 levels have not been measured in 400 parts per million or 300 they've been measured in 1000 2000 3000 you know and the earth was fine it was full of life dinosaurs goodness knows what there were even some of our ancestors back then didn't seem to mind alright so well what what is the physics well this is actually a pretty good picture from an Webb's a NASA website the earth would be unlivable without sunlight it would be much too cold and a little bit like Pluto you know out at the fringes of the solar system which is frigid cold because it doesn't get enough sunlight so we're lucky to have the Sun and the Sun warms the surface of the earths and you have to get rid of some of that heat or it would warm without limit so some of the heat is radiated back into earth as infrared radiation and if you look at the earth with infrared instruments from space it's glowing like a hot coal in a fireplace and that's the cooling radiation from the infrared rock NASA is about to launch some really interesting experiments to look for you know glowing earths out beyond Pluto they may be there no one has looked so you know no one is sure whether there might be lots of earth you know way out at great distances from the Sun anyway so the supposedly what co2 is going to do is greatly modify this cooling cycle so it'll be harder for the earth to cool and therefore in order to make up for that the surface is supposed to warm and so that's the essence of the argument yeah you have to understand a little bit about the way the Earth's atmosphere works yeah Earth's atmosphere has about 10 kilometers of troposphere this is the region of the earth where there's churning of air up and down clouds are forming rain is falling and so most of the heat is transferred from the surface upward not by radiation but by the motion of air especially air that's humid and that's carrying the latent heat of water so you can think of this first 10,000 meters first 10 kilometers is a little bit like a boiling pot of water it and unlike water is air so it gets thinner as you go up there's not so much weight on it so it decompresses and as it decompresses it cools down as you know so this is very basic thermodynamics and so for the engineers and physicists this is a part of the atmosphere where the entropy per per mole is almost the same that the surfaces is at the tropopause and then the tropopause there's atmosphere stops churning that's where airplanes like to fly so they try to get out of this churning so you get a smooth flight and up here where it's it's the stratosphere or so there's still a little bit of convection but very little in the stratosphere lots of left-right convection but very little up and down and then there's heating as you go higher in the stratosphere so the atmosphere warms up again this is ultraviolet light heating ozone and then it just continues up getting thinner and thinner as you go up so this is this is the Earth's atmosphere the earth that we live in and this is a little more detail about that churning that I mentioned the boiling of the troposphere it's actually somewhat organized and you have lots of air rising up over the tropics where the sun is shining hottest and it comes up carrying lots of water vapor so you have very massive thunderstorms along the equator in the tropics and some of it heads north and some of it head south by the time it gets up to the top here it's been stripped most of the water so it's very cold and very dry at these high levels and it's cooled and partly because it's radiated energy out to space here both from cloud tops and from co2 and from water vapor various other things then it comes down at about 30 degrees north or 30 degrees south as a very very dried dehumidified air this is the belt of deserts so this 30 degrees is where the Sahara Desert is it's the northern desert you know the Atacama Desert down here in South America is the mirror image and then there are other convection cells over em so this is a complicated planet that we live in and it's no wonder that you can get any answer you would like if someone asked you well how much you want me to warm the earth for you sir and you know well how about four degrees okay you got it and so that's not basically what's happened yeah I can assure you they don't they haven't gotten a clue of how to do it from first principles yeah all right well see you let's talk a little bit more about co2 co2 is a linear molecule it's got a carbon atom in the center and two oxygens at rest it's just a straight stick like this but it can vibrate and there are three atoms there are three modes of vibration and there's one in which the carbon moves to the right the two oxygens move to the left that's called the asymmetric stretch that absorbs and emits radiation very strongly but it's outside of the thermal emission spectrum of the earth so it has almost nothing to do with global warming the real villain I'd like to call this Satan's number this is the bending mode of co2 at 666 waves per centimeter that's the unit state people like to use for this region of the spectrum and that's what contributes to greenhouse warming along with many other things notably water vapor and clouds or the by far more important and finally it's got a symmetric stretch here where the carbon sits still and the two oxygens move left and right this actually doesn't absorb radiation at all so it's almost irrelevant except that it perturbs these others so if you want to learn more about this come to the physics I'm not going to say any more about it here except to say that if you now look at what this does the radiation what I'm showing here is what is the probability what is the fraction of radiation that is comes in at the top of the atmosphere that reaches the surface and/or that's absorbed I guess it absorbed here so going up it's absorbed so there's an atmospheric window where we look out on this clear day and we see the beautiful blue sky in the Sun and that this visible spectrum here this is wavelength here so these are wavelengths that you can see half a micron 5,000 angstroms there's another narrower winter out here in the infrared where the Earth tries to radiate so the earth is a warm body like a cold and a fireplace and it's trying to send its radiation out to space and some of that gets through this window and so the the allegation is that because co2 is at the edge of this window it will it will narrow this window and so the others can't cool as well and so it'll have to get hotter at the surface but you couldn't see already from this the big gorilla and all of this is not co2 this is a co2 absorption band it's mostly water so water this is the the rotational spectrum of water the fact of molecule is it's tumbling round and round this is the bending mode much like co2 of water there are higher modes out here but the basic physics has to do with the radiation transport and these molecules so let's talk about the facts so it is true that there's greenhouse warming that the earth you know if there were no greenhouse warming the earth would be too cold to live in even with the Sun it would get warm enough briefly during the day and then it would cool off immediately at night like being held to death in the desert so it would not be a nice place to live and so we're glad to have water co2 in the greenhouse effect and more ot co2 certainly will cause some warming so the issue is how much warming it's not it's not that it's impossible of course it's but 1/10 of a degree of warming is different from 10 degrees of forming and the real answer is probably about a half a degree between a half a degree in one degree forming centigrade degrees if you double co2 okay so most of the models predicted in the last 20 years we'd have had three tenths of a degree of warming 15 years going from 370 to 400 parts per million and the observing essentially zero it may actually be slightly negative so is there something Siri seriously wrong with the climate models they really don't work at all people know what ask me you know who are you to you know jump into this here you don't have a union card to be a climate scientist and so I like to point out that I was the co-author one of the very first books on Climate Sun before many of the alarmist climate scientists are even you know in grade school so in 1982 I was co-author of this book I had the part related to radiation transfer and so I've been interested in this for a long time on a very professional level and so here's how well I did this is me and my colleagues this is the warming we predicted and this red bar is what's observed so we were right in the middle of the pack we got it as wrong as everybody else yeah so I mean that gives me a certain amount of humility but in fact the observation showed the earth simply is not warming there there's something seriously wrong with these models and we can talk about this later you know there are all sorts of there's the last I looked there were 30 different observation the proposals of why this is happening none of them with the courage to say that you know the the basic reasons they've overestimated the sensitivity to co2 okay so but the press is noticing now this is from quite a left-wing German they're Spiegel and it says here as last year it says climate change researchers are scratching their heads about the pawls in global warming you know so this the black bars are the observed temperature of the earth and and the various color bars are the fancy computer models all showing rapid warming observations showing no more I mean this is a couple years later now it's still just the same in fact it's pulling out from below the lower edge of this now so uh it's not working so this these are satellite measurements of the temperature one problem in all of this is getting reliable data because a lot of the data is fiddled way is to try and make it that what the politicians would like and so it's amazing if you look at the data for the temperature to the US today and you look at a similar copy twenty years ago they're not the same at all you know they they for example the Dust Bowl has gotten a degree or two cooler than it used to be yeah reminds me of you know the old Soviet Union you use they used to joke the hardest thing to predict as the pass because they were right okay but anyway satellites show no change also and it's by the way this is not the surface with a satellite what you do is you look down at basically radar emissions coming up from the oxygen in the atmosphere so you're doing radiometry on 60 gigahertz if there any engineers here they'd know what I'm talking about and so that only allows you to get down to maybe a few thousand kilometers and at that altitude it should be warming faster so warming should be greater at in the lower troposphere than the surface but actually there's no warming there either and this is where you really ought to look it's not there you can see several things here's that a big El Nino spike that was 1998 one of the biggest El Ninos in the last few decades there's a lesser one we had not so many years ago there may be another one brewing later this year it's not clear it helped to give some rain to California if we would show up but an El Nino you read a lot about it let me just briefly explain what it is normally here is the Pacific Ocean there's North America there's Florida here we are in Raleigh up here you just barely made it on the map there's Australia Indonesia there are persistent trade winds normally along the equator blowing from South America toward Australia you know from east to west it's because of this Coriolis force I mentioned to you earlier that the court doesn't understand and but every now and then the trade wind stops and then all this warm water that's been shoved up against Australia drifts back sloshes back to South America to Mexico and and we have a huge patch of warm water that used to not be there and so the whole earth looks warmer during an El Nino just because there's more exposed warm water on the surface of the ocean than there normally is you know occasionally you get extremely strong trades Lonnie knows when the yeah you really drive all the warm water down here and then the earth looks a lot cooler of course the heat is the same it's just how much is exposed that you can see from outer space ok well let's talk about agriculture so I when I give this talk and many parts of America people don't know much about agriculture but I hope people do here so this what crop is this what's this crop so I've been very good and has it been genetically engineered yes yes yes yes that's good good good all right they're good people all right so they you have to know what soybeans look like but the fact that there are no weeds means it's been genetically engineered yeah okay so that's Roundup Ready okay well here's what happens when you test growing plants with more co2 this is sure we did so at the University of Arizona this is ambient co2 levels of pine tree I've forgotten which for idea it's not blah blah and Moncrieff by 150 300 450 and you can see trees love it you know all plants love it there's the actual experimental setup that you surround it with these polyethylene things that let the sunlight in and you measure the growth rate these are various crop plants ambient co2 a hundred percent and here's a camp plant is something like a cactus or a or a pineapple there's the only thing I can think of we actually eat that's account it's an unusual photosynthetic path but most of our plants are called c3 and so that would be things like wheat soybeans there are a few very important plants that are c4 plants and one of those is corn that's a c4 plant and and sugar cane is also so no matter what the photosynthetic pathway is all of them do much better if you increase co2 by this is roughly doubling here not quite doubling and this is far from saturated if you double again you get even more yield and here's the reason for that if you look at a plant leaf the plant gets its co2 from the air it doesn't get it from the roots not like nitrogen or potassium or phosphorus it has to get it from the air and so in the leaf there are little holes Samata I think that is Greek for a little mouth and so into these stomata co2 molecules diffuse and the molecular machinery of the plant grabs the co2 molecule fixes it turns it into sugar cellulose or something that it needs carbon for but for every co2 that diffuses in there roughly a hundred water molecules that diffuse out so the plant has as a chemical plant something growing has this trade off it has to make that it doesn't want to dry out by losing all of its water through the stomata but it still needs to get enough co2 to grow and so plant saw are extremely sensitive to the levels of co2 so if you double co2 levels you find that the number of stomata it don't goes down by a factor of two so if you were to Samata and so that's one of the ways that we can estimate past co2 levels on the earth that you go to a peat bog or something and this is an actual picture from a peat bog this is a dwarf birch leaf and this is actually a photograph of the leaf and this was a measurement you could read it up here in Denmark and by Counting stomata this guy inferred that at that time co2 levels were about what they are today 400 parts per million it's a very controversial paper people can't figure out if that's not the explanation what is it anyway so Samata are very important and it's why plants do so much better with more co2 stomata is a bad thing to have other things being equal you don't want them because they draw you out and so you know if you're a greenhouse operator you can go to the internet you can buy a co2 generator and it it turns out the cheapest source of co2 is not a bottle of co2 it's a it's a tank of propane so if you're running a greenhouse you buy propane you put it into this thing you you burn the propane you throw away the heat and you put the exhaust into the into the greenhouse to make your plants go better and get a better price for your product it reminds me of William Faulkner's Russia recipe for hush puppies you know you go catch a bunch of cat there so you get a big pot of oil Ebola catfish and then you make the batter and you batter the catfish and dump the hush puppies and then you throw away the catfish in you so that's sort of how this works right all right so you look down from satellites you can measure the chlorophyll on the earth and what this is the last 20 years I think this you can look this up here here's the reference but you notice there's greening all over the earth so this is a measure of the greening but especially in arid region so the west of India the Sahel southern you know edge of the Sahara Western Australia and almost certainly this is the fact that these plants here they have measurably fewer stomata so they don't need so much water as they used to need and and you can test that in labs there's central Turkey it's dry there too so co2 far from being a pollutant is actually making the world a better place well you know people keep talking about starvation this was when norm this was when Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb he said the earth would be a shambles by now we had all been extinct you know nothing he predicted in the book was correct except that his his his authors now chief science advisor for the president his co-author John Holdren yeah so that's their that's your reward for predicting everything wrong but but anyway this is wheat yield in India versus time and it's increased by more than a factor of 10 is still going up you know and so in fact India has a problem with wheat if they have a surplus you know there's not a big enough market to eat all the wheat in India today and so they're a major player in the world export market for wheat now and and they were all supposed to be starving to death today yes what what nonsense well getting Charlie you keep hearing about extreme weather well here's the facts this is supposedly more co2 is causing the weather to be more extreme well the weather is never terribly stable but this is tornadoes per year this is today if this is going back decade by decade this is northern hemisphere snow cover no change really no trend this is hurricanes no trend you know drought years wet years you know the climate changes you know I when I was killed in North Carolina there used to be a proverb you know what's impossible for God and the the answer was to please a farmer you know whatever the year is it's so hot it's too cold it's too dry it's duet you know you never can get the climate right you know okay pH you hear about ocean acidification let me just this is a actual experiment where they took a ship and sail from Hawaii to Alaska measured the pH of the ocean the whole way this is the pH D you see the pH of the ocean for the chemists in the crowd it varies from way above 8 you know in the near the equator to down to about 7.3 or so it's still alkaline over the entire range it's very depth dependent so up and down as the top of the ocean this is the bottom of the ocean this is a why this is Alaska here and even on a single day in a patch of ocean where the sun is shining on that the ph level goes up and down by roughly one unit just because of photosynthesis you know during the day you suck all the co2 out to make sure as algae and so that you know there's the there's not enough co2 so it gets very alkaline and then at night it gets acid again so it fluctuates up and down so it's nonsense sea level well sea level rose enormous lee when the ice sheets melt did 12,000 10,000 years ago but it's quite stable now it's increasing of at a rate of 2 or 3 millimeters per year there's no change whatever in that rate as there's no sign of any effect of co2 on that rate here here's uh slightly blown-up version of the sea level rise and it fluctuates it was actually falling up until about 1850 this was the end of the Little Ice Age you know when it was really very cold everywhere and sea levels were dropping then this is us emissions of co2 you can see that we peaked in the early 2000s because of the switch to natural gas so that we're burning less coal natural gas so we're the only major country in the world in which co2 level emission they're going down and that because there's a fracking revolution this is comparison to the other countries this is China this only goes to 2010 China is now more than double the US so it doesn't matter what any other country does as long as China and India is close behind don't slow down I don't see any reason for China or India to slow down they need to become prosperous and I'm all for that they should put on precipitators you know to get out the fly-ash and they shouldn't burn high sulfur coal there's obvious things they shouldn't do but co2 is not one of the issues okay so here's the summary policies - so co2 emissions are based on their flawed computer models we exaggerate warming by factors for two or three more co2 is an overall benefit so the actual the mitigation schemes actually do harm they don't not only don't do any good they actually harm what we could have and so closing thought this is my friend Schopenhauer all truth passes through three stages first its ridicule second its violently opposed and third is accept it is self-evident I think right now we're somewhere between you know 1 & 2 here there that day between ridicule and violent opposition for example if you read that Ridley's op-ed last week in the Wall Street Journal on co2 but more or less the talk I just gave he sent me an email yesterday saying that you know he had just been mercifully hammered you know by all of the right thinking people from you know from the co2 cult and so I saw the violent opposition is certainly true right now 100 right does that literally mean that the chemical with the 100 every one part of the million that goes up it's equal to 100 parts co2 going up I'm saying that yes but you know what they don't tell you is that co2 is now heavily saturated in that it's done most of the warming it can't possibly do so if you look at this this is warming this way this is co2 Vince Li the curve goes up in its flattened out and so the you know if you were to look at the co2 molecule at the beginning at the same concentration that says this super molecule you mentioned they would have almost the same potentials so it has to do with the fact that co2 is in its saturation region water vapor clouds are the major thing right although it's hard to get even close to those what's that where is my thing is a little bit like the gentleman's molecule here it's far from saturated so you measure methane and parts per billion whereas co2 you measure parts per million so there's a thousand times less methane and since it's in an unsaturated region there's not very much chocolate so a little goes a long way so I indeed a little methane cause it for one but nothing is right in the middle of the water the edge of the water absorption band so it has a hard time competing with water vapor another big difference with methane is that nothing doesn't live very long in the atmosphere before it's oxidized you come collide with an O H radical and it gets converted to co2 and so it's unlike co2 which lives for a long time you know it gets absorbed in the ocean but it can come back well ozone again it's very unstable you know where we may have that on the surface and yes it's similar to that it's an unsaturated molecule it's an unsaturated absorption but ozone has much more serious issues in global warming you know if you get too much of something you're wrong their lives and felt like as opposed to methane which causes you no harm or co2 causes you feel Harmon its own really about choose up your you know your inside yeah how do you think the public debate is going to play itself out how do you think the public debate is going to play off well I don't know I mean it's kind of interesting some politicians have bet their careers on you know sort of the green support and Al Gore was one of the first but he wasn't the only one in Australia they made that bad and the government was resoundingly voted out of office just last year six or eight months ago so at least the experiment has been tried in Australia so it was a disaster for the Greenies you know they lost control of the government yeah yes well uh there there's lots of people who'd uh take violent exception you know I I occasionally get a postcard with a death threat you know I put it in the garbage and phone calls you know to me and my family the people that I respect you know fellow physicist for the most part engineers are quite open you know many of them agree with me so I think I may have said before that this idea that the scientific community is fully aboard it nothing could be further from the truth yeah they're all I think they're they're quite worried about the long-term effects on scientific credibility

Channel: John Locke Foundation

Views: 546,864

Keywords: John Locke Foundation, North Carolina, Carolina Journal, William Happer

Id: M8iEEO2UIbA

Length: 50min 19sec (3019 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/NeedScienceProof]

If CO2 is "pollution", then greenhouses should be outlawed.

[u/Pubboy68]

I’ve posted this a dozen times. He’s brilliant.

[u/RoadDog69420]

This is good stuff.

[u/spikedpsycho]

If co2 is pollution, dry ice is crystal meth

[u/vap0rtranz]

Dr Happer isn't respected by the "real" climate scientists so this won't matter. Working on the physics of lasers, like Happer does, just isn't good enough.

I watched his lecture awhile back and he makes some decent points. Still waiting on a scientific debate with him from the other side.