Claim: climate “alarmism” is a hoax, carbon dioxide is good—and the victim of a conspiracy
The climate change denier on President Trump’s Security Council who possesses the most conspicuously solid scientific credentials is one William Happer, who received a PhD in physics at Princeton in 1964, and attained high standing in the physics community for his work on optics and atomic physics—not, however, climate. His contrarian stance on climate change has some fellow physicists scratching their heads, muttering “who got to this guy?”
In fairness, one should note that Happer does not exactly dispute the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. What he disputes is that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and the resultant climate change will be as severe as “alarmists” claim . . . and to the slight extent that CO2 does modify climate, it’s a good thing. And that good thing, in his view, is under malicious assault. He is prone to such provocative catchphrases as “the demonization of CO2,” “we are in a CO2 famine,” and “if plants could vote, they’d vote for coal.”
Yes! Plants would vote for coal! Or not. Plants were thriving in the Carboniferous Period, which is when they were also dying en masse, piling up in peat which was eventually compressed into what we call fossil fuels today: coal, petroleum, and natural gas. It was also a time of heavy competition between plant species in what we might call the Survival of the Vegetative Fittest—so that for any individual plant or species, the Carboniferous might not have looked quite like Paradise on Earth. It might have seemed, to some light-starved, struggling seedling on the forest floor enshrouded in the gloom shed by a dense canopy of enormous trees, more like a dungeon.