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.
Plants became coal—and potentially, the plants we see around us today could also become coal in couple of hundred million years. Just why that would persuade plants to vote for coal is an odd notion—it’s a bit like voting for the remains of your loved ones that will end up in some paleontologist’s lab in the year 200,000,000 A.D. Worse, because at least the human remains should retain some individuality, whereas the plants of the Carboniferous were crushed into featureless masses of solid, liquid, and gaseous stuff.
I’m picking on Happer’s language not just to make a joke of one of his catchy jokes. It’s to point to his penchant for provocative expressions that offer clues to a mindset radicalized by a sense of righteousness. The organization he helped establish to fight climate change consensus is named the CO2 Coalition. Its advocacy for carbon dioxide is built on the premise that, since CO2 is essential to plant growth and is thus vital to life on Earth, you can’t have too much of it.* Thus you will find that the CO2 coalition is funded by such fossil fuel boosters as the Mercer family and the Koch brothers.
I mean, it’s weird. Right? Having a coalition named for a molecule. I don’t know of any other molecular compound or element that has its own coalition. Uranium, like CO2, is under fire from environmentalists, but there is no U Coalition. Some say there’s a plundering of phosphorus that could lead to critical shortages, but there is no P Coalition. (I’m cheating here, since phosphorus does not exist in a free form in nature, but rather in compounds such as calcium phosphate (Ca3(PO4)2), since it is so highly chemically reactive. Nonetheless, the naming principle holds: there is no Ca3(PO4)2 Coalition. Yet.)
Happer is quoted in a Guardian article saying “the demonization of CO2 . . . really differs little from the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the Soviet extermination of class enemies or [the] ISIL slaughter of infidels.”
Whoa! OK, Happer may have been unfairly rejected by a number of climate scientists, but “differs little from the Nazi persecution of the Jews?” It’s not just that Happer sounds persecuted, but he has, by implicit parallelism, personified carbon dioxide as a sentient victim.
I’m not saying that Happer is crazy enough to think that carbon dioxide is sentient. (Although in his dreams he might to go hand-in-hand with CO2 out into the world as champions of profligate plant growth.) I am saying that his identification with CO2 suggests that he has become more than a little paranoid on behalf of a single chemical compound. Else why “demonization of CO2?” Why “CO2 famine?” Why “the Soviet extermination of class enemies?” The emotional charge of this language suggests a degree of instability that makes you question whether Happer, for all his atomic physics expertise, can have an objective view of climate change.
In Happer’s mind, the pro-CO2 campaign has become bizarrely personal. Happer’s midbrain is driving the show; his forebrain is its servant. An analogy can be found with Linus Pauling’s Vitamin C crusade. A groundbreaking chemist and twice Nobel prize-winner, Pauling took it into his head late in life that megadoses of Vitamin C conferred disease resistance and could even cure cancer. The more evidence that accumulated countering his claims about Vitamin C , the more strenuously Pauling argued his case and maligned his critics.
CO2 Paranoia—it’s contagious
Another quasi-paranoid view among the ranks of the CO2 Coalition is evinced by its chairman. Patrick Moore. He compares Happer to Galileo, Darwin, Mendel, and Einstein, embattled figures having “to fight against a so-called consensus.”
These examples widely miss the mark. Galileo was persecuted not by other scientists, but by the Catholic Church. Likewise, Darwin’s theory of evolution, once it became well known, enjoyed appreciation (along with some niggling) among most scientists, although not by much of the clergy. Gregor Mendel didn’t have to “fight” for his work, because it was not known well enough to elicit opposition during his lifetime. When it did come to light 16 years after Mendel’s death, it was soon embraced by most geneticists, and hardly met with a firestorm of criticism. Einstein’s experience was complicated by the breadth and depth of his early work (see Einstein’s Miracle Year) that earned support from those who understood it early on (such as the great Max Planck) and, for a few years, neglect and confused opposition by those who did not. ** There was never anything remotely comparable to the situation in climate science today, where contrarians such as Happer make up 3% of the climate science community versus a 97% consensus among the rest.
In sum, Patrick Moore’s four examples of lone speakers of scientific truth fighting persecution by prejudiced majorities are wholly disproportionate. (We might add that the 97% do not constitute a “so-called consensus,” they ARE a consensus.) Moore’s examples are part of the narrative of victimization for which Happer is the chief spokesman, and those comparisons surely came from the ramblings of Happer himself. No surprise that Happer’s narcissism has him comparing himself to some of the giants of science. But as a onetime co-founder of Greenpeace, Moore should know better.
This is not to say that Happer is wrong. It is to say, first, that it’s extremely likely that he’s wrong, and secondly, on the off chance that he is right on some counts, his conviction is mixed up with a paranoid mindset that calls his objectivity into question. That he has found his niche in a small coterie within the Trump administration is further evidence that climate change denial is indeed largely political, and more emotionally charged than its adherents would like to admit.
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* Water, of course, is also vital to life, but floods, tidal waves, and rising seas demonstrate that sometimes you can have too much of it. Maybe that’s why there’s no H2O coalition—the cause is lost from the start because water has clearly proven itself to be inimical to civilization.
** There are still cranks today who deny the reality, not just of the General Theory of Relativity—which is mind-bendingly mathematically complex (for which see Einstein’s field equations)—but of the more straightforward Special Theory that predated it. (Happer is not among these cranks.) Early on, the opposition to Einstein got entwined with conspiracy theories that warped the views even of otherwise capable scientists; the parallels between climate change denial today and the conspiracy-theory-laden opposition to Relativity in the early Twentieth are suggestive. To be fair to Happer, we must acknowledge that climate science models are probabilistic and statistical, as opposed to the incontrovertible mathematics underpinning Einstein’s theories.