RUTHFULLY YOURS

Carbon dioxide, we’ve been told over and again, is the enemy that must be subdued if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming. It is, however, a faulty premise. Physics, not politics, tells us that man’s CO2 emissions will not cause catastrophic climate change nor an increase in extreme weather.

“The common belief that CO2 is the main driver of climate change and the EPA Endangerment Finding assertion that ‘elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated’ to endanger the public health and welfare are scientifically false,” conclude the authors of a new paper.

Richard Lindzen and William Happer are not political hacks. They are serious researchers with extensive experience and robust academic backgrounds. Lindzen is emeritus professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Happer a Princeton University emeritus physics professor. What they have to say is important in a world that is sodden with climate-related myths and folk tales.

While Democrats and their leftist counterparts in other advanced nations have gone to war on carbon dioxide, Lindzen and Happer argue that cutting CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and eliminating fossil fuel use “will have a trivial effect on temperature.”

How can they say this? After all, don’t 97% of scientists agree that humanity’s use of fossil fuels is causing our world to overheat? (They don’t, more on that later.)

Lindzen and Happer confidently make those statements because “unscientific evidence is the fundamental basis” behind the rush to net zero GHG emissions as well as the EPA’s claim that “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated to endanger the public health and to endanger the public welfare of current and future generations.”

They use the term “unscientific” because the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “is government controlled and thus only publishes government opinions, not science.” The summaries for policymakers that are produced by the IPCC are “approved line by line by member governments,” which “override any inconsistent conclusions scientists write for IPCC reports.”

The pair cite a 1995 report that was rewritten to say “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” and was the opposite of the language from a draft composed by independent scientists. Not only has the IPCC failed to correct this fabrication, it “has repeatedly reported the same false science ever since.”

Inconsistent with the climate narrative but consistent with reality, Lindzen and Happer also point out that CO2 is not only a weak greenhouse gas, its impact decreases as its atmospheric levels rise.

“It becomes a less effective greenhouse gas at higher concentrations because of what in physics is called ‘saturation.’ Each additional increase of CO2 in the atmosphere causes a smaller and smaller change in ‘radiative forcing,’ or in temperature.”

Simply put, “the common assumption that carbon dioxide is in the IPCC’s words ‘the main driver of climate change’ is scientifically false.”

Now, back to the 97% claim. It relies on the dubious assertion that the acknowledgment by many that man’s CO2 emissions have a mild, harmless influence on the climate is the same as believing that man is causing a catastrophe. These are conflicting positions yet they are lumped together in the 97% for political purposes.

“The assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research,” former Heartland Institute president and chief executive Joseph Bast and University of Alabama in Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer wrote in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal.

Furthermore, science is not determined by consensus, Lindzen and Happer remind us, it is guided by experiment and observations.

The climate change tale is based on such a wobbly foundation, and its adherents screech so loudly and shade the truth so often that we can’t help but believe they know they’ve been intentionally misleading the public.

Maybe we’ve reached a Solzhenitsyn moment in which we know they’re lying, they know they’re lying, and they even know that we know they’re lying. And they still don’t care, because for them it’s all about raw political power and the acquisition of other people’s money.