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MORE CARBON DIOXIDE WILL BENEFIT MANKIND |
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Written by William Happer
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Thursday, 26 February 2009 |
Testimony before the Senate Environment & Public Works
Committee on February 25, 2009
Madam Chairman and members, thank
you for the opportunity to appear before the Committee on Environment and
Public Works to testify on Climate Change. My name is William Happer, and I am
the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton
University.
I am not a climatologist, but I
don't think any of the other witnesses are either. I do work in the related
field of atomic, molecular and optical physics. I have spent my professional
life studying the interactions of visible and infrared radiation with gases
- one of the main physical phenomena behind the greenhouse effect.
I have published over 200 papers in peer reviewed scientific
journals. I am a member of a number of professional organizations, including
the American Physical Society and the National Academy of Sciences.
I have done extensive consulting work for the US Government
and Industry. I also served as the Director of Energy Research at the
Department of Energy (DOE) from 1990 to 1993, where I supervised all of DOE's
work on climate change.
I have come here today as a concerned citizen to express my
personal views, and those of many like me, about US
climate-change policy. These are not official views of my main employer, Princeton
University, nor of any other
organization with which I am associated.
Let me state clearly where I probably agree with the other
witnesses. We have been in a period of global warming over the past 200 years,
but there have been several periods, like the last ten years, when the warming
has ceased, and there have even been periods of substantial cooling, as from
1940 to 1970.
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have
increased from about 280 to 380 parts per million over the past 100 years. The
combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, has contributed to the
increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. And finally, increasing concentrations of
CO2 in the atmosphere will cause the earth's surface to warm.
The key question is: will the net effect of the warming, and
any other effects of the CO2, be good or bad for humanity?
I believe that the
increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind. I
predict that future historians will look back on this period much as we now
view the period just before the passage of the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution to prohibit "the
manufacturing, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors."
At the time, the 18th amendment seemed to be exactly the
right thing to do - who wanted to be in league with demon rum? It was the 1917
version of saving the planet.
More than half the states enacted prohibition laws before
the 18th amendment was ratified. Only one state, Rhode
Island, voted against the 18th amendment. Two states,
Illinois and Indiana,
never got around to voting and all the rest voted for it.
There were many thoughtful people, including a majority of
Rhode Islanders, who thought that prohibition might do more harm than good. But
they were completely outmatched by the temperance movement, whose motives and
methods had much in common with the movement to stop climate change.
Deeply sincere people thought they were saving humanity from
the evils of alcohol, just as many people now sincerely think they are saving
humanity from the evils of CO2. Prohibition was a mistake, and our country has
probably still not fully recovered from the damage it did.
Institutions like organized crime got their start in that
era. Drastic limitations on CO2 are likely to damage our country in analogous
ways.
But what about the
frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2 that we keep hearing
about? In a word, they are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits
of prohibition were wildly exaggerated.
Let me turn now to the science and try to explain why I and
many scientists like me are not alarmed by increasing levels of CO2.
The earth's climate really is strongly affected by the
greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes
real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would
be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life.
However, at least 90%
of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit
player.
There is little argument in the scientific community that a
direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the
earth's temperature -- on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2
will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2
in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it
can.
It is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when
you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a
windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC
[United Nations InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change] thinks that this
extra jacket is water vapor and clouds.
Since most of the greenhouse effect for the earth is due to
water vapor and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water's
contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about. The
buzz word here is that there is "positive feedback."
With each passing year, experimental observations further
undermine the claim of a large positive feedback from water. In fact,
observations suggest that the feedback is close to zero and may even be
negative. That is, water vapor and clouds
may actually diminish the already small global warming expected from CO2, not
amplify it.
The evidence here comes from satellite measurements of
infrared radiation escaping from the earth into outer space, from measurements
of sunlight reflected from clouds and from measurements of the temperature the
earth's surface or of the troposphere - the roughly 10 km thick layer of the atmosphere
above the earth's surface that is filled with churning air and clouds, heated
from below at the earth's surface, and cooled at the top by radiation into
space.
But the climate is
warming and CO2 is increasing. Doesn't this prove that CO2 is causing global
warming through the greenhouse effect? No, the current warming period began
about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an
appreciable increase of CO2.
There have been similar and even larger warmings several
times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier
warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels.
The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural
causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a
slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.
The climate has changed many times in the past with no help
by mankind. Recall that the Romans grew grapes in Britain
around the year 100, and Viking settlers prospered on small farms in Greenland
for several centuries during the Medieval Climate Optimum around 1100.
People have had an urge to control the climate throughout
history so I suppose it is no surprise that we are at it again today. For
example, in June of 1644, the Bishop of Geneva led a flock of believers to the
face of a glacier that was advancing "by over a musket shot" every day. The
glacier would soon destroy a village. The Bishop and his flock prayed over the
glacier, and it is said to have stopped.
The poor Vikings had long since abandoned Greenland
where the advancing glaciers and cooling climate proved much less susceptible
to prayer.
Sometimes the
obsession for control of the climate got a bit out of hand, as in the Aztec
state, where the local scientific/religious establishment of the year 1500 had
long since announced that the debate was over and that at least 20,000 human
sacrifices a year were needed to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, and to
stop climate change.
The widespread dissatisfaction of the people who were
unfortunate enough to be the source of these sacrifices played an important
part in the success of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
The existence of climate variability in the past has long
been an embarrassment to those who claim that all climate change is due to man
and that man can control it. When I was a schoolboy, my textbooks on earth
science showed a prominent "medieval warm period" at the time the Vikings
settled Greenland, followed by a vicious "little ice
age" that drove them out.
So I was very surprised when I first saw the celebrated
"hockey stick curve," in the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. I could
hardly believe my eyes. Both the little ice age and the Medieval Warm Period
were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000
had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot
up like the blade on a hockey stick.
This was far from an obscure detail, and the hockey stick
was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. We now know
that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of
incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical
analysis. There really was a little ice age and there really was a medieval
warm period that was as warm or warmer than today.
I bring up the hockey stick as a particularly clear example
that the IPCC summaries for policy makers are not dispassionate statements of
the facts of climate change. It is a shame, because many of the IPCC chapters
are quite good.
The whole hockey-stick
episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell's Ministry of Information in the
novel "1984:" "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls
the past, controls the future."
The IPCC has made no
serious attempt to model the natural variations of the earth's temperature in
the past. Whatever caused these large past variations, it was not due to people
burning coal and oil. If you can't model the past, where you know the answer
pretty well, how can you model the future?
Many of us are aware that we are living in an ice age, where
we have hundred-thousand-year intervals of big continental glaciers that cover
much of the land area of the northern hemisphere, interspersed with relatively
short interglacial intervals like the one we are living in now.
By looking at ice cores from the Greenland
and Antarctic ice sheets, one can estimate past temperatures and atmospheric
concentrations of CO2. Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2
concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises,
the temperature also rises.
Doesn't this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2?
Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes
up. There is a delay between a
temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years.
This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because
of the fundamental concept of causality. A cause must precede its effect.
For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o'clock, and by about 7 o'clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I
have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to
me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o'clock because the house got warm at 7 o'clock.
Sure, temperature and gas burning are correlated, just like
temperature and atmospheric levels of CO2. But the thing that changes first is
the cause. In the case of the ice cores, the
cause of increased CO2 is almost certainly the warming of the oceans.
The oceans release dissolved CO2 when they warm up, just
like a glass of beer rapidly goes flat in a warm room. If not CO2, then what
really causes the warming at the end of the cold periods of ice ages? A great
question and one of the reasons I strongly support research in climate.
I keep hearing about the "pollutant CO2," or about
"poisoning the atmosphere" with CO2, or about minimizing our "carbon
footprint." This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth
pondering: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt
thought."
CO2 is not a pollutant
and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by
depriving "pollutant" and "poison" of their original meaning.
Our exhaled breath contains about 4% CO2. That is 40,000
parts per million, or about 100 times the current atmospheric concentration.
CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth.
Commercial greenhouse operators often use CO2 as a
fertilizer to improve the health and growth rate of their plants. Plants, and
our own primate ancestors evolved when the levels of atmospheric CO2 were about 1000 ppm, a level that we will
probably not reach by burning fossil fuels, and far above our current level of
about 380 ppm.
We try to keep CO2 levels in our US Navy submarines no
higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels.
Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels.
We are all aware that "the green revolution" has increased
crop yields around the world. Part of this wonderful development is due to
improved crop varieties, better use of mineral fertilizers, herbicides, etc.
But no small part of the yield improvement has come from increased atmospheric
levels of CO2.
Plants photosynthesize more carbohydrates when they have
more CO2. Plants are also more drought-tolerant with more CO2, because they
need not "inhale" as much air to get the CO2 needed for photosynthesis.
At the same time, the plants need not "exhale" as much water
vapor when they are using air enriched in CO2. Plants decrease the number of
stomata or air pores on their leaf surfaces in response to increasing
atmospheric levels of CO2. They are adapted to changing CO2 levels and they
prefer higher levels than those we have at present.
If we really were to decrease our current level of CO2 of
around 400 ppm to the 270 ppm that prevailed a few hundred years ago, we would
lose some of the benefits of the green revolution.
Crop yields will
continue to increase as CO2 levels go up, since we are far from the optimum
levels for plant growth. Commercial greenhouse operators are advised to add
enough CO2 to maintain about 1000 ppm around their plants. Indeed, economic
studies like those of Dr. Robert Mendelsohn at Yale University project that moderate warming is an overall benefit to mankind because
of higher agricultural yields and many other reasons.
I remember being forced to read Voltaire's novel, Candide, when I was young. You recall
that Dr. Pangloss repeatedly assured young Candide that he was living in "the
best of all possible worlds," presumably also with the best of all CO2
concentrations.
That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2
concentrations seems to be a tacit assumption of the IPCC executive summaries
for policy makers.
Enormous effort and imagination have gone into showing that
increasing concentrations of CO2 will be catastrophic, cities will be flooded
by sea-level rises that are ten or more times bigger than even IPCC predicts,
there will be mass extinctions of species, billions of people will die, tipping
points will render the planet a desert.
A few months ago I read that global warming will soon bring
on a devastating epidemic of kidney stones. If you write down all the ills
attributed to global warming you fill up a very thick book.
Much is made about
tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever devastating the populations of
temperate climates because of the burning of fossil fuels and the subsequent
warming of the earth. Many people who actually work with tropical diseases,
notably Dr. Paul Reiter, a specialist on tropical diseases, have pointed out
how silly all of this is.
Perhaps I can add a few bits of history to illustrate this
point. One of the first military expenditures of the Continental Congress in
1775 was $300 to purchase quinine for the Continental Army and to mitigate the
effects of malaria.
The Continental Congress moved from the then Capital of the
United States , Philadelphia, to my home town of Princeton, New Jersey, in the
summer of 1783 for two reasons. The first was that the Congress had not yet
paid many soldiers of the Revolutionary War their promised wages, and
disgruntled veterans were wandering up and down the streets of Philadelphia.
Secondly, there were outbreaks of malaria in cities as far
north as Boston. The Congress knew
you were less likely to catch malaria in Princeton than
in Philadelphia.
In 1793 there was not only malaria, but a horrendous
outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia.
Many thousands of people died in a city with a population of about 50,000. And
I should point out that Philadelphia
was a bit cooler then than now, since the little ice age was just coming to an
end.
Controlling tropical diseases and many other diseases has little
to do with temperature, and everything to do with curtailing the factors that
cause the spread - notably mosquitoes in the case of malaria and yellow fever.
Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come
from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to
mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the
atmosphere.
It is true that
climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers.
But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them
predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten
years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite
observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative.
Modelers have been wrong before. One of the most famous
modeling disputes involved the physicist William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin,
and the naturalist Charles Darwin.
Lord Kelvin was a great believer in models and differential
equations. Charles William Darwin was not
particularly facile with mathematics, but he took observations very seriously.
For evolution to produce the variety of living and fossil species that Darwin
had observed, the earth needed to have spent hundreds of millions of years with
conditions not very different from now.
With his mathematical models, Kelvin rather pompously
demonstrated that the earth must have been a hellish ball of molten rock only a
few tens of millions of years ago, and that the sun could not have been shining
for more than about 30 million years. Kelvin was actually modeling what he
thought was global and solar cooling.
I am sorry to say that a majority of his fellow physicists
supported Kelvin. Poor Darwin
removed any reference to the age of the earth in later editions of the "Origin
of the Species." But Darwin was
right the first time, and Kelvin was wrong. Kelvin thought he knew everything
but he did not know about the atomic nucleus, radioactivity, and nuclear
reactions, all of which invalidated his elegant modeling calculations.
This brings up the frequent assertion that there is a
consensus behind the idea that there is an impending disaster from climate
change, and that it may already be too late to avert this catastrophe, even if
we stop burning fossil fuels now. We are told that only a few flat-earthers
still have any doubt about the calamitous effects of continued CO2 emissions.
There are a number of answers to this assertion.
First, what is correct
in science is not determined by consensus but by experiment and observations.
Historically, the consensus is often
wrong, and I just mentioned the incorrect consensus of modelers about the
age of the earth and the sun.
During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia
the medical consensus was that you could cure almost anything by bleeding the
patient. Benjamin Rush, George Washington's Surgeon General during the War of
Independence, and a brave man, stayed in Philadelphia
throughout the yellow fever epidemic.
He worked tirelessly to save the stricken by bleeding them,
the consensus treatment of the day. A few cautious observers noticed that you
were more likely to survive the yellow fever without the services of the great
man. But Dr. Rush had plenty of high level-friends and he was backed up by the
self-evident consensus, so he went ahead with his ministrations. In summary, a
consensus is often wrong.
Secondly, I do not
think there is a consensus about an impending climate crisis. I personally
certainly don't believe we are facing a crisis unless we create one for
ourselves, as Benjamin Rush did by bleeding his patients. Many others, wiser
than I am, share my view.
The number of those
with the courage to speak out is growing. There may be an illusion of
consensus. Like the temperance movement one hundred years ago, the
climate-catastrophe movement has enlisted the mass media, the leadership of
scientific societies, the trustees of charitable foundations, and many other
influential people to their cause.
Just as editorials used to fulminate about the slippery path
to hell behind the tavern door, hysterical op-ed's lecture us today about the
impending end of the planet and the need to stop climate change with bold
political action.
Many distinguished scientific journals now have editors who
further the agenda of climate-change alarmism. Research papers with scientific
findings contrary to the dogma of climate calamity are rejected by reviewers,
many of whom fear that their research funding will be cut if any doubt is cast
on the coming climate catastrophe.
When the Romans invaded Scotland
in the year 83, the great Scottish chieftain Calgacus is quoted as saying "They
make a desert and call it peace." If you have the power to stifle dissent, you
can indeed create the illusion of peace or consensus. The Romans of today have made impressive inroads into climate science. Certainly, it is a bit
unnerving to read statements of Dr. James Hansen in the Congressional Record
that climate skeptics are guilty of "high crimes against humanity and nature."
Even elementary school teachers and writers of children's
books are enlisted to terrify our children and to promote the idea of impending
climate doom. Having observed the education of many children, including my own,
I am not sure how effective the effort will be. Many children seem to do just
the opposite of what they are taught.
Nevertheless, children
should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.
Many of you may know that in 2007 a British
Court ruled that if Al Gore's book, "An
Inconvenient Truth," was used in public schools, the children had to be told of
eleven particularly troubling inaccuracies.
You can easily find a list of the inaccuracies on the
internet, but I will mention one. The court ruled that it was not possible to
attribute hurricane Katrina to CO2. Indeed, had we taken a few of the many
billions of dollars we have been spending on climate change research and
propaganda and fixed the dykes and pumps around the New
Orleans, most of the damage from Hurricane Katrina
could have been avoided.
The sea level is
indeed rising, just as it has for the past 20,000 years since the end of the
last ice age. Fairly accurate measurements of sea level have been available
since about 1800. These measurements show no sign of any acceleration.
The rising sea level can be a serious local problem for
heavily-populated, low-lying areas like New Orleans,
where land subsidence compounds the problem. But to think that limiting CO2 emissions will stop sea level rise is a
dangerous illusion.
It is also possible that the warming seas around Antarctica
will cause more snowfall over the continent and will counteract the sea-level
rise. In any case, the rising sea level is a problem that needs quick local
action for locations like New Orleans
rather than slow action globally.
In closing, let me say again that we should provide adequate
support to the many brilliant scientists, some at my own institution of Princeton
University, who are trying to
better understand the earth's climate, now, in the past, and what it may be in
the future.
I regret that the climate-change issue has become confused
with serious problems like secure energy supplies, protecting our environment,
and figuring out where future generations will get energy supplies after we
have burned all the fossil fuel we can find.
We should not confuse these laudable goals with hysterics
about carbon footprints. For example, when weighing pluses and minuses of the
continued or increased use of coal, the negative issue should not be increased
atmospheric CO2, which is probably good for mankind.
We should focus on real issues like damage to the land and
waterways by strip mining, inadequate remediation, hazards to miners, the
release of real pollutants and poisons like mercury, other heavy metals,
organic carcinogens, etc.
Life is about making decisions and decisions are about
trade-offs. The Congress can choose to promote investment in technology that
addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real
problems more efficiently.
Or they can act on unreasonable fears and suppress energy
use, economic growth and the benefits that come from the creation of national
wealth.
Dr.
William Happer is the director of the Happer Lab of Atomic Physics at Princeton University.
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