"In 1794 Captain George Vancouver sailed to Icy Strait. He found it choked with ice, and what was to become Glacier Bay was barely noticeable. The ice was more than 4,000 feet thick, up to 20 miles wide in places, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias Mountain Range. In 1889 John Muir found that the ice had retreated 48 miles up the bay and by 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier had retreated 65 miles from Glacier Bay’s mouth. This rapid retreat is found only here in Southeast Alaska. Scientists have been studying the phenomena hoping to learn how glacial activity affects climate change."
We just returned from Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, an amazing place. The above is taken from a brochure promoting the area. It is interesting to note that Glacier Bay ice had retreated over 65 miles by 1916, as I read it, and the thing that should humble all of us is that we don't know why. It mostly happened before the onset of fossil fuels. I find within the people advancing human-caused climate change an unwarranted sense of finality, as if they've explained things and that it is just up to "deniers" to catch up. It is a kind of smugness that, when I encounter it in regular life leads me to think that it masks great insecurity.
I've read and followed the work of the five who authored the energy department climate report, and I don't find in them that smugness. They've all been banished and belittled. Perhaps they are introducing reason and humility into the debate. It is much needed.
The climate and energy debate needs to be split in two, treating climate and energy separately.
Wind droughts render the wind and solar power system unfit for a modern industrial civilization. Have a look at Germany and Britain.
Trillions of dollars have been spent around the world rolling out wind and solar infrastructure and in return we have more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts.
The elephant in the net zero room is the wind droughts or dunkelflautes that Australian investigators documented over a decade ago.
When competent commentators explain the wind drought problem, the credibility of the push for net zero will collapse like a punctured balloon.
Moving on to climate change and warming. Climate realists need to reframe the terms of the debate which the alarmists have won so far by making out that climate realists deny climate change. Hence the dread of being called a climate denier.
In fact climate realists don’t deny climate change, we study it and we find that the warming in the last 200 years or so since the Little Ice Age has been unequivocally beneficial, like the increase in airborne plant food (CO2.)
The last Assessment Report from the IPCC clearly refuted alarmism, as Steve Koonin explained clearly for anyone who is seriously interested, after he read the 4000 pages of scientific papers.
Climate alarmism started as a pollical movement in the US and it will die there since President Trump recruited genuine climate scientists to rewrite the script.
Yes, a “denier” is someone who says the climate was stable and gentle before we started burning coal, a position that is refuted by every piece of evidence in history.
The report seems ok to me. I do find the carbon cycle/sink section to be too short, because it doesn't describe well how current models predict the natural sinks' ability to sequester CO2 will decay over time.
My back of the envelope estimates show we are embroiled in a race between fossil fuel depletion (which leads inexorably to less emissions) and carbon sink decay. IF fossil fuel prices do increase due to the exhaustion of cheaper sources, then demand will drop and replacement will take place gradually. Meanwhile, as cumulative co2 sequestration and temperatures increase, the sinks will perform worse. This competition hasn't been modeled and no one pays attention to the subject, including this report's authors.
This is all important. Alas, many hardcore climate cultists talk "the Science" but only in so far as they can brandish as a weapon. Yesterday, a post by a sort-of colleague reminded me of how they deal with science that doesn't fit their agenda: Retreat to asserting the extreme danger from "turning points" -- which seem to be on little more than speculation, not good science.
The nation ignores this excellent Koonen-Christy-Curry summary at its peril. What hit me was its assertion that economic intervention was unjustified if ECS is < 2.0. Yet the CO2-only ECS is quoted as only 1.0 degree per 2X CO2. To get the ECS up even as high as 2.0, positive feedbacks must be postulated which double the CO2-only ECS to justify doing anything more than nothing. ECS was pushed up to 3.0 or higher for use in the climate models. Yet systems dominated by positive feedbacks are fundamentally unstable. They tend to oscillate out of control, crash and burn. How could such a model be justified for climate, which has been stable enough to sustain life on earth for a loooong time? The wisdom of that move escapes me.
I am sceptical of the value of this for the general debate.
This will be framed as a maga/Trump anti-science initiative. The authors will be framed as the usual suspects, boomers who are trying to regain some power.
The gatekeepers will do everything in their power to refrain scientist to participate in the online commenting.
This report will also destroy the career of many western politicians who have invested heavily in the manmade climate crisis. There politicians and their supporters will resist, and they fight dirty. Very dirty.
This is such a welcome development. One wonders whether the long dominant catastrophists (that's you NYT, WaPo, Guardian, European establishment, all universities, all relevant government agencies other than those whose heads Trump replaced, and environmental NGO's flush with Soros/billionaire/ Biden EPA Titanic cash) will simply cover their ears and scream "Na Na Na Na I'm not listening", and hold their collective breath and cross their fingers for 3 years til their nightmare ends. Or will we actually get an evolution in mainstream thinking that leads to a consensus around realistic, humanistic, cost effective climate/energy policies, instead of the current fantasies of a massive subsidy dependent wind/solar/battery "transition" powering a modern economy, delusions of netzero 2050, and popular but bizarro concepts like "climate justice" and "sustainability" that actually mean their opposites.
IMHO the big tent approach hasn't been particularly successful in the climate/energy policy area.
We are extremely fortunate that we have Chris Wright, Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum as key members of the Trump Administration. Three people that are smart, energetic and honest. Attributes that are generally in short supply in Government leadership.
Way back in 2014 Steve Koonin led a workshop conducted at NYU under the auspices of the American Physical Society intended to provide a basis for deciding whether to issue a revised position statement on climate change. Besides Koonin, Judith Curry, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, Ben Santer and Isaac Held were the participants. The transcript of the workshop is fascinating for a climate nerd at least.
One of the recommendations that came out of this was a red team blue team approach. APS and the climatariat ignored the findings and recommendations of the group. It's only taken 10 years for sanity to prevail.
Dr. Curry, your father, you, and the many, many others assaulted by the consensus enforcers, deserve to have your voices clearly heard. The blatant deception, deliberate deception and relentless suppression practiced by the consensus enforcers deserves to be publicly repudiated for the costly, dangerous claptrap it is.
But I have a question, I’ve seen it posted here before and never seen Roger answer. Not about Arsenal 😘.
Pick a subject, a field of study, and there will be people who fit the description of “he wrote the book on that”.
I’m nobody but I read endlessly.
AGW is basically the science of absorption characteristics of radiation in the atmosphere.
The guy who “wrote the book” on that is Bill Happer.
He says this is nonsense, where methane and co2 exist they are almost completely overlapped and drowned out by water vapor and those lines are therefore saturated so increasing their concentration does little to nothing.
Is he wrong? All I have seen are personal attacks (not here of course), but I really want to know.
From time to time, THB commenters have asked about the Happer/Wijngaarden claim that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide only decreases the outgoing infrared radiation by a few percent.
I spent much of my professional career conducting research in atmospheric chemistry, primarily centered on aerosol chemistry, but I also became somewhat familiar with the underlying physics that governs climate. Radiative transfer is at the heart of understanding climate. If this part is incorrectly calculated, then everything that flows from that incorrect calculation is also incorrect. So this topic caught my attention.
I read through the 2019 and 2020 papers of Happer and Wijngaarden and this is my take on their conclusions. I claim no expertise in the physics of radiative transfer.
Although these papers are highly technical, in truth, you don’t need a PhD in atmospheric physics to discern the conclusion. You do have to read it carefully, though. A helpful tip for reading almost any technical paper is to look for the sections where the authors compare their results with those of other researchers.
The 2020 paper appears to be largely a restatement of the 2019 paper with the addition of an expanded assessment of how forcing translates into temperature so I’ll restrict my comments to the 2020 paper.
Table 3 of this paper compares the forcings (watts per square meter) they calculate with those published in 2006 as part of an IPCC climate model intercomparison study. H&W use the words “comparable” and “fairly close” when comparing their results with those from the 2006 study.
But how does forcing in units of watts per square translate into Kelvins? In Section 7 they acknowledge that this is less clear due to water vapor feedback effects that change the temperature profile of the atmosphere, which, in turn, affects the radiative transfer of energy.
Table 5 compares their climate sensitivity results ( the expected temperature change from a doubling of carbon dioxide) with other published values. They note that “all groups obtain similar surface warming”.
A curious paragraph in the Conclusion section says that “The most striking fact about radiation transfer is….doubling the current concentrations of greenhouse gases….increases forcings by a few percent for cloud-free parts of the atmosphere. Table 3 shows the forcings at the top of the atmosphere and at the tropopause are comparable to those found by other groups.” They go on to use phrases: “agree well”, “is within 0.1 K” and “differ by about 10%” to characterize their climate sensitivity results from other published results.
Perhaps the “few percent” phrase refers to the well-known fact that the degree of forcing by doubling the carbon dioxide concentration is about 3.0 w m-2 when compared ot the total flux of infrared radiation out into space of about 240 w m-2. But they are not fools and this has long been known so I don’t know what they are trying to convey by the “few percent” remark.
On the other hand, co2coaltion.org ascribes this quote to Dr. Happer without reference:
“The point of the paper is that the direct effects of greenhouse gases on the thermal radiation to space is much smaller than the average person realizes. This is the radiation that gets rid of solar heating. A 100% increase of CO2 (doubling) only reduces radiation to space by 1%.”
I conclude that the Happer and Wijngaarden radiative transfer model produces essentially the same results as published by IPCC. I also find it telling that there is no reference to the Happer/Wijngaarden papers in the recent DOE review by Christy, et al.
It seems to me that he is mostly right on the accumulating effects of co2 on temps, and the IPCC agrees, which is why the climate alarmists created a raft of positive feedbacks and tipping points to “fix” the problem?
At the end of the day, they need co2 (and methane) to kill us all, and lo there it is.
Thanks for this reply but I still don’t know the answe.
I guess because there is no certainty in real science only more questions.
As per one of my favorite quotes:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned”
I am far from an expert in the relevant areas of physics. When I read one of the Happer papers, it seemed to me that the conclusion did not follow from the paper. I recall being puzzled by one graph. It looked to me that they are correct that each doubling produces a smaller warming but it also seemed that another doubling would add a degree or two. Sorry I don't have the exact reference at hand. I would very much like to understand this better.
See Lindzen and Happer PDF, 08/21/24: “Net Zero Policies Will Have A Trivial Effect on Temperature, But Disastrous Effects on People Worldwide.”
Longer more technical paper: R. Lindzen, W. Happer and W. van Wijngaarden, Net Zero Avoided Temperature Increase, (Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase - CO2 Coalition;
A google search of “William Happer co2 saturation” returns hundreds of hits including many debunking links.
But of course we knows that if I google Roger Pielkie I will get back hundreds of hits debunking everything right down to your genealogy, same with Judith Curry, Steve Koonin etc.
Sorry, Roger, but I seriously disagree with you. You have named only two members of the five, but the names of Stephen Koonin and Judith Curry are well known and respected. This doesn’t seem to me like a “red team”, and I don’t see “dueling assessments”. This looks like a team of actual scientists, open to interpretation of actual data. Previous “teams” were very likely to be composed of the following types:
1. Fanatics of climate catastrophism, who believe that scientific truth and objectivity should not stand in the way of achieving their ideological obsessions. This type has been illustrated with quotes by your own posts.
2. Self-serving corrupt scientists, who have a lot to gain by selling their scientific probity in exchange for positions and abundant research money.
3. Cowards, scientists who are too afraid to lose their positions, tenured or not, by saying what they really think. There are plenty, as you well know, who are under exactly the same pressure you have been, or worse, and who did not maintain their dignity as you did.
Let’s be honest about this. The scientific community, and climate scientists in particular, have largely dishonored their mission and few still deserve the respect due to experts. Let’s stop this pseudo-neutral pretense that we’re dealing with “dueling teams”, which in reality is a display of stubborn partisanship, and look reality in the face.
Here is how the authors characterize their report:
"This document originated in late March 2025 when Secretary Wright assembled an independent group to write a report on issues in climate science relevant for energy policymaking, including evidence and perspectives that challenge the mainstream consensus."
This is how I'd characterize a "red team" exercise.
Roger, I can only hope that by “red team” you have in mind a neutral, war-game style exercise that looks for answers without bias. Unfortunately, the idea that we’re dealing here with a “red team” can also be interpreted as a Democrat vs Republican team “dueling”. My point is that we’re not dealing with such “dueling”.
I’m sure that you know exactly which scientists were responsible for the previous assessment, which led to the idea that CO2 content in the atmosphere is controlling temperatures, like a thermostat that can be cranked up and down (the excellent topic of one of your recent posts). So please, could you please tell us who are those scientists and how reliable they are, knowing what huge pressures and corrupting influences are applied on anybody dealing with climate science?
If you believe that the previous assessment was an unbiased, truly rigorous scientific work, uncontaminated by ideological directives, Ill be glad to be wrong.
I've had a quick glance. I would be interested to see where (and if) the fundamentals of climate science differ to, for example, what was set out in Charney. My expectation is that it isn't. But what this DoE report benefits from is decades of observational evidence, which culminates in Table 12.12 of AR6 wg1 showing not much going on regarding climate impact drivers. If Jule Charney was asked to write his report today, with 40 years of observational evidence, how would he conclude?
I would prefer the big tent approach, but have this question. In our present politicalized and polarized situation, which "mainstream" climate scientists would be good candidates to share the big tent, and work respectfully and responsibly with their critics. I'll suggest one- James Hansen. I'd like to see other suggestions and how such a big tent approach might be accomplished.
Here's the problem- parallelism. The five climate scientists chosen by DOE Secretary Chris Wright are among the best known and most active "consensus science" critics. I think they are excellent choices. Their new assessment of climate science is data and science based, and they wisely avoid politics and twitter wars. Perhaps the one legitimate criticism might be their selection of supporting scientific papers. The media and "climate activists" will want a similar galaxy of their well known "climate stars". That's why I suggested James Hansen. Another might be Richard A. Muller. Many of the well known "consensus science" luminaries have burnt bridges and engaged in ad hominem attacks, disqualifying themselves, in my opinion. Yes, it would would be better, I think, to emphasize science credentials and not celebrity status, but the latter is what "sells".
"This of course is supposed to be the job of the IPCC and US NCA."
As you have pointed out numerous times and most of us already know, the problem with the IPCC is the political/bureaucratic overlay that shows it's ugly head in the "Summary for Policy Makers" and the utterances of UN leaders like Guttieres and our own politicians including President Biden and Al Gore. The excellent science ends up being subverted by the political process. Now it remains to be seen if Chris Wright, who you know and with whom you have appeared in several discussion forums, plays it straight as an "Honest Broker" or if he turns out to be like all the other politicians. I believe that he will fight like hell to play it straight. I hope that he is ready for all the crap that's going to be flung at him by the usual suspects.
The telling point here is that Wright isn’t a politician and so didn’t have to speak nonsense to be elected.
He was appointed to be energy secretary because he understands energy AND isn’t climate insane, which apparently disqualifies him to some, we know who.
Energy secretaries are supposed to be ideologically pure functionaries lacking understanding so they are able to be molded and shaped by the consensus.
"In 1794 Captain George Vancouver sailed to Icy Strait. He found it choked with ice, and what was to become Glacier Bay was barely noticeable. The ice was more than 4,000 feet thick, up to 20 miles wide in places, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias Mountain Range. In 1889 John Muir found that the ice had retreated 48 miles up the bay and by 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier had retreated 65 miles from Glacier Bay’s mouth. This rapid retreat is found only here in Southeast Alaska. Scientists have been studying the phenomena hoping to learn how glacial activity affects climate change."
We just returned from Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska, an amazing place. The above is taken from a brochure promoting the area. It is interesting to note that Glacier Bay ice had retreated over 65 miles by 1916, as I read it, and the thing that should humble all of us is that we don't know why. It mostly happened before the onset of fossil fuels. I find within the people advancing human-caused climate change an unwarranted sense of finality, as if they've explained things and that it is just up to "deniers" to catch up. It is a kind of smugness that, when I encounter it in regular life leads me to think that it masks great insecurity.
I've read and followed the work of the five who authored the energy department climate report, and I don't find in them that smugness. They've all been banished and belittled. Perhaps they are introducing reason and humility into the debate. It is much needed.
The climate and energy debate needs to be split in two, treating climate and energy separately.
Wind droughts render the wind and solar power system unfit for a modern industrial civilization. Have a look at Germany and Britain.
Trillions of dollars have been spent around the world rolling out wind and solar infrastructure and in return we have more expensive and less reliable power with catastrophic environmental impacts.
The elephant in the net zero room is the wind droughts or dunkelflautes that Australian investigators documented over a decade ago.
When competent commentators explain the wind drought problem, the credibility of the push for net zero will collapse like a punctured balloon.
Moving on to climate change and warming. Climate realists need to reframe the terms of the debate which the alarmists have won so far by making out that climate realists deny climate change. Hence the dread of being called a climate denier.
In fact climate realists don’t deny climate change, we study it and we find that the warming in the last 200 years or so since the Little Ice Age has been unequivocally beneficial, like the increase in airborne plant food (CO2.)
The last Assessment Report from the IPCC clearly refuted alarmism, as Steve Koonin explained clearly for anyone who is seriously interested, after he read the 4000 pages of scientific papers.
Climate alarmism started as a pollical movement in the US and it will die there since President Trump recruited genuine climate scientists to rewrite the script.
Thanks for that.
Yes, a “denier” is someone who says the climate was stable and gentle before we started burning coal, a position that is refuted by every piece of evidence in history.
The report seems ok to me. I do find the carbon cycle/sink section to be too short, because it doesn't describe well how current models predict the natural sinks' ability to sequester CO2 will decay over time.
My back of the envelope estimates show we are embroiled in a race between fossil fuel depletion (which leads inexorably to less emissions) and carbon sink decay. IF fossil fuel prices do increase due to the exhaustion of cheaper sources, then demand will drop and replacement will take place gradually. Meanwhile, as cumulative co2 sequestration and temperatures increase, the sinks will perform worse. This competition hasn't been modeled and no one pays attention to the subject, including this report's authors.
Look forward to the discussion on the report.
This is all important. Alas, many hardcore climate cultists talk "the Science" but only in so far as they can brandish as a weapon. Yesterday, a post by a sort-of colleague reminded me of how they deal with science that doesn't fit their agenda: Retreat to asserting the extreme danger from "turning points" -- which seem to be on little more than speculation, not good science.
The nation ignores this excellent Koonen-Christy-Curry summary at its peril. What hit me was its assertion that economic intervention was unjustified if ECS is < 2.0. Yet the CO2-only ECS is quoted as only 1.0 degree per 2X CO2. To get the ECS up even as high as 2.0, positive feedbacks must be postulated which double the CO2-only ECS to justify doing anything more than nothing. ECS was pushed up to 3.0 or higher for use in the climate models. Yet systems dominated by positive feedbacks are fundamentally unstable. They tend to oscillate out of control, crash and burn. How could such a model be justified for climate, which has been stable enough to sustain life on earth for a loooong time? The wisdom of that move escapes me.
The move was done to support the narrative. It has led to $trillions wasted on renewables, but many got very rich.
No need to look any further than that.
Decision based evidence making, right from the start.
True believers notwithstanding. Useful idiots, in another conversation.
I am sceptical of the value of this for the general debate.
This will be framed as a maga/Trump anti-science initiative. The authors will be framed as the usual suspects, boomers who are trying to regain some power.
The gatekeepers will do everything in their power to refrain scientist to participate in the online commenting.
This report will also destroy the career of many western politicians who have invested heavily in the manmade climate crisis. There politicians and their supporters will resist, and they fight dirty. Very dirty.
This is indeed happening
When you lose control of the narrative, bad things happen to you.
See: Russiagate.
The attacks on you and the other authors are going to multiply as there is far too much at stake.
Buckle up Roger, you are a prime target.
This is such a welcome development. One wonders whether the long dominant catastrophists (that's you NYT, WaPo, Guardian, European establishment, all universities, all relevant government agencies other than those whose heads Trump replaced, and environmental NGO's flush with Soros/billionaire/ Biden EPA Titanic cash) will simply cover their ears and scream "Na Na Na Na I'm not listening", and hold their collective breath and cross their fingers for 3 years til their nightmare ends. Or will we actually get an evolution in mainstream thinking that leads to a consensus around realistic, humanistic, cost effective climate/energy policies, instead of the current fantasies of a massive subsidy dependent wind/solar/battery "transition" powering a modern economy, delusions of netzero 2050, and popular but bizarro concepts like "climate justice" and "sustainability" that actually mean their opposites.
IMHO the big tent approach hasn't been particularly successful in the climate/energy policy area.
We are extremely fortunate that we have Chris Wright, Lee Zeldin and Doug Burgum as key members of the Trump Administration. Three people that are smart, energetic and honest. Attributes that are generally in short supply in Government leadership.
Way back in 2014 Steve Koonin led a workshop conducted at NYU under the auspices of the American Physical Society intended to provide a basis for deciding whether to issue a revised position statement on climate change. Besides Koonin, Judith Curry, John Christy, Richard Lindzen, Ben Santer and Isaac Held were the participants. The transcript of the workshop is fascinating for a climate nerd at least.
One of the recommendations that came out of this was a red team blue team approach. APS and the climatariat ignored the findings and recommendations of the group. It's only taken 10 years for sanity to prevail.
Can I stop eating bugs now?
I knew he was missing, but I thought that Elmer Fudd finally got him.
Dr. Curry, your father, you, and the many, many others assaulted by the consensus enforcers, deserve to have your voices clearly heard. The blatant deception, deliberate deception and relentless suppression practiced by the consensus enforcers deserves to be publicly repudiated for the costly, dangerous claptrap it is.
I always ❤️ whether I agree or disagree
That’s the whole point of this exercise right?
But I have a question, I’ve seen it posted here before and never seen Roger answer. Not about Arsenal 😘.
Pick a subject, a field of study, and there will be people who fit the description of “he wrote the book on that”.
I’m nobody but I read endlessly.
AGW is basically the science of absorption characteristics of radiation in the atmosphere.
The guy who “wrote the book” on that is Bill Happer.
He says this is nonsense, where methane and co2 exist they are almost completely overlapped and drowned out by water vapor and those lines are therefore saturated so increasing their concentration does little to nothing.
Is he wrong? All I have seen are personal attacks (not here of course), but I really want to know.
Is he wrong?
Thank you for using the acronym AGW
From time to time, THB commenters have asked about the Happer/Wijngaarden claim that doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide only decreases the outgoing infrared radiation by a few percent.
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Infrared-Forcing-by-Greenhouse-Gases-2019-Revised-3-7-2022.pdf
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2006.03098
I spent much of my professional career conducting research in atmospheric chemistry, primarily centered on aerosol chemistry, but I also became somewhat familiar with the underlying physics that governs climate. Radiative transfer is at the heart of understanding climate. If this part is incorrectly calculated, then everything that flows from that incorrect calculation is also incorrect. So this topic caught my attention.
I read through the 2019 and 2020 papers of Happer and Wijngaarden and this is my take on their conclusions. I claim no expertise in the physics of radiative transfer.
Although these papers are highly technical, in truth, you don’t need a PhD in atmospheric physics to discern the conclusion. You do have to read it carefully, though. A helpful tip for reading almost any technical paper is to look for the sections where the authors compare their results with those of other researchers.
The 2020 paper appears to be largely a restatement of the 2019 paper with the addition of an expanded assessment of how forcing translates into temperature so I’ll restrict my comments to the 2020 paper.
Table 3 of this paper compares the forcings (watts per square meter) they calculate with those published in 2006 as part of an IPCC climate model intercomparison study. H&W use the words “comparable” and “fairly close” when comparing their results with those from the 2006 study.
But how does forcing in units of watts per square translate into Kelvins? In Section 7 they acknowledge that this is less clear due to water vapor feedback effects that change the temperature profile of the atmosphere, which, in turn, affects the radiative transfer of energy.
Table 5 compares their climate sensitivity results ( the expected temperature change from a doubling of carbon dioxide) with other published values. They note that “all groups obtain similar surface warming”.
A curious paragraph in the Conclusion section says that “The most striking fact about radiation transfer is….doubling the current concentrations of greenhouse gases….increases forcings by a few percent for cloud-free parts of the atmosphere. Table 3 shows the forcings at the top of the atmosphere and at the tropopause are comparable to those found by other groups.” They go on to use phrases: “agree well”, “is within 0.1 K” and “differ by about 10%” to characterize their climate sensitivity results from other published results.
Perhaps the “few percent” phrase refers to the well-known fact that the degree of forcing by doubling the carbon dioxide concentration is about 3.0 w m-2 when compared ot the total flux of infrared radiation out into space of about 240 w m-2. But they are not fools and this has long been known so I don’t know what they are trying to convey by the “few percent” remark.
On the other hand, co2coaltion.org ascribes this quote to Dr. Happer without reference:
“The point of the paper is that the direct effects of greenhouse gases on the thermal radiation to space is much smaller than the average person realizes. This is the radiation that gets rid of solar heating. A 100% increase of CO2 (doubling) only reduces radiation to space by 1%.”
I conclude that the Happer and Wijngaarden radiative transfer model produces essentially the same results as published by IPCC. I also find it telling that there is no reference to the Happer/Wijngaarden papers in the recent DOE review by Christy, et al.
It seems to me that he is mostly right on the accumulating effects of co2 on temps, and the IPCC agrees, which is why the climate alarmists created a raft of positive feedbacks and tipping points to “fix” the problem?
At the end of the day, they need co2 (and methane) to kill us all, and lo there it is.
Thanks for this reply but I still don’t know the answe.
I guess because there is no certainty in real science only more questions.
As per one of my favorite quotes:
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned”
Richard Feynman
I am far from an expert in the relevant areas of physics. When I read one of the Happer papers, it seemed to me that the conclusion did not follow from the paper. I recall being puzzled by one graph. It looked to me that they are correct that each doubling produces a smaller warming but it also seemed that another doubling would add a degree or two. Sorry I don't have the exact reference at hand. I would very much like to understand this better.
Can you point to the specific argument of Happer (e.g.,, in a paper)?
Happy to have a look and give you my 2 cents!
See Lindzen and Happer PDF, 08/21/24: “Net Zero Policies Will Have A Trivial Effect on Temperature, But Disastrous Effects on People Worldwide.”
Longer more technical paper: R. Lindzen, W. Happer and W. van Wijngaarden, Net Zero Avoided Temperature Increase, (Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase - CO2 Coalition;
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/09/21/the-greenhouse-effect-a-summary-of-wijngaarden-and-happer/
https://co2coalition.org/publications/net-zero-averted-temperature-increase/
http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.07392)
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/18/the-saturation-effect-questions-the-prevailing-narrative-on-co2/
A google search of “William Happer co2 saturation” returns hundreds of hits including many debunking links.
But of course we knows that if I google Roger Pielkie I will get back hundreds of hits debunking everything right down to your genealogy, same with Judith Curry, Steve Koonin etc.
This is the problem, who to believe.
Happer’s argument is easy to find
Sorry, Roger, but I seriously disagree with you. You have named only two members of the five, but the names of Stephen Koonin and Judith Curry are well known and respected. This doesn’t seem to me like a “red team”, and I don’t see “dueling assessments”. This looks like a team of actual scientists, open to interpretation of actual data. Previous “teams” were very likely to be composed of the following types:
1. Fanatics of climate catastrophism, who believe that scientific truth and objectivity should not stand in the way of achieving their ideological obsessions. This type has been illustrated with quotes by your own posts.
2. Self-serving corrupt scientists, who have a lot to gain by selling their scientific probity in exchange for positions and abundant research money.
3. Cowards, scientists who are too afraid to lose their positions, tenured or not, by saying what they really think. There are plenty, as you well know, who are under exactly the same pressure you have been, or worse, and who did not maintain their dignity as you did.
Let’s be honest about this. The scientific community, and climate scientists in particular, have largely dishonored their mission and few still deserve the respect due to experts. Let’s stop this pseudo-neutral pretense that we’re dealing with “dueling teams”, which in reality is a display of stubborn partisanship, and look reality in the face.
Here is how the authors characterize their report:
"This document originated in late March 2025 when Secretary Wright assembled an independent group to write a report on issues in climate science relevant for energy policymaking, including evidence and perspectives that challenge the mainstream consensus."
This is how I'd characterize a "red team" exercise.
Roger, I can only hope that by “red team” you have in mind a neutral, war-game style exercise that looks for answers without bias. Unfortunately, the idea that we’re dealing here with a “red team” can also be interpreted as a Democrat vs Republican team “dueling”. My point is that we’re not dealing with such “dueling”.
I’m sure that you know exactly which scientists were responsible for the previous assessment, which led to the idea that CO2 content in the atmosphere is controlling temperatures, like a thermostat that can be cranked up and down (the excellent topic of one of your recent posts). So please, could you please tell us who are those scientists and how reliable they are, knowing what huge pressures and corrupting influences are applied on anybody dealing with climate science?
If you believe that the previous assessment was an unbiased, truly rigorous scientific work, uncontaminated by ideological directives, Ill be glad to be wrong.
All 5 are listed in the linked report.
I've had a quick glance. I would be interested to see where (and if) the fundamentals of climate science differ to, for example, what was set out in Charney. My expectation is that it isn't. But what this DoE report benefits from is decades of observational evidence, which culminates in Table 12.12 of AR6 wg1 showing not much going on regarding climate impact drivers. If Jule Charney was asked to write his report today, with 40 years of observational evidence, how would he conclude?
I would prefer the big tent approach, but have this question. In our present politicalized and polarized situation, which "mainstream" climate scientists would be good candidates to share the big tent, and work respectfully and responsibly with their critics. I'll suggest one- James Hansen. I'd like to see other suggestions and how such a big tent approach might be accomplished.
There are many, many excellent climate scientists who are interested in science, rather than politics and tribal Twitter wars.
I actually think assembling a big tent would be much easier than people might expect.
This of course is supposed to be the job of the IPCC and US NCA.
Roger,
Here's the problem- parallelism. The five climate scientists chosen by DOE Secretary Chris Wright are among the best known and most active "consensus science" critics. I think they are excellent choices. Their new assessment of climate science is data and science based, and they wisely avoid politics and twitter wars. Perhaps the one legitimate criticism might be their selection of supporting scientific papers. The media and "climate activists" will want a similar galaxy of their well known "climate stars". That's why I suggested James Hansen. Another might be Richard A. Muller. Many of the well known "consensus science" luminaries have burnt bridges and engaged in ad hominem attacks, disqualifying themselves, in my opinion. Yes, it would would be better, I think, to emphasize science credentials and not celebrity status, but the latter is what "sells".
"This of course is supposed to be the job of the IPCC and US NCA."
As you have pointed out numerous times and most of us already know, the problem with the IPCC is the political/bureaucratic overlay that shows it's ugly head in the "Summary for Policy Makers" and the utterances of UN leaders like Guttieres and our own politicians including President Biden and Al Gore. The excellent science ends up being subverted by the political process. Now it remains to be seen if Chris Wright, who you know and with whom you have appeared in several discussion forums, plays it straight as an "Honest Broker" or if he turns out to be like all the other politicians. I believe that he will fight like hell to play it straight. I hope that he is ready for all the crap that's going to be flung at him by the usual suspects.
The telling point here is that Wright isn’t a politician and so didn’t have to speak nonsense to be elected.
He was appointed to be energy secretary because he understands energy AND isn’t climate insane, which apparently disqualifies him to some, we know who.
Energy secretaries are supposed to be ideologically pure functionaries lacking understanding so they are able to be molded and shaped by the consensus.