Meet William Happer. He’s one of the latest official additions to the list of dissenters in a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report. He was the former director of the Office of Energy Research in the U.S. Department of Energy before V.P. Gore fired him for not toeing the party line, and he is the current Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton. He’s a Denier.
He’s a scientist who rightly understands that correlation does not equal causation, an elementary fallacy that Al Gore does not yet grasp.
He’s a former director of an organization responsible for doling out non-weapons research grants from a budget of $3 billion, and he saw the writing on the wall in the late 80′s and early 90′s with the “give me money and I’ll get the answer you want” global warming crowd.
He’s watched the analysis of average global temperatures decline over the last decade, all the while fighting the droning claims of global warming coming from less than upright scientists and self-aggrandizing politicians.
He’s noted the impossibility for climate change models to even accurately predict past weather conditions, much less predict future conditions. Some major periods of history cannot even be accounted for given current models:
Happer cited an ice age at the time of the American Revolution, when Londoners skated on the Thames, and warm periods during the Middle Ages, when settlers were able to farm southern portions of Greenland, as evidence of naturally occurring fluctuations that undermine the case for anthropogenic influence.
He publicly notes the ridiculousness of claiming that something every one of us breathes out second-by-second could be polluting the earth, especially given that plants are our direct counterpart in this exchange.
The response from the global warming climate change alarmist crowd? We have a lot of evidence you’re not allowed to pick apart or argue with. We’ve got a very popular thing going on (haven’t you noticed the consensus?). So you just read our convincing report and tell us why we’re wrong. No, really:
Oppenheimer, director of the Wilson School’s Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy [and the lead author of the fourth report of the IPCC], stressed that the preponderance of evidence and majority of expert opinion points to a strong anthropogenic influence on rising global temperatures, noting that he advises Happer to read the IPCC’s report and publish a scientific report detailing his objections to its findings.
A response to criticism of the report’s claims is a challenge to read the report and publish his objections? Is this Oppenheimer even paying attention?
I am eager for the day we can look back on this age of scientific/religious environmental alarmism and smile at the futility and lunacy of the whole mess. My hope is that we do not oppress too many, spend too much wastefully, or drag too many whole nations down on the road to enlightenment.
