happer 2 bak

2/19

320 poster boy for? physics? hack? he's the mainline channel from email to trump white house, block congress testimony? [transparency]

omfg gets better trump gig; Soon gets outed, whines and slinks away but Happer immune?!

see heartland, sci suppress 3, house intel comm

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new

note coherent long term strategy!

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nyt

Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington

A conference near the White House drew hundreds of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change. The mood was triumphant.

A man stands in front of a crowd with a slide on a screen. The slide reads, “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture and forestry!”

William Happer, a Princeton professor emeritus of physics who has argued that global warming is good for humanity, during a presentation at the Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change Conference in Washington on Wednesday.Credit...Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

Maxine Joselow

By Maxine Joselow

Reporting from Washington

April 9, 2026

Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “leftist politicians.” Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.

These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.

“We aren’t just following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom-and-gloom prediction of the day is,” Mr. Zeldin said at the conference, which drew around 220 attendees to the basement ballroom of a hotel in downtown Washington.

“We won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” Mr. Zeldin added, drawing applause from the crowd, which had given him a standing ovation before his speech.

The event made clear that climate change deniers are experiencing a triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington after years of feeling sidelined by the scientific and political establishments.

A man holds a pamphlet that reads, "Fossil Fuels are the Greenest Energy Sources."

A vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is real and that it is caused by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. They expect average global temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels within the next decade, unleashing dire impacts that include more deadly heat waves, coastal floods, water shortages and crop failures.

Earth has already warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution, scientific estimates suggest.

Mr. Trump, however, has derided the scientific consensus on global warming as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” And Mr. Zeldin has said that the E.P.A. is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion” by rolling back dozens of regulations that burdened the fossil fuel industry.

The conference on Wednesday brought together people with varying levels of skepticism of the scientific consensus. Some attendees flatly denied that the planet was warming, while others recognized the trend but argued that it was not an emergency and that the potential solutions were too costly.

The event was organized by the Heartland Institute, a research organization that says it promotes free-market solutions and that has attacked mainstream climate science for decades. Other sponsors included the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that claims falsely that planet-warming carbon dioxide is beneficial to humans.

The influence of both groups waned under the Biden administration, which embraced the science behind climate change and pushed policies designed to address it. Mr. Zeldin’s appearance at the conference underscored how the groups’ sway has grown in the Trump era.

Image

A sign reads "thank you for emitting/"

:{A display at the event.

James Taylor of the Heartland Institute poses for a portrait.

Last month, the CO2 Coalition successfully nominated an eye doctor with no background in air pollution science to a committee that advises the E.P.A. on the latest air pollution research. On Wednesday, the group gave out tote bags, pamphlets, mints and blue-and-green stress balls that resembled miniature Earths to conference attendees. The white lettering on the stress balls read: “Don’t stress. There is no climate crisis.”

Next to the CO2 Coalition’s booth, a chemist and businessman from Wisconsin, Stephen Einhorn, was distributing copies of his own pamphlet, whose cover promised to reveal “what the climate activists don’t know or don’t want you to know.”

Threats to library funding end with a settlement by Trump Administration.

Anna Paulina Luna calls for the quick expulsion of Eric Swalwell from the House.

:{Trump’s explanation for the image of him as Jesus: “I thought it was me as a doctor.”

“I’m very happy that Trump appointed Zeldin,” Mr. Einhorn said in an interview. “I’m surprised at how much progress he’s made toward informing the American people what the actual science is, which is that we have a wonderful climate. We’re blessed. There’s nothing to worry about.”

The Heartland Institute does not disclose its funders. In the past, it has received financial support from oil and gas interests as well as the Mercer Family Foundation, an influential donor to conservative causes.

“Because we’re not as well-funded by industry as people think, we don’t have a fancy green room,” James M. Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute, said in an interview outside the main ballroom.

The group receives around $4 million each year from foundations and individuals, Mr. Taylor said. If the Heartland Institute had recently received funding from the fossil fuel industry, he added, he wasn’t aware of it.

Pausing to reflect, Mr. Taylor said the second Trump administration had done more for the climate change denial movement than any other administration in history. He pointed to the E.P.A.’s extraordinary move in February to renounce the federal government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

“This is absolutely a moment of triumph,” Mr. Taylor said, adding, “It’s nice to be winning.”

Image

A stack of books including "Climate Change Reconsidered."

Patrick Morrisey, the governor of West Virginia, stands behind a podium.

In addition to Mr. Zeldin, the speakers at the conference included West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican who has built a career opposing federal climate regulations.

“I’m very hopeful that we’re going to keep the White House for a number of terms, but let’s take advantage of where we are now,” Mr. Morrisey said.

William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University who has argued that global warming is good for humanity, delivered the lunchtime address. He dismissed concerns about rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere over a relatively carbon-intensive lunch of roasted chicken breast, cannellini bean ragù and ricotta cheesecake.

EDF Action, the political arm of the Environmental Defense Fund, put up posters outside the conference that protested the event and highlighted the effects of climate change nationwide.

“Climate denial won’t lower insurance costs,” one poster read, referring to high home insurance premiums in areas prone to wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters fueled by rising global temperatures.

The conference was set to continue on Thursday with a speech by John Clauser, a Nobel physics laureate who has claimed, falsely, that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet.

Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Gathering Shows Upswing of Climate Denial Groups. Order Reprints | Today’s

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REF

E AND E POL

Meet the scientists Trump could tap to undermine climate regulations

:{By Scott Waldman, Zack Colman | 03/19/2025 :

Some downplay the threat of global warming. Others question the efficacy of climate policy. All could be of interest to the new administration.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made it his mission to destroy what he calls the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.

But President Donald Trump’s EPA chief can’t do it alone. To smash the holy grail, Zeldin needs help from a rare kind of scientist — the kind who believes climate change isn’t that bad or might even be good for humanity.

Those scientists aren’t easy to find. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the burning of fossil fuels is heating up Earth, and the planet’s rapid change is putting people at risk for a wide range of calamities — from more extreme storms to rising sea levels to more intense heat waves.

Those threats underpin what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — Zeldin’s holy grail. The 2009 declaration by EPA made clear that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the root cause of climate change, and that EPA has the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act because they can harm human health.

The endangerment finding has empowered EPA to establish landmark climate regulations, including limits on the emissions produced by cars or power plants. Rolling back these regulations — and the endangerment finding itself — would require an attack on the climate science that serves as their foundation.

Enter the climate naysayers.

The Trump administration is looking to recruit scientists who could cast doubt on climate science or climate policy, or who view global warming as either a small inconvenience or a boon to humankind.

Once selected, these scientists could add their perspective to a bedrock climate report that comes out every few years, known as the National Climate Assessment. Their contributions to the report, in turn, could be cited as evidence in future efforts to undermine the endangerment finding — all of which would make it easier to quash climate regulations.

The scientists even could help author a second endangerment finding. A Trump-era endangerment finding might, for example, selectively highlight areas of doubt in climate science or tout the perceived benefits of global warming.

To do that, a Trump-approved body of climate findings would center around future scenarios based on lower carbon scenarios than the world is currently experiencing.

It also could emphasize less severe climate trajectories than those envisioned in the original finding, said Roger Pielke Jr., a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Being able to tease out signals of human-caused climate change in extreme weather — which everybody cares about — are going to be much more challenging with a lower emissions trajectory than a higher one,” said Pielke Jr., who is not involved in any of the efforts and has questioned how scientists can link human-driven warming to specific extreme weather events.

There is a relatively small pool of researchers who could — or would be willing to — engage in such an effort because it would misrepresent decades of climate science by the world’s top science agencies.

“It’s a very small group of people. It’s the same people who have been there for the last 20 years,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s this endlessly recycled group of people who have been making the same arguments that are unable to convince anybody in the scientific community.”

The White House has not announced its plan yet nor the researchers who might be involved, and it did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said that as “part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.”

Here are some of the scientists who have spent years downplaying climate risks or criticizing climate regulations, and could be tapped by the Trump administration to help Zeldin destroy the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.

David Legates

David Legates (second from right) appears at a 2016 event in Washington. | Kris Connor/AFP via Getty Images MORANO

Legates likely would be a key leader. He has worked with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on a series of proposals to tear down NOAA and to recruit industry and think tank researchers that oppose climate rules to write a government science report.

The two men authored a key chapter outlining their plans in the Project 2025 conservative policy playbook.

Legates, who was the former state climatologist for Delaware until he was asked to step down, served as a top NOAA official in Trump’s first term. He was also detailed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but was later removed from that position after attempting to publish a series of research memos that distorted climate science.

For years, Legates has turned a partisan lens to research, claiming that climate change will benefit humanity while climate policy will hurt people. He is affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance, a group of conservative Christian scholars “dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship.”

Legates declined to comment for this story.

Steve Kooni

Koonin, a New York University physicist and former top scientist at BP, has long pushed to conduct a “red team, blue team” review of climate science, which would pit two groups of scientists against each other to debate a scientific report, such as the National Climate Assessment.

One group would defend the report while the other would highlight its alleged scientific weaknesses. Koonin worked on putting together the effort during the first Trump administration, but the project was eventually scuttled by the White House because some officials were concerned about Trump’s reelection chances.

Koonin said he would prefer to take on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to highlight areas of doubt.

“Anything that I can do to help make the science more transparent, you know, that’s been my goal, and remains my goal, for a long time,” he said.

Richard Lindzen

The retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist told POLITICO that he would “of course” help the Trump administration challenge the endangerment finding. Lindzen was dismayed that the red team, blue team exercise to publicly debate established climate science never took off during Trump’s first term.

A longtime critic of accepted climate science, Lindzen applauded Zeldin for calling “bullshit” on a “fake issue” of the severity of rising temperatures. But he acknowledged there may be little upside given how much the scientific community has supported the conclusion that human activity is driving climate change, even if he disagrees with it.

Lindzen argued the courts may offer the most direct route, where he said EPA should argue there “was never any evidence in the first place” to suggest greenhouse gases meet a legally defined standard of dangerous.

“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty obvious when Trump is running on the issue of ‘Drill, baby drill,’ that he is not going to pay any attention to what is claimed to be the science.”

Ryan Maue

Maue has not had any communication with the Trump administration about serving in any science advisory or agency role, he wrote in a text message. But the libertarian meteorologist would be a natural fit: He served at NOAA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in Trump’s first term.

Maue agrees that humans are warming the planet, but he has pushed back against stringent government policies to rein in greenhouse gases.

He has often used his large social media following on X to dispute the connections between climate change and specific extreme weather events. He has repeatedly cautioned that the world is not following the worst-case scenario climate trajectory, calling it “highly implausible” — a view that could align with Trump administration thinking to emphasize less dire forecasts.

Judith Curry

Curry said she would help the Trump administration reconsider the endangerment finding if she could work from home, but noted there’s been no outreach from Trump’s team.

The Georgia Tech professor emerita argued the original endangerment finding was “politically driven,” and that its reliance on worst-case climate scenarios compelled more drastic policy than necessary. Despite U.S. greenhouse gas reductions falling 17 percent below 2005 levels, the nation is still off-track of the U.S. share of reductions needed to stabilize global temperatures.

An additional 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100 — which is aligned with current trajectories — “isn’t a big deal because it’s what we’ve seen over the last 100 years, and we’re doing just fine,” said Curry, who is now president of consulting firm Climate Forecast Applications Network.

Scientists have said such increases have brought and would bring massive biodiversity loss, more intense extreme weather events, deadlier heat waves and economic harm through natural disaster damage, lost labor productivity, food insecurity and deteriorating health.

While Curry said there are “plenty of reasons not to like fossil fuels” and that clean energy investment is needed, she claimed “policy isn’t going to help here.” An endangerment finding that reflected less severe consequences for failing to deal with climate change “takes away the urgency for doing all of this” through government policy, she said.

John Christy

Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead IPCC author. He has questioned whether humans are driving the observed warming trends in recent decades — something the world’s top science agencies have long confirmed.

He opposed the endangerment finding in 2009 and has questioned the climate models on which it was based in congressional testimony. He is also a longtime proponent of applying a red team, blue team exercise to climate science.

Christy said he believed he could identify weaknesses in the first endangerment finding and that he could use research from the last 15 years to further his argument if the Trump administration pursued a second endangerment finding.

“I would like to see a very clear demonstration that climate models are not capable of telling us about the future of climate to the level of the CO2 forcing that is occurring in the atmosphere,” he said.

In fact, climate scientists have tested the models on which they rely and have found a notable amount of accuracy, particularly the latest versions, which are far more sophisticated than the models of the past.

Will Happer

Happer was part of Trump’s National Security Council in the first term, who mostly worked on classified military projects. He is a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, though not a climate scientist.

Happer is one of the few scientists who have given Trump a briefing on climate research, though his views are not supported by the world’s leading science agencies. Happer has long cast doubt on the role humans play in driving global warming and has been a vociferous opponent of climate policy.

In Trump’s first term, Happer worked on the effort to conduct an adversarial review of climate science with Koonin. After that effort was torpedoed by White House officials, Trump told Happer that he wanted to bring him back for a red team, blue team effort in his second term. Trump even discussed a potential nationally televised science “debate,” Happer told POLITICO.

“If I see an opportunity to help, I will,” Happer said. “I think it’s long overdue.”

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john-clauser-nobel-climate-denial

He won a Nobel Prize. Then he started denying climate change.

John Clauser shared the Nobel in physics last year. Now he’s a self-described ‘denier’ of the overwhelming scientific consensus on a warming planet.

By Maxine Joselow

:{:{November 16, 2023}:

Physicist John F. Clauser last year at his home in Walnut Creek, Calif. Clauser jointly won a Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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BALTIMORE — At a fiery news conference at the Four Seasons hotel here Tuesday, speakers denounced climate change as a hoax perpetrated by a “global cabal” including the United Nations, the World Economic Forum and many leaders of the Catholic Church.

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It might have seemed like a fringe event, except for one speaker’s credentials. John F. Clauser shared the Nobel Prize in physics last year before declaring Tuesday that “there is no climate crisis” — a claim that contradicts the overwhelming scientific consensus.

The event showcased Clauser’s remarkable shift since winning one of the world’s most prestigious awards for his groundbreaking experiments with light particles in the 1970s. His recent denial of global warming has alarmed top climate scientists, who warn that he is using his stature to mislead the public about a planetary emergency.

Clauser, 80, who has a booming voice and white hair he often leaves uncombed, has brushed off these concerns. He says skepticism is a key part of the scientific process.

“There was overwhelming consensus that what I was doing was pointless” in the 1970s, he said in an interview after the news conference. “It took 50 years for my work to win the prize. That’s how long it takes for opinions to change.”

Tuesday’s event was organized by the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of more than a dozen Catholic organizations that argues that “those pushing the anti-God and anti-family climate agenda need to be called out and exposed.” Clauser, who is an atheist, needed some convincing to be the keynote speaker, a coalition spokesman acknowledged.

The other speakers included Marc Morano, a former Republican congressional staffer who runs a website that rejects mainstream climate science, and Alex Newman, a journalist for right-wing media outlets who has called for exposing the “climate scam.” Both men took multiple jabs at former vice president Al Gore and his 2006 documentary about the dangers of climate change.

Clauser, who wore a gray blazer with black jeans and Teva sandals, appeared buoyant as he took the stage. He cycled through a PowerPoint presentation that began with the exclamation: “Great news! There is no climate crisis!”

“Much as it may upset many people, my message is the planet is not in peril,” Clauser told an audience of roughly a dozen people in the hotel conference room and others watching online. “I call myself a climate denier,” he added. “I’ve been told that’s not politically correct. So I guess I’m a climate crisis d-word person.”

Clauser bragged that he met privately with President Biden in the Oval Office last year, when the 2022 Nobel Prize winners were invited to the White House. He said he criticized Biden’s climate and energy policies, to which he said the president replied: “Sounds like right-wing science.”

The Washington Post could not confirm this account; a White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘Pure garbage’

The vast majority of climate scientists agree that global warming will have catastrophic consequences for current and future generations. They warn that heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end if humanity does not rapidly reduce emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

The influence of climate deniers has waned over the past several decades, as the science has become clearer and the impacts of global warming have become starker. But a small group of vocal skeptics — including several prominent physicists — has persisted.

Clauser, who has never published a peer-reviewed paper on climate change, has homed in on one message in particular: Earth’s temperature is primarily determined by cloud cover, not carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. He has concluded that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet, so there is no climate crisis.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that argument is “pure garbage” and “pseudoscience.”

The “best available evidence” shows that clouds actually have a net warming effect, Mann said in an email. “In physics, we call that a ‘sign error’ — it’s the sort of error a freshman is embarrassed to be caught having made,” he said.

Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, agreed.

“Clouds amplify warming,” Dessler said in an email, adding, “The scientific community has spent the last century studying [climate change] and, at this point, virtually everything that’s happening has been predicted. John Clauser and his ilk ignore this because they are not advancing serious scientific critiques.”

But Anton Zeilinger, an Austrian physicist who shared the Nobel Prize with Clauser last year, said in an interview that he has “very high respect” for Clauser’s scientific rigor, although he cautioned that he is not an expert on climate science.

In 1972, Clauser conducted groundbreaking experiments on quantum entanglement, a process in which two or more particles are coupled so that any change in one particle triggers a simultaneous change in the other, even if they are separated by vast distances. The experiments confirmed a phenomenon that Albert Einstein had famously referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” They also paved the way for technologies such as quantum computers, which can solve problems too complex for classical computers.

“Einstein, when he proposed his ideas, was considered crazy and an outsider,” said Zeilinger, a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Vienna. “It has happened in science that the majority was dead wrong. I have no idea if that is the case here, but science has to be open to debate.”

‘A skeptical streak’

Some physicists have made crucial contributions to the world’s understanding of climate change. In 2021, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists Syukuro Manabe of the United States and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany for work that laid the foundation for current climate models.

Others have made a name for themselves as climate contrarians.

William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, has argued that global warming is good for humanity. Under President Donald Trump, Happer served as a senior director on the National Security Council, where he oversaw a controversial initiative to reassess the federal government’s analysis of climate science.

Richard Lindzen, a retired MIT physicist, has similarly criticized what he has called “climate alarmism.” And Steven E. Koonin, a physicist who served as the Energy Department’s undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, wrote the best-selling book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

“There is a skeptical streak in the physics community regarding climate science,” Nadir Jeevanjee, a research physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote in a recent critique of Koonin’s book.

In an interview, Jeevanjee said that while climate science is based in physics, not all physicists are experts in climate science. But that hasn’t stopped some distinguished physicists from portraying themselves as experts and sowing doubt, he said.

“When they talk, people listen,” said Jeevanjee, who emphasized that he was speaking on behalf of himself and not NOAA. “It stokes the flames of denial.”

Some physicists who reject the scientific consensus on climate change have received funding from fossil fuel companies. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, an astrophysicist who claims that variations in the sun’s energy have caused most global warming, accepted more than $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry from 2005 to 2015 while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most scientific papers.

Clauser said he does not receive any money from oil, gas and coal interests.

“If I go to Asia, I get a huge honorarium for giving talks,” he said in the interview after Tuesday’s event. “But this conference hasn’t given me an honorarium for coming here. The best I get is airfare and hotel. I’m just living off savings.”

In June, Clauser gave the keynote address at a conference on quantum information science in Seoul, telling the audience that “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis.” The speech came a month after he joined the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, a group that contends carbon dioxide is beneficial for the planet.

Climate deniers ejected from teachers conference for pro-carbon comic

In search of an audience

Clauser has not been welcomed everywhere. In July, he was scheduled to deliver a seminar on climate models to the International Monetary Fund’s Independent Evaluation Office, but then the event was “summarily canceled” with no explanation, the CO2 Coalition said in a statement at the time.

On Tuesday, Clauser said he was initially told the event would be reformatted as a debate with an author of a report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that idea “never went anywhere,” he said.

Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the office declined to comment on the record and did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the event might be rescheduled.

Clauser’s message also may be reaching a limited audience. Of the roughly dozen people at the news conference in Baltimore, two were journalists and several others were members of the Deposit of Faith Coalition.

Asked about the smaller crowd, Clauser, who has emphysema caused by smoking cigarettes in his younger years, took a puff of his inhaler and shrugged.

“I get a reasonable amount of fan mail, some of which comes from people who claim to be climate scientists,” he said. “Most of it is very positive.”

LNX

William Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, has argued that global warming is good for humanity. Under President Donald Trump, Happer served as a senior director on the National Security Council, where he oversaw a controversial initiative to reassess the federal government’s analysis of climate science....

Richard Lindzen, a retired MIT physicist, has similarly criticized what he has called “climate alarmism.” And Steven E. Koonin, a physicist who served as the Energy Department’s undersecretary for science under President Barack Obama, wrote the best-selling book “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

“When they talk, people listen,” said Jeevanjee, who emphasized that he was speaking on behalf of himself and not NOAA. “It stokes the flames of denial.”

Clauser said he does not receive any money from oil, gas and coal interests.

Climate deniers ejected from teachers conference for pro-carbon comic

...

Clauser has not been welcomed everywhere. In July, he was scheduled to deliver a seminar on climate models to the International Monetary Fund’s Independent Evaluation Office, but then the event was “summarily canceled” with no explanation, the CO2 Coalition said in a statement at the time.

Nobel Laureate (Physics 2022) Dr. John Clauser was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF on Thursday and now his talk has been summarily cancelled. According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk. Technically, it was “postponed.”

Dr. Clauser had previously criticized the awarding of the 2021 Nobel Prize for work in the development of computer models predicting global warming and told President Biden that he disagreed with his climate policies. Dr. Clauser has developed a climate model that adds a new significant dominant process to existing models. The process involves the visible light reflected by cumulus clouds that cover, on average, half of the Earth. Existing models greatly underestimate this cloud feedback, which provides a very powerful, dominant thermostatic control of the Earth’s temperature.

More recently, he addressed the Korea Quantum Conference where he stated, “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” and expressed his belief that “key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by approximately 200 times.” Dr. Clauser, who is recognized as a climate change skeptic, also became a member of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition last month, an organization that argues that carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial to life on Earth.

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Climate deniers ejected from teachers conference for pro-carbon comic

At a meeting of science teachers, the CO2 Coalition handed out comic books depicting carbon as good for the planet. They got kicked out.

By Maxine Joselow

:{:{Updated April 11, 2023}:

Students measure a tree at Farragut State Park in Idaho to learn about the effects that trees have on the environment north of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho on May 18, 2017. (Rajah Bose/For The Washington Post)

To science teachers attending a recent convention, the comic books titled “Simon the Solar-Powered Cat” seemed unremarkable at first. Their story began with Simon, an orange-and-white cat, begging for more food in typical feline fashion.

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But on Page 5, the story took an unusual turn: A “friendly scientist” explained that Simon subsisted not on kibble, but on carbon dioxide. The scientist concluded that CO2 was a “miracle molecule” that fueled all life on Earth by helping plants turn sunlight into food.

That message and the comic book were the brainchild of the CO2 Coalition, a group that rejects the scientific consensus that carbon emissions are causing catastrophic climate change. The group claims that it distributed about 700 comic books to teachers at the National Science Teaching Association’s convention in Atlanta last month before being kicked out of the event.

“We were overwhelmed by the positive response from the teachers at the convention,” Gregory Wrightstone, executive director of the CO2 Coalition, said in an interview. “In fact, by the second day, we had handed out all of the comic books we had brought.”

The episode, details of which have not previously been reported, raised concerns among scientists and education experts that the teachers could spread climate misinformation to their students. It comes as states take divergent approaches to climate instruction in public schools, with New Jersey requiring students to learn about climate change in nearly every class and the Texas Board of Education calling for science textbooks to emphasize the “positive” effects of fossil fuels.

A large majority of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming by emitting massive amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Humanity must rapidly reduce these emissions, scientists say, or face catastrophic consequences such as dramatic sea level rise over the next few decades.

A page from a comic book from the CO2 Coalition, titled “Simon the Solar-Powered Cat.” (CO2 Coalition)

“By focusing 100 percent on this idea that plants need CO2, they’re intentionally misleading people by avoiding the real problems of CO2, which they didn’t talk about at all,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s kind of like if you’re talking about cigarettes, and all you talk about is how cool they make you look.”

The influence of climate denial groups has waned over the past several decades, as the science has become clearer and the impacts of global warming have become starker. But the Virginia-based CO2 Coalition, which describes its mission as informing policymakers and the public of the “important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy,” has persisted in spreading its message.

Members of the coalition, which has received money from far-right organizations and donors with ties to the fossil fuel industry, ran a booth at the National Science Teaching Association’s convention. They spent the first day distributing three comic books and accompanying lesson plans to some of the roughly 6,500 attendees.

All of the comics featured three young sisters named Sophia, Ariana and Elyssa — the owners of Simon the cat — and their neighbor, a scientist named Mr. Gordon. In a book titled “Once upon a time: A true story about the miracle molecule — carbon dioxide,” Gordon tells the sisters that CO2 has net benefits for the planet.

“Everything green in our very green world owes its existence to carbon dioxide,” Gordon says to them. “And every person and every animal … are built from the carbon in CO2, which we get from eating vegetables and meat.”

A character named Mr. Gordon touts the benefits of carbon dioxide in a comic book titled “Once upon a time: A true story about the miracle molecule — carbon dioxide.” (CO2 Coalition)

While it is true that CO2 helps plants grow, its accumulation in the atmosphere will have net negative effects for plants and people alike, Dessler said. Telling kids they need CO2 to survive, he said, “is like telling a drowning person they need water to survive. It’s not helpful.”

On the second day of the convention, an official with the National Science Teaching Association asked members of the CO2 Coalition to stop distributing their materials or leave, according to a uploaded by the coalition.

Global carbon dioxide emissions hit new highs last year, says IEA report

“You can take down your literature or you can go home — it’s your choice,” NSTA chief operating officer Ryan Foley says in the video. When Wrightstone refuses to comply, Foley responds, “All right, then you’re being kicked out. You should pack up and get out.”

Jakob Namson and Sarah Morris, with their class from Lake City High School, measure a tree at Farragut State Park in Idaho to learn about the effects that trees have on the environment north of Coeur d'Alene in 2017. (Rajah Bose for The Washington Post)

When coalition members requested a booth at the convention, they signed a contract certifying that their materials were consistent with the association’s position statement on the teaching of climate science, NSTA Executive Director Erika Shugart said in an email. But then they violated the contract, she said.

In addition to the comic books, she said, coalition members circulated a pamphlet that criticized the position statement, which recognizes the “overwhelming scientific consensus” that the “Earth’s climate is changing, largely due to human-induced increases in the concentrations of heat-absorbing gases” such as CO2.

Debating the science

The CO2 Coalition does not disclose its source of funding, and it declined to do so for this story. But in 2017, the coalition received $170,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation and more than $33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute, according to tax filings obtained by the Climate Investigations Center, a watchdog group.

The Mercer Family Foundation — financed by New York hedge fund executive Robert Mercer and directed by his daughter Rebekah — has also helped finance the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has denounced climate science as rigged. Heartland in 2017 mailed some 200,000 teachers books titled “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.”

It remains unclear whether the Mercers have continued to fund the coalition. Wrightstone said in an email that although “we cannot release details on our funding sources,” the “vast majority” of donors are individuals making small contributions. While the CO2 Coalition paid an artist to create the comic books, the members of the group’s Education Committee are unpaid volunteers, he said.

These volunteers include William Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who has challenged the idea that carbon dioxide could damage the planet. Under President Donald Trump, Happer served as a senior director on the National Security Council, where he oversaw a controversial initiative to reassess the federal government’s analysis of climate science.

Physicist William Happer in 2017. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Sharon Camp, a retired high school science teacher, designed the lesson plans accompanying the comic books. One lesson encourages teachers to use beads, Legos or Styrofoam balls to help students visualize CO2 molecules.

Camp, who taught Advanced Placement environmental science at Walton High School in Marietta, Ga., for 15 years, said students should be allowed to reach their own conclusions about climate science. “This is the only branch of science where you are not allowed to debate, you are not allowed to question,” she said in an interview. “Science is not supposed to work that way.”

Climate in the classroom

The coalition’s efforts come as some states have failed to update their standards for teaching climate change in public schools, leaving students at risk of learning incorrect ideas.

How teachers are getting it wrong on climate change

In a 2020 report, the National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network Education Fund graded all 50 states on their standards for teaching climate change. The groups examined whether the standards helped students understand that climate change is real, caused by humans, and already affecting nature and society, among other criteria.

Twenty-seven states scored a B+ or better. Of the rest, 20 scored a C+ or lower. In the coal state of West Virginia, the standards require students to debate climate change in their science classrooms, despite little debate among scientists. Those standards received a D. And in Alabama, which received an F, the standards suggest that human activity “may have caused” a rise in global temperatures, similarly downplaying the scientific consensus.

In March, the Republican-dominated Texas State Board of Education altered its internal guidance to say science textbooks should emphasize the “positive” aspects of fossil fuels, a leading cause of global warming. As a result, the state would probably still score an F if the report were conducted today, said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education.

Some Democratic-led states have moved in the opposite direction. New Jersey in 2020 became the first state to adopt learning standards obligating teachers to instruct kids about climate change across grade levels and subjects.

In one state, every class teaches climate change — even P.E.

Shannon Falkner, an English teacher at Chatham High School in Chatham, N.J., said her freshman English students have written climate fiction, or “cli-fi.” Some students have penned dystopian tales about flooded cities, while others have offered more hopeful stories about the nation’s transition to renewable energy. Falkner said the reaction from students has been largely positive, and no parents have complained about the assignment.

There is evidence that climate instruction is popular. About 77 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “schools should teach about global warming” in a 2021 poll by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication; about 22 percent disagreed.

“It’s actually one of the most supported policies we have measured,” said Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale program. Both the CO2 Coalition and conservative policymakers, he said, “are standing in front of the tide of public opinion and trying to hold it back with a piece of cardboard.”

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happer wapo

4 yrs ago

The White House plans to create an ad hoc group of select federal scientists to reassess the government’s analysis of climate science and counter conclusions that the continued burning of fossil fuels is harming the planet, according to three senior administration officials.

The National Security Council initiative would include scientists who question the severity of climate impacts and the extent to which humans contribute to the problem, according to these individuals, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The group would not be subject to the same level of public disclosure as a formal advisory committee.

The move would represent the Trump administration’s most forceful effort to date to challenge the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are helping drive global warming and that the world could face dire consequences unless countries curb their carbon output over the next few decades.

Is extreme weather related to climate change?

2:21

Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

The idea of a new working group, which top administration officials discussed Friday in the White House Situation Room, represents a modified version of an earlier plan to establish a federal advisory panel on climate and national security. That plan — championed by William Happer, an NSC senior director and a physicist who has challenged the idea that carbon dioxide could damage the planet — would have created an independent federal advisory committee.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act imposes several ground rules for such panels, including that they meet in public, are subject to public records requests and include a representative membership. The new working group, by contrast, would not be subject to any of those requirements.

While the plan is not finalized, NSC officials said they would take steps to assemble a group of researchers within the government. The group will not be tasked with scrutinizing recent intelligence community assessments of climate change, according to officials familiar with the plan.

From deadly wildfires to debilitating hurricanes: White House releases major climate report

2:50

The Trump administration released on Nov. 23 a long-awaited report outlining that climate change impacts "are intensifying across the country." (Video: Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)

The National Security Council declined requests to comment on the matter.

Champion of new White House climate group calls CO2 ‘not a pollutant’

During the Friday meeting, these officials said, deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman said President Trump was upset that his administration had issued in November the National Climate Assessment, which must be published regularly under federal law. Kupperman added that congressional Democrats had seized upon the report, which is the product of more than a dozen agencies, to bolster their case for cutting carbon emissions as part of their Green New Deal.

Attendees at the session, which included acting interior secretary David Bernhardt and senior officials from throughout the government, debated how best to establish a group of researchers that could scrutinize recent federal climate reports. More than one participant suggested they might face a challenge establishing an independent outside panel that would question central findings of the National Climate Assessment and other landmark federal reports, said one official familiar with the discussion.

Happer, who headed an advocacy group called the CO2 Coalition before joining the administration in the fall, has challenged the scientific consensus on climate change inside and outside of government.

Public records show the coalition, which describes its mission as informing policymakers and the public of the “important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy,” has received money from far-right organizations and donors with fossil fuel interests.

In 2017, according to federal tax filings obtained by the Climate Investigations Center, the group received $170,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation and more than $33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute.

One senior administration official said the president was looking for “a mixture of opinions” and disputed the National Climate Assessment, a massive interagency report, in November that described intensifying climate change as a threat to the United States.

“The president wants people to be able to decide for themselves,” the aide said.

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Several scientists, however, said the federal government’s recent findings on climate change had received intense scrutiny from other researchers in the field before they became public.

Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute who served on the National Academy of Sciences review panel for the scientific report that formed the basis of last year’s climate assessment, said the committee met several times “to do a careful, page-by-page evaluation by the entire report.”

“The whole review process is confrontational from the very get-go, but it’s based in scientific credibility, in a traceable chain of evidence through publications,” said Field, an earth system science and biology professor.

Trump officials had weighed the idea of conducting a “red team-blue team” exercise on climate change, an idea espoused by Scott Pruitt, who was then the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, during the early months of the administration. White House aides, including then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, blocked the idea, and at one point discussed whether to “ignore” the climate research being conducted by federal scientists.

Government researchers in a range of disciplines have identified climate change as a serious threat for the past two decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations.

In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report to examine how an abrupt change in climate would affect the country’s defense capabilities: Its authors concluded that it “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.”

Last year, a military-funded study warned sea level rise and other climate impacts could make more than a thousand low-lying islands in the Pacific Ocean “uninhabitable” by midcentury, including an atoll where a missile defense site is located.

Just last month, the national intelligence director delivered a worldwide threat assessment that “climate hazards” including extreme weather, wildfires, droughts and acidifying oceans are worsening, “threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security.”

Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climate scientist whom Republicans have sought to testify on climate change because she often highlights the uncertainties that remain, said in an email that she backed the idea of an independent assessment of government climate reports as long as the participants reflected a range of perspectives and are not activists on either side of the debate.

But retired Rear Adm. David Titley, who served as oceanographer of the Navy and chief operating officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the new initiative could imperil national security by clouding “truthful assessments of the risks stemming from a changing climate.”

“I never thought I would live to see the day in the United States where our own White House is attacking the very science agencies that can help the president understand and manage the climate risks to security of today and tomorrow,” said Titley, who sits on the advisory board of the Center for Climate and Security, a nonpartisan group focused on climate-related risks. “Such attacks are un-American.”

Several experts questioned whether the White House’s plan could undermine decades’ worth of science pointing to a warming planet. One federal climate scientist, who asked for anonymity to avoid possible retaliation, said agency researchers had pursued and published their research in the past two years without meaningful resistance.

Camilo Mora, a geographer and environmental professor at the University of Hawaii, said in an email that a single task force could not alter the findings of scientists across the globe.

“When it comes down to climate change, we are talking about thousands of independent papers, from everywhere, finding exactly the same thing: that the climate is changing, that we are doing it and that most often than not, the impacts are pretty bad,” Mora said.

White House prepares to scrutinize intelligence agencies’ finding that climate change threatens national security

Major Trump administration climate report says damage is ‘intensifying across the country’

Gap continues to widen between Trump and intelligence community on key issues

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lcv aug 2022 who hooked him up? ebell?

Washington, D.C. – In response to Blake Masters winning the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate in Arizona, LCV Victory Fund issued the following statements:

“Blake Masters has tied himself to big oil and MAGA radicals who want to upend our democracy,” said LCVVF Regional Campaigns Director Eva Estrada. “He continues to question climate science and has repeatedly pushed the Big Lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Thankfully Arizonans have a proven climate leader who has taken on big oil and fought time and again to protect our democracy. LCV Victory Fund has made this race a top priority and will fight like hell to keep Captain Mark Kelly in the Senate.”

“We feel the impacts of climate change everyday. Record breaking heat and worsening droughts are affecting millions across our state, especially those who can least afford it.” said Chispa Arizona State Co-Director Vianey Olivarria. “It is frightening to see Blake Masters, a known climate denier and white supremacists, as the GOP nominee. “He does not reflect our values. Climate and the future of our communities is top of mind for Arizonans, and we deserve leaders in Congress who will stand up for us. We know Arizonans will elect a reasonable leader to the Senate again – Senator Mark Kelly.”

Blake Masters has shown time and again he is a radical candidate, questioning science and threatening our democracy:

:{He has repeatedly }:{ in interviews, claiming, “we have to figure out if the earth is warming and why….”}:
Blake Masters was Peter Thiel’s Deputy on the Trump transition team when they attempted to appointWilliam Happer, a known climate change denier, to be Trump’s science adviser.
He has continuously repeated the big lie, pushing the false claim that President Trump won the 2020 election. Trump’s endorsement of Masters said ‘Blake knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place, he will expose it and also, never let it happen again.’
Super PAC funded by Masters’ old boss Peter Thiel blasted his opponent for not believing that the election was stolen from President Trump. ‘Mark Brnovich says President Trump is wrong on voter fraud. Really? Brnovich failed to convene a grand jury, certifying Biden as president. Now he’s nowhere to be found, making excuses … instead of standing with our president.”

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clexit: Viv Forbes:

“There is no justification for the War on carbon dioxide – CO2 does not drive global temperature and Earth’s climate cannot be tweaked by erecting windmills or putting taxes on carbon dioxide. CO2 is naturally sequestered by oceans and the biosphere. Burning natural hydrocarbons merely recycles Earth’s carbonaceous nutrients vital to all life – already world food production and global forests have benefitted from the small increases in carbon dioxide plant food in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Clexit also featured an article by Will Happer, originally published in The Washington Times,where he argues “The Case for Nixing the Paris Agreement.” According to Happer, “[…] more CO2 is not a pollutant but is a benefit to humanity. The ‘social cost of carbon,’ akaCO2, is negative. It is immoral to prevent developing countries from using reliable, inexpensive fossil fuels to escape centuries of poverty.” [12], [13]

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bs bk; “Marc Morano’s book Green Fraud provides a factual scientific and political account of the Green New Deal and other misanthropic and self-serving schemes of the global elite and their opportunistic or deluded acolytes.” —Will Happer,Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics emeritus, Princeton University

:{:{}:

“Morano is truly the Pete Rose and Hank Aaron of climate contrarians.” —Steven Hayward of Power Line

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https://www.climatedocket.com/2019/06/26/exxon-climate-denial-american-council-science-health/

exxonMobil is funding a little-known nonprofit that calls itself a “pro-science advocacy organization,” but whose scientific advisory board includes several renowned climate deniers and has worked for decades to sow doubt about the health impacts of climate change.

Records show the ExxonMobil Foundation provided grants of at least $60,000 in both 2017 and 2018 to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), a group that says its mission is to “publicly support evidence-based science and medicine.”

Members of the ACSH scientific advisory board, however, include a who’s who of climate deniers, includingPatrick J. Michaels, who has worked for more than 30 years on behalf of the fossil fuel industry;S. Fred Singer,who last year wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal falsely claiming that sea level rise is not caused by climate change; andWilliam Happer, a current member of President Trump’s National Security Council who as recently as 2016 argued that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Documents recently revealed in an investigation by The Guardian guk show ExxonMobil’s current funding of the ACSH began prior to 1999, when Exxon and Mobil merged to become Exxon Mobil Corporation, one of the largest oil companies in the world....

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from naomi heartland art'l

Health & Science

White House prepares to scrutinize intelligence agencies’ finding that climate change threatens national security

The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director.

The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Juliet Eilperin and

Missy Ryan

Feb. 20, 2019

The White House is working to assemble a panel to assess whether climate change poses a national security threat, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, a conclusion that federal intelligence agencies have affirmed several times since President Trump took office.

The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security, which would be established by executive order, is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director. Happer, an emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University, has said that carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/06/08/white-house-blocked-intelligence-aides-written-testimony-saying-human-caused-climate-change-could-be-possibly-catastrophic/?tid=lk_inline_manual_34&itid=lk_inline_manual_34

no lnx

Climate and Environment

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony calling climate change ‘possibly catastrophic’

Officials sought to excise the State Department’s comments on climate science because they did not mesh with the administration’s stance

According to the National Park Service, Glacier National Park’s ice sheets are a fraction of the size they were 100 years ago.

Juliet Eilperin,

Josh Dawsey and

Brady Dennis

June 8, 2019

White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change is “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change.

The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn that climate change could undermine the United States’ national security — a position President Trump rejects....

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e&e news

Science critics angered by scrapped climate panel

Scott Waldman, E&E News reporter

Published: Friday, July 12, 2019

Some of President Trump's most vociferous cheerleaders on environmental policy are angry that he has backed away from a plan to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science.

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060713373

The proposed White House panel that would conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science is dead for now, as President Trump grapples with negative perceptions of his environmental record at the outset of his reelection campaign.

The monthslong push from within the National Security Council to review established science on climate change divided White House advisers and generated sharp opposition from researchers across the country. The effort, led by a physicist overseeing technology issues at the NSC, William Happer, stalled indefinitely amid internal disagreements within the White House, according to two sources.

"It's been totally stymied by the forces of darkness within the administration, but also by the looming election campaign," said Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute who led the EPA transition team under Trump.

Happer has consulted conservative groups that attack climate science in an attempt to recruit members for the proposed panel. He's spoken with policy analysts at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and CO2 Coalition, a group Happer founded and that claims that the world would be better off with higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions. The theories promoted by those groups are rejected by NASA, NOAA and the world's top science academies.

Happer initially wanted Trump to issue an executive order to create the "Presidential Committee on Climate Security." He wanted the panel to review assertions within the National Climate Assessment related to risks from climate change on national security. Happer briefed Trump on climate science at least twice (Climatewire, June 24).

The idea to create the panel has caused strife within the White House. Among its critics are deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell; Kevin Hassett, the outgoing chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council; and Kelvin Droegemeier, the president's science adviser. Those supporting the plan include Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and Brooke Rollins, assistant to Trump in the Office of American Innovation.

An official at NSC disputed the characterization that the panel was dead, even while confirming that it had been indefinitely delayed. The plan has suffered several downgrades over the months. It was initially proposed as a rapid response team of climate science critics who would challenge government publications on human-caused warming. Recent discussions have centered on the idea of forcing government climate scientists to participate in a debate with critics of their work who deny that humans are causing widespread changes on Earth (Climatewire, June 6). Most recently, the plan was diminished to creating dueling white papers that would elevate climate denialism to the level of consensus science.

Those in talks to participate as critics of mainstream science include John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. A potential leader of the exercise was Paul Robinson, a former Department of Energy official who oversaw talks about nuclear weapons tests with the Soviet Union, but who is not trained in climate science.

Trump supporters who want the administration to be more aggressive in its rejection of climate science were frustrated that the climate review panel had been sidelined. Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute sees it as a sign that the Trump campaign is sensitive to Democratic attacks on climate change.

"The reelect campaign has been completely taken over by the usual cast of Republican establishment consultants who are primarily concerned with making very large amounts of money on the campaign," Ebell said.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-official-resigns-in-protest-after-the-white-house-blocked-him-from-revealing-evidence-of-climate-change-report/

no lnx

Trump administration official resigns ‘in protest’ after the White House blocked his testimony on evidence of climate change: report

House Intelligence Committee

written by Cody Fenwick July 10, 2019

Rod Schoonover has resigned as a State Department intelligence official “in protest” over the White House’s decision to block him from presenting evidence and data on the impacts of climate change in Congressional testimony, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The report cited anonymous State Department officials as sources on the development. Previous reporting had revealed that the White House had blocked the written testimony.

The Washington Post reported:

According to several senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal deliberations, Trump administration officials sought to cut several pages of the document on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance. Critics of the testimony included William Happer, a National Security Council senior director who has touted the benefits of carbon dioxide and sought to establish a federal task force to challenge the scientific consensus that human activity is driving the planet’s rising temperatures.

Schoonover still testified before the House Intelligence Committee on June 5, 2019, on the topic of the national security implications of climate change, but he wasn’t allowed to provide evidence and data supporting his conclusions in his written testimony, the Journal reported. His written remarks were reportedly cut in half to exclude this information.

“As an intelligence officer, my job is to provide clear, objective, independent analysis top policymakers to advance U.S. national security,” Schoonover said at the hearing. “The Earth’s climate is unequivocally undergoing a long-term warming trend, as established by decades of scientific measurements from multiple independent lines of evidence.”

He added: “We see few plausible future scenarios where significant harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change. People’s choices in the present and future, however, dictate the magnitude of many factors.”

The Journal reported that Schoonover’s last day at the department will be Friday after having worked there for almost a decade.

The event highlights an ongoing struggle in the Trump administration, which arises from the fundamental failures of the Republican Party more broadly. The federal government has developed layers of experts and career officials who work to provide the analysis and information to elected and appointed officials in order for them to best carry out their duties to the public. But these career officials, while they certainly have political opinions, largely do their work with dedication toward pursuing the objective truth to aid decisionmakers. When a party like the GOP becomes so disconnected from reality that it denies the scientific consensus on climate change, it will likely clash with the government’s experts.

Alternatively, as occurred under President George W. Bush, the intelligence community may be co-opted into building the case for even a deeply misguided policy aim such as the Iraq War. Notably, the Journal pointed out that Schoonover’s agency, the Intelligence and Research Bureau, “was nearly alone among spy agencies in questioning whether Iraq had active weapons of mass destruction programs” when Bush pushed for war in 2003.

619 new

bad: the White House chooses climate denial over national security

Reporting on federal climate denial and delay during the (George W.) Bush administration, a journalist muttered to herself from time to time,“You can’t argue with physics.”
Fast forward a dozen years and hooooo-mama: Was I naive or what?
Because last week, as first reported by the Washington Post, a physicist working for the White House tried to cut all the factual climate science out of a State Department intelligence expert’s formal testimony to Congress on how climate change could could be “possibly catastrophic” to U.S. national security.
When the State Dept. refused to change its staffer’s testimony, the White House still let him talk to Congress, but barred him from submitting the written statement for entry into the Congressional Record for the hearing.
“I have never heard of basic facts being deleted from or blocked from testimony,” conservative policy scholar Norman Ornstein told The New York Times.
Almost every page of the written testimony’s scientific section, according to The Times, was marked up with negative comments by physicist William Happer, a National Security Council appointee.
Happer for years led the Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank that has received substantial funding from a charitable giving arm of Exxon.
In a 2014 media appearance, Happer denied that he was a climate change denier, but also told CNBC’s Squawk Box that “the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world and so were the Jews.”
According to a recent story on Climatewire, Happer in late May met with President Trump to brief him on a White House initiative to “highlight uncertainties in climate research and downplay the threat of global warming to national security.”

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omfg note system tip pt

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/06/10/rod-schoonover-trump-attempted-suppress-state-dept-analyst-testimony-climate-crisis

The Trump administration issued one of its most blatant attacks on climate science this past week when it tried to stop a State Department employee from testifying on the climate crisis, reports showed on Saturday.

As the Washington Post reported, intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover'stestimony was submitted to the White House for approval ahead of his planned appearance before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His remarks focused on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis.

The Trump administration refused to approve the testimony for entry into the congressional record, noting that the data Schoonover planned to present—drawing from top government scientists' research and peer-reviewed scientific reports—did not align with the executive branch's views.

[pix]

National Security Council advisers wrote a number of comments on Schoonover's draft, saying the testimony was “not objective.”

The testimony “includes lots of climate alarm propaganda that is not science at all,” wrote William Happer,a senior member of the National Security Council who has sought to create a federal task force to challenge the consensus reached by 97 percentof peer-reviewed climate scientists who say humans are contributing to the climate crisis.

“I am embarrassed to have this go out on behalf of the executive branch of the federal government,” Happer added, noting a particular objection to Schoonover's use of the term “tipping point” in reference to possible devastating, irreversible effects of the climate crisis.

“'Tipping points' is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” Happer wrote.

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Related: Get the background from DeSmog on climate science denier William Happer, and read: Physicist William Happer, the 'Unmoored' Climate Science Denier Heading a White House Climate Probe

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Schoonover was ultimately permitted to testify before the committee, but his testimony was not submitted into the record because, the Office of Legislative Affairs said, it did not “jibe” with the Trump administration's views on the climate.

President Donald Trump and many of his appointeesdenythat human activity like the extraction of fossil fuels are contributing to the warming of the globe, which scientists warn is already causing extreme weather events like hurricanes and wildfires, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers. As Schoonover mentioned in his testimony, the last five years have been the warmest on record according to NASA.

Although Schoonover was able to testify, climate action advocates decried the White House's attempt to stifle the information he eventually shared with the committee.

“Any attempt to suppress information on the security risks of climate change threatens to leave the American public vulnerable and unsafe,” Francesco Femia, chief executive of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, told the Post.

...

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omfg

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/us/politics/trump-climate-science.html

some lnx below

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science

May 27, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term “global warming” into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.

[Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.]

Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The attack on science is underway throughout the government. In the most recent example, the White House-appointed director of the United States Geological Survey,James Reilly, a former astronaut and petroleum geologist, has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project the impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.

Image

President Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of holding public debates on the validity of climate science.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times]

Scientists say that would give a misleading picture because the biggest effects of current emissions will be felt after 2040. Models show that the planet will most likely warm at about the same rate through about 2050. From that point until the end of the century, however, the rate of warming differs significantly with an increase or decrease in carbon emissions.

:{:{}:

The administration’s prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the earth’s atmosphere could warm by as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

In an email, James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

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“The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Mr. Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide — sometimes to an awkward degree.

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Image

The Beaufort Sea in the Arctic, a region that is warming rapidly. The United States recently declined to sign a communiqué on protecting the Arctic unless it omitted references to climate change.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times]

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“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

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Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer,the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

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Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

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“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

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William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council, is pushing to create a climate review panel that would question scientific consensus.CreditPool photo by Albin Lohr-Jones]

The concept is not new. Mr. Trump has pushed to resurrect the idea of a series of military-style exercises, known as “red team, blue team” debates, on the validity of climate science first promoted by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator who was forced to resign last year amid multiple scandals.

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At the time, the idea was shot down by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. But since Mr. Kelly’s departure, Mr. Trump has talked about using Mr. Happer’s proposed panel as a forum for it.

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For Mr. Trump, climate change is often the subject of mockery. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” he posted on Twitter in January when a snowstorm was freezing much of the country.

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His views are influenced mainly by friends and donors like Carl Icahn, the New York investor who owns oil refineries, and the oil-and-gas billionaire Harold Hamm — both of whom pushed Mr. Trump to deregulate the energy industry.

ImageThe Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: The White House Plan to Change Climate Science]

...

The thrust of Boutrous’ presentation wasn’t that climate science was wrong — he, too, took a turn running through graphs showing the precipitous rise in global temperatures and sea levels — but he also took care to show the rate of emissions in China and India, lingering particularly on a graph that said that China’s emissions currently exceed the United States. He said that this was largely due to the burning of coal, which is being reduced in the US. In fact, Boutrous even credited hydraulic fracking with reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the US.

Boutrous seemed to say that fossil fuel companies aren’t responsible for how people use their products. “IPCC doesn’t say that the extraction or production of fossil fuels leads to emissions,” Boutrous said. “It’s energy use, the economic activity, that drives the demand for fuel that leads to emissions.”

“WE’RE JUST MAKING THE CIGARETTES, PEOPLE ARE CHOOSING TO SMOKE.”

It’s an argument we’ve heard before from tobacco companies, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Tobacco companies for years said that ‘We’re just making the cigarettes; people are choosing to smoke,’” Frumhoff says.

And for years, courts sided with the companies, he says — until public opinion began to change. “It was the consequence of their efforts to disinform that led juries and judges — who are members of the public — to say, ‘Wait a minute,’” Frumhoff says. The lawsuit itself says bluntly that the defendants “borrowed the Big Tobacco playbook in order to promote their products.” The complaint accuses the oil companies of “promoting massive use of fossil fuels by misleading the public about global warming by emphasizing the uncertainties of climate science.”

In response, Boutrous’ presentation on the history of climate science focused on the controversy around the theory that climate change was caused by humans. Chevron may be willing to say nowthat climate change was caused by humans, but surely it wasn’t wrong to say otherwise then. For example, both Boutrous and Allen mentioned Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius who, at the turn of the 20th century, grew increasingly concerned that anthropogenic carbon emissions could increase global temperatures.

But Boutrous took time to emphasize that, until about the 1960s, most scientists didn’t believe him. This isn’t strictly wrong — although Judge Alsup himself noted that in 1938, Guy Callendar linked climate change to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Even NASA’s Earth Observatory agrees that Arrhenius was largely disregarded until the second half of the century. “It’s trial and error. Scientists debating each other,” Boutrous said in court. “Questioning other scientists’ views is part of the scientific process.” (Boutrous did not call any scientific experts on behalf of the oil companies to speak before Judge Alsup Wednesday about how the scientific process is conducted or anything else.)

“WHAT’

Boutrous drew quotes from IPCC reports across the years, showing the increasingly strong language that was used to characterize its conclusions about climate change. In 1995, the IPCC said that “the balance of evidence suggests” human-caused climate change, the 2007 report goes with the phrase “very likely,” and by 2013, it becomes “extremely likely.” In other words, the oil companies are emphasizing that it’s taken time for scientists to reach a consensus on climate change. It’s a strategy that climate law expert Jessica Wentz at Columbia Law School was expecting. “Not directly attacking the science, but undermining it by emphasizing uncertainty,” she says.

The legalistic reading of the IPCC’s statements was frustrating to Allen, he said in an interview with The Vergeafter the tutorial concluded, because to scientists, the evidence and context are more important than the language. “The question of whether somebody writing a scientific paper uses the word ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ is kind of neither here nor there,” Allen says. “What’s actually said is not nearly as important as what the evidence is to support it.”

Still, on the basic facts, the two sides agreed more than they disagreed — which kept arguments over whether or not climate change was real from derailing the hearing. This wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the deniers: academicsWilliam Happer, Richard S. Lindzen, and Steven E. Koonin requested leave to file their own scientific presentation, which questions anthropogenic climate change. Happer and Lindzen are climate deniers; Koonin claims climate science is “not settled.”

Another group of deniers, led by a British viscount with a degree in classical architecture, asked to file an amicus brief in the case. Neither group has yet received permission to contribute to the case, but the judge has asked both to disclose their funding sources and any links to either of the parties in the case. Notably, Koonin disclosed that he had “some money vested in a BP pension plan arising from his employment that ended nine years ago.” (He was chief scientist at BP for five years, according to his NYU bio.)

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milloy desmog

February 4, 2018

In January 2018, more than 200 scientists endorsed an open letter calling on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to remove climate change denier Rebekah Mercer from its board and to “end ties to anti-science propagandists and funders of climate science misinformation.” The New York Times reported that those among the AMNH letter calling for Mercer to step down wereMichael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. [60]

Milloy was among a group of climate change deniers who responded with their own open letter, calling for the AMNH “not to cave in to this pressure.” The letter was signed by numerous individuals with ties to groups funded by the Mercer Family Foundation such as Will Happer of the CO2 Coalition;Richard Lindzen, a fellow at the Cato Institute; and Craig Idso, the chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. There are a number of signatories affiliated with the Heartland Institute, which has received over $5.78 million from the Mercer Family Foundation since 2008. [61]

new

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/02/20/physicist-william-happer-unmoored-climate-science-denier-heading-white-house-climate-probe

In 2016, retired Princeton physicist Professor Will Happer accepted an invitation from conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin to give a keynote at his conference to talk about the “positive effects of CO2.”

Griffin thinks the science behind global warming is a scam. He also thinks there is “no such thing” as the HIV virus and that some plane contrails are part of a political plot to spray the population with poisons.

In an interview at the conference, Happer repeated his well-oiled mantra that “CO2 will be good for the Earth” and how it was “pretty clear we are not going to see dangerous climate change.”

Under normal circumstances, you might think that Happer's association with a notorious anti-science conspiracy theorist might not look good on your résumè for a government science committee. However, these are not normal times.

White House Probe

But less than three years later, Happer is now on the United States National Security Council and, according to the Washington Post, is about to be invited to head a White House committee to assess the risks climate change poses to U.S. national security. A 2014 Pentagon reportconcluded that climate impacts including extreme temperatures and rising sea levels were already positing a risk to national security.

Happer, 79, has a long list of scientific papers in distinguished journals on optics and atomic physics, but has no training on climate science and has never published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal on climate change.

Princeton colleague and climate scientist Professor Michael Oppenheimer has said of Happer that “with respect to climate science and scientists, he is not only unknowledgeable but appears to have become unmoored.”

One of the few genuine climate scientists to have engaged with Happer in detail about his interpretation of climate science is Dr. David Karoly, currently leader of the Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub at the Australian government's CSIRO science agency. In 2016, while at the University of Melbourne, Karoly engaged with Happer in a so-called “focused civil dialogue” on climate science.

Karoly told DeSmog he disengaged from the process after having reservations about the way it was being moderated. “But in the end, I realised that no matter what I said — all based on the peer reviewed science — he was not going to change his view, so I gave up,” said Karoly.

Commenting on Happer's suitability for the White House position, Karoly said: “Usually you would select a scientist with a strong peer-reviewed publication record in the area of interest. But he has not published a single peer-reviewed article on climate change in his career. That would suggest he does not have the credentials. I would argue that he does not have the appropriate experience, or the demonstrated capabilities, to be engaged in this sort of position.”

Jews and CO2

In a 2014 interview, Happer repeated a previous comparison he had made between carbon dioxide and the Holocaust.

“The demonization of CO2 is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. CO2 is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews,” he said.

In 2015, Happer was caught in a sting operation after Greenpeace operatives posing as oil and gas industry representatives asked him to write a report on the benefits of CO2. Happer agreed, suggesting payments be made to the CO2 Coalition.

For years, Happer has been an active participant in the climate science denial community — serving as a trustee of the Exxon-funded and now-defunct George C. Marshall Institute and, later, co-founding the institute's next iteration as the CO2Coalition with former Exxon manager Roger Cohen.

Reacting to Happer’s prospective role in leading an assessment of the national security risks of climate change, Francesco Femia, CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks and co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, said: “We would welcome a rigorous and independent panel of credible climate and national security experts to study the security implications of climate change. However, this is not that.”

“The proposed committee is intended to provide an ‘adversarial’ review of already rigorously-reviewed reports from the intelligence, defense, science, and presumably other agencies, and will be chaired by a vocal climate skeptic that reports to the President. Therefore, it will be neither independent nor rigorous.”

Femia told the Washington Post: “This is the equivalent of setting up a committee on nuclear weapons proliferation and having someone lead it who doesn’t think nuclear weapons exist.”

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NEW

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15032019/air-pollution-trump-epa-science-advisers-health-risk-fossil-fuel-chemical-tobacco-industry

For two years, the Trump administration has been planting seeds of change in the Environmental Protection Agency—installing allies of regulated industries onto its elite panels of science advisers. That effort now has borne fruit in dramatic fashion.

The EPA's new science advisers, sweeping aside decades of research on the grave health risks of fine particle air pollution, have launched a drive to force the agency to give greater weight to a handful of contrarian studies that dispute the harmful effects of soot.

Particulate matter is the pollution caused by combustion, a mixture of solid and liquid droplets that forms in the burning of fossil fuels or wood. The health risks of particulate matter have been an underpinning of the EPA's cost-benefit analysis of a number of air pollution regulations, including those meant to address climate change, like the Obama administration's Clean Air Act.

The science is well-established—the World Health Organizationestimates that there are 4.2 million premature deaths a year due to fine particle pollution, making it one of the leading environmental health risks globally. But allies of the fossil fuel industry have vigorously disputed the validity of fine particle pollution studies since they first emerged in the 1990s.

Significantly, the health damages from particle and other pollution coming from the combustion of fossil fuels have also been used by the EPA to justify controls on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Controlling climate change has important co-benefits, the agency has reasoned. The Trump administration and its industry allies oppose this logic.

More Weight for 'Discordant' Claims?

The latest scientific dispute centers around the EPA's draft assessment of the science on particulate matter (PM), a comprehensive review that the agency is required by law to conduct every few years to update the state of the science on several key pollutants. EPA released its draft review last fall.

It affirmed the agency's previous findings that the science points consistently and overwhelmingly to a "causal relationship" between PM pollution and premature deaths. The assessment concludes the greatest risk is due to particles less than 2.5 microns in width, and that PM2.5 is associated with a range of cardiovascular and respiratory effects.

For the first time, the EPA concluded that the evidence was strong enough to show a "likely" causal relationship between long-term PM2.5 exposure and cancer, as well as nervous system effects. The EPA concluded, as it has in the past, that there is evidence of health risks even at extremely low levels of PM exposure.

Now, in a harshly worded draft review, the Trump administration's science advisors are blasting those findings as based on "unverifiable opinions" and lacking in scientific support.

The advisers are members of a seven-member panel called the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee. Although it is clear the members are not unified in their critique—individual members attached separate letters—the document calls for "substantial revisions" to EPA's assessment of PM, including giving more weight to what it called the "discordant" evidence among the 2,800 published studies cited in the EPA's 1,900-page science assessment.

"Substantial discordant and conflicting evidence remains ignored or unresolved," the Trump administration-appointed CASAC wrote, "leading to repeated assertions that the literature shows consistent and coherent positive associations when in fact it shows a mixture of positive and negative results."

When asked for comment on the critique, a spokesperson for the EPA said by email: "We appreciate the work of the CASAC and we will review the report."

Who Are New Committee Members Listening To?

The CASAC, now chaired by Louis Anthony "Tony" Cox, Jr., a Denver-based consultant, offers a few examples of the studies it wants to see the EPA give more weight to. Among them are studies that are authored, in fact, by Cox himself—whose clients have included the American Petroleum Institute, the tobacco industry and the chemical industry.

Other studies mentioned by the CASAC are by S. Stanley Young, a former pharmaceutical industry statistician based in Raleigh, N.C., who is an adviser to the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science. Young is now also an EPA science adviser.

The CASAC also pointed to the work of James Enstrom,a Los Angeles epidemiologist who for years has questioned the health risks of particulate matter. A former tobacco industry researcher, Enstrom was a plaintiff in a 2016 lawsuit brought by the fossil fuel industry-funded Energy and Environment Legal Institute that challenged the makeup of the previous CASAC.

Many of the environmental scientists who were appointed to EPA's advisory panels had received funding from EPA at some point in their careers, which the Enstrom suit said was a conflict of interest. In 2017, Trump's first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, made the same argument when he replaced scientific experts from the existing science advisory boards with new appointees—including a number of industry allies and consultants, like Cox and Young.

'CASAC Itself Lacks Necessary Expertise'

One scientist who was among those removed from the CASAC last year, H. Christopher Frey, an environmental engineer at the University of North Carolina, said the harsh science critique from the Trump administration-appointed committee comes amid "numerous major changes to the [air quality standards] review process that collectively undermine its quality, integrity and credibility."

"Most astonishing is the arrogant and insulting tone of this letter toward EPA scientific staff," Frey, a former chairman of the CASAC, said in an email to InsideClimate News. Frey dismissed as "patently absurd" the document's assertion that the EPA's approach on particulate matter was unscientific. "The statement is ironic given that the CASAC itself lacks necessary expertise," he said.

In fact, the CASAC recommended that it be given access to additional technical expertise in order to complete its review of EPA science on particulate matter. Two members of the CASAC called for the EPA to reconstitute a 20-member special review panel on particulate matter that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded in October, just prior to the start of the peer review. That panel included experts in the science of particulate matter and health effects—expertise that is now missing on the CASAC. Although much of the science on the health risks of particulate matter is from large human studies, there are no epidemiologists on the current CASAC.

In one striking passage of its draft peer review, the CASAC said it is unable to reach consensus on the link between particulate matter and mortality—the "causality determination of mortality from PM2.5 exposure." Some members "are of the opinion that, although uncertainties remain, the evidence supporting the causal relationship between PM2.5 exposure and mortality is robust, diverse, and convincing," the document said. But other committee members think EPA should provide a better justification for its determination that there is a causal relationship between PM exposure and premature death.

Daniel Greenbaum, president of the Boston-based Health Effects Institute (HEI),a research institute that has conducted major studies on air pollution, said that he was surprised at that passage.

"Given that there is more than a decade worth of work now looking at the epidemiology, the toxicology, and a number of other things to see whether or not PM can contribute to mortality, there's pretty robust literature that says that," said Greenbaum. HEI has offered its own critiques of some aspects of EPA's assessment—for example, it does not agree with EPA's conclusion on nervous system effects. But HEI does not dispute EPA's fundamental conclusion on mortality risk. "By most standards, people would say that the evidence has strengthened over the last 20 years," Greenbaum said.

But Greenbaum noted that the committee's review document is only a draft. The CASAC has set a conference call for March 28 to discuss the document and the next steps before submitting its final recommendations to Wheeler.

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https://www.vox.com/2019/2/20/18233378/william-happer-trump-climate-change-panel

Pentagon and several federal agencies have repeatedly warned over the years that climate change is a threat to national security. Yet the White House is reportedly convening a panel to question it anew.

The Washington Post, citing a National Security Council (NSC) discussion paper it obtained, reports that White House staff are preparing an executive order for President Donald Trump’s signature that would establish a Presidential Committee on Climate Security to be chaired by a notorious climate change denier.

That man, NSC senior director William Happer, argued on CNBC in 2014 that “the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

John Whitehouse of Media Matters dredged up the video:

[vid twit?]

Happer’s views have gotten no less extreme since then. When he was under consideration for the role of Trump’s science adviser in early 2017, Happer sent an email to a Jezebel reader asserting that the “demonization of CO2” “really differs little from the Nazi persecution of the Jews, the Soviet extermination of class enemies or ISIL slaughter of infidels.”

Media Matters has previously detailed how Happer, a retired Princeton professor who is not trained as a climate scientist, has tried — unsuccessfully — to conceal the fact that oil interests have directly funded his “research.” And as a recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted, the fossil fuel industry has long been involved in campaigns in US politics “aiming to refute, confuse and obstruct acceptance of the reality of climate change,” using scientists just like Happer to spread misinformation.

The Trump administration keeps trying to muddy the waters about climate science

The Post’s report about the White House’s new panel is the latest indication that the Trump administration is trying to actively mislead the public on the well-established science of climate change.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan and Alex Ward have reported, many agencies in the executive branch of Trump’s own government have been warning the president and the American people of the severe threats of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

“The impacts and costs of climate change are already being felt in the United States, and changes in the likelihood or severity of some recent extreme weather events can now be attributed with increasingly higher confidence to human-caused warming,” according to the National Climate Assessment, released in November.

Asked about the National Climate Assessment by a reporter in November, Trump flatly said, “I don’t believe it.”

Last month, the Pentagon released a report detailing the national security threat posed by climate change. Weeks later, the intelligence community released its annual consensus World Threat Assessment. The document echoes the Pentagon’s finding that climate change is a major threat:

Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.

The NSC discussion paper obtained by the Post about the new panel suggests it would be created with an eye toward muddying the waters about the Pentagon and intelligence community’s findings. Though the paper acknowledges that a number of federal government reports have concluded climate change is a major threat, it goes on to claim “these scientific and national security judgments have not undergone a rigorous independent and adversarial scientific peer review to examine the certainties and uncertainties of climate science, as well as implications for national security.”

Given Happer’s views, there’s little doubt that he’ll indulge Trump if he wants to use the panel to deny the well-established science of climate change. In doing so, the consequences are grave: He’d further imperil the United States and future generations everywhere.

ref mma

A professor who was caught agreeing to hide the oil funding behind a climate denial research paper named Breitbart News as a media outlet that could "likely help" publicize the research, according to emails unearthed as part of an undercover investigation by Greenpeace. Indeed, Breitbart News has frequently cited Princeton Emeritus Professor William Happer to promote the supposed "benefits" of climate-warming carbon pollution and argue against a "war on CO2" -- including just days before the Greenpeace investigation was released. And now that Greenpeace has exposed Happer's ethically dubious actions, Breitbart News is defending Happer's behavior as "morally and scientifically unimpeachable."

On December 8, Greenpeace released the results of its investigation, in which Greenpeace UK reporters claiming to represent oil and coal companies asked two university professors to write industry-friendly research papers, and the professors agreed to do so without disclosing the fossil fuel funding behind them. According to Greenpeace, the investigation details "how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies' commercial interests."

As part of its report about the investigation, titled "Exposed: Academics-for-hire agree not to disclose fossil fuel funding," Greenpeace released a series of emails between its undercover staffers and the two academics, William Happer and Penn State Emeritus Professor Frank Clemente. In an email exchange in early November, a Greenpeace employee who was posing as an oil company consultant based in Beirut asked Happer if he could write a briefing paper "examin[ing] the benefits of fossil fuels to developing economies," and if there were any "US outlets or contacts you may have" that could help "get this research out far and wide." The Greenpeace employee also mentioned a London Timescolumn praising carbon emissions by Matt Ridley, who Happer said was in "close touch" with a pro-carbon group called the CO2 Coalition that Happer helped organize. The Greenpeace employee then asked Happer if Ridley -- a Timescolumnist who also frequently writes op-eds published by The Wall Street Journal-- "would help to disseminate our research." Happer replied: "I am sure Matt Ridley will be interested in whatever you produce. The Breitbart news organization would also likely help, as would various blogs, syndicated columnists, etc."

Given Breitbart News' past coverage of Happer, it should come as no surprise that he mentioned Breitbart when asked to name media outlets that would promote his industry-funded, climate-denying research. For instance:

A June 3, 2015 Breitbart article touted a letter from Happer and two other physicists attacking the American Physical Society (APS) for a statement recognizing the reality of man-made climate change.
A January 22, 2015 Breitbart article purporting to list off "Ten reasons why the war on CO2 has done far more harm than good" approvingly quoted Happer referring to "the jihad against atmospheric carbon dioxide."
An October 24, 2014 Breitbart article quoted "climate expert" Happer as saying: "No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science."
A September 2, 2011 Breitbart article quoted Happer as follows: "Disagreeing with [the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is like going to Saudi Arabia and criticizing Muhammad."

On December 4, several weeks after Happer mentioned Breitbart News in his email to Greenpeace (and just days before Greenpeace released the results of its investigation), Breitbart News published yet another article touting Happer, this one titled "Carbon Dioxide Is Not Our Enemy." In it, Breitbart's John Hayward wrote a highly sympathetic profile of Happer's climate science denial, asserting that a white paper Happer co-authored was "meant to be a conversation-starter" and took "a non-confrontational approach with copious footnotes and supporting sources, inviting readers to perform their own research and gain a fuller understanding of CO2 and its benefits." Hayward also stated that Happer "lamented the vicious treatment given to scientists who showed even modest skepticism toward the link between CO2 and climate change."

After Greenpeace released its investigation, Breitbart News' James Delingpole rushed to Happer's defense with a December 8 article,in which he wrote: "What's clear is that [at] every stage Happer's behaviour was morally and scientifically unimpeachable." Delingpole alleged that Happer was not at fault because he made clear he "would only say in his paper what he believed anyway" and indicated that he did not "wish to benefit personally from the fee, but preferred that the money should go to a tax-exempt educational charity, which pays only his travel expenses."

It's true that Happer has a long track record of advocating for the purported "benefits" of carbon pollution, and it's also true that he requested in his emails to the undercover Greenpeace employee that "whatever fee would have come to me would go directly to the CO2 Coalition" -- the group Happer helped organized earlier this year. But Delingpole tellingly did not provide Happer's answer to two other questions Delingpole noted that Greenpeace had raised: "Would the CO2 Coalition be happy to take a direct donation on condition the donor remained anonymous?" and "Might Happer be able to get his paper peer-reviewed by sympathetic authors?"

This is where Happer's conduct is far from "unimpeachable," as Breitbart News claimed.

The Greenpeace staffer posing as a representative of the Middle Eastern oil company told Happer over email that "we are happy to make a direct donation to the CO2 Coalition, providing it is anonymous," and asked Happer whether "the CO2 Coalition voluntarily discloses its funders." Happer replied that he believed the CO2 Coalition isn't "required to make public any donors, although it is required to disclose them to the Internal Revenue Service." He also forwarded the question to William O'Keefe, another member of the Board of Directors of the CO2 Coalition and former Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the American Petroleum Institute. O'Keefe replied by suggesting that the oil company funnel the funds through the Donors Trust, which has been dubbed the "dark-money ATM" of the conservative movement:

We are under no obligation to identify donors, except to the IRS but I think that is just organizations. When people ask the IRS or a firms 990 [sic], the donor list is redacted. If the person participates in the Donors Trust, he/she can make the donation through that and have complete confidentiality.

Happer then forwarded O'Keefe's response to the undercover Greenpeace employee. As Greenpeace noted, in his emails "Happer also disclosed that [coal giant] Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a crucial Minnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition."

The exchange between Happer and the undercover Greenpeace staffer exemplifies how the fossil fuel industry's funding of shoddy science can be hidden from public view, and how this strategy can apply not just to the research papers themselves but also to op-eds and other media coverage about them. Indeed, the other university professor that Greenpeace approached, Penn State's Frank Clemente, listed over email a series of op-eds he had written that had been published in newspapers across the United States, and then observed: "Note that in none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar."

The other serious issue raised in Happer's emails relates to peer review, the process by which scholarly work is checked by a group of experts in the same field prior to publication. As Greenpeace documented, in his emails Happer "laid out details of anunofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal." Specifically, Happer wrote that if he submitted the research paper to a peer-reviewed journal, it might "no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly your client would also like." Instead, Happer proposed a review process that would not be anonymous and would be conducted by the climate-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, writing that although "purists might object that the process did not qualify as a peer review ... I think it would be fine to call it a peer review."

The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently conducted a similar review of another pro-carbon pollution paper, with Ridley -- who used to be a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal -- deceptively alleging in the London*Times* that the paper had been "thoroughly peer reviewed."

Logo: The Washington Times

Reliable Reporting. The Right Opinion.

New York Times hit with backlash for labeling Princeton physicist a 'climate denialist'

Best states for concealed carry — ranked worst to first

In this Oct. 9, 2007, file photo, reviewed by a U.S. Dept of Defense official, U.S. military personnel inspect each occupied cell on a two-minute cycle at Camp 5 maximum-security facility on the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. An effort to decrease the detainee population appears to have bogged down as authorities wrestle with what to do with those who cannot easily be brought to trial but are considered too dangerous to free, and others who have been cleared for release but can’t be sent to their home countries. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

Guantanamo not in the picture for Trump despite vow to ‘load up’ prison’s empty cells

...

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Wesley Pruden

No end of the Mueller minstrels in sight

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Monica Crowley

Conditioning the masses to an extreme agenda

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A man polishes the sign for The New York Times at the company's headquarters, July 18, 2013 in New York. The newspaper has faced declines in print advertising and subscription revenue. The company has tried to offset those drops by increasing the number of digital subscribers. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

A man polishes the sign for The New York Times at the company’s headquarters, July 18, 2013 in New York. The newspaper has faced declines in print advertising and subscription revenue. The company has tried to offset those drops by ... more >

By Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Thursday, February 21, 2019

Princeton professor emeritus William Happer’s role in forming a White House climate security committee didn’t sit well with a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, which called the eminent physicist a “denialist.”

The headline prompted a backlash from those who object to applying a derogatory label associated with Holocaust disbelief to scientists and others who challenge worst-case climate-change scenarios.

:{:{}:

Among those who bristled at the term was Roy Spencer, University of Alabama in Huntsville principal research scientist, NASA U.S. Science Team leader, and author of Amazon bestsellers such as “Inevitable Disaster: Why Hurricanes Can’t Be Blamed on Global Warming” (2017).

:{:{}:

“Journalists using the ‘denialist’ label demean their profession,” Mr. Spencer said in an email. “None of the prominent skeptical scientists I know deny some level of recent warming, or humans as a contributing cause.”

:{:{}:

Including Mr. Happer. “I know Will,” Mr. Spencer said. “Dr. Happer doesn’t deny that increasing CO2 might have some small influence on climate.”

He continued, “The question is the magnitude of the influence, whether the benefits of more CO2 are being ignored, and whether reducing CO2 substantially might well impoverish humanity.”

:{:{}:

Will Happer is an esteemed Princeton physics prof who believes that CO2 is plant food and that climate hysteria is just that.

:{:{}:

To the NYTimes, however, he is no different than a Holocaust denier.

Journalism.@CoralMDavenport pic.twit

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) February 21, 2019

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his student not an asshole, opposite

Petroleum and Propaganda: The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry

Article

May 2012

John Farley

James Powell was inspired to write this important new book because of a remarkable paradox: among climate scientists, there is a near-unanimous consensus that global warming is occurring now, is largely manmade, and will cause very severe environmental problems if humanity continues business as usual. However, among the lay public the picture is much more mixed: only about half of the U.S. public agrees with the climate scientists. Why the enormous discrepancy?… The Inquisition of Climate Science explains in detail how the global-warming-denialist ideas that serve the interests of the oil companies (and fossil-fuels industry) become sincerely held beliefs for a significant fraction of society. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

View

Our Last Chance to Save Humanity?

Article

Sep 2010

John Farley

James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 320 pages, $25.00, hardcover. James Hansen, one of the world’s most

William Happer - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Happer

William "Will" Happer (born July 27, 1939) is an American physicist who has specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy. He is the Cyrus ...

Career · ‎Views · ‎Honors

New York Times labels William Happer, Princeton physicist, a 'climate ...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/.../new-york-times-labels-william-happer-princeton...

3 days ago - Princeton professor emeritus William Happer's role in forming a White House climate security committee didn't sit well with a number of media ...

William Happer is Trump's pick to chair new climate change panel - Vox

https://www.vox.com/2019/2/20/.../william-happer-trump-climate-change-panel

4 days ago - Trump’s pick to chair new climate panel once said CO2 has been maligned like “Jews under Hitler”. William Happer has bizarre, backward views about climate science. ... That man, NSC senior director William Happer, argued on CNBC in 2014 that “the demonization of carbon dioxide ...

William Happer | DeSmogBlog

https://www.desmogblog.com/william-happer

William Happer is the emeritus Eugene Higgens professor of physics and Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor of physics at Princeton University. Happer is a director ...

White House prepares to scrutinize intelligence agencies' finding that ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../ccc8b29e-3396-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.ht...

4 days ago - The proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security is being spearheaded by William Happer, a National Security Council senior director ...

William Happer | Department of Physics - Princeton Physics

https://phy.princeton.edu/people/william-happer

William Happer. Professor Emeritus. Phone: 609-258-4382. Email Address: happer@Princeton.EDU. Assistant: Antonia Sarchi. Office Location: 258 Jadwin Hall.

About The Happer Group - Princeton Physics - Princeton University

physics.princeton.edu/atomic/happer/

We are interested in studying the physics of spin-polarized atoms and nuclei, and the use of such polarized systems in various applications, including polarized ...

Web results

Trump's likely science adviser calls climate scientists 'glassy-eyed cult ...

https://www.theguardian.com/.../trump-science-adviser-william-happer-climate-change-c...

William Happer, frontrunner for job of providing mainstream scientific opinion to officials, backs crackdown on federal scientists' freedom to ...

A Physicist and Possible Adviser to Trump Describes His ... - ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org/.../a-physicist-and-possible-adviser-to-trump-describes-his-lo...

Brilliant and controversial, Dr. Will Happer of Princeton says being called a climate denier feels like being labeled a Nazi sympathizer.

William Happer: Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again - WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274

In The Wall Street Journal, William Happer writes that the observed response of the climate to more CO2 is not in good agreement with ...

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2/19 capt bak

6/16 hack poster boy? pension plan still useful?

how was this feck not taken out? mercer, bradly and koch $

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/10/02/climate-science-deniers-trump-admin-happer-wehrum-rollins-wynn-simmons

readfearn

here are five folks spearheading the United States government who think that when it comes to climate change, they know better than all of the world’s main scientific institutions.

There’s Donald Trump himself, of course, who famously tweeted that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese, and said that a cold snap in the weather overturns a century or more of scientific inquiry.

Then there’s energy secretary Rick Perry, whose fuzzy logic on the science sees him unconvinced that CO2 is the key driver of climate change.

Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, is similarly confused and non-committal about the impacts of burning fossil fuels, as is former coal-lobbyist-turned-EPA head Andrew Wheeler. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson said in 2015 that climate change was “irrelevant,” that temperatures were driven by natural cycles and, since then, hasavoided questions about the role of human activity in climate change.

OK, so there are more than five (with Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Jeff Sessions among those who have denied the science in the past), but these five are well positioned to influence the energy and climate policies of the nation.

Wheeler, for example, is driving through cuts to national efficiency standards for motor vehicles and is relaxing pollution rules on coal power plants. Zinke and Perry are aggresively promoting fossil fuel growth with Trump as the climate-wrecker-in-chief. Carson heads an agency that has a role in promoting (or not) climate change adaptation and resilience for homes and properties, particularly after natural disasters.

Remembering not only do these five reject the advice of the world’s major science academies, but also the expertise of the scientists working in their own government agencies.

But while these five might be relative household names with their views well reported, DeSmog presents five lesser-known climate science deniers inside the administration who are also in positions to gut federal action on climate and promote fossil fuel-friendly policies, backed by their own convictions that climate change just isn't much of a problem.

Will Happer

Will Happer, emeritus professor from Princeton University, was once in the running as Trump’s science advisor but has now been appointed to the National Security Council, specializing in emerging technologies.

After news of Happer’s appointment became public, Science, republishing E&E News, characterized the 79-year-old physicist as a “vocal critic of mainstream climate science.”

But Happer is more than a mere critic — he has acted as an enabler and activist against action on climate change for well over a decade.

For years, Happer was chairman at the George Marshall Institute and then, when that was shuttered, he founded the CO2Coalition with former Exxon director, the late Roger Cohen. Both groups took fringe positions on the science of climate change, with Happer claiming that adding more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere will be good for humans.

In 2015, Happer was caught in a sting by Greenpeace when he offered to write a report on the “benefits” of CO2 for a fake oil client and then hide the funding, which would be directed to the CO2 Coalition. Since then, that group has received funding from the foundation of Trump backer and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer.

In December 2016, Happer attended a conference organized by conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin. Now he’s on the National Security Council.

Late in 2017, the Trump administration nixed climate change from a list of global threats to the U.S. in the National Security Strategy.

It's safe to say Happer won't be leading any pushes to add it back in.

Bill Wehrum

Bill Wehrum is the U.S. government’s most senior official on air pollution, as the assistant administrator in the Office of Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Wehrum is a long-serving lawyer for the coal industry, as well as petrochemical and petroleum industry groups (such as Koch Industries).

Wehrum’s office is also tasked with looking at regulations to tackle power plant pollution and climate change and recently proposed the Affordable Clean Energy rule as a replacement for Obama's Clean Power Plan.

But as the New York Times reported, Wehrum has been delivering big time for his former fossil fuel industry clients by proposing the new rule, which EPA's own analysis shows would increase premature deaths from pollution.

One former EPA director, Bruce Buckheit, told the New York Times: “They basically found the most aggressive and knowledgeable fox and said, ‘Here are the keys to the hen-house.'”

Over a decade earlier, Wehrum was in the same position at EPA as he is now and back then argued against granting California a Clean Air Act waiver to set more stringent pollution standards for vehicles.

Back in power at the EPA, he ran the agency's midterm review of auto emissions standards, which this year recommended rolling back the stricter standards proposed by the Obama administration.

Under question during his confirmation hearings, Wehrum claimed that CO2 emissions as a main driver of climate change, which the government’s own scientists confirm, was to him an “open question." [vid]

Brooke Rollins

Rollins was an aide to Texas Governor Rick Perry before spending 15 years leading the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which she left in early 2018 to become assistant to the president in the Office of American Innovation (OIA), based in the White House (some wonder what the OIA actually does).

During her time at TPPF, Rollins promoted the work of the organization’s Kathleen Hartnett White, a climate science denier and fossil fuel evangelist whose controversial nomination to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality was ultimately withdrawn.

In August 2018, Rollins appeared at the Heartland Institute’s energy conference alongside that think tank’s new president Tim Huelskamp.

At the conference, Rollins nodded as Huelskamp suggested American schoolchildren’s heads were being “filled with mush” about the dangers of CO2.

When asked if the inner-workings of the White House were as chaotic as some media had claimed, Rollins replied: “Is there chaos? Yes. But I would say it’s like the chaos of my home — having four children in five years.”

Home life was like a “goat rodeo,” she said, and working in the White House wasn’t “much different.”

While at TPPF, Rollins wrote that Trump should exit the Paris climate agreement.

What she's actually doing in her role with OIA remains unclear, but the fact that she appeared at the America First Energy Conference, hosted by a climate science denying think tank, indicates she isn't likely straying from her previous positions on climate and energy.

Todd Wynn

Todd Wynn is director of the Interior Department’s Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs after spending years in pro-fossil fuel industry think tanks, many with Koch network connections.

On Wynn’s CV is his time working at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate bill mill where he led that group’s energy task force.

In that position, he fought against state renewable energy mandates and federal regulation of fracking fluids.

Lisa Graves, co-director of DocumentedInvestigations.org, has described Wynn as an “aggressive fossil fuel insider.”

In his new position with the Department of the Interior, Wynn is responsible for “strengthen[ing] relationships between state and local partners and external stakeholders” with Secretary Zinke's office, which, by the looks of it, has already been quite cozy with fossil fuel stakeholders.

An investigation by HuffPost alleged Wynn may have violated an ethics pledge by continuing to liaise with former associates while in his new job.

“Wynn has been a rising star in the influential network of fossil fuel-funded think tanks that push policies and produce pseudoscientific research to muddle the debate on climate change,” the HuffPost report detailed.

Wynn has himself questioned the role that fossil fuel emissions have on warming the planet, suggesting in 2010 that it was “absolutely ridiculous” to claim CO2 was driving climate change.

Daniel Simmons

Who better to lead the Trump administration's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy than a man who once asked for that same office to be closed while barracking for fossil fuels? Daniel Simmons is just that guy.

As reported by DeSmog and others, Simmons spent years working for so-called “free market think tanks,” including the Institute for Energy Research, before joining the Trump transition team and then securing the nomination for the role, located in the Department of Energy.

Simmons has a history of working at organizations that attack programs aimed at encouraging the development of clean energy industries like solar and wind power. But in 2015, the American Energy Alliance (AEA), where he was working, attacked the office Simmons now heads, writing disapprovingly that its role was to “promote and subsidize 'clean energy' as determined by government bureaucrats.”

The office, AEA wrote, “aims to control multiple sectors of the economy, from energy production and transmission to manufacturing and construction.” Cutting the office entirely could “save” the administration more than $9 billion. Simmons himself has claimed that the costs of the Paris climate agreement target of keeping global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius would be greater than any benefits.

Perfect man for the job? In the Trump administration, the answer is yes.

ref1

https://YYY.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/dec/06/more-terrifying-than-trump-the-booming-conspiracy-culture-of-climate-science-denial

For years now geologists have been politely but forcefully arguing over the existence or otherwise of a new epoch – one that might have started decades ago.

Some of the world’s most respected geologists and scientists reckon humans have had such a profound impact on the Earth that we’ve now moved out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene.

It’s not official. But it’s close.

Dropping nuclear bombs and burning billions of tonnes of fossil fuels will do that to a planet, as will clearing swaths of forests to make way for food production and supermarket car parks and the like.

The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age

That’s all in the real world though, and sometimes you might get the horrible, chilling idea that when it comes to the production of our thoughts and ideas, that’s not the place a lot of us live anymore.

So I’d like to also propose the idea of an impending new epoch – the Trumpocene – that in the spirit of the era itself is based solely on a few thoughts held loosely together with hyperlinks and a general feeling of malaise.

In the Trumpocene, the epoch-defining impacts of climate change are nothing more than a conspiracy. Even if these impacts are real, then they’re probably good for us.

The era is named, of course, for the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, the Republican pick for US president whose candidacy has been defined by a loose grasp of facts, jingoistic posturing, populist rhetoric, his amazing hair and his treatment of women.

So what are the things that might define the Trumpocene?

Is it the point at which large numbers of people started to reject the views of large groups of actual experts – people with university qualifications and things – in exchange for the views of anyone who agrees with them? (Brexit, anyone?)

How about that point when a critical mass of people have become convinced that they can Google their way out of the laws of physics?

:{:{}:

Let’s go and dig for evidence of the Trumpocene.

:{:{}:

A few months ago, Trump gave an interview to polemicist and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who could be the angriest person on the internet.

Jones has a regular online radio and TV show called Infowars that has expanded beyond being a vehicle for Jones’s cult personality to include regular news bulletins and a line in “alternative” health therapies.

Las Vegas shooting was 'false flag' operation, InfoWars founder claims

Jones thinks that climate change is a scam being forced on us by the United Nations, which, in turn, is a totalitarian regime and kingpin of a new world order.

The a fervent Trump supporter has told his viewers that the both US president, Barack Obama, and the Democrat nominee, Hilary Clinton, were “literal demons” who smelt of sulphur. I kid you not.

In Australia, we have a senator who similarly sees climate change as a thing made up by the UN. Our top-rating radio host, Alan Jones (no relation), has said climate science is “witchcraft”.

Now, before I go on, there’s a prevailing view (often expressed in the comments of this blog) that climate science deniers and oddballs like Alex Jones should be ignored. In some ways, those commenters are right.

But then you look at the popularity of people like Jones and see that, to increasing numbers of people, they are not people to be ignored, but are paragons of fearless truth-telling.

There’s a demographic to which rhetoric from people like Jones and, more broadly, Trump, appeals.

Jones’s YouTube account has about 1.6 million subscribers and is growing. He has 1.2m likes on his Facebook account. His website, according to SimilarWeb, was getting 27m pageviews a month back in February. Now it’s at 36m.

Earlier this year Jones snagged a rare interview with the conservative blogger Matt Drudge. Jones and Drudge expressed mutual admiration.

Drudge’s news and opinion aggregator website, the Drudge Report, is a genuine web phenomenon and considered hugely influential.

With about 1.37bn page views a month, the Drudge Report is the second-ranked media site in the United States — 600m views behind msn.com but 300m ahead of Google’s news page.

The Drudge Report also tends to link to news items that disparage any action to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s now a whole media ecosystem that climate science denialism can exist inside, where there’s little scrutiny of the views of deniers. US-based sites like the Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart and Daily Caller are part of that ecosystem.

As the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade notes,Breitbart “has the dubious honour of challenging Fox News’s status as America’s most influential conservative media outlet”.

Not only is the outlet having influence, but its executive chairman, Stephen Bannon, is running Trump’s campaign.

Breitbart too is growing its audience, according to those SimilarWeb statistics. In February 2016 the site registered 89m page views. In August, it was up to 143m.

Conspiracy central: the activists painting Clinton as a sick, terrorist-friendly killer

Another characteristic of the Trumpocene might be the heightened levels of hubris combined with triumphant rhetoric and the tendency towards insults.

The Breitbart writer James Delingpole, for example, rejects the evidence of human-caused climate change. Last week he described a Royal Society fellow and climate scientist as a “puffed-up missy”.

“What a bunch of disgraceful, money-grubbing, charlatans the climate alarmists are,” wrote Delingpole, before then trying to link “climate alarmists” with child abusers.

For a while, maybe the Trumpocene and the Anthropocene can coexist.

But even though they exist on separate plains, can we really afford to dismiss the impact of either of them?

---

ref2

https://YYY.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/dec/06/more-terrifying-than-trump-the-booming-conspiracy-culture-of-climate-science-denial

no lnx

more terrifying than Trump? The booming conspiracy culture of climate science denial

Graham Readfearn

Conspiracy websites and hyperpartisan media outlets are building huge online audiences who want to hear climate change is a hoax

@readfearn

Tue 6 Dec 2016 01.52 EST Last modified on Wed 14 Feb 2018 12.08

The US president-elect, Donald Trump, who has praised the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars.com, Alex Jones. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Back in December 2015, Donald Trump gave a 30-minute live interview to the website Infowars.com and its combustible leader, Alex Jones.

“Your reputation is amazing and I will not let you down,” said Trump, who, at the time, was leading in most polls for the Republican presidential nomination.

Jones, a fervent Trump supporter, is a conspiracy theorist writ large. He insists there is “iron clad” evidence that the 11 September terrorist attacks in the US were an “inside job”.

How a dubious tweet about illegal votes found its way to Trump's megaphone

Jones has also said that in 1996 governments deployed a worldwide program to secretly put chemicals into the fuel of aircraft to poison people. These “chemtrails” don’t hurt the “globalists” though, because Jones says they have a “special detox”.

Oh, and Jones also thinks climate change is a hoax.

Climate change is an issue he covers regularly on his shows, where he has interviewed climate science deniers such as Christopher Monckton (a familiar name to Australians given his multiple speaking tours here), Marc Morano and James Delingpole.

While it’s easy to dismiss the conspiracy culture pushed by Jones as pseudoscientific rubbish, it is not so easy to dismiss the size of the audience he has been building. Jones’s website gets 57m page views per month – double where it was six months ago.

According to analytics site Social Blade, the Alex Jones YouTube channel has 1.8m subscribers and just racked up its one billionth (that’s not a typo) video view. (For comparison, the BBC News YouTube channel has 992,000 subscribers.)

Jones’s Infowars site is part of an ecosystem of hyperpartisan media outlets that insist climate change is a hoax. Like Jones, that ecosystem is rapidly building a receptive online audience.

Those sites can now reach hundreds of millions of people with headlines insisting that human-caused climate change is a hoax, that global warming has stopped or that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is good.

One example. The most popular climate change story across social media in the past six months was not some diligently researched piece from one of the many very good science journalists writing for major news organisations around the world.

Rather, the story claimed that thousands of scientists had come forward to declare that climate change was a hoax. The writer was a guy running a website in Los Angeles who worked for eight years for the UK conspiracy theorist David Icke.

Icke thinks the moon might be some sort of spaceship, that the world is controlled by a globalist illuminati and, yes, that climate change is a hoax. Icke is a regular guest on Infowars.

Infowars will often source material from Breitbart – the website that used to be run by Trump’s campaign chairman and soon-to-be chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

Many of Breitbart’s most popular climate change items are written by Delingpole, a British polemicist. Guess what he thinks of climate change?

Given that climate science denial has become a part of the Republican party’s identity, it was hardly surprising that the GOP-led House of Representatives committee on science should tweet a link to a Breitbart climate story written by Delingpole (a story based on a deeply misleading article in the UK’s Daily Mail).

Breitbart is also building its audience. According to data from SimilarWeb, the site now gets 168m page views per month, doubling its reach in the past six months.

The Drudge Report – the wildly popular conservative-leaning news aggregator site with 1.7bn page views a month – also helps drive traffic to sites such as Infowars and Breitbart. Its founder, Matt Drudge, was another recent guest of Jones.

Since Trump won the US election, there has been much talk of the influence of “fake news”, with Facebook in particular identified as a key conduit. That encompasses news that is blatantly fabricated but also lounge room content farms that pass themselves off as news. Then there are the hyperpartisan opinion sites.

I’m happy to admit the online growth and reach of climate science denialists and conspiracy theorists terrifies me. Why?

LeBron James will not stay at Trump-branded hotel in New York

Spreading Misinformation

Happer began is speech by excoriating what he called “climate hysteria” and went on to accuse people involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of being “on the take”. Happer added that others, such as climate NGOs and activists, were driven primarily by a “financial agenda”.

Within his presentation, one slide claimed that fossil fuel power plants emit no pollution, and equated their CO2 emissions with a human exhaling. His inability to distinguish between CO2 in the current carbon cycle versus injecting carbon from millions of years ago is a standard denier sleight of hand, but it went unchallenged by his Dublin audience sources claim.

Next, Happer presented a series of charts purporting to show that “Global Warming Models Don’t Work!”. For this, he used a long-debunked chart produced by Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama and a favourite among climate deniers in the US Republican Party.

Happer then did a number of slides explaining how CO2 is really “plant food” and how the world has been in a “CO2 famine for the last several million years”. When challenged by an audience member on this “CO2 as fertilizer” myth, Happer admitted that this was not in fact his area of expertise. But this in no way prevented him from continuing to spread misinformation.

One audience member attending Happer’s talk was rural TD (member of parliament), industrial turf cutter and noted climate denier, Michael Fitzmaurice. In a surreal moment, he asked Happer for advice on how to defeat the arguments of people “who claim that climate change is real”.

Happer next stated that radiative forcing “cannot be verified by direct measurement”. This too is manifestly false, as demonstrated by the US Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab research.

The presumed reason the ICSF invited Happer to present is to provide ammunition to downplay the role of agricultural emissions by inferring that methane is largely irrelevant to climate change. This is the key message the founder of the ISCF, Ray Bates, a retired meteorologist who is an active lobbyist to exempt Ireland’s GHG-intensive beef and dairy sectors from the impact of climate regulations.

Ireland’s agricultural emissions are by far the highest per capita in the EU, with the government committed to backing the politically powerful farm lobby expanding both forms of ruminant agriculture despite the climate implications.

Closed-Door Science

Dr Gerard Fleming, Head of Forecasting with Met Éireann, was invited to both talks but declined to attend. Fleming has also seen Prof Happer’s slide presentation and commented: “a lot of the stuff in there wasn’t science”, adding that it went instead “into the realm of political advocacy”. He stressed that Met Éireann has no corporate connection whatever with the ICSF(Bates is a former assistant director).

Dr Fleming emphasised that Met Éireann regard IPCC science as the “gold standard” and was baffled by Happer’s assertion about alleged IPCC corruption. “I haven’t seen too many [climate] scientists driving around in gold-plated cars,” he added.

He accepted that the presence of senior Met Éireann staff at both ICSF events could lead to the perception that they were giving the event “silent assent”, but stressed no formal discussion had yet occurred within Met Éireann. “We will probably now have to sit down and consider this internally”.

Dr Fleming added that he was personally unhappy with the closed nature of the ICSF meetings. “Science is not to be discussed behind closed doors; I’m not at all comfortable with that idea of inviting some and excluding others. We need an open exchange of views”.

No information on the funding for Happer’s visit was made available. It is understood that, once again, no cover charge was levied for the meeting, and no donations were sought.

Following ICSF hosting Lindzen for their inaugural meeting last month, their choice of another hard-core denier as their second speaker removes any remaining doubt as to the climate-denying credentials of the well-funded ICSF, whatever about its stated aims of “better informing climate and energy policies in Ireland”.

Group organiser, Jim O’Brien, an engineer, refused to answer any questions from DeSmog UK and barred our reporter from attending. DeSmog UK also contacted Happer directly by email with a series of questions, but at time of going to press, he had not responded.

John Gibbons is a Dublin-based specialist writer and commentator on climate and environmental issues. He blogs at ThinkOrSwim.ie. You can follow him on Twitter here.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/05/10/conservative-groups-pushing-trump-exit-paris-deal-have-taken-millions-koch-brothers-and-exxon

The “conservative groups” urging President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement have accepted tens of millions of dollars from groups linked to the billionaire petrochemical brothers Charles and David Koch, ExxonMobil, and the Mercer family.

More than 40 groups have co-signed an open letterurging Trump to keep his campaign promise and “withdraw fully from the Paris Climate Treaty.”

The groups, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, claim failing to withdraw from the treaty could put Trump’s policy agenda of promoting fossil fuels at risk.

The Wall Street Journal has quoted a White House spokesperson saying the president will not make a decision on the Paris agreement until after meeting G-7 leaders later this month.

Analysis carried out by DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center (CIC) shows many of the groups signing the letter have taken multi-million dollar donations from groups tied to the Koch brothers, who own Koch Industries. Several of the groups have accepted cash from oil giant ExxonMobil while many also deny the basic science linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change.

In the letter, the groups say Trump should withdraw from the Paris deal and “stop all taxpayer funding of UN global warming programs” — two promises made by Trump during his campaign.

Paris Deal

As part of the Paris deal, agreed to by almost 200 countries as part of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.S. pledged in a document known as a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025, based on their levels in 2005.

“Paris then requires a more ambitious NDC every five years in perpetuity,” the groups write.

The letter says environment groups and some attorneys general are using court action to try and protect the Obama era’s Clean Power Plan that sought to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The U.S. participation in the Paris deal is being cited in these lawsuits, the groups claim.

“Failing to withdraw from Paris thus exposes key parts of your deregulatory energy agenda to unnecessary legal risk,” the letter claims.

Right-wing media outlets including Breitbart and The Daily Caller have been reporting the letter from conservative groups without mentioning the known links to the Koch brothers and to their denial of the science of climate change.

Koch Cash

The DeSmog and CIC analysis, using publicly available IRS disclosures, shows the Koch brothers have donated at least $6.9 million to the groups, much of which went to the Heritage Foundation. Exxon donated about $5.9 million to the groups since the late 1990s.

Several of the letter signers had roles in Trump’s various transition teams, including the CEI’s Myron Ebell and Thomas Pyle of the American Energy Alliance.

In 2014, Freedom Partners (FP) — a group once described as the Koch brothers secret bank — gave some $16 million to Americans for Prosperity, another of the letter’s signatories. FP also gave $2.3 miilion to the American Energy Alliance.

Denial Dollars

But as well as accepting millions of dollars from vested interests such as the Kochs and Exxon over the years, another thing the groups have in common is their denial of the clear science linking fossil fuel burning to dangerous climate change — an issue backed by all the major scientific academies around the world.

The analysis shows groups have also accepted about $80 million through two linked funding organisations — Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust — that academics have confirmed is a key financial source for many U.S. climate science denial groups.

The Koch brothers, through a funding group known as the Knowledge and Progress Fund (KPF), gave more than $7.6 million to the Donors Trust since 2010. The only grants made by the KPF over that period were to Donors Trust.

The Heartland Institute, which has been given more than $5 million in recent years by major Trump financier Robert Mercer, is known for organizing regular conferences where climate science denialists gather.

In the run-up to one conference in May 2012, Heartland said in a statement: “The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.”

Another signer to the letter is Professor William Happer, the president of the CO2 Coalition — a group that emerged from the disbanded George C. Marshall Institute.

The CO2 Coalition denies the evidence that humans are causing dangerous climate change and runs with the tag line “CO2 — Essential for Life.”

Happer, thought to be in the running as Trump’s science adviser, has compared what he called the “demonization” of CO2, to the “demonization of poor Jews under Hitler.”

zombies don't die:

Conservative Op-Eds Argued Wrongly That China and India Are Not Taking Action

Right-wing op-eds falsely claimed that China, India and other developing nations were not committed to Paris goals.

In a syndicated column that appeared in USA Today and USA Today Network newspapers, Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment and a former vice president of Americans for Prosperity, wrote, "The Paris treaty effectively bans coal-fired power plants in the United States—while China has 368 coal plants under construction and more than 800 in the planning stage. India's coal production under the deal is allowed to double by 2020—and they are likely to have emissions much higher than what they promised." And in his anti-Paris op-ed in theBoston Herald, Loris wrote, "Developing nations want affordable, dependable energy to raise their standards of living, and countries such as India, China and Indonesia need to use a lot of coal to get there."

China and India are on pace to meet their emissions targets ahead of schedule.

The Washington Post recently reported that an analysis conducted by the Climate Action Tracker found that "China and India are on track to overachieve on their climate pledges" and quoted Bill Hare, CEO of the nonprofit science and policy institute Climate Analytics, saying that China and India "are going to slow the global growth in CO2 emissions significantly." A New York Times editorial discussing the same analysis noted, "The shift from fossil fuels has ... been much faster and more pronounced than most experts expected. China has reduced coal use for three years in a row and recently scrapped plans to build more than 100 coal power plants. Indian officials have estimated that country might no longer need to build new coal plants beyond those that are already under construction."

China and India are taking big steps to develop clean energy and scale back coal plants.

In January of this year, China announced that it plans to spend more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable energy sources and is canceling plans to build more than 100 coal-fired power plants. Last year, India announced that it plans to get 57 percent of its total electricity capacity from renewable sources by 2027 and launch a $2 billion equity fund to boost renewable energy development. According to The Associated Press, a March report by the groups CoalSwarm, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace found that "construction starts for coal-fired plants in China and India were down by 62 percent in January from a year earlier while new facilities starting operation declined 29 percent." Additionally, a May 22 New York Times editorial noted, "Electric vehicle sales in China jumped 70 percent last year, thanks in large part to generous government incentives. India is much further behind in this area, but the country's minister of power said last month that all cars sold in the country should be electric by 2030.

Developing nations pushed for a strong Paris agreement and were "crucial" to its adoption.

Developing countries, including the least developed countries, were a key part of the "high ambition coalition" that called for tougher climate change policies and "was widely credited with ensuring the Paris meeting ended in agreement," according to Climate Change News. Far from pushing for a weak agreement and wanting leeway to burn coal, the developing nations have been insistent on the need for fast action to deal with climate change, and have sounded alarms about the role of corporations and lobbyists in UN climate negotiations, fearing that they might weaken emissions goals.

Developing nations committed to cutting emissions even though it's more difficult for them and they have less responsibility to do so.

The world's developing countries have emitted only a small proportion of the climate-warming gases that humans have sent into the atmosphere over the past 160 years, and so they're responsible for only a small proportion of the global warming the world is experiencing. And yet all but two of the world's developing nations signed onto the Paris agreement and submitted action plans, many of which experts said were ambitious. Yet developing countries face a tougher challenge reducing emissions than their wealthier counterparts do. As Robert Lempert of the RAND Corporation explained to the Chicago Tribune, "The richest countries have much of their economy in lower-emitting sectors. ... The U.S. can grow their economy and improve their quality of life without increasing energy use. But in developing countries, you can't do that."

Op-Eds Against the Agreement Pushed Climate Science Denial

Anti-Paris agreement op-eds spread climate science misinformation.

In an op-ed for The Washington Times, Princeton emeritus physics professor and climate denier William Happer wrote that the U.S. "should withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement," claiming, "For too long, well-meaning policymakers have been misled by propaganda, masquerading as science, that more atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will harm the planet ... More CO2 is not a pollutant but is a benefit to humanity." In an op-ed in The Hill, Patrick J. Michaels of the Cato Institute attempted to undermine the scientific rationale behind the Paris agreement by disputing that human activity is the dominant cause of recent global warming.

Slate's Phil Plait: Claiming CO2 is not a pollutant is "ridiculous" and "in-your-face wrong."

In a Feb. 18 column, science journalist Phil Plait wrote in Slate that the frequently used climate-denier claim that CO2 is not a pollutant is "ridiculous," "in-your-face wrong" and a "typical denier distraction technique, trying to downplay or distract you from what's really going on." He summarized the overwhelming scientific consensus: While some carbon dioxide is necessary for plant life, burning fossil fuels and thus releasing excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is warming up the globe "too quickly for many living things to adapt." Carbon pollution is causing rapid changes to the Earth's climate, and, as Plait explained, that speed is the "danger; the rate at which we are heating the planet is unprecedented."

Humans are "by far" the dominant cause of global warming.

InsideClimate News reported in 2016 that "ninety to 100 percent of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming due to human activity, according to a peer-reviewed paper published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The study, called a 'consensus on consensus' synthesizes findings from prior published research." In 2013, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported, "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines "extremely likely" as having 95 to 100 percent probability. A 2009 letter signed by 18 U.S. scientific organizations stated that "greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver" of climate change. In a 2012 literature review for the blog Skeptical Science, Dana Nuccitelli laid out the overwhelming evidence that humans are the primary driver of climate change, writing, "A wide variety of statistical and physical approaches all arrived at the same conclusion: that humans are the dominant cause of the global warming over the past century, and particularly over the past 50 years. This robust scientific evidence is why there is a consensus among scientific experts that humans are the dominant cause of global warming."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Media Matters for America.

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omfg

President Donald Trump is on the look-out for a chief science adviser, but who to choose?

If his most recent appointments are any indication of the future, then, on climate change at least, Americans should expect the president to tap a climate science denier.

So it is little surprise then that one person reportedly in the running is 77-year-old Princeton atomic physicist William Happer.

Happer has for more than a decade rejected all the credible evidence on the risks of human-caused climate change. He is often described as an “expert” on climate change, yet his record of publishing research on the issue in peer-reviewed scientific journals is almost non-existent.

So who is he?

Happer’s expertise is in atomic physics. He served in the George H.W. Bush administration as a science director.

But since the late 90s, Happer has become known for his outspoken and often offensive views on climate change and climate scientists, whom he has described as being “more like a cult.”

“They’re glassy-eyed and they chant. It will potentially harm the image of all science,” he told The Guardian.

He has also claimed that the “demonization” of carbon dioxide is like the “demonization of poor Jews under Hitler.”

In recent times Happer has been associating with conspiracy theorists and other oddballs as he rolls out the same talking points that have been his staple for years.

Since the mid-2000s, Happer was involved with the George C. Marshall Institute, a think tank that concentrated heavily on pushing claims that global warming concerns had been over-hyped. Happer was a former chair of the institute — one of many to take cash from oil giant ExxonMobil.

Happer is now the president of the CO2 Coalition — a group created after the Marshall Institute folded — with the tagline that carbon dioxide (CO2) is “vital for life.”

In 2015 Happer was caught in a sting by Greenpeace activists when he offered to write a report on the benefits of carbon dioxide for a fake fossil fuel client. He offered to find a way to hide the funder of the report by asking for the payment to go to the CO2 Coalition.

Happer’s position is shown to be wrong by all the credible evidence and scientific institutions across the world. His claims can also be easily checked.

So what are his claims?

In December 2016, Happer repeated his long-debunked talking points in an interview with Stefan Molyneux (himself an odd character who has had to fend off accusations that he is running a cult-like group through his FreeDomainRadio enterprise).

In the interview, Happer talks about a geological period known as the Phanerozoic eon which started about 540 million years ago and stretches to the present.

Happer says that over this period CO2 has been much higher, suggesting that everything was all fine and, by implication, it would be fine again if levels of carbon dioxide in the air got up to 1,000 parts per million or more.

Dr. Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at Australian National University specializing in understanding the ancient past, told me:

The Phanerozoic covers an enormous amount of Earth’s history — the last 541 million years. If we were to think about that time period as a single day, complex life first evolved at midnight and the age of the dinosaurs (252-66 million years ago) lasted from just after midday (12:49 p.m.) through to 9:04 p.m. Modern humans only evolved at 11:59 p.m. (0.2 million years ago).

So even though the Earth was able to support the slow evolution of life when it had carbon dioxide in the parts per thousand level, sea levels more than 100 meters higher than today, and land masses that were completely different to the countries we currently live in, that planet was certainly nothing like the one that humans have ever lived upon.

Happer also tells Molyneux: “There was no danger from ocean acidification … all of the other scare stories you read about. They just didn’t happen.”

That depends if, when you say there was “no danger from ocean acidification,” you don’t think the extinction of 90 percent of all marine species is anything to write home about.

Research published in the journal Science in 2015 found that ocean acidification from massive injections of carbon into the atmosphere was the cause of a “mass dying” about 250 million years ago which, according to Happer, “just didn’t happen.”

Happer also ignores how warmer conditions in the ancient past have generally coincided with the melting and collapse of ice sheets at the poles, pushing sea levels roughly 30 feet (ten meters) or more higher than they are today.

Many of Happer’s arguments ignore how quickly the climate is changing now compared to the past.

“The speed of current climate change doesn’t have an analogue in Earth’s past,” says Abram.

“We are able to directly measure the carbon dioxide level of Earth’s atmosphere over the last 800,000 years because of the bubbles of ancient air trapped within Antarctic ice cores. The fastest natural changes in the past occurred as the world warmed out of the ice ages, and saw CO2 levels increase by around 35 parts per million over 1,000 years. So far this century we have added an equivalent amount of CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere — 35 parts per million — in just the last 17 years.”

What else does Happer get wrong?

He claims a well-established climate mechanism, known as the water vapor feedback, “does not seem to work” and that this means future warming might not be so bad. Water vapor feedback is the mechanism where adding extra carbon dioxide causes warming, which then enables the atmosphere to hold more water vapor — another key greenhouse gas — that in turn causes more warming.

“There’s time enough [gone by] to see if it works and it doesn’t seem to work,” says Happer.

Unfortunately for Happer, the opposite seems to be true. As challenging as it is to measure, scientists have been using instruments on satellites, weather balloons, and aircraft and have found that water vapor is indeed increasing.

Perhaps Happer would know this if he had been hanging out with leading scientists at genuine academic gatherings, rather than spending time with some genuine oddballs.

As I wrote on The Guardian, in December 2016 Happer was a speaker at a gathering in Arizona organized by G. Edward Griffin and his Freedom Force International organization.

Griffin is a serial conspiracy theorist who thinks the HIV virus is not real, that there is some sort of international plot to spray the planet with chemicals (that’s right, he’s a chemtrailer), and that climate change is a hoax.

Will any of this convince Donald Trump to look elsewhere for his advice on science?

Given Trump is reportedly taking tips from another conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, the likely answer to that question would be “no.”

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/02/25/trump-potential-science-adviser-will-happer-carbon-dioxide-demonized-jews

Trump Advisor Will Happer is Not a Climate Scientist

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Dennis SILVERMAN

Trump Advisor Will Happer is Not a Climate Scientist

Distinguished Princeton physicist Will Happer was given the honor of visiting our would-be-President Donald Trump at his golden 5th Avenue tower, or White House North. This is because Prof. Happer is one of the leading scientists pushing the climate denier agenda. He also publishes in the Wall Street Journal, that great climate denier journal run by Rupert Murdoch. Looking at Prof. Happer’s publication list since 1994, there are important optics articles, but no climate science articles. That covers the last 22 years, during which most of climate science has been developed. Among his honors, he served as director of the Office of Science in the Department of energy from 1991-93 under President George W. Bush.

Looking at his articles and public testimony, he only parrots the standard climate change or science deniers one liners, which are standardly shown to be false. He adds nothing new or scientific, except a lot of vitriol accusing thousands of climate scientists as frauds, comparable to Lysenko’s false domination of Soviet biology, or even (gasp) to Hitler. Links to these are given in Happer’s Wikipedia article. Trump and his advisors cite several of the fallacious statements in his interviews, as do almost all Republicans in Congress, adding their own vitriol.

(As an aside, I do believe in the statement “As ye sow, so shall you reap” applies to Donald Trump. I also somewhat believe in “As they go low, we go high”. I have to be academic in an academic blog, but I am nerd enough to include sophomoric punning.)

The American Physical Society of 47,000 physicists, after much argument, endorsed a mild statement backing climate science. Happer circulated a counter petition, which was signed by only a few hundred, and was dropped.

Dr. Happer wrote an article in First Things, titled, “The Truth About Greenhouse Gasses: The Dubious Science of Climate Crusaders”. Fortunately, climate scientist Michael MacCracken, published a 42-page scientific rebuttal of Happer’s 43 assertions, titled: “The Real Truth about Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change: Paragraph-by-Paragraph Comments on an Article by Dr. William Happer”, at Climate Science Watch, September 2011. This article quotes each of Happer’s statements, so you only have to read MacCracken’s article. Dr. MacCracken is a very distinguished climate scientist and a leader of governmental and international climate science committees, as is well documented by Wikipedia. To my knowledge, Dr. MacCracken has not been invited to the Golden Trump Tower to tell President-in-four-days Trump the truth about our warming climate.

The main retort that I want to report on in this article is Dr. Happer’s assertion in 2011 that climate science is the second highest funded research subject in the government appropriations. Dr. MacCracken replied that in the 2010 budget, “of the $147.6 billion the government spends on research and development, the Department of Defense gets about $80 billion and then the Department of Health and Human Services gets $31 billion. Then come DOE and NASA (mostly for energy and space research, respectively) at about $11 billion each. … the total enacted global change research budget for all agencies combined in FY-10 was $2.178B, so about 1.5% of the Federal Government’s total research budget …”.

The above just shows that Trump’s publicly announced meeting with Dr. Happer, presumably about climate science, was just to reinforce Trump’s own beliefs on the subject, not to give the subject further consideration, as he has promised.

Dr. Happer as potential White House Science Advisor?

The press has speculated that maybe Trump was interviewing Dr. Happer to be the White House science advisor. There have been questions in the science journals Nature and Science as to whether President Trump would even have a science advisor. At the same time, President Obama has just published a long paper in the journal Science, arguing the importance of a continued attack on climate change. The Science Advisor is not a cabinet position, and does not have to be appointed, nor approved by the Senate.

We might have to assume that for any scientist to be a Science Advisor for a Republican administration, with a climate denying Congress funded by fossil fuel magnates, and with the biggest such magnate Rex Tillerson being Secretary of State, and their lackeys being head of the Department of Energy and Administrator of the EPA, that the advisor has to be a climate science sceptic. However, they do not have to be one of the most public deniers of climate science, appearing in such prestigious business journals as the Wall Street Fake-Climate-Science-News Journal. Dr. Happer is undoubtedly an excellent physicist, but something is wrong if he has not studied climate science yet expounds on it, and claims that all climate scientists are frauds, or worse. I don’t think many scientists would trust him as a science advisor, since there are many other important areas of science which are political footballs right now, and accurate science advice is needed. These would include the reliability of our nuclear weapons, childhood vaccines, the continued path to clean air and clean water, the health costs of coal power, which abortion pills do not actually cause abortions, the necessity of universal health care to lessen overall medical costs, the effects of global warming on fisheries, drought, forest fires, mass migrations, etc.

Dr. Happer’s incredible exaggeration of how much the Federal Government spends on climate research is a prime example of why he should not be in any Government position.

It would be amazing to run a science based economy and country with only the advice of his cabinet, which is hand-picked to deny science, as well as Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence.

mann bk: Singer and happer try to roll Am Phys Soc (Chron Higher Edm, w/ Cohen Exxon?

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http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/08/exposed-academics-for-hire/

sting: GP

A Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies’ commercial interests.

Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries.

The professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.

Citing industry-funded documents – including testimony to state hearings and newspaper articles – Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Leading climate-sceptic academic, Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company on the benefits of CO2 and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.

Happer is due to appear this afternoon as a star witness in Senate hearings called by Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

In emails to reporters he also revealedPeabody Energy paid thousands of dollars for him to testify at a separate state hearing, with the money being paid to a climate-sceptic think tank.

Read the emails with Professor Frank Clemente

Read the emails with Professor :{Happer and the Donors Trust}:

The investigation also found:

US coal giant PeabodyEnergy also paid tens of thousands of dollars to an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never revealed.
The Donors Trust, an organisation that has been described as the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously channel money from a fictional Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US climate sceptic organisations.
Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal.
A recent report by the GWPF that had been through the same unofficial peer review process, was promoted as “thoroughly peer-reviewed” by influential columnistMatt Ridley-a senior figure in the organisation.

The findings echo the case of Willie Soon, who was the subject of an investigation published in the New York Times earlier this year. The investigation revealed that Soon had accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers. He described his studies as “deliverables” and failed to declare who paid for the research.

The revelations also follow a series of reports showing fossil fuel companies burying the truth about climate change, while funding flawed research to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.

Academics for hire

Reporters approached the academics claiming to be representatives of unnamed fossil fuel companies – one, a Middle Eastern oil and gas exploration company, the other a coal mining firm based in Indonesia – looking to commission “independent” research.

“In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.” – Professor Frank Clemente

The individuals approached have previously been linked to fossil fuel companies or climate sceptic organisations that have received fossil fuel funding.

Professor Frank Clemente, a sociologistfrom Penn State university, was asked if he could produce a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the World Health Organization’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution)”.

He said that this was within his skill set; that he could be quoted using his university job title; and that it would cost around $15,000 for an 8–10 page paper. He also explained that he charged $6,000 for writing a newspaper op-ed.

When asked whether he would need to declare where the money came from, Professor Clementesaid: “There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US.”

Clemente is a favourite of the coal industry and particularly Peabody Energy, whichregularly uses his research as evidence of the need for an expansion of coal power in developing countries. [grn blk death scam?]

In the exchange Clemente disclosed that for another report on “the Global Value of Coal” he was paid $50,000 by Peabody Energy – the sponsorship was mentioned in the small print of the paper, but the amount has not been disclosed until now.

Following the report Clemente produced anop-ed arguing against the coal divestment movement in universities, which was picked up by over 50 newspapers across the US. But as Clemente told undercover reporters: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Professor Clemente failed to respond to requests for comment.

Investigators also approached Professor William Happer of Princeton University, who is chairman of the climate scepticGeorge Marshall Institute and a former Director of Energy Research at theUS Department of Energy under the first President Bush where he “supervised all of DOE’s work on climate change”.

Professor Happer, who is a physicist rather than a climatologist, told Greenpeace reporters that he would be willing to produce research promoting the benefits of carbon dioxide for $250 per hour. He asked that the money be paid to climate sceptic campaign group, the CO2 Coalition, of which he is a board member.

Happer described his work on carbon dioxide as a “labor of love”and said that while other pollutants produced by burning fossil fuels are a problem, in his opinion “More CO2 will benefit the world”, adding “The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

When reporters asked if it would be possible for the fossil fuel client’s role in commissioning the research to remain hidden, in order to give the work more credibility, Happer replied that: “If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘the author received no financial compensation for this essay.’”

Happer also disclosed that Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a crucialMinnesota state hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition.

“I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.” – Professor Happer

The academics’ willingness to conceal the source of funding contrasts strongly with the ethics of journals such as Science, which states in itssubmission requirements that research “should be accompanied by clear disclosures from all authors of their affiliations, funding sources, or financial holdings that might raise questions about possible sources of bias”.

Late last month Happer appeared at aclimate sceptic summit in Texas. There he defended CO2 production saying: “Our breath is not that different from a power plant.” He went on to say, “If plants could vote, they would vote for coal”.

Hiding the money trail

The investigation has also revealed a system by which oil and gas companies can anonymously fund US climate-sceptic scientists and organisations.

When asked to ensure that the commissioning of the report could not be traced back to the Middle East oil and gas company, Professor Happer contacted his fellow CO2 Coalition board member, Bill O’Keefe,explaining: “I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.”

O’Keefe, a formerExxon lobbyist, suggested channelling it through the Donors Trust, a controversial organisation that has previously been called the“Dark Money ATM” of the US conservative movement.

The organisation has a long history of channelling funding to US climate sceptics, including controversial professor Willie Soon, and some of the most influential organisations in the US conservative movement, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

When investigators asked Peter Lipsett of the Donors Trust if the Trust would accept money from an oil and gas company based in the Middle East, he said that, although the Trust would need the cash to come from a US bank account, “we can take it from a foreign body, it’s just we have to be extra cautious with that.”

He added that: “I’ll double check everything and make sure I’m wording things correctly after chatting with our CFO [Chief Financial Officer], but what he’s told me before is that the preference is to have it in US dollars, and the ideal preference is to have it originate from a US source, but the US dollars is the important bit”.

[sound file]

Peter Lipsett isdirector of growth strategies at the Donors Trust and has worked in a senior position for Charles Koch, and before that Koch Industries for almost a decade. When contacted for on the record comment, Mr Lipsett said:

“We only accept donations in U.S. currency and drawn from U.S. banks. Donors Trust has never accepted secret donations from foreign donors. We have supported over 1,500 organizations representing the arts, medicine and science, public policy, education, religion, and civics. We are no more a “middle man” between donors and their causes than any other community or commercial donor-advised fund sponsoring organization”.

Mr O’Keefe said: “As a matter of personal policy, I do not respond to requests such as yours.”

Peer review

As well as exposing how fossil fuel companies are able to anonymously commission scientific research, Greenpeace can reveal details of a so-called “peer review” process being operated by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK climate sceptic think tank.

Sense About Science, a UK charitable trust, describes peer review as the process by which “scientists submit their research findings to a journal, which sends them out to be assessed for competence, significance and originality, by independent qualified experts who are researching and publishing work in the same field (peers).” The process usually involves varying degrees of anonymity.

“I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.” – Professor Happer

Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’sAcademic Advisory Council, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.

He added: “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”

GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist Matt Ridley, who is also a GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been“thoroughly peer reviewed”.

Sense About Science, which lists Ridley as a member of its Advisory Council, has warned against such review processes, saying: “sometimes organisations or individuals claim to have put their studies through peer review when, on inspection, they have only shown it to some colleagues. Such claims are usually made in the context of a campaign directed at the public or policy makers, as a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”

The organisation also says that: “reporters or advocates citing these sources as peer reviewed would show themselves to be biased or uninformed”.

Professor Happer claimed that the review of the paper was “more rigorous than the peer review for most journals”. But he also told undercover reporters that he believed most members of the Academic Advisory Council had been too busy to comment on the paper:

“I know that the entire scientific advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) was asked to submit comments on the first draft. I am also sure that most were too busy to respond,” he said.

Professor Happer also noted that submitting a report on the benefits of carbon dioxide to a peer-reviewed scientific journal would be problematic.

“That might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly [as] your client would also like,” he said.

When asked about the review process behind Dr Goklany’s report, GWPF explained that the report had gone for review to other chosen scientists beyond just those in their Advisory Council and that: “the quality of Dr Goklany’s report is self-evident to any open-minded reader.”

Peabody Energy

The investigation raises further questions for coal giant Peabody Energy, which earlier this year was investigated by**New York attorney generalEric Schneidermanover accusations that they violated New York laws prohibiting false and misleading conduct, in relation to misleading statements on the risks it could face from tightening climate change laws. Peabody have now agreed to change the way it reports the risks posed to investors by climate change.

Professors Clemente and Happer were both employed by Peabody to provide testimony favourable to the company in state and governmental hearings. The company paid $8,000 for Professor Happer to make the case on the social costs of carbon.

Other prominent climate sceptics who provided testimony in the Minnesota hearing on behalf of Peabodyincluded: Roy Spencer who told Greenpeace he was paid $4,000 by Peabody; Richard Tolwho said he was not paid and Richard Lindzen and Robert Mendelsohn who failed to reply to questions. Tol, Lindzen and Mendelsohn are all members of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council.

Both Penn State and Princeton University declined to comment.

The GWPF said: “Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.

“Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report “commissioned by a fossil fuel company” through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace.

“The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany’s report, and to smear Professor Happer’s reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policyissues to the public’s attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.”

Journalist and GWPF Academic Advisor, Matt Ridley, did not respond to requests for comment.

---

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/exposed-academics-hire-agree-not-disclose-fossil-fuel-funding-20151208

EXPOSED: ACADEMICS-FOR-HIRE AGREE NOT TO DISCLOSE FOSSIL FUEL FUNDING

Last edited 8 December 2015 at 2:39pm

Leading climate sceptic who agreed to suggestion of secret Middle East oil cash is set to speak at Ted Cruz Senate hearing today

8 December, 2015

The Professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.

Citing industry-funded documents - including testimony to state hearings and newspaper articles - Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

The leading climate-sceptic academic, Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.

Happer is due to appear this afternoon as a star witness in US Senate hearings called by Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

In emails to reporters he also revealed Peabody energy paid thousands of dollars for him to testify at a separate state hearing, with the money going to a climate-sceptic think-tank.

The investigation also found:

US coal giant Peabody Energy paid tens of thousands of dollars to an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never revealed.

The Donors Trust, an organisation that has been described as the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously channel money from a Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US climate sceptic organisations.

Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil funded report through a similar review process after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal.

A recent report by the GWPF that had been through the same unofficial review process, was promoted as “thoroughly peer-reviewed” by influential columnist Matt Ridley -a senior figure in the organisation.

The full story and all the documents have been published onhttp://energydesk.greenpeace.org/

The findings echo the case of Willie Soon, a prominent academic exposed in a New York Times investigation as having accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers.

Reporters approached the academics claiming to be representatives of unnamed fossil fuel companies looking to commission ‘independent’ research.

Professor Frank Clemente, a sociologist from Penn State university, was asked if he could produce a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the WHO’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution)”. He said that this was within his skill set; that he could be quoted using his university job title; and that it would cost around $15,000 for an 8-10 page paper

Asked whether he would need to declare the source of the money, Professor Clemente said: “There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US.” He then shared examples of a testimony and an op-ed, explaining: “Note that in none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Clemente also disclosed that for another report on “the Global Value of Coal” he was paid $50,000 by Peabody Energy - the sponsorship was mentioned in the small print of the paper, but the amount has not been disclosed until now.

The academics’ willingness to conceal the source of funding contrasts strongly with the ethics of journals such as Science, which states in its submission requirements that research “should be accompanied by clear disclosures from all authors of their affiliations, funding sources, or financial holdings that might raise questions about possible sources of bias”

The investigation has also revealed a system by which foreign oil and gas companies can anonymously fund US climate-sceptic scientists and organisations.

When asked to ensure that the commissioning of the report could not be traced back to the Middle East oil and gas company, Professor Happer contacted his fellow CO2 Coalition board member, Bill O’Keefe, a former Exxon lobbyist. He suggested channelling it through the Donors Trust, a controversial organisation that has previously been called the“Dark Money ATM” of the US conservative movement.

When investigators asked Peter Lipsett of the Donors Trust, if the Trust would accept money from an oil and gas company based in the Middle East, he replied that, although the Trust would like the cash to come from a US bank account, “we can take it from a foreign body, just we have to be extra cautious with that.”

Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’sAcademic Advisory Council, was also asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry-funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.

:{:{:{:{}:

GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist_{ Matt Ridley, who }is{ also a }_GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been “thoroughly peer reviewed”.

Commenting on the investigation, Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said:

“This investigation exposes a network of academics-for-hire and a back channel that lets fossil fuel companies secretly influence the climate debate while keeping their fingerprints off. Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change, and that those professors will keep that funding secret from the public. The question now is very simple. Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it. It’s time for the sceptics to come clean.”

He added:

“Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has serious questions to answer. Does it condone a member of its academic council agreeing to be secretly sponsored to write a report by a group purporting to be from a Middle Eastern oil company? Have reports by senior figures in Lawson’s foundation been secretly paid for by the fossil fuel industry? Would they have agreed to Professor Happer’s suggestion that the ‘oil-funded’ report be put through a 'similar review' process to the GWPF's own ‘peer-review’ process? Does it accept that the foundation’s so-called ‘peer review’ process is flawed, given Professor Happer’s revelations about how it operated on an earlier report? And does the foundation stand by its academic advisor, Viscount Ridley, who described that earlier report as ‘thoroughly peer-reviewed’?”

ENDS

:{:{:{Article tagged as:}::{Climate Deniers, Climate Skeptics, Investigation, Republican Party, Ted Cruz}::{}:

}:}:

===

Lord Lawson has taken the extraordinary decision to stand by a “distinguished” academic advisor to his charity who has become embroiled ina new scandal about climate denier groups being secretly funded by oil companies. desmog

busted:

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Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate

Research

By JOHN SCHWARTZ DEC. 9, 2015

A sting operation by the environmental group Greenpeace suggests that some

researchers who dispute mainstream scientific conclusions on climate change

are willing to conceal the sources of payment for their research, even if the

money is purported to come from overseas corporations producing oil, gas and

coal.

Over a period of several months, two Greenpeace employees posed as

representatives of energy companies and offered to pay prominent

commentators on climate change to write papers that extolled the benefits of

coal and carbon emissions. The Greenpeace workers also asked that the

payments not be disclosed.

The commentators — a professor from Princeton University and one from

Pennsylvania State University — agreed to the offers.

Disclosure of funding for scientific research has been a flash point in the

fight over climate change, especially in the case of published scientific

research. The effort by Greenpeace, which has a long record of using

aggressive tactics to make environmental statements, was to “unravel the

story” of industry ties to denial of climate change, said Lawrence Carter, one of

the Greenpeace employees involved in the subterfuge.

12/9/2015 Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate Research The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeacesubterfugetestsclimateresearch.html?_r=0 2/4

“It shows a way that fossil fuel money can get into funding these climate

skeptic campaign groups,” he added.

Frank Clemente, a professor emeritus of sociology at Penn State, agreed to

write a paper on coal on behalf of a coal mining firm that he was told was

based in Indonesia. William Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton,

agreed to write a paper at the request of an unnamed oil and gas company in

the Middle East.

Both men acknowledged, in response to requests for comments, that the

exchanged emails about the arrangements, which Greenpeace released on

Tuesday, were genuine. But both denied having done anything improper.

Dr. Clemente formerly served as director of an environmental policy

center at Penn State. He said in an email response to questions: “I fully stand

behind every single statement I made in the emails apparently pirated by

Greenpeace. I am very proud of my research and believe that clean coal

technologies are the pathway to reliable and affordable electricity, reduction of

global energy poverty and a cleaner environment.”

In an email message responding to a request for comment, Dr. Happer

said, “I don’t think I have anything to be embarrassed about.”

When asked whether he agreed that there should be full disclosure of

foreign and industry influence on science, Dr. Happer said, “Yes, I believe in

full disclosure.”

But, he added, “I don’t think that full disclosure was the point of the

Greenpeace article at all. The aim was simply to smear their enemies.”

Dr. Happer testified on Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate subcommittee

on Space, Science and Competitiveness, whose chairman is Senator Ted Cruz,

Republican of Texas and a presidential candidate who disagrees with the

scientific consensus on climate change.

12/9/2015 Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate Research The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeacesubterfugetestsclimateresearch.html?_r=0 3/4

Michael Halpern, a program manager at the Union of Concerned

Scientists, expressed discomfort over the scrutiny of unguarded email

exchanges, a controversial element of monthslong efforts by Representative

Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, to challenge the work of climate scientists

from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“I know they can be taken out of context,” Mr. Halpern said. But, he

added, “It’s entirely justified to ask for information that relates to researchers’

funding and whether there are any strings attached.”

Dr. Happer wrote in his exchanges with Greenpeace that he believed there

were “real pollutants associated with the combustion of fossil fuels,” including

the oxides of nitrogen and sulfur that contribute to smog, and that he

supported regulation of those pollutants.

But he opposed the notion that carbon dioxide itself is a pollutant.

“More CO2 will benefit the world,” he wrote. “The only way to limit CO2

would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly

immoral and irrational policy.”

Dr. Happer suggested to the purported funders that he not be paid

directly. “My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of

love,” he wrote.

He recommended that money for the project be paid to a nonprofit

organization he helped found this year, the CO2 Coalition, which he said paid

him no fees or salary, but “covers occasional travel expenses.”

On the question of disclosure, Dr. Happer said, “I don’t think there would

be any problem stating that ‘the author received no financial compensation for

this essay.’ ”

Dr. Happer then wrote to William O’Keefe, managing director of the

nonprofit, and said, “I am trying to get another mysterious client to donate

12/9/2015 Greenpeace Subterfuge Tests Climate Research The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeacesubterfugetestsclimateresearch.html?_r=0 4/4

funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing

something for them.” Dr. Happer also asked Mr. O’Keefe about disclosure.

Mr. O’Keefe responded, “We are under no obligation to identify donors,

except to the I.R.S.,” and that list, he said, is redacted before release to the

public

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/greenpeace-subterfuge-tests-climate-research.html?_r=0

===

In news that’s equally shocking and not really shocking at all, Greenpeace has reported that when it posed as consultants for gas and oil companies and visited some of the top universities in the US, it caught two professors offering to write reports on the benefits of rising CO2 levels and the use of fossil fuels - for a price.

During discussions with disguised Greenpeace reps, the academics were happy to come up with ways to obscure the proposed corporate funding in their 'research', while admitting that the content likely wouldn’t make it through the peer-review process, so they’d have to handpick the reviewers themselves.

sci direct

As damning as that is, US secretary of state John Kerry played down the impact of the finding at the UN climate talks in Paris. "One professor or one scientist is not going to negate peer-reviewed scientists by the thousands over many years and 97 percent of the scientists on the planet," he told the press.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but the fact is that 30 percent of Americans are still not convinced that global climate change is real, and research published by 'skeptical' academics who may or may not be receiving money from fossil fuel companies is being cited as reasonable doubt.

The Greenpeace officials posed as consultants from a Middle Eastern oil and gas company and an Indonesian coal company and contacted professors from leading US universities asking if they could commission a report outlining the benefits of using fossil fuels, and of the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Two academics were happy to bite - known climate skeptic, William Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett professor of physics at Princeton University; and Frank Clemente, a retired sociologist formerly employed by Pennsylvania State University.

“I could submit the article to a peer-reviewed journal, but that might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and to the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly as your client would also like," Happer wrote in an email to what he thought was a fossil fuel rep, as Suzanne Goldenberg reports for *The Guardian*.

He suggested that he could pass his report on to handpicked reviewers instead. "Purists might object that the process did not qualify as a peer review. I think it would be fine to call it a peer review," he said.

Clemente, on the other hand, told who he thought was an Indonesian coal company representative that if he were to write a report challenging research linking coal use to increased rates of premature death around the world, he’d need about US$15,000 for an eight-to-10-page paper, and $6,000 for an opinion piece for a newspaper.

UK GRD link] that Clemente was fine with being quoted as a professor emeritus at Penn State - even though he’s now retired and no longer employed by the institution - while at the same time declaring that he’s an "independent scholar" and is not beholden to any university. He said he was under no obligation to reveal the source of his funding.

"Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change and that this sponsorship will then be kept secret," John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace UK, told the press.

"Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it."

As we mentioned earlier, it's shocking to find confirmation that these academics are in the pockets of corporations that the vast majority of scientists agree are damaging the environment - quite possibly beyond repair - for profit. But it's also not surprising. We just have to make sure our children are educated enough in the actual science to make these kinds of tactics irrelevant in the future.

Read these next:

===

While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party’s presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled “Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth’s climate.”

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Senator Cruz opened the hearing with some ironic remarks. “This is a hearing on the science behind the claims of global warming. Now, this is the Science Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, and we’re hearing from distinguished scientists, sharing their views, their interpretations, their analysis of the data and the evidence. Now, I am the son of two mathematicians—two computer programmers and scientists—and I believe that public policy should follow the actual science, and the actual data and evidence, and not political and partisan claims that run contrary to the science and data and evidence.”Senator Cruz brought in four witnesses to testify, mostly chosen from the usual suspects that have participated in similar hearings in the past. There were two of the very small handful of climate scientists who express doubts about human responsibility for climate change—Georgia Tech professor and blogger Judith Curry and John Christyfrom the University of Alabama in Huntsville. William Happer, a retired Princeton physicist and chairman of theGeorge C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think-tank, was also invited to speak. The fourth person brought in to talk climate science was conservative radio host and columnistMark Steyn. (The last two were keynote speakers at this year’s Heartland Institute conference for climate “skeptics.”)}:}:

John Christy, who has helped develop the UAH satellite temperature dataset favored by climate “skeptics” because it shows slower warming in portions of the troposphere than we see in surface records, made his pitch for why we just don’t know what has caused recent warming. That explanation involved highlighting his graph of tropical mid-troposphere (rather than global surface) model projections and observations that frequently appears in the comments on stories like this one—a graph other climate scientists take issue with—and claiming that emissions cuts would have a minimal impact on climate change. While claiming that research funding is biased, he proposed setting aside five to 10 percent of federal climate research funding for a “Red Team” like the CIA section tasked with outside-the-box analyses that challenge the status quo. This Red Team would “produce an assessment that expresses legitimate, alternative hypotheses” for climate change.

Judith Curry echoed Christy’s complaints, claiming that climate science has fallen victim to “groupthink”—a conclusion she says she reached after reading the quote-mined “Climategate” e-mails between scientists in 2009. (A pile of subsequent independent investigations found no evidence of scientific misconduct.) The rest of Curry’s testimony entailed claims that the science of anthropogenic climate change is unsettled, which she has spoken and written about at length over the years.

Mark Steyn’s testimony focused on his accusations that climate science is fraudulent and oppresses contrarians. Steyn’s claim to climate fame is that he’s being sued for defamation by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Steyn has repeatedly accused of fraud.

William Happer used most of his time to argue that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are good for the planet, claiming that there is “not much dispute” that there is too little CO2 and too much oxygen for plants right now. He also seemed to like Christy’s “Red Team” idea, as he said climate science lacks an “adversarial process” to check if the science is right. (Of course, “an adversarial process” isn’t a bad description of peer review or the work of thousands of independent researchers.) “I would like to argue very strongly that we set aside some fraction of funding for climate research that is designed to be for the other side,” Happer said. That would run counter to the way funding is granted today, which is based on the hypothesis and the quality of the test rather than what the resulting conclusion is going to be.

Happer became a story in his own right earlier in the day, when Greenpeace released e-mails with Happer in which they had pretended to represent a foreign energy company. They asked Happer if he would produce a report extolling the virtues of CO2 but without disclosing their financial support, and Happer agreed this was something he could do. Happer explained that Peabody Coal Company had paid him $8,000 to testify at regulatory hearings in Minnesota. That fee went to the tax-exemptCO2 Coalition, which he said pays his travel expenses but no salary. Just before Tuesday’s hearing, someone from Greenpeace filmed a heated exchange with Happer asking whether he had been paid to testify. Happer seemed to indicate that the CO2 Coalition “took some of my fee” before rising out of his chair and angrily replying, “I haven’t taken a dime, you son of a bitch.”

Finally, there was testimony from a witness invited by committee Democrats—former Navy Rear Admiral and current Penn State meteorology professor David Titley. Titley calmly attempted to explain the basics of climate science, highlighting the fact that nothing is ever 100 percent certain in science, yet we understand how to act on risks despite imperfect knowledge.

A question-and-answer portion followed this testimony, which at one point devolved to Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Steyn, and Curry pretty much shouting at each other. But there was also some discussion about satellite temperature data sets. (Curiously, this involved no questions for John Christy, who helps run one.) Senator Cruz is fond of claiming that one of the satellite data sets shows “no warming for 18 years” while ignoring longer-term trends and the fact that all surface temperature data sets show warming over that period.

After Senator Cruz pushed Titley to answer a question about the satellite records, which he claimed “the global warming alarmists don’t want to talk about,” Titley let loose. “Let’s talk about the satellite measurements,” Titley said. “Let’s talk about orbital decay. Let’s talk about overlapping satellite records. Let’s talk about stratospheric temperature contamination. I think Dr. Christy and Dr. [Roy] Spencer, when they’ve put this out, they have been wrong, I think, at least four consecutive times. Each time the data record has had to be adjusted upward. There have been several sign errors. So, with all due respect, sir, I don’t know which data, exactly, your staff has, whether it’s the first or second or third or fourth correction to Dr. Christy’s data. We used to have a negative trend, and then we had no trend, and now we begrudgingly have an upward trend.”

To be fair, Senator Cruz was pointing to a competing data set run by Remote Sensing Systems in California that, until recently, showed an even smaller 18-year warming trend than the University of Alabama in Huntsville data set. And the latest version of that UAH data set, which is in beta, reduces that trend once again.

In a curious moment, William Happer chimed in to state that these satellites measure temperatures “the same way as hospitals do today,” with devices that measure infrared radiation. In fact, these satellites measure microwaveradiation, and doctors aren’t trying to simultaneously determine temperatures of various layers inside you when they pop a thermometer in your ear.

Senator Cruz also accused scientists of deliberately manipulating land surface temperature data to create the appearance of warming over the 20th Century. (Quality-control adjustments to sea surface temperature data, which obviously involve a much larger portion of the globe, actually make the overall effect a decrease in global 20th Century warming.) When asked about this, Judith Curry didn’t quite support Senator Cruz’s accusation but did comment, “To me, the error bars should really be much bigger if they’re making such a large adjustment, so we really don’t know too much about what’s going on.”

In contrast to this talk of uncertainty and scientific skullduggery, Senator Gary Peters (D-Mich.) opted for some remedial physics in his opening comments. “By burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon into the atmosphere that would have otherwise remained locked away. This process creates carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat that otherwise would have been radiated off into space. We know that by the law of conservation of energy, that additional heat can’t just magically disappear. Instead, it causes our planet to get warmer.”

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http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/senate-science-committee-hearing-challenges-dogma-of-climate-science/

TPPF

morano bs

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, called policies to reduce CO2 “based on nonsense.”

“Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. They are all based on computer models that do not work. We are being led down a false path.

“Our breath is not that different from a power plant,” he continued.

“To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?” he asked.

“Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world. Coal is CO2 from ancient atmospheres. We are simply returning CO2 to the atmosphere from which it came when you burn coal. And it’s a good thing since it is at very low levels in the atmosphere. We are in a CO2 famine. It is very, very low,” Happer explained.

Happer continued: “CO2 will be beneficial and crop yields will increase.” “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture,” he added.

Happer then showed a picture of polluted air in China with the caption: “Real pollution in Shanghai.”

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“If you can see it, it’s not CO2,” Happer said.

“If plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” Happer declared.

Happer also rebutted the alleged 97% consensus.

“97% of scientists have often been wrong on many things,” he said.

Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discusse

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Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/scientists-declare-un-climate-summit-goals-irrational-based-on-nonsense-leading-us-down-a-false-path/#ixzz3suwhYHQL

http://www.desmogblog.com/william-happer

Ph.D, physics, Princeton (1964).
Bachelor's degree in physics from University of North Carolina (1960).

Source: [1]

Background

William Happer is Eugene Higgens Professor of Physics and Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Princeton University, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the George C. Marshall Institute and is on the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Stance on Climate Change

“I, and many other scientists, think the warming will be small compared the natural fluctuations in the earth’s temperature, and that the warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind.” [2]

Key Quotes

“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.”[3]

“I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken … Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science.” [4]

“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.” [3]

“We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth's atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.” [13]

Key Deeds

May 8, 2013

William Happer and Harrison H. Schmitt co-author a paper published in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide.” [13] The authors submit that no chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the “single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production.” [13] The conclusion of the article states that, “The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.” [13]

January 27, 2012

Happer signed a *Wall Street Journal* opinion piece that claims there is no need to panic about global warming. [6]

Other “scientists” who signed the article include Claude Allègre, J. Scott Armstrong,Roger Cohen, William Kininmonth, Jan Breslow, Richard Lindzen, James McGrath, Rodney Nichols, Burt Rutan, Harrison H. Schmitt, Nir Shaviv, Edward David, Michael Kelly, Henk Tennekes, and Antonino Zichichi.

Media Transparency reported on the Op-Ed, concluding that most of the scientists have never published articles in peer-reviewed journals on the subject of climate change. They also contacted economist William Nordhaus who had been cited by the article, and he said that the WSJ was guilty of a “Complete Mischaracterization Of My Work.” [7]

*Skeptical Science* also looked into the signatories, and summarize how the list “only includes four scientists who have actually published climate research in peer-reviewed journals, and only two who have published climate research in the past three decades.” Also, almost half have received funding from oil companies and big industry. [8]

May 20, 2010

Testified (PDF) before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, U.S. House of Representatives on “Climate Science in the Political Arena.” [2]

February 25, 2009

Testified before the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee where he describes how the dangers of CO2 are “Wildly Exaggerated” and “why I and many scientists like me are not alarmed by increasing levels of CO2.” [3]

He said that the earth is in a “CO2 famine,” and more atmospheric carbon dioxide would be beneficial. [9]

The Committee was formerly chaired by climate skeptic Senator James Inhofe who is also currently Senate Minority Committee Member. [10]

November 9, 2008

Happer's name appears on anad funded by the CATO instituteaddressed to then President-Elect Barack Obama, responding to his statement that “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear” by saying, “With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.”

1998 – 2008

Happer is listed as a signatory to the Oregon Petition. [5]

According to the Associated Pressarticle, the Oregon petition included names that wereintentionally placed to prove the invalid name collection process. The Oregon Petition has been used by climate change skeptics as proof that there is no scientific consensus.

Affiliations

George C. Marshall Institute — Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) — Member of “Academic Advisory Council.”
Department of Energy — Director of Energy Research (1991-1993)
MITRE — Listed on Board of Trustees.
Richard Lounsbery Foundation* — Vice President and member of the Board of Directors.

*The Richard Loundsbery Foundation has funded (PDF) Fred Singer's Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) and the Marshall Institute's Environmental Literacy Council.

Publications

William Happer appears to have only published one paper on climate change, titled “Climate Science and Policy: Making the Connection.”

Note that while the paper appears in Google Scholar, it was published by the George C. Marshall Institute and not by any peer-reviewed journal.

Resources

“Board of Trustees: Dr. William Happer,” MITRE Corporation. Archived March 20, 2011.
“Climate Science in the Political Arena” (PDF), Statement of William Happer before the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming U.S. House of Representatives (May 20, 2010).
William Happer's testimony to the Senate Energy Committee on February 25, 2009. Republished by the Science and Public Policy Institute, April 8, 2009.
“U. S. Senate Minority Report: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.” U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.
“List of Signers By Name,” Global Warming Petition Project. Accessed December, 2011.
“No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2012.
“The Journal Hires Dentists To Do Heart Surgery,” Media Transparency, January 30, 2012.
“The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction,” Skeptical Science, January 31, 2012.
Kennedy Maize. “Will Happer: We need more CO2,” Power, February 25, 2009.
“Members,” U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. Accessed May 12, 2013.
“William Happer,” SourceWatch Profile.
“William Happer,” Wikipedia entry.
“In Defense of Carbon Dioxide,” The Wall Street Journal, May 8, 2013.

Organizations:

Tags:

climate change denier

global warming research

climate misinformation

Will Happer

William Happer

smogger

climate change skeptic

George Marshall Institute

climate denialism

denial database

http://ecowatch.com/2014/07/15/princeton-carbon-jews-hitler/

wsk 16: William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy and Board member, George Marshall Institute which is a recipient of substantial funding from Exxon Mobil.

---

Happer, William

Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics

Princeton University

Fellow APS, AAAS

Member National Academy of Sciences

Activities: OISM1998, GMI2002, A.HOCKX, CATO2009, (organizer) APS2009, A.GATE, A.Hockey

Organizations: CATO, (Chairman) GMI, JASON

People: (Singer; Canavan; Nichols) via GMI; (H.Lewis, Dyson) via JASON;.

Sproull via GMI, both were on Board (at least). (other APS2009 organizers) Austin, Cohen, Gould,

H.Lewis, Singer. See GMI for many other connections.

Fields: nuclear; defense, NMR

Locations: NJ; DC; NJ-Princeton

Employers: DOE; Princeton

Groups: JASON; GMI

Notes: Atomic physics; JASON 1976-90 (chair steering 1987-1990); Trustee MITRE; DOE Energy

1991-1993. (MITRE manages JASON.)

Happer was GMI Director at least 11/07/01-onward, then became Chairman January 2006, a few months

into the WR effort.

www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/405.pdf

www.princeton.edu/physics/people/faculty/william-happer/

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/01/12/22506/

―Physics professor William Happer GS ‘64 has some tough words for scientists who believ e that carbon dioxide is

causing global warming. ―Th is is George Orwe ll. This is the ‗Ge rmans are the master race. The Je ws are the scum

of the earth.‘ It‘s that kind of propaganda,‖ Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brac kett Professor of Physics, said in an

interview. ― Carbon dio xide is not a pollutant. Every time you e xhale , you e xhale a ir that has 4 percent carbon

dio xide. To say that that‘s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult …‖‖

―Happer said that he is alarmed by the funding that climate change scientists, such as Pacala and Socolow, receive

from the private sector.

―Their whole caree r depends on pushing. They have no other reason to exist. I could care less. I don‘t get a

dime one way or another from the global warming issue,‖ Happer noted. ―I‘m not on the payroll of oil co mpanies

as they are. They are funded by BP.‖‖

As the article mentions, GMI had received at least $715,000 from ExxonMobil from 1998 through 2006,

and GMI has long been funded by family foundations , some of which were built on oil fortunes (A.2)

Happer has worded his comments carefully. His Princeton research has no obvious connection with

climate or energy (despite claims elsewhere about CO2 expertise), so unsurprisingly is not funded by oil

companies. GMI has certainly gotten money from oil-based family fortunes, and from ExxonMobil (at

Crescendo to ClimateGate Cacophony V1.0 03/15/10

126

least) starting in 1999, and about 40% of GMI‟s funding is still unidentified. Funding often flows to think

tanks without formally specifying the exact purpose. It may be labeled “for research and support”, or “to

promote free enterprise.” A think tank might seek money from ExxonMobil or tobacco companies, and

would presumably know how to spend it to be able to show accomplishments when seeking further grants.

The money-laundering maze is difficult to track, and with family foundations it is even worse. One may

have some idea of the original sources of wealth, but it is difficult to discover actual current investments,

not just of the foundations, but of the people controlling them. To criticize university research grants

seems inconsistent while Chairing a think tank long funded via oil money to do climate anti-science.

www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/non-climate-scientist-cli_b_173422.html

This is part of article by Duke‘s Bill Chame ides, which inc ludes 7-minute video of Happer, speaking to

Senate EPW February 25, 2009. The transcript is available at:

scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/happer_senate_testimony.html

tedhsu.blogspot.com/2009/03/on-will-happer-and-lorne-gunter.html

―1) Dr. Happer was a proponent of the Reagan administration's heavily critic ized and eventually abandoned "Star

Wars" (Strategic Defense Initiat ive) project.

2) He was appointed by George H.W. Bush as Director of Energy Research in the U.S. Department of Energy.

3) Soon after the Clinton administration took over in 1993, Happer was fired by Al Gore for not having any

urgency in dealing with ozone depletion and climate change.‖

An article in Reason says this also, albeit from a different viewpoint, and others have pointed out that

political appointees unsurprisingly change when administrations change, unless they have managed to

―burrow in‖ to a civil service position beforehand.

www.SEPP.org/Archive/controv/controversies/happer.html

www.mitre.org/about/bot/happer.html JASON Chair of Steering Committee 1987-1990

www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1999_h/990713-happer_071399.htm

www.marshall.org/experts.php?id=57

www.climatedepot.com/a/4383/Princeton-Professor-Will-Happer-on-the-Orwellian-Movement-UN-IPCC

-rewrites-the-history-of-the-past-climate-of-Earth-with-the-Hockey-Stick-which-is-clearly-fraudulent

A.Hockey

Singer‘s 1999 ―Hot talk, Cold Science – Revised Second Edition‖, published by The Independent

Institute (TII), has a blurb from Happer:

―HOT TA LK, COLD SCIENCE ca refully revie ws the scientific, economic and policy literature on global

warming, and provides a welcome, reasoned assessment of the facts and uncertainties. I strongly recommend this

book to any citizen.‖

Hence, Singer and Happer were involved at least as far back as 1999.

Contrib: R99-04, D04: www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?city=Princeton&st=NJ&last=happer

Happer was one of the organizers of the APS2009 and surrounding advocacy efforts and then coauthored

an email to APS members about Climategate (A.12.3).

mashey