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23 May 2011: Dr. William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, provides an excellent analysis of current misguided climate science. He was formerly Director of Research for the U.S. Department of Energy, but fired by Vice President Al Gore in 1993 over his skepticism regarding assumptions regarding the Ozone Hole. Dr. Happer has testified before Congress on several occasions on the topic of climate science.
Dr. Happer points out:
"A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth's atmosphere) per day. . .Now the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate atmospheric CO2 as a 'pollutant'. . .As far as green plants are concerned, CO2 is not a pollutant, but part of their daily bread--like water, sunlight, nitrogen, and other essential elements. Most green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand ppm, many times higher than now. Plants grow better and have better flowers and fruit at higher levels. Commercial greenhouse operators recognize this when they artificially increase the concentrations inside their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm."
"Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly cause about 1 degree Celsius in warming. At the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere--about 2 ppm per year--it would take about 195 years to achieve this doubling."
"The existence of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period were an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel."
Dr. Happer provides an excellent summary discussion of CO2, temperature and climate, the IPCC, emails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University (Climategate), the American Physical Society, and other topics. This article is well worth the read. Find the complete text at First Things here.
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