Wood Romances

In a recent talk  (relevant excerpt from John Shewchuk  here ) given to an Australian political group called the Institute for Public Affairs (IPA), William Happer argued that doubling CO2 causes only 0.71 K warming, and that amount of warming for 2xCO2 is too small to matter. He then suggests that in order to make CO2 a problem, scientists had to invent giant feedbacks to amplify warming by as much as 10x the amount caused by CO2 alone. I've seen this claim repeated by others on X and other social media platforms, but as best I can tell Happer originates this particular argument. So I'd like to consider, is this plausible at all? I think it's pretty easy to investigate this and show conclusively that it is not. In fact, even Happer disagreed with this claim as recently as 2020. Ranges for ECS/TCR in IPCC Reports Happer's Argument At about the 1 minute mark of the above linked excerpt, Happer explains his math on how he arrives at 0.71 K for equilibrium climate sensitiv...

The CO2 Coalition claims to exist "for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy. The Coalition seeks to engage in an informed and dispassionate discussion of climate change, humans’ role in the climate system, the limitations of climate models, and the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emission." And if you think there's even a grain of truth in that, we can dispel with that right here.  On their website, they have what they consider educational resources, including a series  of "facts" that ostensibly would help us get past media propaganda to the scientific evidence about AGW. Their second "fact" has the following title: "The warming effect of each molecule of CO2 declines as its concentration increases." As is typical in these "facts," the title is superficially true; the disinformation comes in the way it...

W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer (WH) have periodically attempted to circumvent publishing manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and have instead taken to uploading manuscripts on the arXiv. As I understand it, the intended use for the arXiv is to allow pre-published manuscripts to be read and evaluated by scientists before the peer-review process is completed. This gives scientists faster access to the newest research, but with the caveat that these manuscripts may need to be revised significantly before being published, once going through the peer review process. Some may not even be published at all, so scientists often look at these manuscripts with interest but also with a grain of salt until the final version passes peer review. WH are apparently using the arXiv to store manuscripts for which they have no intention of submitting to any peer-reviewed journal. The manuscripts are formatted to look like scientific papers, but they will never see the light of day in an ac...

Recently I came across a document reportedly written by William Happer and Richard Lindzen (HL) entitled Comment and Declaration on the SEC’s Proposed Rule “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors,” File No. S7-10-22, 87 Fed. Reg. 21334 (April 11,2022).[1] As I read through the science-related material in the document, it became quickly apparent to me that his document is utter garbage. It's so bad, I wonder to what extent either of them actually wrote it. Rather than go through the document section by section, I want to just analyze the section on climate sensitivity. What we'll see here is that the paper is inconsistent with itself, it contradicts the other published works of the authors, and of course, it's demonstrably false. Internal Inconsistencies The section I'd like to discuss primarily is section II.M, with the brief title, "The Logarithmic Forcing from CO2 Means that Its Contributions to Global Warming is Heavil...