The idea of exposing the public to both sides of the global warming debate is back in the form of a President’s Committee on Climate Security, but like climate science itself, this committee’s future is not yet settled.
For decades, the world has heard from the so-called “97 per cent” of scientists said to believe that the planet faces an existential threat from global warming. Soon, through the Presidential Committee on Climate Security that the White House is today contemplating, we may be hearing from “the deniers” said to populate the other three per cent — i.e., the scientific misfits and incompetents that the press has castigated for putting the planet in peril by questioning climate change.
Some misfits, some incompetents. The head of the committee would be William Happer, currently a senior director at the National Security Council who oversaw a US$3-billion research budget in the first Bush administration as Director of Energy Research in the Department of Energy. In Happer’s academic career as a professor at Columbia and Princeton universities, he published some 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and became a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Happer is also past president of the CO2 Coalition, a non-profit that he co-founded following research by him and others that found CO2 to be a boon for the environment. As put by the CO2 Coalition’s website: “the recent increase in CO2 levels has had a measurable, positive effect on plant life. Future CO2 increases will boost farm productivity, improve drought resistance, bolster food security and help create a greener, lusher planet.”
Other “deniers” reportedly being considered for the commission include Richard S. Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a recipient of the Jule Charney award for “highly significant research” in the atmospheric sciences from the American Meteorological Society. Lindzen’s pioneering research in atmospheric dynamics debunked the notion of disastrous climate change. Also under consideration is Judith Curry, past chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who argues that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the chief fount of climate dogma — should be disbanded. And John Christy, notable for discounting a large role for humans in climate change and for co-developing a record of earth’s temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, for which he received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.
Other skeptics of the prevailing climate orthodoxy who would be qualified to round out the commission include Michael Griffin, the former head of NASA, Princeton’s Freeman Dyson, arguably America’s most famous scientist, and Edward Wegman, a past chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences. Statistics are important because many claims in the global warming debate — such as the IPCC’s infamous “hockey stick” that purported to show unprecedented increases in temperatures in the 20th century — are based on statistical models. It was Wegman’s testimony before a congressional committee that established the statistical incompetence of the hockey stick’s authors. Their model was so flawed that it would produce a hockey-stick shape regardless of the data used as inputs — keying in baseball stats would produce a hockey-stick shape.
