#2977: William Happer

William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Princeton University and an internationally recognized expert on atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy. He is most famous, however, for his views on climate change, a topic that is emphatically not within his area of expertise. Happer, who not a climate scientist, rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and has, indeed and obviously without knowing what he is talking about, become one of the big authorities in the climate denialist movement. In 2018, then-president Trump therefore appointed him to the National Security Council to counter evidence linking carbon dioxide emissions to global warming – and as opposed to some of Trump’s appointees who admitted that scientific consensus had a strong case, Happer stayed true to dogmatic denialism throughout his tenure. There is a detailed breakdown of Happer’s antics on the council here. He resigned from the council in 2019, partially, it seems, because the council didn’t go as far along with his denialism as he wanted.

 

Happer is also co-founder and board member of the well-funded astroturf advocacy group  the CO2 Coalition, which was established in 2015 to “educate the public that increased atmospheric levels of CO2 will benefit the world”. He is also an “adjunct scholar” at the Cato Institute, on the academic advisory council of the British Global Warming Policy Foundation, and a member of Climate Exit (Clexit), a group formed shortly after the Brexit decision based on the idea that “[t]he world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade.”

 

Happer’s position is that climate change was invented by “paranoid” scientists – Happer dismisses climate scientists as a “glassy-eyed” “cult” – and is a “completely imaginary threat that doesn’t exist. People are afraid to stand up and say that.” More specifically, he thinks that “the warming will be small compared to the natural fluctuations in the earth’s temperature, and that the warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind”, which is a conjunction with two false conjuncts. The latter, however, is something of a main schtick for Happer; CO₂ is plant food, and “from the point of view of geological history, we are in a CO2 famine”, which is not only inaccurate but even if it were accurate, utterly irrelevant since it sort of neglects the small point that sea levels were also typically “100s of feet higher during [e.g.] the Phanerozoic”. To Happer, however, the important point is to “counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. It’s not a pollutant at all”; rather “[a]lmost all plants grow better and are more drought resistant with two to four times more CO2 than now” (“[i]f plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” says Happer). Apparently, he considers it something of a gotcha trick against climate scientists to ask “is CO2 a pollutant or a vital molecule for life onEarth”, just like how “is poop a vital organic fertilizer for plants or is it bad to eat” would be a gotcha for other medical doctors. In 2014, Happer said that the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler”, which is a strikingly silly thing to say on a striking number of levels.

 

And William Happer is a an obvious confused and silly person, who really, really doesn’t even remotely grasp the essentials of the issue he is going all denialist about (he does, for some reason, complain that people who call him a denier are trying to make him “look like a Nazi sympathizer”) and staunchly refuses to consult introductory textbooks that would explain them. That, of course, hardly matters to denialist organizations that frequently cite him and invoke him as some kind of authority he clearly isn’t. Here is a fair response to some of his denialist PRATTs from someone who does have some understanding of what it is all about.

 

According to himself, Happer arrived at his beliefs about climate change during his experience at the Department of Energy back in the age of Bush the elder (he was dismissed in 1993 over disagreements concerning the ozone layer); at least he has been in the game for a while – he was for instance coauthor of petition to change the official position of the American Physical Society to a version that raised doubts about global warming in 2009, which was overwhelmingly rejected by the APS Council – and has no intention of letting scientific evidence affect his firmly entrenched commitments.

 

Diagnosis: Happer has been accurately described as “a fringe figure even for climate sceptics”, and he really has no idea what he is talking about. But he nevertheless talks about it with confidence, and has, due to his credentials in other fields, established himself as a frighteningly powerful authority figure in the denialist movement.

 

Hat-tip: Desmog