Next up in our Canary in a Climate World vol. 3 series is the esteemed atmospheric physicist and science leader Dr. Will Happer. Will was for many years a professor of physics at Princeton who also served as Director of Research at the US Department of Energy and later as an advisor on science issues to the White House. Like Richard Lindzen he has earned the right to speak his mind, and he doesn’t hold back. “Climate science” (which he puts in quotes), spread through universities in response to lavish spending by governments and foundations. “Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or paleontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Center for Saving the Planet’”, he states. “They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude.” Many who saw through the dodge, a piece of short-run bureaucratic cleverness that turned into long-term sacrifice of integrity, kept their doubts to themselves, and the ones who spoke up paid a steep price. But Happer is convinced the truth will prevail eventually, and science will self-correct. We’d better hope.

Happer focuses on the notion that CO2 is a control knob for the Earth’s climate. It’s not a straw man argument: alarmists really do claim it and use models that embed the assumption. But it’s a testable theory and, when tested, it fails repeatedly.

Here Happer invokes Karl Popper’s vital criterion that the scientific status of a theory is determined less by its verifiability than its falsifiability. To be useful a theory must make predictions that are surprising and important and, critically, can be compared with data to see if they fail. Thus a theory ceases to be scientific when its predictions cannot be put to the test. But of course it also ceases to be scientific if when put to the test those predictions keep turning out to be untrue, and on that basis Happer argues that climate alarmism is an unscientific failure.

He does not deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Indeed in his chapter he explains how the process works which is more than many dogmatic alarmists can do, especially those who natter about a blanket wrapped around the atmosphere on the edge of space. But, as many others have noted, that fact only implies a slight bit of warming, especially at current temperatures (it matters a lot if the Earth is close to the deadly cold of space) whereas alarmism is based on the idea that CO2 emissions can cause a catastrophic heating of the atmosphere at any temperature and especially the current one, a claim with no basis in reality. On the contrary, far from being verifiable, it is demonstrably false.

Happer believes that “Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history, where it belongs.” But in the meantime, he laments, it is doing a lot of damage, hence “We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.” And though well past normal retirement age Happer, thankfully, continues to answer his own call to action.