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Climate change

United Nations • Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns. Human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Will Happer, Physicist Sought by Trump, Loves Science, and CO2

Andrew Revkin
4.7K subscribers
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2.7K views 8 years ago
Here's an excerpt from an interview with Will Happer, a brilliant, controversial physicist who is one of two scientists known to have met with Donald Trump as candidates for science adviser. He's beyond a maverick when it comes to CO2-driven climate change, as you'll hear in this excerpt. But in the interview he focuses on the importance of sustaining government investment in climate science and observations, improving science education, and building a culture in which scientific breakthroughs are more possible. There's lots more from Happer here:    • Physicist Sought by Trump Wants More ...   and here:    • Physicist Sought by Trump Wants More ...   Read the interview on @propublica: A physicist and possible adviser to Trump describes his love of science, and CO2 https://www.propublica.org/article/a-... Listen to Andy Revkin chat with Terry Gross about Happer, Trump, climate and more on Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/  …...more
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Will Happer, Physicist Sought by Trump, Loves Science, and CO2
33Likes
2,734Views
2017Feb 15
Here's an excerpt from an interview with Will Happer, a brilliant, controversial physicist who is one of two scientists known to have met with Donald Trump as candidates for science adviser. He's beyond a maverick when it comes to CO2-driven climate change, as you'll hear in this excerpt. But in the interview he focuses on the importance of sustaining government investment in climate science and observations, improving science education, and building a culture in which scientific breakthroughs are more possible. There's lots more from Happer here:    • Physicist Sought by Trump Wants More ...   and here:    • Physicist Sought by Trump Wants More ...   Read the interview on @propublica: A physicist and possible adviser to Trump describes his love of science, and CO2 https://www.propublica.org/article/a-... Listen to Andy Revkin chat with Terry Gross about Happer, Trump, climate and more on Fresh Air: http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/ Here's the relevant section of our chat: Happer: If you look around the world there are people peddling every risk you can imagine, you know. High altitude nuclear bursts, you know. The instability of the grid, you know. Cyber meltdown, the year 2000, you know, people make money on risks as long as the world is existing, you know, so it’s a common way to make a living. And you know, if you subscribe to every one of these people you might as well shut down, you know, you can’t operate. GMOs. So I— In the case of climate, you know, I think that any dispassionate weighing of the facts would give you a negative cost of carbon, you know, that more CO2 is good for the world. You know, I’ve always maintained that, you know, I can explain many reasons for it, but— Now this is not to say that, you know, irresponsible burning of fossil fuels is good for the world, there are all sorts of real problems there, and one bad thing about the climate hysteria is it distracted people from real problems. You go to Beijing or New Delhi, I’m sure you’ve been both places, on certain days, you know, you can practically not go outside, the air is so bad. But it’s not CO2, you know, it’s people burning the fields, it’s fly ash from, you know, unregulated coal burning, it’s every possible thing, all of which have solutions, you know. You don’t have to live with this stuff. And yet instead of cleaning up the air and making, you know, people’s lives better, you know, they jet around the world talking about saving the planet from CO2, which it’s not in danger of. So I think enormous damage has been done to the environment by diverting money from real problems into completely made-up problems. Q: So you really do see it as a non-problem, not as something worth investing in? A: Absolutely. Not only a non-problem. I see the CO2 as good, you know. Let me be clear. I don’t think it’s a problem at all, I think it’s a good thing. Q: Is there a finding that could emerge related to let’s say sea level rise, that could get you more focused or thinking about the downside of the relentless buildup of a gas? Remember, the thing that’s the issue here is the long-lived nature of CO2. So it’s kind of like a ratcheting forward mechanism. A: Well to me I think CO2 is good, I’m very happy that it’s long-lived. The longer the better. Look, I mean you can already see the earth greening. If you look at agricultural yields, they’re steadily going up. A lot of that is, you know, fertilizer better varieties, but some of it is CO2, if you took all this CO2 out and brought us back to 280 or whatever it was, you know, you would throw away 20 or 30% of agricultural yields. You know, the world would starve, you know, unless we planted 20 or 30% more land, we don’t have that. So I mean I can’t imagine why you would want to decrease CO2. I don’t think you should get a special benefit for adding it, you know, because the actual cost, you know, per ton of CO2 is—I mean the benefit is not very high, so that should not be a consideration on whether you built a coal plant or a gas plant or a nuclear plant, you know, it’s just almost irrelevant. But it shouldn’t be a demerit if you put CO2 into the air. It should be a big demerit if you put fly ash, you know, or nitric oxides and stuff like that, you know, they’re really not good. CO2 is fine.

Follow along using the transcript.

Andrew Revkin

4.7K subscribers