Source: CNBC
URL: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000169287&play=1
Date: 17/05/2013
Event: William Happer on CO2: "I think a thousand parts per million would be better for the planet"
Credit: CNBC Squawk Box
People:
Joe Kernen: Switching gears to the science - and I use that in the loosest term possible - the science of global climate change, our next guest is a physicist. He says carbon dioxide emissions are something that the world has seen for its entire history and can actually be beneficial to an ecosystem, rather than a burden. He argues that rising CO2 levels are only very weakly linked to rising temperatures, and actually would increase productivity. He wrote a big piece - with another person that was actually on Apollo 17, one of the astronauts - in the Wall Street Journal a week or two ago, that we're going to show you a shot of [a few minutes later, the Wall Street Journal article headline appears on screen]...
But he's Professor William Happer of Princeton University, who co-wrote the article in the Journal, called In Defense of Carbon Dioxide. It appeared in the Journal a couple of weeks ago, with Dr. Harrison Schmitt. And you're a physicist, so we're immediately going to hear that you're not really - you don't have enough background to be judging climate science at this point, and that 98% of climate scientists say there is a link between carbon dioxide and warming. You say there's not. Or a very weak link.
William Happer: Well, you could look at the record, the geological record. And you know, we have proxies for carbon dioxide over millions of years, hundreds of millions of years.
Joe Kernen: And we're at 400 parts per million. In the past, we've seen what type of levels? In the [inaudible.]
William Happer: 4,000...
Joe Kernen: 4000 parts per million.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Oh, but now -
Joe Kernen: Hold on, I saw Al Gore say these are the highest levels in human history. If you look at the length, if you look at the age of the Earth represented in hours of a day, the Earth is 24 hours old - Man has been around for 11 seconds. Out of the 24 hours. So it's true that we haven't been at 400 parts per million. But we've been at 1,000 parts per million, we've been 4,000 parts per million in the Cenozoic Era. Correct? Was there - did you see warming, and do we know whether the warming came before the CO2 levels went up, or as a result of the CO2 level?
William Happer: Well, the Earth is almost always warming or cooling. The most dramatic example of that is this series of ice ages that we're living through in the last few million years. But during that time, for sure there's a correlation between CO2 and temperature, but temperature always changes first and then CO2 follows.
Joe Kernen: Well, that doesn't help - here's one of the quotes from the piece and also hopefully we can look at a couple of charts.
[On screen is a quote from the article In Defense of Carbon Dioxide: "The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA's and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide."]
Joe Kernen: "The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade" has shown how exaggerated NASA and other computer predictions of warming have been, and how little they correlate. I hope we can look at... Has there been any global temperature increase since 1998?
William Happer: No.
Joe Kernen: And that's a - you can see that plotted, by objective scientific organisation?
William Happer: Yes, there are many records there - surface records, satellite records...
Joe Kernen: Now, considering that CO2 has increased every year since - concentrations since 1998, I have seen them go back, the computer models, I have seen them go back to try to explain why there's been no warming since 1998. And the latest is that there's a layer in the middle of the ocean that's absorbing more heat than normal - have you seen...?
William Happer: Yes, I've seen that. Yes.
Joe Kernen: And they also say that 15 years is too short a period to say that it's not happening. And yet their entire thesis is based on 150 years of warming - out of a 4 billion year-old planet. I didn't need you here, I don't think - [Laughter in the studio. Dr. Happer is smiling.]
Michelle Caruso-Cabrera: What he said...
Andrew Ross Sorkin: You could have been a defence attorney.
Joe Kernen: I wasn't going to let you get the point - I'm just trying to make the point that CO2 is not a demon. I wasn't going to let you get to the point where you're saying a thousand parts per million would actually help the planet. That's your thesis, is it not?
William Happer: Oh yes, I think a thousand parts per million would be better for the planet.
Joe Kernen: How?
William Happer: Well, agricultural productivity is already going up from the small amount of CO2 increase we've already had. If you look around the world, you find many greenhouse operators who put in several thousand parts per million -
Joe Kernen: Into their greenhouse.
William Happer: - into their greenhouses.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: But people don't want to live in those greenhouses, right? I mean, there's -
Joe Kernen: Would there be any negative effects of breathing a thousand parts per million CO2?
William Happer: No, absolutely not.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: No, no, hold on. All I was going to suggest - and I'm not a scientist and I'm not an expert on this, so I would admit it's hard to push back. But I read, and the readings would suggest that we haven't had this amount of carbon while humans have been around, so we've talked about a lot of data over a very long period of time -
Joe Kernen: - 0.04%.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: - but we're not talking about a period where we've been around. And we're here, and what our impact is or is not.
William Happer: Well, our primate ancestors were here when CO2 levels were 3,000 parts per million - that was roughly 70, 80 million years ago. That's when we evolved.
Joe Kernen: Not that long ago, on a 4 billion year-old planet
William Happer: And so it was 10 times what it is now, and we also let our sailor and submarines live in atmospheres that are several thousand parts per million.
Joe Kernen: Professor, can you explain to me why well-intentioned people that are - I can't imagine that they - that if we go another five or six years where temperatures don't rise, they're going to have to revisit all these models, because it's going to be obvious that the anecdotal evidence isn't supporting the models. Will they go back and revisit it, and maybe say "Gosh, maybe we were wrong". Why are - what is it that causes it to be such a zealous, sort of almost a secular religion, with these people?
William Happer: Well, I think they already are revisiting the models, and many of them are saying they probably overestimated, you know, numbers, many numbers in the models. You know, the models are extremely complicated. You know, you have the Sun, you have the cooling, you have -
Joe Kernen: Water vapour.
William Happer: - complicated -
Joe Kernen: Water vapour isn't a product of the hydrocarbon industries.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Well, when people talk about the increase in ocean levels, when you see these images, up in Alaska or Greenland -
Michelle Caruso-Cabrera: The receding glaciers...
Andrew Ross Sorkin: The receding glaciers -
Joe Kernen: Most of which receded prior to 1900.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: - how do you explain that, or do you write that off? What's the -
William Happer: Well, of course -
Andrew Ross Sorkin: I'm just talking as a spectator here. This is what I see, this is what I read and I need to understand what to think of it, because you're telling me to think of it very differently than the way it's been portrayed.
William Happer: You should make a trip to Glacier Bay, and that's very impressive. The glaciers there are all gone, and they disappeared in the 1800s, in fact. That was one of the most famous trips of John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, was to visit Glacier Bay in 1879, and he pointed out all the glaciers were gone. That was long before there was any increase in CO2.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: So basically, to summarise [?].
Henry Blodget: The stat that we keep seeing, the 97% of climate scientists - they're wrong, and we should: don't worry, be happy, burn burn burn. Is that the bottom line?
William Happer: Well, first of all, the statistics on the 97% are a little phoney, you know. If you look at the questions they are... "Does CO2 affect the climate?" I would say "Yes". So I would be part of the 97%.
Joe Kernen: You wouldn't be asked, because you're a physicist, though. They don't ask the question, they don't freak out -
William Happer: You can design the poll to get any answer you wish.
Henry Blodget: What about the claims that we're having these very severe storms across the world, hurricanes and Sandy and stuff, because of climate change? Is that true, or is that -
Joe Kernen: That's even more preposterous than the link between -
William Happer: You can look at the data. There's no evidence in the data.
Henry Blodget: So there's no evidence of having big storms because of this?
Joe Kernen: There were three storms that hit the east coast, New York, that were twice as strong as Sandy in one year, in 1954. And that's only how many years ago. And we have got like, Bloomberg saying "Vote for President Obama", because of Sandy, because of climate change. We just had a tornado - I made this point earlier today - we had a bad tornado in the last couple of days, down in Texas. But it's a 60-year low, right now, in terms of tornado activity. In terms of hurricanes, it's about an eight year low. It's never been eight years where we haven't had a Category Five - Four or Five, something greater than Three - hit land. So it's never been this long, eight years. You know, you get - if an adverse climate event occurs anywhere in the globe, you're going to read about it in the New York Times. You're going to read about flooding in Pakistan - they're going to attribute it to... My entire life, there have been climate events that have happened -
Henry Blodget: So [inaudible], then why does this keep getting repeated and repeated?
Joe Kernen: I don't know -
Henry Blodget: Why do you think they keep repeating this storm thing?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: - it's most scientists.
Joe Kernen: But they take the models, they take where you're going to be and then they extrapolate where the tides will be, where the ocean levels will be -
Andrew Ross Sorkin: It is most scientists.
Joe Kernen: It's not most scientists. Not most scientists.
Andrew Ross Sorkin: You don't feel like a minority?
William Happer: Well, a small minority. I think if you honestly polled the scientists, you'd find about half are on my side.