Now, I can predict the myriad responses to this.
Personal attacks -- I'm a liberal, I'm a socialist, I'm a scientist, I'm an apostle of Gore, I'm a Tarnsman of Gor, you know the type.
Numerous postings drawing my attention to stuff I've seen before which supposedly refutes one or more of my points (98% of which don't even come close)
Diatribes and monologues on how any action to address anthropogenic climate change is either a) a conspiracy or b) a plot to take over the world, or c) both.
Funny comments (rare, but it does happen)
Inane, not very funny comments, and
Reiterated talking points, such as my current favorite, the globe has been cooling for 10 years. Anybody who thinks this should be informed that trends are not determined (statistically) by drawing a line from the highest peak to the lowest trough. They are determined by a variety of line or curve-fitting analyses which are dependent on having a requisite number of data points and which usually should have some mechanism for excluding outliers. YMMV.
So here it is. Dr. Happer's statements are italicized, my comments are bolded.
10 things wrong with Dr. Happer’s testimony to Congress:
Let me state clearly where I probably agree with the other witnesses. We have been in a period of global warming over the past 200 years, but there have been several periods, like the last ten years, when the warming has ceased,
1. The warming has not ceased. The first decade of the 21st century has 8 of the top 10 warmest years in the instrumental record. Only until there are years with annual global mean temperature (GMT) . This includes 2005, which was statistically equivalent to the warmest-ranked year, 1998. 2005 did not have a large El Nino event, an event known to raise global temperatures. 1998 had the second-largest El Nino event of the 20th century. 
and there have even been periods of substantial cooling, as from 1940 to 1970. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased from about 280 to 380 parts per million over past 100 years. The combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas, has contributed to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. And finally, increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause the earth’s surface to warm. The key question is: will the net effect of the warming, and any other effects of the CO2, be good or bad for humanity?
I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind. (following section about Prohibition deleted)
But what about the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2 that we keep hearing about? In a word, they are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated. Let me turn now to the science and try to explain why I and many scientists like me are not alarmed by increasing levels of CO2.
The earth’s climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth’s temperature — on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can. It is like putting an additional ski
2. This is incorrect, and is a common misconception among global-warming skeptics. CO2 in the atmosphere continues to absorb heat as concentration increases because the atmosphere is three-dimensional, and heat will continue to be absorbed in upper layers of the troposphere. This is explained FULLY in the following two articles:
hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC thinks that this extra jacket is water vapor and clouds.
Since most of the greenhouse effect for the earth is due to water vapor and clouds, added CO2 must substantially increase water’s contribution to lead to the frightening scenarios that are bandied about. The buzz word here is that there is “positive feedback.” With each passing year, experimental observations further undermine the claim of a large positive feedback from water.
3. This is an astonishing assertion. Two supporting publications that indicate strong positive water vapor feedback:
Minschwaner, K., and A.E. Dessler. 2004. Water vapor feedback in the tropical upper troposphere: Model results and observations. Journal of Climate 17:1272-1282.
Dessler, A. E., Z. Zhang, and P. Yang (2008), Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003–2008, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L20704, doi:10.1029/2008GL035333.
Abstract: Between 2003 and 2008, the global-average surface temperature of the Earth varied by 0.6°C. We analyze here the response of tropospheric water vapor to these variations. Height-resolved measurements of specific humidity (q) and relative humidity (RH) are obtained from NASA's satellite-borne Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS). Over most of the troposphere, q increased with increasing global-average surface temperature, although some regions showed the opposite response. RH increased in some regions and decreased in others, with the global average remaining nearly constant at most altitudes. The water-vapor feedback implied by these observations is strongly positive, with an average magnitude of λ q = 2.04 W/m2/K, similar to that simulated by climate models. The magnitude is similar to that obtained if the atmosphere maintained constant RH everywhere.
In fact, observations suggest that the feedback is close to zero and may even be negative. That is, water vapor and clouds may actually diminish the already small global warming expected from CO2, not amplify it. The evidence here comes from satellite measurements of infrared radiation escaping from the earth into outer space, from measurements of sunlight reflected from clouds and from measurements of the temperature the earth’s surface or of the troposphere, the roughly 10 km thick layer of the atmosphere above the earth’s surface that is filled with churning air and clouds, heated from below at the earth’s surface, and cooled at the top by radiation into space.
But the climate is warming and CO2 is increasing. Doesn’t this prove that CO2 is causing global warming through the greenhouse effect? No, the current warming period began about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an appreciable increase of CO2. There have been similar and even larger warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide.
4. Attribution studies indicate that the 20th century warming, particularly the late 20th century warming, is primarily due to human activities, primarily increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to fossil fuel combustion.
The IPCC Explains… Unnatural Warming
Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.
5. This is a repetition of the statement made at the beginning of the presentation and is refuted as Point 1. Also see comments in Point 7.
(Next historical section deleted)
The existence of climate variability in the past has long been an embarrassment to those who claim that all climate change is due to man and that man can control it. When I was a schoolboy, my textbooks on earth science showed a prominent “medieval warm period” at the time the Vikings settled Greenland, followed by a vicious “little ice age” that drove them out. So I was very surprised when I first saw the celebrated “hockey stick curve,” in the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. I could hardly believe my eyes. Both the little ice age and the Medieval Warm Period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick. This was far from an obscure detail, and the hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. We now know that the hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis.
6. Dr. Happer is incorrect when he asserts that the MWP was removed from the well-known “hockey stick”. The MWP was most strongly manifested in the Northern Hemisphere and Europe; the inclusion of data from other parts of the world reduced the impact of this event. The first IPCC report contained a sketch that over-emphasized the size of the MWP, and this sketch has continued to circulate, even being used in “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, even though the sketch was not data-based. It has influenced the general public perception of the "size" of the MWP. The figure below shows a number of proxy temperature records going back to the year 1000. While the use of temperature proxies for such analyses has been shown to be increasingly unreliable beyond about 400 years in the past, there is no truth to the statement that the MWP and the LIA were “gone” from such records. Such a statement is based on an over-reliance on anecdotal memory and depictions or descriptions lacking scientific rigour, compared to actual data reconstructions, which can be evaluated (and critiqued) by scientific methodology, as has been done.
There really was a little ice age and there really was a medieval warm period that was as warm or warmer than today. ["Warmer" is not scientifically supported. It can't be; the proxies are not sufficiently accurate that far into the past.] I bring up the hockey stick as a particularly clear example that the IPCC summaries for policy makers are not dispassionate statements of the facts of climate change. It is a shame, because many of the IPCC chapters are quite good. The whole hockey-stick episode reminds me of the motto of Orwell’s Ministry of Information in the novel “1984:” “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” The IPCC has made no serious attempt to model the natural variations of the earth’s temperature in the past. Whatever caused these large past variations, it was not due to people burning coal and oil. If you can’t model the past, where you know the answer pretty well, how can you model the future?
7. An incorrect statement regarding the IPCC’s role. The IPCC does not do ANY independent research. It evaluates and summarizes hundreds of climate papers authored by independent scientists. Chapter 6 of the Report of Working Group 1 (“The Scientific Basis”) in the Fourth IPCC report fully addresses paleoclimate, both short-term (Holocene) and long-term (over the entire Quaternary back to the beginning of the Paleocene). It addresses cause-and-effect of several different Quaternary events with regard to radiative forcing, and takes considerable effort to evaluate the glacial-interglacial era. So Dr. Happer does not truly represent the IPCC’s presentation on this topic in his statement above. Furthermore, atmospheric CO2’s role as a primary driver of global temperature for paleoclimate is underscored in multiple ways in the research that is presented and summarized/discussed in the IPCC reports.
Many of us are aware that we are living in an ice age, where we have hundred- thousand-year intervals of big continental glaciers that cover much of the land area of the northern hemisphere, interspersed with relative short interglacial intervals like the one we are living in now. By looking at ice cores from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, one can estimate past temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises, the temperature also rises. Doesn’t this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2? Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up. There is a delay between a temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years. This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because of the fundamental concept of causality.
8. The supposed CO2-temperature lag has been addressed numerous times because it is a often-repeated (~ad infinitum) skeptical talking point. This point does not, in any way, negate the important role of CO2 climate forcing. I explain this with many supporting links in my profile (point #5). There are other Web site that also address this incorrect assertion:
The lag between temperature and CO2
New Scientist addresses this climate warming myth ("myth" is their term)
CO2 lags, not leads (both links are presented due to different discussion threads)
A cause must precede its effect. [This simple statement does not refute the simple fact that a triggering cause can induce secondary effects which may have a larger aggregate influence.] For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o’clock, and by about 7 o’clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o’clock because the house got warm at 7 o’clock. Sure, temperature and gas burning are correlated, just like temperature and atmospheric levels of CO2. But the thing that changes first is the cause. In the case of the ice cores, the cause of increased CO2 is almost certainly the warming of the oceans. [I missed this in my evaluation. This is also wrong, because the total ocean SST change from glacials to interglacials would only produce about 10% of the total observed atmospheric CO2 increase by the mechanism described. The other 90% likely results from ocean circulation alteration and other mechanisms, which are addressed in the relevant point in my profile.] The oceans release dissolved CO2 when they warm up, just like a glass of beer rapidly goes flat in a warm room. If not CO2, then what really causes the warming at the end of the cold periods of ice ages? A great question and one of the reasons I strongly support research in climate. [It's been done; links to references are in my profile. While the final solution is not settled, the processes which could accomplish this are well-characterized.]
[Long following section deleted; this was about CO2 and plants. There was nothing incorrect in this section, but there is an implicit suggestion that returning to climate when there were no ice caps in either polar region is an acceptable outcome. Some might dispute that, particularly if such an outcome would be realized over centuries rather than millennia.]
Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, “general circulation models,” that try to mimic the behavior of the earth’s climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative.
9. Here Dr. Happer repeats two previous assertions which have been refuted earlier. It should also be noted that GCMs used for climate are different than coupled ocean-atmosphere models; the climate GCMs use a very simplified representation of the ocean. Only a coupled ocean-atmosphere GCM could simulate the warming effects of an El Nino or the cooling effects of a La Nina. Coupled ocean-atmosphere models do have El Nino and La Nina events, but predicting the actual timing of such events is similar to the ability of long-range weather forecasts (six months or longer) to predict the actual timing of snowstorms, which is to say that it can’t be done. So the recent cooling due to an extended La Nina event is not something that climate GCMs would do at all, and not something that coupled ocean-atmosphere models would do well.
[section about Lord Kelvin deleted; further historical musings also deleted]
Even elementary school teachers and writers of children’s books are enlisted to terrify our children and to promote the idea of impending climate doom. Having observed the education of many children, including my own, I am not sure how effective the effort will be. Many children seem to do just the opposite of what they are taught. Nevertheless, children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science. Many of you may know that in 2007 a British Court ruled that if Al Gore’s book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was used in public schools, the children had to be told of eleven particularly troubling inaccuracies. You can easily find a list of the inaccuracies on the internet, but I will mention one.
10. The full finding of the court is here:
And an address of the supposed inaccuracies is found here:
Regarding Hurricane Katrina, the Team Gore response says:
“The film is careful not to ascribe any single weather event to climate change. However, in the film Mr. Gore does state, "There have been warnings that hurricanes would get stronger." He based that claim on research published in peer-reviewed journals from Dr. Kerry Emanuel, and several others, who have found a link between an increase in sea surface temperature and an increase in the intensity of hurricanes. Since then, further research has strengthened the science in this area with regards to a link between human-induced climate change and hurricane intensity. Mr. Gore has never addressed the issue of climate change and hurricane frequency.”
The court ruled that it was not possible to attribute hurricane Katrina to CO2. Indeed, had we taken a few of the many billions of dollars we have been spending on climate change research and propaganda and fixed the dykes [sic]and pumps around the New Orleans, most of the damage from Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided.
The sea level is indeed rising, just as it has for the past 20,000 years since the end of the last ice age. Fairly accurate measurements of sea level have been available since about 1800. These measurements show no sign of any acceleration. The rising sea level can be a serious local problem for heavily-populated, low-lying areas like New Orleans, where land subsidence compounds the problem. But to think that limiting CO2 emissions will stop sea level rise is a dangerous illusion. It is also possible that the warming seas around Antarctica will cause more snowfall over the continent and will counteract the sea-level rise. In any case, the rising sea level is a problem that needs quick local action for locations like New Orleans rather than slow action globally.
In closing, let me say again that we should provide adequate support to the many brilliant scientists, some at my own institution of Princeton University, who are trying to better understand the earth’s climate, now, in the past, and what it may be in the future. I regret that the climate-change issue has become confused with serious problems like secure energy supplies, protecting our environment, and figuring out where future generations will get energy supplies after we have burned all the fossil fuel we can find.
11. I fully agree with Dr. Happer’s statement above. Except for the last part, because as the supplies become depleted, the cost of extraction will eventually become prohibitive.
We should not confuse these laudable goals with hysterics about carbon footprints. For example, when weighing pluses and minuses of the continued or increased use of coal, the negative issue should not be increased atmospheric CO2, which is probably good for mankind. We should focus on real issues like damage to the land and waterways by strip mining, inadequate remediation, hazards to miners, the release of real pollutants and poisons like mercury, other heavy metals, organic carcinogens, etc. Life is about making decisions and decisions are about trade-offs. The Congress can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently. Or they can act on unreasonable fears and suppress energy use, economic growth and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.
Because I can't reply I'm not going to reply. This was the product of a few hours of work and investigation (though I did have an idea where to look). I invite anyone truly interested in the science to investigate the topics independently and to discuss them with experts. That would disqualify me from further discussion.