Glasgow Climate Conference Brings Halloween Frights

In case you missed this Rocky Horror Show before, this is once again the last chance to save the planet from the worst threat imaginable.

No, I’m not referring to White Supremacy, nor even the new nuclear-armed Chinese orbital rocket.

I’m referring to the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Conference of the Parties (COP-26) in Glasgow which is appropriately scheduled to begin on Halloween.

I have invited my long-time friend Dr. William (Will) Happer, one of the world's most preeminent climate scientists and former as director of energy research in the Department of Energy under President George H.W. Bush, to fill us in on what new terrors we can expect to be revealed during this latest last of last chances event.

Dr. Happer is also specially honored as the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Princeton University.

LB: So, Will, just how much more terrifying has climate change become since the previous 2019 COP-25 scare fest in Madrid? According to IPCC, what have we learned since then?

WH: The latest IPCC extravaganza is more of the same: breathless hype by the climate-alarm establishment with frenzied support by apparatchiks in the mass media and international elite who feel entitled to dictate to the rest of humanity.

Britain’s current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, hitched his wagon to climate alarmism some years ago. Accordingly, the host United Kingdom will do all in its power to make the conference appear successful.

With each new conference, the number of parasitic hangers-on grows, and the flimsy scientific support for a climate problem gets weaker.

Session 13, for example, addresses “Climate and Gender,” and Session 7 addresses compensation of imaginary damages caused by climate changes.

LB: Are you saying then that Goblins don’t necessarily drive SUVs? What role does CO2 really play in this picture?

WH: More CO2 has clearly been a benefit for life on Earth, and even more will be better. People are made largely of carbon, about 20% by weight, and each of us exhales about two pounds of CO2 per day.

To call CO2 “carbon pollution,” is truly Orwellian newspeak of a climate cult: “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.”

Greenhouse operators learned long ago that doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the concentrations of CO2 greatly enhanced plant growth and quality. These benefits are even greater outdoors – particularly under arid conditions – since plants with more CO2 require less water.

Thanks to some gradual CO2 enrichment, satellites reveal substantially added forest and agriculture greening that benefits people and animals.

Unfortunately, CO2 gets a bad rap as a dangerous atmospheric “greenhouse gas.” These are gases that are mostly transparent to sunlight, but which have significant opacity to thermal radiation that sheds Earth’s solar heating back to space.

This is different from the main atmospheric gases, nitrogen, and oxygen, that are transparent to both sunlight and thermal radiation.

Since greenhouse gases hinder the escape of thermal radiation to space, alarmists tell you that we will all fry if you don’t stop breathing, driving your SUV, and other activities that release CO2 into the atmosphere.

What alarmists don’t tell you, is that CO2 is a very feeble “trace” greenhouse gas at current concentrations, and that doubling the concentration will only diminish the added radiation to space by about a piddling 1%... a 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit change which you can’t even notice.

Climate scaremongers attempt to turn this trivial CO2 molehill into a threatening mountain by inventing hypothetical, but entirely unproven, computer model “positive feedbacks” caused by water vapor (including clouds) that that they claim to multiply CO2 warming influences by factors of three or more.

Each passing year, as the Earth warms more slowly out of the last Ice Age than predicted, these fanciful model-premised feedbacks become more and more silly.

LB: Why then are government sponsored studies and energy policies treating fossil fuel as the Devil incarnate? What about that “clean” and “renewable” wind and solar energy we keep hearing about?

WH: Wind and solar energy are both anemic and unreliable sources of energy which, with

few exceptions, our ancestors abandoned when engines driven by fossil fuels became available.

During the transition from sail to steam, sailors use to talk about “a fair wind in the fo’castle hold,” by which they meant a coal-fired steam engine that freed ships from caprices of wind uncertainty because “the wind bloweth when it listeth,” and quite frequently doth not blow when needed.

Most of us also notice that the Sun does not shine at night, and that there is very little sunlight late in the day when demand for electrical energy peaks. Backup sources – mostly natural gas turbines - are needed to supply our power grids when the wind isn’t blowing, and when sunlight isn’t available.

Near my home in Princeton, once green fields are now covered with ugly, weedy solar panels for as far as the eye can see. And those unfortunate enough to live near wind “farms” suffer both from blighted landscapes and noise.

Wind turbines also Cuisinart countless birds and insect-devouring bats.

In addition, construction of those vast wind and solar facilities requires huge polluting mining operations to provide the rare earths for wind-turbine magnets, lithium and cobalt for batteries, steel, and concrete for wind towers, etc.

That so-called “renewable” energy certainly doesn’t come free. We pay higher environmental, tax subsidy, and pocketbook prices for it than for reliable and abundant hydrocarbons… costs that weigh most burdensome on low-income people.

You might call this “the inverse Robin Hood strategy,” robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

LB: Then why are we frightening impressionable children into believing their parents are murdering polar bears? And why, as taxpayers, do we allow and enable those who do?

WH: We should not allow this misguided nonsense to continue.

Many of us have children or grandchildren who have been terrified by the evil propaganda that human emissions of greenhouse gases will turn the world into an inferno.

There is absolutely no observational support for dangerous warming, more extreme weather, flooding of coastal cities, or any of the other horrors that the global warming cult attributes to increasing CO2 concentrations.

I hope that our fellow citizens will take the trouble to learn how phony the so-called “climate emergency” is.

And I hope they will support leaders who tell the truth: there is no climate emergency, and there will not be one, whether we cut CO2 emissions or not.

LB: Will, thanks for unmasking this scary, Halloween-costumed charade scam.