Legal Insurrection readers may remember my many references to my CO2 Coalition colleague Dr. William Happer.
I often refence his work when reviewing the latest climate crisis narrative being pushed by the minion media. In one of my most recent pieces, I noted Happer (Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University) asserts that increasing amounts of the life-essential gas boosts crop yields.
Happer appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience (#2397) this week, alongside Richard Lindzen, a retired MIT professor of atmospheric sciences. The episode centered on sound reasons for climate science skepticism, the politicization of research funding, and the limitations of current climate models. In other words, a very large audience of potentially less-than-reliably informed people were treated to a discussion of real science about both carbon dioxide and geologic history.
Happer and Lindzen discuss how government funding mechanisms and political narratives shape climate research priorities. They argue that scientists who challenge mainstream views risk career marginalization and loss of funding. Rogan's audience was treated to a robust review on how ideology and media framing have amplified what Happer calls a "CO₂ cult," and how vital it is to question the reliability of predictive climate models.
As Happer noted during the show, the focus on CO2 has set science back 50 years. During the discussion, he cited that "settled science" once considered the Sun was comprised of phlogiston (a hypothetical fire-like substance once believed to exist within all combustible materials.)
...We've set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years, by this manic focus on CO₂. If your theory doesn't have CO₂ in it, forget it. You won't get funding. And so the true answer, to me, there was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was a phlogiston. There was this magic subject, nonexistent. But everyone to believed in phlogiston. It turned out it was nonsense.
Part of what delighted me the most was the focus on geologic history and the very neglected discussion of Earth's glacial history. When Rogan noted the Earth's temperature has always been subject to variation, Lindzen took a moment to review the actual numbers.
There's something else about it, which I find funny, and you might have some insight into it. People pay no attention to the actual numbers. We're not talking about big changes. In other words, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees, but that was because Most of the Earth was not affected, much of the Earth anyway, very much. But somebody says one degree, a half degree. What's his name? [UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres] at the UN says, "The next half degree and we're done for." Doesn't anyone ask? I have to agree. I mean, I deal with that between 9: 00 AM and 10: 00 AM.
Personally, my favorite part was when Happer referenced ancient Egyptian mummies.
But you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue. The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it. It's all CO₂. Co₂ is the control. No, don't confuse me with other possibilities. But nobody is quite sure about the Sun.
We have not got good records of the Sun for a long time, so we're stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. One of the proxies is when the Sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10. These stick around for long, thousands of years or longer.
You can, from that infer, how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. They don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant. It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, this radioactivity that's produced changes from year to year. If you don't take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon-14 dating, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon-14 in it. You get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today.
Because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies. There's a a very good historical record of that. So it's clear the sun is always changing. And over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, and that's particularly noticeable near the Arctic and high latitudes in the north.
For example, my father's home in Scotland. I was a kid, I would walk up into the hill south of Edinburgh, and you could see these farms from the year 1000, where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today. It's too cold today, but it was clearly warming up in the year 2000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland.
So what caused those? It was not people burning oil and coal. And so I think the best guess as to what it was, it's some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days because they do correlate with the carbon 14.
I would like to think that bit was an homage to my contributions in promoting sensible and serious discussion of climate science.
The show is awesome, and I encourage everyone to listen to it.