America Out Loud by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris | May 2, 2022
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Don’t you wish that you could effectively counter your loud-mouth climate activist brother-in-law at your next family gathering? How about a few killer science facts that he would have no answer to and would silence him for good on this topic?
If, like many of us, you are fed up with a family member who just won’t shut up about the supposed climate emergency, even in the middle of Easter dinner, then you must listen to this week’s episode of The Other Side of the Story. We have invited Dr. Will Happer, a leading physicist and climate expert from Princeton University, to be our guest.
In language any intelligent layperson can understand, Dr. Happer explains why the climate scare makes no sense. Carbon dioxide rise yields nothing but benefits for humankind and the biosphere, both on land and in the oceans. Dr. Happer breaks down exactly how we now know that even a doubling of CO2 from today’s levels will have a negligible impact on Earthly temperatures. He then completely dismantles the ocean acidification scare, often called “global warming’s evil twin,” showing us that ocean organisms have only benefitted from increasing CO2 absorption from the atmosphere, and they will continue to do so.
Professor Happer takes us behind the scenes in the Trump White House, where he regularly met with the former president and realized that Mr. Trump well understands that the climate “emergency” does not exist. However, we learn why the President was limited in what he could do to kill the scare and what he must do if he wins a second term in 2024.
Dr. Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor Emeritus of physics at Princeton University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a specialist in modern optics, optical and radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei. All that is of course, vitally important to understanding the impact of increasing CO2 on our atmosphere.
Besides his work at the Columbia University Radiation Laboratory and Princeton, from 1991 to 1993, Professor Happer was Director of Energy Research at the U.S. Department of Energy. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has received many awards for his work, one of which, this interview demonstrates, should clearly be for science communication. Whether you have a science background or not, this is one program you don’t want to miss!
References relevant to this show:
- “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules,” by W. A. van Wijngaarden1 and W. Happer, January 14, 2021
- “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases” by W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, preprint, submitted to Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics, December 22, 2020:
- “One World Socialists Trying to Defeat Capitalism Under the Guise of a Climate Emergency,” by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris, April 26, 2022, America Out Loud