How crazy has the world become? What we are watching is the most insane delusion faced by humankind.

To believe that carbon dioxide, plant food, is a pollutant is an idea that would have put you in the asylum 40 years ago. But not now. The climate cult has taken this bizarre ideology mainstream and the asylum is being run by the inmates…

Some sane voices are still speaking up.

Princeton University’s Emeritus (retired) Professor of Physics William Happer is one of them. The Institute of Public Affairs was proud to host his tour around Australia. A video of his presentation may be viewed on YouTube.

Professor Happer is one of the world’s leading scientists and climate realists, having made extensive contributions to the debate about climate science. He has often spoken on the crusade against carbon dioxide and the importance of integrity within the body of climate science. He has played a vital role in ensuring the community is exposed to information and arguments that many major institutions in our society seek to censor.

As a physics professor (now retired also), I found his approach to fundamental issues, like thermal radiation into space, refreshing. He has looked at the fundamentals of the laws of nature and shown that there cannot be any climate emergency based on carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere.

In recent times, whole communities have suddenly fixed ‘their minds upon one object Net Zero’ and have subsequently gone ‘mad’. He stated, ‘Millions of people [have] become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it.’ This is what has happened regarding the war against alleged anthropogenic global warming caused by carbon dioxide, water vapour, and cow farts (he never said that; the last one was just me).

When it comes to his background, Professor Happer described his involvement in developing artificial stars for the US military. It is a technique that uses a powerful laser and adaptive optics to cancel the speckling effects of temperature variations in the atmosphere from the ground up to high altitudes. Details aside, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this research was declassified and now astronomical observatories routinely use the technique to improve their image quality from light passing through the atmosphere.

A side benefit of this research was that scientists could measure the temperature profiles of the atmosphere precisely up to an altitude of 100 km. This meant they could measure the thermal radiation being emitted into space.

Blackbody curve from Prof. Happer’s slide show

More than 100 years ago, German physicist Max Planck figured out radiation from a ‘blackbody’, beginning what is now known as quantum mechanics. The measurements that Happer et al. made fell within standard predictions of that physics. But more importantly, they discovered that the atmospheric greenhouse gases reduced the emissions into space. This is due to the effects that certain features of those molecules (their vibrational and rotational states and Karl Schwarzschild’s research) have on the emissions at various wavelengths, particularly in the infrared. In total those features reduce the amount of radiation into space by about 30 per cent less than would be radiated if there were no gasses such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapour in the atmosphere. CO2 particularly has a very strong effect and it is easily observed how much it reduces emissions. In fact, without CO2 there would be way too much emission of heat into space and the Earth would be too cold to live on.

The physics also showed that ‘if you double CO2 it almost doesn’t affect the radiation to space’. You can hardly tell any difference in the emissions. It is only a 1 per cent increase. Prof. Happer said, ‘100 per cent increase of CO2 [give you a] 1 per cent effect on radiation to space, so of course the mainstream media would never tell you that but the UN knows perfectly well this is true.’ This is hard physics as he says. It is not debatable. It is not consensus physics like the UN IPCC likes to use. It is by measurement with very accurate instruments.

Stefan-Boltzman equation from Prof. Happer’s slide show

Now I don’t want to get too nerdy into the physics, but Prof. Happer went on to describe the Stefan-Boltzman equation that tells us the relationship between the emission of radiation into space and the temperature of the radiating body (the Earth in this case). It turns out the emission of radiation into space goes as the fourth power of the temperature. That’s a huge effect. It means if you double the temperature you increase the radiation by 16 times. But if you invert this – a 1 per cent change in radiation into space means 0.25 per cent change in absolute temperature and that is not centigrade (C), but absolute temperature measured in kelvin (K). An atmospheric temperature at sea level of 15.5 C is about 288.7 K. That means 0.25 per cent of 288.7 K change, which is about 0.71 of a degree C. In this case that change is the same in C or K. 0.7 degrees is tiny but that is all you would get from a doubling of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from 400 ppm to 800 ppm, which at current accumulation rates would take a very long time, maybe another hundred years.

There is much more to the story. He explains the invocation of huge positive feedback in all the UN climate models which are not in any normal systems. They have to have these unknown feedback systems to get temperature changes way beyond any understanding in the standard physics. This is because ‘CO2 is too wimpy to be worried about,’ Prof. Happer said. So the climate cult makes up something that Happer called ‘affirmative action for CO2’. He then commented that the French chemist Le Chatelier noted that in most natural processes in nature, feedbacks are negative. Positive feedbacks almost never occur. But unremarkable negative-feedback-stabilised Earth temperatures are hardly likely to secure the next lucrative research grant and so the gravy train continues.

There is nothing to get excited about. Well-established standard physics and experimental observations tell us that it doesn’t matter how much CO2 density in the atmosphere varies around the 400 ppm to 800 ppm range; it does very little to change Earth’s temperatures.

Net Zero emissions is total madness. Even if humans could reduce their CO2 output to the atmosphere it will reduce plant food production, create famines and unnecessarily cool the planet by less than 1 degree. Reject the propaganda!