CO2 is safe says physicist

• July 21, 2014
• science  
• climate change  
• stupidity  

Princeton physicist William Happer is still being invited on television to talk about things of which he is ignorant. He’s living proof that being intelligent on one topic doesn’t make you smart on other subjects. Case in point, this quote:

I keep hearing about the “pollutant CO2,” or about “poisoning the atmosphere” with CO2, or about minimizing our “carbon footprint.” This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving “pollutant” and “poison” of their original meaning….CO2 is absolutely essential for life on earth.

I’d love to lock him in a sealed chamber for a few minutes with 7% of the nitrogen replaced with CO2. Note that the percentage of oxygen would be unchanged from normal atmospheric levels. Then I’d ask him if CO2 was a poison. Of course getting an answer will be difficult because he’ll be dead.

That stupidity isn’t the worst part. What is worse is attacking a straw man argument. When people who know what they’re talking about use phrases like “poisoning the atomosphere” they don’t mean that we’re going to immediately drop dead due to a hundred ppm increase in CO2 (i.e., far less than a 1% increase). They’re using a poetic shorthand for the second order effects (e.g., increased temperature) that will make life very unpleasant for a significant fraction of the Earth’s population — human, animal and vegetable.