I’ve been waiting to find out who will be Pres. Trump’s science adviser. It appears to be physicist Dr. William Happer, a physicist currently teaching at Princeont University, and former Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science from 1991–1993. He’s no slouch as a scientist. His work for the Air Force on the sodium guidestar laser platform for the military’s missile defense program provided information on the tropopause layer in the upper atmosphere, which is where atmospheric wave fronts distort both starlight and laser emissions, and where heat either begins to leak into space or does not, depending on how much and what kind of gas is blocking heat radiation.
The tropopause is the boundary between the troposphere, where we live and where weather takes place, and the stratosphere. The layers above that are the stratosphere, where stratocirrus clouds form as floating clouds of ice, the mesosphere, the thermosphere and the top, very thin layer, the exosphere. Beyond that is space.
Dr. Happer’s view of the whole climate thing clashes badly with the PC crowd’s notions about it, mostly because during the development of the sodium guidestar, he had to learn the physics and chemistry of the troposphere and the tropopause, and the layers above the troposphere.
I’ve tried to photograph Mars with a Superzoom camera attached to a tripod, and believe me, the wind distortion in the layers above the troposphere is intense. The best shot I got was a red squishy blob. I’ll have to try again later. If it’s really busy up there, bustling along like a bat out of hell ahead of a storm front, even the Moon has wiggles in it, all caused by high speed atmospheric wind at high altitudes distorting the image. And frankly, when I shot the photo attached to this article last summer, the sky really was that deep, clear blue. It was late afternoon ahead of a storm. Where’s the pollution?
As it is, I’m quite sure that Dr. Happer knows far more about the physics and contents of those high layers of air than the people who’ve tried to turn weather and climate into some sort of cultist ideology.
And that includes that moronic, greedy, fraudster sideshow barker, Al Gore. I was particularly intrigued by the jackass at George Mason University last year who wanted ‘climate deniers’ (whatever that is) persecuted under the RICO Act.
Some pimple-brained Australian music teacher living in Austria back in 2012 wanted anyone to get the death penalty who disagreed with the then-popular ideology of global warming. He published his opinion on the website of the University of Graz, where he was teaching. Shortly after that, the embarrassed University publicly rejected what he said and he had to publicly recant his diatribe. https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/prof-richard-parncutt-death-penalty-for-global-warming-deniers/
A few years ago, Greenpeace tried entrapment on Dr. Happer in a sting, getting him to give his view of the climate’s properties to them through a false e-mail address. That backfired on them.
I think he’s the right person for the job. I think he has what it takes to open reasoning dialog on this contentious subject, instead of allowing only one side to be heard. Since the media kowtows to the incipient cultism coming out of the leftist crowd, I want to see what happens when requiring the publication of real results instead of mulched numbers is required to get grant money, especially since it’s easy enough for us plebes to get the raw, unaltered data from public websites.
Science is not ideology. Ideology does not accept opposition or dissenting views. Real science does. This whole thing about ‘climate this and that’ has taken on the characteristics of cultism. The noisy crowd on the left side of the fence scream and holler loudly at you if don’t agree with whatever their stance is on the climate, but if you try to pin them down about the chemistry, physics and biology of the whole thing, they can’t give you answers. They can’t tell you anything about weather.
And frankly, I don’t think they even like rain because they hate getting wet. But they want their veggies, which require rain, lots of it. They want your tax money spent on silly, useless, daydream programs instead of on keeping reservoir dams in good repair, because it never rains in Southern California. Oh, that rain? The forecast was for two inches, period. The total so far has been well beyond that, so much so that the Andersonville Dam spillway, per a twitterpated photo, is operating in full force now. 3 to 6 inches of rain at the lower levels in California translates to 30 to 66 inches of new snow in the Sierras.
That is going on now. The National Weather Service has forecast heavy snow in the Lake Tahoe area with a high avalanche danger until Tuesday in an area of the Sierra Nevada from Yuba Pass to Ebbetts Pass. Forecasters say the winter storm could drop up to 5 feet of snow in areas above 7,500 feet. Lower elevations could see between 8 and 24 inches of snow.
In regard to CO2 levels in the atmosphere, Dr. Happer would likely agree on the following simple statement. This planet we live on is a closed biosystem. It is symbiotic in nature, with animals of all kinds from tiny insects to humans to elephants depending on plants as a basic source for food and shelter, and plants depending on animals at all levels for the one thing they need the most: CO2 – carbon dioxide. Plants combine the carbon dioxide, produced by earth activities and by animals, with water to produce sugar, a/k/a sap, which is what they live on. I learned that in the 3rd grade, a very long time ago.
This doesn’t count noxious trace gases in the atmosphere, such as nitrous oxide, ozone, chlorine and phosgene. Dr. Happer has said that we need to find ways to reduce those noxious gases. I would add that we desperately need to find more ways to be more accurate in forecasting weather events, and we need to spend money on real projects like strengthening levees and dikes on major waterways like the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to avoid disastrous episodes of flooding like the 1993 floods. $15 billion in damages could have been prevented if the levees hadn’t failed. https://www.nwrfc.noaa.gov/floods/papers/oh_2/great.htm
Biology is really very simple. We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. We in the animal kingdom are as dependent on the plant kingdom for our existence as plants are on dependent on us for theirs. If there is insufficient carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to support plant life, plants will die off and the entire animal kingdom, right down to the smallest insect, will die off.
