Republican Sen. Ted Cruz will be holding a hearing today of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness. The star witness is slick climate-change charlatan William Happer.
The Princeton physics professor is prominent among those who reject the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change and serves as chairman of the board of the climate change-denying George Marshall Institute, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Exxon Mobil as well as donations from Koch Industries. Given his record, Happer may be paid for his testimony today, with the money going to a group known for climate change denial. The hashtag #ActOnClimate will be active during the hearing.
Happer claims to be an expert on climate even though he has no relevant credentials in the field. He has frequently claimed that the carbon dioxide being poured into our already overburdened atmosphere is a good thing. In July 2014, he said on CNBC that "The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler."
Two reporters from Greenpeace UK, posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, asked academics at Penn State and Princeton to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and coal. Happer, along with Penn State sociology professor Frank Clemente, said they would do so and do not have to disclose the source of their funding.
Happer told the reporters in an email that Peabody Energy had paid thousands of dollars for his testimony at a Minnesota state senate hearing. At his request, the money was sent to the CO2 Coalition, a climate change-denying organization where he is also a board member. The coalition’s slogan is “Carbon dioxide, a nutrient vital for life.” Happer told the two that he would write a paper pushing the benefits of carbon dioxide for $250 per hour, with the money going to the CO2 Coalition.
Professor Clemente told the two he could write a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the World Health Organization’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution).” He would charge them $15,000 for an 8-10 page paper, he said, and $6,000 for a newspaper op-ed.
In emails Happer sent to the undercover reporters to ensure them their funding would remain hidden, he revealed an effort to conceal the source of funding for any papers he might write. He said that when writing for a Middle Eastern oil company, he asked Bill O’Keefe, who sits on the CO2 Coalition board with him how this concealment might work. O’Keefe suggested going through the Donors Trust, an organization that has been called a “Dark Money ATM,” which has, with the Donors Capital Fund transferred more than $125 million to groups that are part of the climate counter-movement.
The Greenpeace reporters also noted that Happer helped provide a clearer understanding of how papers that he and other climate-change charlatans write are presented as peer-reviewed when they aren’t. Phony peer-reviewing is a practice of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), another organization that rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.
Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’s Academic Advisory Council, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed.” Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.
GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr. Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist Matt Ridley, who is also a GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been “thoroughly peer reviewed.”
Sense About Science [a UK charitable trust] which lists Ridley as a member of its Advisory Council, has warned against such review processes, saying: “sometimes organisations or individuals claim to have put their studies through peer review when, on inspection, they have only shown it to some colleagues. Such claims are usually made in the context of a campaign directed at the public or policy makers, as a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”
A good question for Professor Happer from subcommittee members Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) or Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) would be how much he or the CO2 Coalition will be getting for his baloney testimony today.