News Flash: Astronaut Solves the Climate Problem

Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, blogs regularly at theGreenGrok.com.

Since the later days of the 19th century, scientists have been pondering the warming effects of carbon dioxide (CO₂) on the climate. So you can imagine my surprise to read on Sunday that the entire scientific community has been scooped by former U.S. senator Harrison Schmitt (R-NM), also an astronaut who walked on the moon. Schmitt has at last uncovered the truth: there is no climate problem.

Harrison Schmitt has decided he is not going take it anymore. He resigned from the Planetary Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to the advancement of space exploration, because it concluded along with the vast majority of the scientific community that the globe is warming because of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gas pollutants like CO₂.

Interestingly, the Planetary Society is not alone in its position. Other groups reaching similar conclusions of human-caused warming include:

• the American Geophysical Union,
• the American Meteorological Society, and
• most tellingly, the National Academy of Sciences [pdf], the scientific body established by Congress when Lincoln was president to advise the nation of scientific and technical matters.  

Against the weight of all these scientific experts stands Harrison Schmitt.

They say the globe is warming because of human activities and he says it is not.  Where did he get his superior scientific insight? Was it from his stroll on the moon - after all that's pretty lofty stuff. Or maybe it was gained during his years serving in the Senate, a body renowned for its scientific and technical expertise.

Schmitt is apparently concerned that scientists are being intimidated and are losing "grant funding when they haven't gone along with the so-called political consensus that we're in a human-caused global warming."

This is all news to me. While I agree that there is a scientific consensus, I had not realized until I heard it from Schmitt that there was also a "political consensus." Strange since one would have thought that if there were a political consensus we would already have had climate legislation in the United States. Could it be that the Senate has some kind of arcane rules that prevents it from passing legislation even if there is a consensus? Perhaps the former senator from New Mexico could fill us in on that.

I was also surprised to hear that scientists were losing their grants for not going along with the idea that humans were causing global warming. Stop me if I am wrong, but didn't we just go through eight years of an administration that denied that or questioned how much of global warming was caused by humans and did its best to obfuscate and bury evidence to the contrary? I would have thought that under those circumstances scientists who accepted that humans are causing global warming were more likely to lose funding. Here again I am dazzled by Schmitt's superior understanding and insight.

But there's more. In addition to shooting down global warming science, the former astronaut has toppled major scientific theories that have nothing to do with the climate.

For example, as reported by the AP, Schmitt has apparently figured out that CO₂ concentrations are increasing because the temperature is increasing. That's a really amazing scientific breakthrough. You see, the conclusion that the atmospheric CO₂ increase is due to burning fossil fuels is based on isotopic data, which in turn is based on fundamental atomic and nuclear theory. So Schmitt's conclusion overturns not only global warming science but all of atomic and nuclear theory.

Who knows where this may lead - could it turn out that there really is no such thing as a nuclear bomb? If so, I would be the first to nominate Schmitt for the Nobel Peace Prize. What greater contribution could there be to peace than removing the threat of nuclear war? And how very fitting for him to get the prize right on the heels of Al Gore.  

What a great country this is, where we have folks like former astronaut Harrison Schmitt. He can walk on the moon, he can go to the Senate, and then he can (try to) undo decades of scientific research just by saying it isn't so.

Comments

[Bobby Burk]

Please tell me your definition of the "climate problem?" Weather can be a problem for us from day to day, but over time climate is in a constant state of change (yes, change we can believe in.) I sure was bummed to find out on my first trip to Yosemite to find that I had missed the glaciers at Glacier Point by few thousand years.

C02 is a greenhouse gas but the vast majority of it's effect is at very low levels. Reconstruction of past climate (from proxies such as tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores) clearly demonstrate that average estimated historical temperature have been higher than todays with lower estimated C02 levels and lower than todays with greater estimated C02 levels. Just look at Al Gore's graphs on his award winning documentary "Inconvenient Truth."

Clearly the progressives (code name for communists) demand for carbon taxes is a demand for communist take over of the free world.

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

Bobby Burk, Your points have all been "asked and answered" in earlier posts, so pardon me if I don't go over the same material again. But the remark about communists and carbon taxes is too tempting to pass up. Please take a look at my post on all the conservatives out there who favor carbon taxes: http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/nicholas/insider/thegreengrok/carbontax . The Wall Street Journal favors a carbon tax - does that make it a communist rag or just a pinko one? And by the way, carbon taxes are not my cup of tea.

[GRLCowan]

In recent years Schmitt has been one of the proponents of getting helium-three from the moon and burning it here as fuel. The minor difficulty in this is that the necessary fusion reactors, no-one has clue 1 how to build. Deuterium and tritium are hard enough.

The major difficulty is that deuterium's fusion with itself *produces* 3-He, so that if one were able to build fusors to fuse 3-He, it is very likely one could easily make all the 3-He one could ever want using terrestrial deuterium. It is purely idiotic -- and yes, it is a widely subscribed-to idiocy -- to propose going to the Moon for it.

So there is accumulating evidence Schmitt isn't what he was.

--- G.R.L. Cowan, ('How fire can be domesticated')
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/

[mamacat]

Thank you Prof. Chameides. The anti-GW crowd is prolific, and often vitriolic, but their refusal to look at evidence is stunning.

Like the anti-evolutionists, and before them the flat-earthers, the anti-global warmers are extremely confident that their reasoning is sound, never mind the science saying otherwise. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left scratching our heads, wondering how they have managed to ignore the research and facts for so long. The only thing missing from this circus is the right-wing evangelist preachers, demanding that in the name of the deities their flock must go out and bomb anti-GW scientists. Let's hope that that never happens.

Sometimes I think that the only way we are able to advance as a species is when one generation, with its old prejudices and habits, dies out, giving room for the next generation. We seem to have a real knack for refusing to examine our old ways of thinking, no matter how unproductive they have been.

[Bill Chameides - Huffpost Blogger]

Hey mamacat, thanks for the comments. Your surmise about the need for one generation to die out is provocative. But I am concerned. Since I am well past 30, I am probably part of the generation that needs to shuffle off this mortal coil.