When crocodiles roamed the Arctic

New Scientist – 18 June 2008

WHEN Ernest Shackleton and his men marched towards the South Pole in December 1908, they came across something entirely unexpected. After scaling the vast Beardmore glacier on the edge of the polar plateau, they found seams of coal amid the snow and ice. They also found impressions of leaves in sandstone boulders nearby and even fossilised wood from a coniferous tree.

The conclusion was extraordinary but inescapable: Antarctica was once warm and forested, conditions that could hardly be more different to the far-below-freezing midsummer weather that forced Shackleton’s team to turn back before reaching the pole. How was this possible?

Four years later, Alfred Wegener put forward his theory of continental drift which, it was later realised, could explain the balmy climate: Antarctica had been warmer because it was once much closer to the equator. Even today, some schoolchildren are taught that continental drift accounts for all the evidence for a warmer Antarctica.

However, the fossil trees Shackleton’s team discovered grew around 250 million years ago, when Antarctica was barely closer to the equator than it is today. What’s more, the continent reached its current position roughly 100 million years ago, and an ever-growing list of fossil finds date from 100 to 40 million years ago. During this time, when dinosaurs roamed the almost subtropical forests of an ice-free Antarctic, conditions on the other side of the planet were even more remarkable: the Arctic Ocean was a gigantic freshwater lake infested with crocodile-like reptiles.

As the modern world warms, there has been a surge of interest in this “hothouse” period. What sustained such high temperatures for tens of millions of years? If the poles were so warm, what were the tropics like? Recent findings provide a fascinating insight into our past – and perhaps also a glimpse of our future.

Icehouse phase

The Earth’s climate is currently in an “icehouse” phase: the polar ice sheets are not as extensive as they were during ice ages, when the sea level fell by as much as 120 metres, but some ice has remained even between ice ages. Before about 34 million years ago, though, the planet went through a prolonged hothouse phase with no ice at all. Sea level was more than 70 metres higher than today, covering vast swathes of what is now dry land. For instance, an inland ocean divided North America in two. This period lasted from the middle of the Cretaceous era until well into the Eocene – about 100 million to 50 million years ago.

One of the earliest signs that the poles were ice-free and warm 100 million years ago was the discovery at the turn of the 20th century of fossil breadfruit trees from the Cretaceous in Greenland; today such trees are at home in places like Hawaii. Since then, even more extraordinary finds have been made.

The most evocative image of a warm Arctic has emerged from the work of John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, New York. For more than a decade, Tarduno has been hunting for fossils on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. The island was already well within the Arctic Circle 90 million years ago.

His team has found bones and even partial skeletons of a crocodile-like creature called a champsosaur from this period. The champsosaur was a fish-eating reptile up to 2.4 metres long that probably looked much like the gharials of India. Because these reptiles would have relied on their environment to stay warm, conditions in the far north must have been far hotter than today. “These fossils speak volumes,” says palaeoclimatologist Paul Wilson of the University of Southampton in the UK.

Warmth-loving reptile

Last year, Tarduno’s team reported that most champsosaur remains are of juveniles, meaning the animals not only lived but bred in the Arctic. As hatchlings and juveniles could not have survived if winter temperatures came anywhere close to freezing, this means it was not only warm, but warm all year round.

Modern crocodiles are found no further north than the lower Yangtze and North Carolina. If the champsosaurs’ temperature requirements were similar, the Axel Heiberg locality must have had mean annual temperatures of at least 14 °C, and the average temperature during the coldest month could not have fallen below 5.5 °C. The region would not even have had ice in winter.

The champsosaur was not the only warmth-loving reptile to live inside the Arctic Circle. Tarduno’s team has found an abundance of fossils of four kinds of turtles at Axel Heiberg Island, again pointing to a mean annual temperature of at least 14 °C.

Most recently, the team has found fossils of a family of turtles called Macrobaenidae on Axel Heiberg Island (the details have yet to be published). These turtles originally lived in Asia, but from the late Cretaceous onwards appeared in North America too. Because turtles are very sensitive to climate, the researchers think they could have survived the migration only if they moved along a route in the far north that was warm all year round. More significantly, these turtles – like the champsosaurs – were freshwater creatures. “They would have required a non-marine connection,” says team member Donald Brinkman of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. “If the Arctic was a big freshwater lake, that would have made it possible.”

Biggest lake

Fresh water in the Arctic Ocean? As far-fetched as it seems, there is now strong evidence that as recently as 50 million years ago, at the start of the middle Eocene, at least the surface of the Arctic Ocean was fresh. This picture has emerged only recently because it is extremely hard to access the records of the ocean’s history, says Kathryn Moran of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, a member of a 2004 expedition to drill sediment cores from the Arctic seabed.

Drill ships have to stay exactly above their chosen site to prevent the drill from snapping, yet in the Arctic drifting chunks of sea ice up to several kilometres wide make normal drilling operations impossible. “They can easily knock a ship off location,” says Moran. “So what we had to do was break that ice.” The task fell to two icebreakers. “The ships are really big and powerful, and they basically had to learn how to dance together,” says Moran.

Dance they did, and in 2004 the team collected a core of sediment that had been deposited over tens of millions of years on the Lomonosov ridge, just 250 kilometres from the North Pole. One study of the core revealed that a freshwater fern called Azolla grew abundantly in the Arctic Ocean for 800,000 years about 50 million years ago (Nature, vol 441, p 606). At the time the Arctic Ocean was largely isolated from other oceans, and fresh water from rivers would have floated on top of denser salt water. “It might have been, at least in the surface waters, one of the biggest lakes on the planet,” says Moran.

Surprisingly warm

The waters of this mega-lake were a surprisingly warm 10 °C, but that’s nothing to the temperatures reached a few million years earlier during the hottest part of the Eocene, when the ocean was salty. According to another study of the core the surface water 55 million years ago was around 18 °C, peaking at an incredible 23 °C – more than warm enough for a pleasant swim at the North Pole!

What about the Antarctic? Here too gathering evidence is far from easy. Ice cores from Antarctica’s kilometres-thick ice sheets are no help, for even the oldest ice is a mere million years old. It’s the land beneath the ice that holds the secrets. “We don’t want the Antarctic ice sheet to disappear, for there is 67 metres of sea level stored there, but gosh, it would be lovely, from a palaeoclimate perspective, to know what’s under all that ice,” says Wilson. “In particular, because Antarctica has certainly been in a polar position back through the Cretaceous.”

Fossil hunters on the mainland are limited to a few exposed sites. But on the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of land that juts north towards South America, enough rock is exposed to give explorers a glimpse not just of Antarctica’s ancient flora and fauna, but of the nature of the seas around it.

About 150 to 100 million years ago, the peninsula was a mountain range similar to the Andes, and its rivers drained into a massive basin, now called the James Ross basin. Over millions of years, the basin filled up with sediment and later the rocks it formed were uplifted. Today these rocks lie exposed on islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and contain a treasure trove of fossils from the Cretaceous, including silvery slivers of shells of ocean-dwelling ammonites and gastropods. In the late Antarctic summer, these fragments glint as they catch the sun which barely rises above the horizon. “It looks like the surface is covered in jewels,” says palaeoclimatologist Jane Francis of the University of Leeds, UK, a veteran of 12 expeditions to the poles.

Ferns and cycads

Besides ammonites and gastropods, Francis and her colleagues have found abundant fossils of sea urchins and lobsters that lived on the sea floor, shark teeth, and even massive marine reptiles with rib bones about half a metre long. Oxygen isotopes in the shell fragments show that the waters around Antarctica 100 million years ago were a balmy 15 °C, compared with -2 to 0 °C today.

Dinosaur bones, which must have been washed down off the peninsula into the sea, have also been found in the marine sediments (see “Dinosaurs at the poles”). Plant fossils unearthed by Francis and her students show that 100 million years ago the peninsula was lush with ferns and cycads, along with conifers resembling the monkey puzzle tree. Analysis of the shape and size of fossil leaves has led Francis to conclude that the peninsula was very warm during the mid-Cretaceous, with a mean annual temperature of about 17 to 19 °C, similar to that of South Africa today. “That’s almost sub-tropical,” says Francis.

Growth rings in one fossil tree trunk suggest trees thrived despite complete darkness in mid-winter. “In tree-ring terms, the tree was very happy, it wasn’t growing in any kind of stress, there’s no sign of frost rings and there’s no sign of drought,” Francis says.

Her team has also found fossil flowers dating back to about 85 million years ago. These include flowers resembling those of Siparunaceae, tropical vines found in the Amazon, as well as those of the Australian eucalyptus and Winteraceae trees such as the Tasmanian mountain pepper.

Sweltering greenhouse

It’s abundantly clear that both the Arctic and the Antarctic were ice-free and warm from about 100 million to 40 million years ago. But until a decade ago, climate scientists struggled to explain how the Earth could have become so warm at the poles. Their models suggested it could only have happened if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were very high – turning the Earth into a sweltering greenhouse – but this would also have made the tropics extremely hot. Isotope ratios in marine shells, however, suggested that tropical waters were not much hotter than they are today.

As it turns out, the models were right and the shell studies were flawed. Recent and more careful studies by Wilson and colleagues (Geology, vol 30, p 299) suggest that tropical seas were indeed hotter during the hothouse phase, with the surface waters being as warm as 34 °C compared with 29 °C today, says Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, a climate researcher and contributor to the RealClimate blog.

Despite this advance, climate modellers face a new problem. While pumping up atmospheric levels of CO₂ in the models creates ice-free poles and warmer tropical waters, the land in the tropics becomes unbearably hot. “The temperatures are so high that unless land plants behave differently from modern types, you would be beyond their temperature tolerance,” says Pierrehumbert. “We are talking of temperatures on land of an average of 40 °C, and with seasonal fluctuations they might even go up to 50 °C. It would kill off just about anything on land.” Today, annual mean temperatures rarely exceed 30°C.

As outlandish as these simulations seem, the models might yet again prove to be right. Researchers such as Matthew Huber of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, have only recently begun to look for evidence of plant dieback in the tropics at this time. No one had thought to look before.

Too cold

There is yet another serious problem for climate modellers. The one place the models suggest did get cold during the hothouse episode is the interior of continents at high latitudes – regions like Siberia. This doesn’t fit with the evidence.

In rocks from the late Cretaceous in Siberia, Robert Spicer of the Open University in Milton Keynes in the UK and his colleagues have found plenty of evidence for ferns and flowering plants, and even possibly the pollen of palm trees (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol 267, p 228). Their analysis suggests that at that time Siberia’s mean annual temperature was about 13 °C, rarely touching freezing even in the winter months. “All the climate models give you very, very cold continental interiors [at high latitudes] in the winter time, so cold that you would certainly freeze palm trees and kill them off,” Pierrehumbert says.

One answer to this puzzle is to keep pumping up the CO₂ levels. Models predict that the interiors of continents at high latitudes would not have frozen during the winter if CO₂ levels were higher – but this means the tropics would have got even hotter.

Huber has suggested a possible answer to this dilemma: what if much more heat from the tropics was somehow carried to the poles, keeping the tropics from boiling over. He and Ryan Sriver, also at Purdue, think they have found one possible mechanism.

Hurricane-ridden

They studied conditions in tropical waters before and after the passage of present-day cyclones. They found that cyclones mix up the upper layers of oceans, moving heat downward. They argue that ocean currents then transport this heat towards the poles, reducing the temperature gradient between the tropics and the polar regions ( Nature, vol 447, p 577). Many researchers think the intensity, frequency and duration of tropical cyclones increase with higher temperatures. If so, the amount of heat transported to the poles by cyclones would increase greatly as temperatures rise. In a hurricane-ridden hothouse Earth, this could have kept the tropics below 35 °C, while the poles simmered in subtropical heat.

However, Pierrehumbert thinks that the cyclonic heat-pump idea needs more work, and that explaining the warm interiors of continents remains a challenge. “This is now the most mysterious and toughest looking part of the problem,” he says.

Others might beg to differ. A few lines of evidence point to something seemingly impossible: ice sheets during the warmest phase of the Cretaceous. “Nobody can imagine that we had these high temperatures and at the same time we had some large glaciers in the Antarctica,” says André Bornemann of the University of Leipzig in Germany. Indeed, models cannot replicate these conditions.

One recent study by Bornemann’s team suggests that for a 200,000-year period around 91 million years ago, there were ice sheets at least half the size of the ones that blanket Antarctica today. The evidence comes from oxygen isotope ratios in shells from the Atlantic seabed ( Science, vol 319, p 189).

However, a similar study by Wilson’s team found no evidence of glaciation ( Geology, vol 35, p 615), so this issue is far from settled. But if ice sheets can grow suddenly even during hothouse periods, Wilson point out, it means the climate can change more suddenly and dramatically than anyone thought. “That really demands being understood.”

High volcanic activity

Despite these vexing issues, there is a growing consensus that the hothouse climates were due to high levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. But where did it come from?

Among other things, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere depends on the balance between volcanic activity and the weathering of rocks. High volcanic activity during the Cretaceous might have kept the level of CO₂ high, says Wilson. Later on, volcanic activity may have fallen and weathering increased as the Himalayas began to form, pushing Earth into an icehouse phase.

However, while CO₂ levels up to a million years ago can be directly measured from bubbles of air trapped in ice sheets, it’s much harder working out what they were 100 million years ago. Researchers have to rely on proxies such as the number of pores in fossil leaves, and there are still big uncertainties. Pinning down these numbers is critical, for this would tell us just how sensitive the climate is to rises in CO₂.

Some models suggest CO₂ levels were 16 times as high as pre-industrial levels during the Cretaceous and Eocene hothouses, while others suggest eight times. Despite the uncertainties, eight times fits in far better with the proxy data, suggesting that the climate is highly sensitive to rises in CO₂.

This does not bode well for us, given the amounts of CO₂ we are dumping into the atmosphere. CO₂ levels look set to double from pre-industrial levels and if we keep failing to curb emissions, they could quadruple within 200 years. “Then we are half way towards the CO₂ levels that turned the world into the Cretaceous hothouse,” says Pierrehumbert.

Is Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty?

Daily Paul
Posted October 17th, 2009 by sharpsteve
From mnmajoritydotorg on YouTube

On October 14, Lord Christopher Monckton, a noted climate change skeptic, gave a presentation at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. In this 4 minute excerpt from his speech, he issues a dire warning to all Americans regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty, scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Carbon Dioxide irrelevant in climate debate says MIT Scientist

August 18, 7:39 AMPortland Civil Rights ExaminerDianna Cotter

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In a study sure to ruffle the feathers of the Global Warming cabal, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has published a paper which proves that IPCC models are overstating by 6 times, the relevance of CO₂ in Earth’s Atmosphere. Dr. Lindzen has found that heat is radiated out in to space at a far higher rate than any modeling system to date can account for.

Editorial: The science is in. the scare is out. Recent papers and data give a complete picture of why the UN is wrong.

The pdf file located at the link above from the Science and Public Policy Institute has absolutely, convincingly, and irrefutably proven the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming to be completely false.

Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT’s peer reviewed work states “we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.”

The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish
every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming”
for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now
persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected
in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend.

More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed
throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400
fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at
least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must
accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged
ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global
warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale.

- SPPI Monthly CO2 Report: July 2009

If for no other reason than this: the IPCC assumes that the concentration of CO2 in 2100 will be 836 ppmv (parts per million volume). However, current graphs based on real data show that CO2 concentrations will only be 570 ppmv in 2100, cutting the IPCC’s estimates in half right there.

Another nail in the coffin of Global Warming is the observed rate of temperature change from 1980, which is observed to be 1.5 degrees  C per century. The IPCC modeling calls for a range of 2.4 to 5.3 degree increase per century, which is far above what is observed in real data collected between 1980 and 2009. The graph below clearly represents a far different reality as opposed to the predictions.

Graph A

Not only is the IPCC basing its predictions on data that has been doubled from observed data, it is overstating the role of CO2 in Climate altogether. As the graph seen below shows, when charted for the years between 2002 and 2009, that solid red median line is going down, indicating global cooling.

Graph B

As significant as the above results are, it is not the Pièce de résistance. What is – the curious minded what to know? It is the ERBE results. The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment with 15 years worth of data. The ERBE result is absolutely devastating to the entire Global Warming Theory.

The following graph (Graph C) shows the ERBE results in the upper left hand corner, which is real recorded data, not a computer model. The 11 other graphs are the results from the models used by the UN and everyone else which state that more radiation should be held within Earth’s system, thereby causing warming of the climate. More simply put, the UN results illogically predict that as the oceans got warmer, the earth would simply hold more heat. The UN explains that it is CO₂ which is holding this extra energy. This theory is not supportable by the simple fact that CO₂ cannot hold that much heat, it is a very poor greenhouse gas compared with water. If anything, more clouds -water vapor- would conceivably hold the extra heat, but the corresponding rise in global temperatures this would cause have not been observed. This leaves only one conclusion, the Earth is radiating the extra heat into space, and this is supported by the data.

The ERBE results, which are factual data from real measurements made by satellite, show the exact opposite result from the UN/IPCC Projections (computer models which are not real data). As seas warm on earth, the earth releases more heat into space and the satellite results prove it.

Graph C

Observed reality vs. erroneous computer predictions:

The mismatch between reality and prediction is entirely clear. It is this
astonishing graph that provides the final evidence that the UN has
absurdly exaggerated the effect not only of CO2 but of all greenhouse
gases on global mean surface temperature. - Lindzen & Choi (2009).

For the sake of making the above graphs clear in their meanings, the term ?SST stands for Change in Sea Surface Temperature measured in Kelvin (A unit of temperature like to Celsius and Fahrenheit), and is a measurement of change in sea temperatures. A -1.0 number would indicate cooling, a zero reflects no temperature change, and a +1.0 would indicate an increase in temperature.

?Flux, The Vertical line in these graphs, measures the change in the amount of radiation released by the planet in the infra-red spectrum, heat in other words. From zero to +6 shows more heat radiated out into space. From zero to -6 shows less heat being radiated into space.

0 change in ?SST equals 0 change in ?Flux or no change. Less infra-red heat radiation going out into space should correlate to cooler sea surface temperatures, as there is less heat available to radiate out. More heat radiating out appears when sea surface temperature increases have occurred and more heat is available to radiate. Heat is radiated out into space as seas warm, and  this overall maintains a climate equilibrium, This is proven by the ERBE graph in Graph C above as well as the other graphs presented in this article, which are based on observed data, not computer models.

Graph D

The 3300 Argo bathythermograph buoys deployed throughout the world’s oceans since late in 2003 have shown a slight cooling of the oceans over the past five years, directly contrary to the official theory that any “global warming” not showing in the atmosphere would definitely show up in the first 400 fathoms of the world’s oceans, where at least 80% of any surplus heat would be stored. Source: ARGO project, June 2009.

All of this data leads to the conclusion that the UN/IPCC models are not only wrong, they are so far off the mark as to be laughable.  The satellite and bathythermograph data clearly do not match the IPCC theory, which means that the theory is incorrect.

What this data does tell us is if CO₂ concentration should double, global temperatures will not rise by the devastating 6 degrees F the UN predicts, but by a completely harmless 1 degree F. The ERBE data shows an Earth system that is radiating more heat into space as sea surfaces warm, in other words a system at equilibrium, and is clearly demonstrated by observed data. The UN theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming is dead wrong.

The UN/IPCC have been using models that give a result that allow them to tell Nation States they must reduce and cap Carbon Emissions or the earth’s climate will warm by a devastating 6 degrees F. When in reality, more heat is simply radiated out into space as the ERBE OBSERVED DATA (Not a computer model) PROVES.

The United States House of Representatives has passed a Carbon tax (Cap and Trade) as have other governments in Europe, based on these completely erroneous models.

There are only a couple of conclusions to be made of this. Either the world has been misled by scientists working for the UN and IPCC due to faulty science, or faulty science has been deliberately used in a global scheme to generate tax revenues for the Governments instituting Cap and Trade Taxation policies.

Either way, the world has been the victim of some very bad science. The results of which can be seen in drastically reduced GDP in countries with the Cap and Trade laws in place, as well a a 5 – 10% decrease in standard of living for those citizens living there (Taxing Carbon designed to fail.), all with little or no effect on emissions globally.

Perhaps this will finally end the attempt by the Obama Administration as well as congress to tax a substance that trees need to survive, the very air we exhale thousands of times a day.

Thank you Professor Richard Lindzen, Dr. Ferenc M. Miskolczi, Dr. Miklós Zágoni, Dr. Mike Fox here in Oregon, and a great many other Scientists the world over, who decided to look at facts, instead of playing with models. Science is based on data, facts not theories. They took the facts, and let the theory write itself. The IPCC took theories and tried to cherry pick only the details that fit, and in the end failed to do even that.

Public policies should also be based on facts, not on unproven and in the end disproven theories. The United States and indeed the world is in the debt of these and other scientists, who relied on data and facts to describe our world and its climate! We are in their debt!

For more info: Science and Public Policy Institute, Editorial: The science is in. the scare is out. Recent papers and data give a complete picture of why the UN is wrong. Climate change? Not so fast say Scientists, Have it your way – Global warming is baloney, Einstein-like breakthrough in Climate Science (Part 1), Einstein-like breakthrough in Climate Science (Part 2), Oregon legislature plays Cap-n-Trade shell game, Democrats say Cap and Trade is a big tax, Taxing Carbon designed to fail

Updated to clarify sourcing.  All information in this article is directly from SPPI June Report. as is stated in the beginning of article. 8-18-2009 2:02pm Pacific

Princeton Physicist Tells Congress Earth in ‘CO2 Famine’ — Increase ‘Will Be Good for Mankind’

Dr. Will Happer, once fired by Al Gore, challenges former vice president’s much-published claim that warming debate over.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
2/25/2009 11:08:28 PM

When former Vice President Al Gore said the science was settled on the issue of global warming before Congress in 2007, he might have meant it was settled as far as people that he would allow to work for him.

Dr. William Happer, currently a professor of Physics at Princeton University, was once fired by Gore at the Department of Energy in 1993 for disagreeing with the vice president on the effects of ozone to humans and plant life, also disagrees with Gore’s claim that manmade carbon dioxide (CO₂) increases the temperature of the earth and is a threat to mankind. Happer appeared before the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee on Feb. 25 and explained CO₂ is in short-supply in relative terms of the history of the planet.

“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO₂ famine now. Almost never has CO₂ levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene [geologic epoch] – 280 [parts per million (ppm)] – that’s unheard of,” Happer said. “Most of the time, it’s at least 1,000 [ppm] and it’s been quite higher than that.”

Happer said that when CO₂ levels were higher – much higher than they are now, the laws of nature still managed to function as we understand them today.

“The earth was just fine in those times,” Happer said. “You know, we evolved as a species in those times, when CO₂ levels were three or four times what they are now. And, the oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that, you know, we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started.”

That directly conflicts with the line Gore has been telling the media for years. In November 2007, Gore told NBC’s “Today” that there was “as strong a consensus as you’ll ever see in science” that global warming was caused by mankind.

The chairwoman of the EPW committee, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has long supported Gore’s “global warming battle.” During Wednesday’s hearing, she was skeptical of Happer’s view, stating a lot had changed in the 80 million years. But Happer explained that the laws of science had not changed.

“Well, I don’t think that the laws of nature, physics and chemistry have changed in 80 million year,” Happer said. “Eighty million years ago, the earth was a very prosperous place and there’s no reason to think it will suddenly become bad now.”

Happer claimed that in fact, an increase in CO₂ levels wouldn’t be a bad thing at all, but a good thing for humanity.

“Increasing concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere will cause some warming of the earth’s surface,” Happer said. “The key question is will the net effect of the warming and any other effects of CO₂ be good or bad for humanity? I believe the increase of CO2 will be good.”

Happer explained to the committee that the global warming movement mirrors the temperance movement that led to Prohibition in the 1920s. He claimed the movement has enlisted various elements of society, including the media, to promote their cause. He noted his opinion that children are being misused to spread the “climate catastrophe” movement’s message.

“Like the Temperance Movement a hundred years ago, the climate catastrophe movement has enlisted the mass media, leadership of scientific societies, trustees of charitable foundations, many other influential people to their cause,” Happer said. “Even elementary school teachers and writers of children’s books terrify our children with the idea of impending climate doom. Children should not be force-fed propaganda masquerading as science.”

Also accompanying Happer on the Senate panel were Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Christopher Field director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and Dr. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health.