The Man Who Toppled Al Gore ~ William Happer Interview

As an aside, Bill Nye the “Science Guy” is saying floods in California are due to Global Warming… a year ago the drought in California was attributed to Global Warming by this “science guy,” even though California has been three degrees warmer on average in the past and even has had 200-year long droughts further back than that. A model that is non-falsifiable and explains EVERYTHING is not scientific!

  • “Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”

K.R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, England: Hutchinson & Co, 1959), 316; found in, Werner Gitt,Did God Use Evolution? Observations from a Scientist of Faith (Portland, OR: Master Books, 2006), 11.

(See More)

First, an introduction in case you missed my post on this (hubris included for free), here is Dr. Happer educating the CNBC crowd:

A must read article co-authored by Dr. Happer (originally from the Wall Street Journal, is here: Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer: In Defense of Carbon Dioxide 

This guy has lived a life books are written about. What a great guy, patriot, and scientist. For quotes and topics more zeroed in on Global Warming via the longer interview, see WUWT‘s post. Here is a bit more biographical run of the interview… I will include another recent video discussion on Global Warming between Stefan Molyneux and Dr. Happer below.

…I was fortunate to be promoted to Assistant Professor, and I took great pleasure measuring previously inaccessible properties of excited atoms with my graduate students and post docs. Although I tried to ignore the Vietnam war, it was becoming an increasingly divisive factor in American life. Keeping up an old family tradition, my brother Ian served as a US army doctor in South Vietnam.

After the 1970 US invasion of Cambodia, our physics building was seized by protesters. With other physics faculty and students, I was held captive for several days. The pretext was that several senior physics professors, notably Mal Ruderman and Henry Foley, were members of JASON, a group that did classified and unclassified studies for the US government. Having had several sleepless nights becoming acquainted with the protesters, while defending our cherished equipment with other young faculty members, I decided that JASON must be a pretty good organization if it had enemies like these. So, when Henry Foley asked me to join JASON a few years later, I was honored to do so. JASON continues to do valuable work for the USA, and I am still a member.

During a JASON summer study in 1982, some senior technical people from the US Air Force and DARPA asked the JASONs if they could think of any way to help ameliorate the distortion of laser beams by atmospheric turbulence. This is the same phenomenon that limits “seeing” of large, ground-based telescopes. After passing through parcels of warm and cool air, an initially flat optical wave from a laser or a distant star is “wrinkled.” If you are trying to use a high-power laser to shoot down an attacking missile, the wavefront distortion prevents you from focusing all of the laser power on target. And the image of a star at the focal plane of a big telescope is splattered into hundreds of speckles, instead of a sharp point. This seriously limits the angular resolution, which is one of the main rationales for a big telescope. At that time, it was known that for sufficiently bright stars, you could use the starlight itself to measure the wavefront distortion. This information could be used to control a deformable (“rubber”) mirror in such a way that when the distorted wavefront reflected on it, most of the wrinkles were removed.

But you can’t see many bright stars in the sky at night, and none at all during the day. So, Air Force defenders were going to have a hard time unless their targets were obliging enough to be backlighted by bright stars like Sirius or Vega. By luck, I thought I knew the answer to the problem. It turns out there is a layer of sodium atoms at an altitude of about 100 km above the earth’s surface. The atoms are released when micrometeorites burn up in the atmosphere. I knew from my work at Columbia that sodium atoms had huge scattering cross sections for yellow resonant light — the same as the light you see if you happen to spill salty water into the flame of a gas cooking stove. So, I proposed that the Air Force invest in a big sodium laser and use it to create an artificial “sodium guide star” just in front of their desired target.

After some initial skepticism, the Air Force gambled that the idea would work. A brilliant team of scientists and engineers led by Bob Fugate soon built and successfully tested a sodium guide star at the secret Starfire Optical Range in the desert near Albuquerque. Some ten years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the independent proposal by astronomers to build a sodium guide star, the Air Force work was declassified, largely due to the persistence of my JASON colleague and friend, Claire Max, then at the Livermore National Laboratory. Finally getting a little public recognition for my work, I was elected to various scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences. More details can be found in The Adaptive Optics Revolution: A History, by Robert W. Duffner (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).

I learned a lot about the atmosphere at JASON. I was involved in the analysis of “thermal blooming” of high-power lasers when they are weakly absorbed by H2O and CO2molecules in the atmosphere. The physics is closely related to that of greenhouse warming. I learned about the physics of the tropopause, where much of the wavefront distortion of starlight or defensive laser beams takes place. I was one of 14 JASON coauthors of one the first books on global warming, with the nerdy title, The Long-Term Impacts of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels, edited by Gordon J. MacDonald (Ballinger Publishing Co., 1982). We over-predicted the warming from more CO2 as badly as later establishment models, a topic to which I will return below.

My invention of the sodium guide star gave me some credibility in parts of the US government, but since the work was highly classified in the first few years, only a few scientists knew about it. I scrupulously avoided working on related areas with my university students. But based on this classified notoriety, I was elected to be Chair of the JASON steering committee in 1987, and in 1990 I was appointed Director of the Office of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy (DOE) by President George H. W. Bush, where I served under Secretary of Energy, James Watkins, until the election of President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore in the 1992 election. I served for three more months under Secretary Hazel O’Leary in the spring of 1993. I was fortunate that both Secretaries of Energy were supportive of basic science, the responsibility of my office.

The DOE Office of Science had an annual budget of over $3 billion at that time, more than the National Science Foundation. It funded almost all of DOE’s non-weapons basic research, including a great deal of environmental science and climate science. This was my first encounter with the climate establishment, and I was surprised to find environmental science so different from high-energy physics, nuclear physics, materials science, the human genome, and the many other areas we had responsibility for. I insisted that my assistant directors arrange for regular seminars, given by principal investigators of grants we supported. In most fields, principal investigators were delighted that government bureaucrats were actually interested in their research. They enjoyed being questioned during their talks, since this allowed them to show off their erudition. But, with honorable exceptions, principal investigators working on environmental issues were reluctant to come to our Washington offices, and evasive about answering the questions that were so welcome to briefers from other fields.

About three months after the beginning of the Clinton administration, Hazel O’Leary called me into her office to ask, “What have you done to Al Gore? I am told I have to fire you.” I assume that the main thing that upset Al Gore (left) was my questioning of blatant propaganda about stratospheric ozone that was his focus at the time: “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” and similar nonsense. Although Secretary O’Leary offered to find a way to keep me at DOE as a civil servant, I was glad to have an excuse to get back to doing real science at Princeton University, which was kind enough to offer me a professorship again.

For the next few years after my return to Princeton in 1993, I was very busy working on an exciting new project on magnetic resonance imaging with laser polarized nuclei that my young colleague, Professor Gordon Cates, and his students had pioneered while I was at DOE. But watching the evening news, I would often be outraged by the distortions about CO2 and climate that were being intoned by hapless, scientifically-illiterate newscasters. My wife Barbara, who patiently sat through my outbursts, finally said, “Why don’t you speak up?” At Barbara’s urging, I began to speak up and I have never stopped.

I often hear that since I am not a card-carrying climate scientist — that I, and many other scientists with views similar to mine, have no right to criticize the climate establishment. But as I have outlined above, few have a deeper understanding of the basic science of climate than I. Almost all big modern telescopes use my sodium guidestar to correct for atmospheric turbulence. It works. As we will see below, most climate models do not work. The history of science shows many examples of fields that needed outside criticism. A famous example is Andrei Sakharov’s leadership of opposition to Trofim Lysenko’s politicized biology in the Soviet Union. We will have more to say about Lysenko (right) later in the interview, but one of Lysenko’s main defenses was that Sakharov, a physicist who invented the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was not a “Michurinian” biologist.

The need for outside criticism was well articulated by James Madison, arguably the first graduate student at Princeton University, and the principal architect of the US Constitution. In the “Federalist X,” Madison wrote:

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.

(Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist papers: a collection of essays written in favour of the new constitution as agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787. Dublin, Ohio: Coventry House Publishing, 2015. View citation…)

…you must read it all…

Larry Elder Interviews Thomas Sowell (12-28-2016)

Larry Elder interviews Thomas Sowell and they discuss many issues, some current some biographical. Doc Sowell sounds great (healthy as a horse), and while he has laid his pen for his columns… he says he is still in the mix via his other avenues of scholarship.

I hope he updates a book or two, and publishes a few more. That man is a giant and needs to continue on his his career for the benefit of conservatism.

Kimberley Strassel’s Interview w/Steve Bannon (Alt-Right Defined)

(TAKE NOTE: under the article is a “Reality Check” by Ben Swann… I think he does the best job in defining the loose movement of the Alt-Right. Remember, “Monarchists” would fall into this category.) ALSO, the ADL has backed away from it’s statements somewhat in regards to Bannon:

  • The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has backed away from its earlier accusations against Stephen K. Bannon, stating on its website: “We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon.” (BREITBART

Here is the KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL article where she interviews Steve Bannon about the “war in politics.”

It’s hard to think of Steve Bannon as a low-profile guy. He has garnered about as many headlines over the past week as Donald Trump—no small feat. He is the executive chairman of the hard-right Breitbart News, among the most aggressive voices online, its website an attack machine against Democrats and “establishment” conservatives. President-elect Trump chose Mr. Bannon this week as his chief strategist and senior counselor, a slot usually filed by someone eager to play a presidential surrogate on TV.

Yet Mr. Bannon—who joined the Trump campaign in mid-August to propel its thunderbolt victory—professes no interest in being the story. “It’s not important to be known,” he says in a telephone interview Thursday night, among his first public comments since the election. “It was Lao Tzu who said that with the best leaders, when the work is accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves.’ That’s how I’ve led.”

Nor does he profess to care that Democrats and the media are portraying him as a “cloven-hoofed devil,” as he puts it. “I pride myself in doing things that matter. What mattered in the campaign was winning. We did. What matters now is pulling together the single best team we can to implement President-elect Trump’s vision.

He continues: “How can you take anything seriously from a media apparatus—paid the amount of money you people are paid—that systematically missed something that was so obvious, that missed Brexit, that missed the Trump revolution? You’d have thought they’d have learned their lesson on November 8.”

Slight pause. “They clearly haven’t.”

Here are a few things you’ve likely read about Steve Bannon this week: He’s a white supremacist, a bigot and anti-Semite. He’s a self-described Leninist who wants to “destroy the state.” He’s associated with the “alt-right,” a movement that, according to the New York Times, delights in “harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media.”

You’ll have seen some of Breitbart’s more offensive headlines, which refer to “renegade” Jews and the “dangerous faggot tour.” You maybe heard that Breitbart is gearing up to be a Pravda-like state organ for the Trump administration.

Mr. Bannon is an aggressive political scrapper, unabashed in his views, but he says those views bear no relation to the media’s description. Over 70 minutes, he describes himself as a “conservative,” a “populist” and an “economic nationalist.” He’s a talker, but unexcitable, speaking in measured tones. A former naval officer, he thinks in military terms and likes to quote philosophers and generals. He’s contemptuous of the media, proud of Breitbart, protective of the “deplorables,” and—at least at the moment—eager to work with everyone from soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

At first Mr. Bannon insists that he has no interest in “wasting time” addressing the accusations against him. Yet he’s soon ticking off the reasons they are “just nonsense.”

Anti-Semitic? “Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America. I have Breitbart Jerusalem, which I have Aaron Klein run with about 10 reporters there. We’ve been leaders in stopping this BDS movement”—meaning boycott, divestment and sanctions—“in the United States; we’re a leader in the reporting of young Jewish students being harassed on American campuses; we’ve been a leader on reporting on the terrible plight of the Jews in Europe.” He adds that given his many Jewish partners and writers, “guys like Joel Pollak, these claims of anti-Semitism just aren’t serious. It’s a joke.”

He blames the attacks on a lazy media, noting for instance that the “renegade Jew” line wasn’t Breitbart’s. Conservative activist David Horowitz (also Jewish) has taken responsibility for writing the headline himself, in a piece about Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

The Lenin anecdote came from an article in the Daily Beast by a writer who claimed to have spoken with Mr. Bannon in 2013: “So a guy I’ve never heard of in my life claims he met me at a party, and then claims I said something about Lenin, and this is taken as gospel truth, with nobody checking it.”

What about the charge of white supremacism? “I’m an economic nationalist. I am an America first guy. And I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world, have said repeatedly strong nations make great neighbors. I’ve also said repeatedly that the ethno-nationalist movement, prominent in Europe, will change over time. I’ve never been a supporter of ethno-nationalism.”

Mr. Bannon says the accusations miss that “the black working and middle class and the Hispanic working and middle class, just like whites, have been severely hurt by the policies of globalism.” He adds that he urged candidate Trump to reach out in his campaigning. “I was the one who said we are going to Flint, Michigan, we are going to black churches in Cleveland, because the thrust of this movement is that we are going to bring capitalism to the inner cities.”

Why does he think that leftists are so fixated on him? “They were ready to coronateHillary Clinton. That didn’t happen, and I’m one of the reasons why. So, by the way, I wear these attacks as an emblem of pride.”

Mr. Bannon is fiercely proud of the bomb-throwing Breitbart News, too. He credits it with “catching and understanding this populist movement” as far back as 2013, narrating the rise of the UK Independence Party in Britain, the exit movement for Scotland, and ultimately Brexit. “We were on to this change years before Donald Trump came on the scene,” he says.

He acknowledges that the site is “edgy” but insists it is “vibrant.” He offers his own definition of the alt-right movement and explains how he sees it fitting into Breitbart. “Our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.”

But he says Breitbart is also a platform for “libertarians,” Zionists, “the conservative gay community,” “proponents of restrictions on gay marriage,” “economic nationalism” and “populism” and “the anti-establishment.” In other words, the site hosts many views. “We provide an outlet for 10 or 12 or 15 lines of thought—we set it up that way” and the alt-right is “a tiny part of that.” Yes, he concedes, the alt-right has “some racial and anti-Semitic overtones.” He makes clear he has zero tolerance for such views….

(Read it all at the WSJ)

Dr. Douglas Axe and Dennis Prager Respond to Atheist’s Challenge

This is an excerpt from a larger interview by Dennis Prager with the author of “Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed“, by Douglas Axe. This was the only call into the show, and it was good enough to separate from the larger audio.

Previously the two (Prager and Axe) were discussing why people in the end reject God in light of the evidence… this is the opening challenge of the caller. (For FULL context, the entire interview is here)

The second part of the caller’s challenge is responded to first by Dr. Axe ~ well ~ and then Prager lightly tackles the first part of the caller’s “jab.”

Prager has been working on a book on this exact topic, and so I am sure we will hear more of this in the future.

Author Laura Bates Interviewed by Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager interviews author and columnist, Laura Bates, author of “Everyday Sexism.” This is where Prager doesn’t necessarily debate a guest, but uses the Aristotelian approach of asking questions so the listener can pick up on the inherent inconsistencies of the guests positions. Good interview.

My PAGE on the “Gender Wage Gap Myth” can be found here.
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For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/ ~ see also: http://www.prageruniversity.com/

Ben Shapiro On The Dave Rubin Show

Ben Shapiro (Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Wire) joins Dave Rubin to discuss conservatism vs leftism, free speech on college campuses, gay marriage, gun control, his debate with Piers Morgan on CNN, and more:

Ben Shapiro on Free Speech, College Campuses, and The Regressive Left ~ Isolated

Ben Shapiro on Gay Marriage, Gun Control, and Piers Morgan ~ Isolated

Ben Shapiro on Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton ~ Isolated

Politics According to the Bible (Exodus 21:22) ~ Pro-Life

Exodus 21:22-24

“When men get in a fight, and hit a pregnant woman so that her children are born [prematurely], but there is no injury, the one who hit her must be fined as the woman’s husband demands from him, and he must pay according to judicial assessment. If there is an injury, then you must give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot….”

What does this verse mean for the Judeo-Christian person in the real world — if we rightly shape our worldview according to God’s Revelation? Wayne Grudem explains with an excerpt from from his book, POLITICS ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE:

For the question of abortion, perhaps the most significant passage of all is found in the specific laws God gave Moses for the people of Israel during the time of the Mosaic covenant. One particular law spoke of the penalties to be imposed in case the life or health of a pregnant woman or her preborn child was endangered or harmed:

When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe (Exod. 21:22-25). [footnote A]

This law concerns a situation when men are fighting and one of them accidentally hits a pregnant woman. Neither one of them intended to do this, but as they fought they were not careful enough to avoid hitting her. If that happens, there are two possibilities:

1. If this causes a premature birth but there is no harm to the pregnant woman or her preborn child, there is still a penalty: “The one who hit her shall surely be fined” (v. 22). The penalty was for carelessly endangering the life or health of the pregnant woman and her child. We have similar laws in modern society, such as when a person is fined for drunken driving, even though he has hit no one with his car. He recklessly endangered human life and health, and he deserved a fine or other penalty.

2. But “if there is harm” to either the pregnant woman or her child, then the penalties are quite severe: “Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth …” (vv. 23-24). This means that both the mother and the preborn child are given equal legal protection. The penalty for harming the preborn child is just as great as for harming the mother. Both are treated as persons, and both deserve the full protection of the law. [footnote B]

This law is even more significant when we put it in the context of other laws in the Mosaic covenant. In other cases in the Mosaic law where someone accidentally caused the death of another person, there was no requirement to give “life for life,” no capital punishment. Rather, the person who accidentally caused someone else’s death was required to flee to one of the “cities of refuge” until the death of the high priest (see Num. 35:9-15, 22-29). This was a kind of “house arrest,” although the person had to stay within a city rather than within a house for a limited period of time. It was a far lesser punishment than “life for life.”

This means that God established for Israel a law code that placed a higher value on protecting the life of a pregnant woman and her preborn child than the life of anyone else in Israelite society. Far from treating the death of a preborn child as less significant than the death of others in society, this law treats the death of a preborn child or its mother as more significant and worthy of more severe punishment. And the law does not place any restriction on the number of months the woman was pregnant. Presumably it would apply from a very early stage in pregnancy, whenever it could be known that a miscarriage had occurred and her child or children had died as a result.

Moreover, this law applies to a case of accidental killing of a preborn child. But if accidental killing of a preborn child is so serious in God’s eyes, then surely intentional killing of a preborn child must be an even worse crime.

The conclusion from all of these verses [many are discussed in Grudem’s book] is that the Bible teaches that we should think of the preborn child as a person from the moment of conception, and we should give to the preborn child legal protection at least equal to that of others in the society.


Footnotes:

A. The phrase “so that her children come out” is a literal translation of the Hebrew text, which uses the plural of the common Hebrew word yeled, “child,” and another very common word, yātsā’, which means “go out, come out.” The plural “children” is probably the plural of indefiniteness, allowing for the possibility of more than one child. Other translations render this as “so that she gives birth prematurely,” which is very similar in meaning (so NASB, from 1999 editions onward; similarly: NN, TNIV, NET, HCSV, NLT, NKJV).

B. Some translations have adopted an alternative sense of this passage. The NRSV translates it, “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows …” (RSV is similar, as was NASB before 1999). In this case, causing a miscarriage and the death of a preborn child results only in a fine. Therefore, some have argued, this passage treats the preborn child as less worthy of protection than others in society, for the penalty is less. But the arguments for this translation are not persuasive. The primary argument is that this would make the law similar to a provision in the law code of Hammurabi (about 1760 BC in ancient Babylon). But such a supposed parallel should not override the meanings of the actual words in the Hebrew text of Exodus. The moral and civil laws in the Bible often differed from those of the ancient cultures around Israel. In addition, there is a Hebrew word for a miscarriage (shakal, Gen. 31:38; see also Exod. 23:26; Job 21:20; Hosea 9:14), but that word is not used here, nor is nēphel, another term for “miscarriage” (see Job 3:16; Ps. 58:8; Eccl. 6:3). However, the word that is used, yātsā’, is ordinarily used to refer to the live birth of a child (see Gen. 25:26; 38:29; Jer. 1:5). Finally, even on this (incorrect) translation, a fine is imposed on the person who accidentally caused the death of the preborn child. This implies that accidentally causing such a death is still considered morally wrong. Therefore, intentionally causing the death of a prebom child would be much more wrong, even on this translation.

Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 159-160.

Here is the Dennis Prager interview on this topic: