Letter: Climate arguments are outdated and incorrect

In a recent Tri-City Herald opinion piece on the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, Prof. Happer, an eminent atomic physicist and father of adaptive optics, advances three reasons to support withdrawal — that carbon dioxide has little effect on climate, that climate models are unreliable, and that renewable energy is expensive and unreliable.

These views are outdated and incorrect. The role of carbon dioxide in the ice age cycles is now firmly established by climate scientists. Climate models can now successfully simulate the 9 F warming and 100 feet of sea level rise from ice age to interglacial periods, but only if the measured changes in carbon dioxide and methane are used to drive the simulations.

Solar and wind production of electricity have become cheaper than coal and competitive with natural gas, particularly if health and climate impacts of fossil fuels are accounted for. DC transmission is permitting affordable transcontinental electricity transport with little transmission loss, so that spatially variable production by wind and solar can be distributed over great distances.

Professor Happer’s obsolete opinions should therefore be disregarded by the public and by the president.

This story was originally published July 24, 2017 at 2:09 PM with the headline "Letter: Climate arguments are outdated and incorrect."