FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Trump Preparing Executive Committee To Take on Climate Change

Feb 20 (EIRNS)—According to a report in today’s Washington Post, the Trump Administration is preparing to take on the heart of the Green beast, climate change. Under the headline “White House Prepares To Scrutinize Agency Findings that Climate Change Threatens National Security,” Juliet Eilperin and Missy Ryan report that Trump is soon to announce a Presidential Committee on Climate Change, which will be established through an Executive Order. The authors fret that their sources indicate that the committee chair is likely to be Princeton physicist Dr. William Happer, who (in their words) has argued that “carbon emissions linked to climate change should be viewed as an asset rather than a pollutant.”

During the 1980s, Dr. Happer was part of JASON, a federal program of university scholars connected with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he did extensive studies on the atmosphere under a program to, in his words, “help ameliorate the distortion of laser beams by atmospheric turbulence.” Happer was a contributor to one of the earliest books on “global warming,” a collection of papers on The Long-Term Impacts of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels, edited by Gordon J. MacDonald, in 1982. Of this work, Happer later said that it “over-predicted the warming from more CO2 as badly as later establishment models.” As for the “anthropogenic” part of climate change, he was willing to admit in an interview with “The Best Schools,” that “Some small fraction of the 1˚C warming during the past two centuries must have been due to increasing CO2, which is indeed a greenhouse gas.” However, he later confirms,

“I don’t question that the Earth has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, but I am persuaded that most of the warming was due to natural causes, about which the governments can do nothing.”

The Post connects the formation of this committee as countering recent statements by people in the Trump Administration who undermined the President’s stance against the IPCC ideology. In February 2018, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in written testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned of “abrupt” climate change, stating that, “The impacts of the long-term trends toward a warming climate ... are likely to fuel economic and social discontent—and possibly upheaval—through 2018.”

Trump met with Happer in January 2017, soon after he entered the White House. Coats is now rumored to soon be out of a job.