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EXHIBIT A
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EXHIBIT A
Case 3:17-cv-06011-WHA Document 157-1 Filed 03/19/18 Page 1 of 26

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March 19, 2018
The Honorable Judge William H. Alsup
United States District Court
Northern District of California
Your Honor:
We write to offer a presentation in response to your request for a tutorial on the best science available
on global warming and climate change. We appreciate your willingness to dig more deeply into technical
issues, since wise societal decisions require an understanding of this complex and nuanced subject.
As independent senior scientists and educators long involved in climate matters, we are well-positioned
to offer a clear and informed perspective on what is known, and unknown, about the earth’s changing
climate. During our individual careers, we have provided scientific advice on diverse complex decisions,
always striving to be dispassionate and “call it like we see it.” That ethos not only best informs decisions,
which must consider the science in the context of many other factors, but also preserves the integrity of
science, preventing its degradation by bias or agenda.
Upon hearing of your request for a tutorial, we three came together spontaneously with the goal of
providing such advice. You will find that our presentation, while crafted for this purpose, is consistent
with our past publications. None of us has received any compensation for the considerable effort
expended in its preparation.
Our brief consists of three sections. Section I is a tutorial overview of climate science, covering the most
essential concepts and results and highlighting fundamental problems with the claimed scientific
“consensus.” Section II provides detailed answers to the eight specific questions you asked that the
tutorial cover; we appreciate that these questions focus attention on the underlying basics, an essential
foundation for evaluating derivative claims. Finally, Section III contains our biographical sketches.
We appreciate your willingness to consider our input, and we would, of course, be happy to provide any
further information you might find useful.
Respectfully,
Dr. William Happer
Dr. Steven E. Koonin
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen
Princeton University
New York University
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
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Section I: Climate science overview
Our overview of climate science is framed through four statements:
1. The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century
are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena
2. Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural
energy flows
3. It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be
ascribed to human influences
4. There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient
climate variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly
uncertain
We offer supporting evidence for each of these statements drawn almost exclusively from the Climate
Science Special Report (CSSR) issued by the US government in November, 2017 or from the Fifth
Assessment Report (AR5) issued in 2013-14 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or
from the refereed primary literature.
1. The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past
half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful
natural phenomena
The graph below (CSSR Figure ES.1) shows the globe’s warming during the past 130 years as measured
directly by surface instruments. The left panel shows changes in the anomaly of the global surface
temperature. The annual average temperature anomaly has increased by more than 1.6° F (0.9 C) for the
period 1986–2015 relative to 1901–1960. [Red bars show temperatures that were above the 1901–1960
average, and blue bars indicate temperatures below the average.]
The CSSR’s right hand map shows that the warming has been strongest over the land in the Northern
Hemisphere and greater toward the pole. As can be found in other CSSR figures, there are other
suggestions of modest warming in recent decades, including growing heat in the oceans, rising sea levels,
shrinking Artic ice, shrinking glaciers, and a more humid atmosphere.
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The story, however, is more complex than might be inferred from the figure. To a scientist looking at the
left-hand panel, a few things stand out. First, there are no uncertainty bars, an unfortunately common
practice in representations of climate change; it turns out that the uncertainties are 0.2F (0.1C) in recent
decades, increasing to about twice that in the earliest parts of the record. Second, much of the seemingly
alarming rise in the last few years is due to an El Nino condition, as was also present during the 1998
temperature spike. Finally, the rise in the temperature anomaly is not smooth on the few-decade scale.
For example, it was actually decreasing from about 1940-1970. As human influences were significant only
after about 1950, the graph suggests that the climate is quite capable of varying significantly on its own.
To buttress that point, consider the longer-term geologic record depicted schematically in the following
figure, which shows more directly that the global temperature anomaly has changed dramatically over
the past 500 million years (only 10% of the earth’s history!). There has been significant warming over the
past 20,000 years (blue line) since the end of the last glaciation and 120,000 years ago there was an
interglacial period (the Eemian) when it was the 2C warmer than today and the sea level was 6 meters
higher. Over the past million years, there has been a succession of warm and cold periods driven largely
by variations in the earth’s orbit and orientation, with even larger temperature rises over the past 100
million years. The two red dots on the right show notional projected temperature rises at 2050 and 2100
due to human influences. We discuss the reliability of those projections below.
Even within the
instrumental record,
the warming of the
past four decades is
not unusual, as
illustrated in the
adjacent
figure,
which compares two
50-year periods, one
from the early 20th
century
where
human influences were minimal, and one from the latter 20th century, where they were much stronger. It
is difficult to tell them apart, as the rates and magnitudes of warming were comparable. [The left-hand
panel is the more recent data showing the 1998 El Nino spike at year 42.]
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2. Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation
to natural energy flows
To characterize and quantify human influences, we need to look at the energy flows in the climate system,
as depicted in the following figure (CSSR Figure 2.1 ):
The earth’s climate system is a giant heat engine, reflecting about 30% of the incoming sunlight, absorbing
the rest, and then radiating an almost equal amount back into space as heat, driving the winds,
precipitation, and ocean currents in the process. Note that the natural energy flows are measured in 100’s
of W/m2 (Watts per square meter) and, as shown in the lower left-hand corner, there is a claimed net
imbalance of 0.6 [0.2, 1.0] W/m2 warming the planet.
The chart below (CSSR Figure 2.3) shows how human influences on the climate have grown since 1750.
The units are W/m2, commensurate with the energy flow graphic above. Carbon dioxide, which is
accumulating in the atmosphere largely due to fossil fuel use, exerts the strongest warming influence,
although small compared to the natural energy flows. Methane and other well-mixed greenhouse gases
(WMGHG) are also important.
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The largest anthropogenic cooling influences are associated with aerosols; they are quite uncertain.
Changes in the solar irradiance over the past 250 years are shown to be negligible.
The bottom of the chart above shows that total human influence is currently some 2.3 W/m2, or less than
1% of the natural energy flows in the system. Isolating and predicting the effects of such a physically small
influence in a chaotic, noisy system where we have limited observations is not an easy task. Not only
must we have the large parts of the system understood to high precision, but we also have to be sure
we’ve accounted for all of the other phenomena operating at the 1% level.
3. It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming
can be ascribed to human influences
General Circulation Models (GCMs) of the climate
system are important tools for attributing observed
changes in the climate system. Here, the earth is
covered with a 3-dimensional grid, typically 100 ×
100 km in the atmosphere and 10 × 10 km oceans,
with 10-20 vertical layers and up to 30 vertical layers,
respectively. The air, water, momentum, and energy
are transported through the grid boxes using the
basic laws of physics under imposed forcings (e.g.,
the sun, aerosol loading) with a time step as small as
30 minutes. The results of computer runs extending
over centuries are compared with both average and historical climate properties to validate the models.
This sounds straightforward in principle, but it is in fact fraught with difficulty. One major challenge is
that there are many important weather phenomena that occur on scales far smaller than the grid size
(e.g., topography, clouds, storms) and so the modeler must make assumptions about these “sub grid-
scale” processes to build a complete model. For example, given the temperature and humidity profiles of
the atmosphere in a grid box, “How high, how many, and of what type are the clouds?” While these sub-
grid-scale parametrizations can be based upon observations of weather phenomena, there is still
considerable judgment in their formulation. So the models are not, as one often hears, “just physics”
since the parameters in each must be “tuned” to reproduce aspects of the observed climate.
A second major problem is that there is no unique tuning that reproduces the historical climate data.
Since aerosol cooling plays against GHG warming, a model with low aerosol and GHG sensitivities can
reproduce the data as well as a model with high sensitivities. As a result, the GHG sensitivity is today
uncertain by a factor of three (as it has been for forty years), therefore enlarging the uncertainty in any
projection of future climates.
A third problem is that the models must reproduce the natural variabilities of the climate system, which
we’ve seen are comparable to the claimed anthropogenic changes. Climate data clearly show coherent
behaviors on multi-annual, multi-decadal, and multi-centennial timescales, at least some of which are due
to changes in ocean currents and the interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere. Not knowing
the state of the ocean decades or centuries ago makes it difficult to correctly choose the model’s starting
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point. And even if that were possible, there is no guarantee that the model will show the correct variability
at the correct times.
Despite these problems, the IPCC pushes on, averaging model results over an indiscriminately assembled
“ensemble of opportunity” comprised of some 50 different models from different research groups around
the world. These models give results that differ dramatically both from each other and from observations
on the scales required to measure the response to human influences. This proliferation of discordant
models is further evidence that they are not “just physics”.
This figure (CSSR Figure 3.1; red circle
added) shows a comparison of
observed global mean temperature
anomalies from three observational
datasets to results from the CMIP5
[Climate Model Intercomparison
Project, version 5] model ensemble.
The thick orange curve is the CMIP5
ensemble mean across 36 models while
the orange shading and outer dashed
lines depict the ± 2 standard deviation
and absolute ranges of annual
anomalies across all individual
simulations of the 36 models. All time
series are referenced to a 1901–1960
baseline value. Note in particular that while the model mean does a fair job of reproducing the record
over the past few decades, it fails entirely during the time from 1910-1940 (red circle) where the data
warm at a rate several times the model mean.
Similar data-model comparisons for other climate variables, both global and regional, also show their own
problems. Indeed, as the CSSR states (pg 58) in discussing the role of human influences on the climate:
Key remaining uncertainties relate to the precise magnitude and nature of changes at
global, and particularly regional, scales, and especially for extreme events and our ability
to observe these changes at sufficient resolution and to simulate and attribute such
changes using climate models.
4. There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient climate
variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly uncertain
Here is what IPCC says about changes in various weather extremes observed over the past decades. These
bullets do not constitute “cherry picking”, as each is a modest paraphrase of the text summarizing the
discussion in AR5 (WGI, Chapter 2) of a particular weather phenomenon.
• …since about 1950 it is very likely that the numbers of cold days and nights have
decreased and the numbers of warm days and nights have increased … there is medium
confidence that globally the length and frequency of warm spells, including heat waves,
has increased since the middle of the 20th century
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• … likely that since 1951 increases in the number of heavy precipitation events in more
regions than there have been decreases, but there are strong regional and subregional
variations
• … low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods
on a global scale.
… low confidence in a global-scale trend in drought or dryness since the middle of the
20th century,
…low confidence in trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and
thunderstorms
… low confidence in any long term (centennial) increases in tropical cyclone activity,
virtually certain increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones
since the 1970s in the North Atlantic.
• … low confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical
cyclones since 1900
Contrary to the impression from most media reporting and political discussions, the historical data (and
the IPCC assessment) do not convey any sense that weather extremes are becoming more common
globally.
Heat waves: The most definitive of the IPCC statements on weather extremes concerns temperatures,
and even here the story is not so simple. Consider the figure below (CSSR Figure 6.3) documenting
temperature extremes in the US. [Even though the contiguous US is only 1.6% of the earth’s surface, it is
among the most densely instrumented regions and has one of the longest data records.]
Caption: Observed changes in the coldest
and warmest daily temperatures of the
year in the contiguous United States.
Maps (top) depict changes at stations;
changes are the difference between the
average for present-day (1986–2016) and
the average for the first half of the last
century (1901–1960). Time series
(bottom) depict the area-weighted
average for the contiguous United States.
Estimates are derived from long-term
stations with minimal missing data in the
Global Historical Climatology Network –
Daily dataset (Menne et al. 2012). (Figure
source: NOAA/NCEI).
While the coldest temperatures have been rising, the warmest temperatures have not, and have actually
gotten cooler over the eastern half of the country. Taken as a whole, the average climate is becoming
“milder” across most of the United States. Very recent work attributes the lack of rising temperatures
across the eastern half of the country to agricultural intensification: denser plant growth and rising CO2
levels release more moisture, which both cools the air and increases the amount of rainfall.
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Sea level rise: As shown in the adjacent chart, sea levels
began rising some 20,000 years ago at the end of the
last glacial maximum. They rose some 120 meters until
about 7,000 years ago, after which the rate of rise
slowed dramatically.
To best assess whether human influences are causing
sea level rise to accelerate, we must look at the past
century of data, which is available from tide gauges
around the globe. Three analyses are shown in the left-
hand figure below; these analyses must correct the raw data for the local rising or falling of the coast at
each site. The data show that global sea level has risen by some 200 mm since 1900, or an average rate
of 1.8 mm/yr, although with considerable decadal-scale variability. Sea level has also been measured by
satellite altimetry since 1993; detection of acceleration in that short record remains controversial.
A signature of human impacts on sea level would be an
increase in the rate of rise after about 1950, when human influences started to become significant. Such
a signature is not evident in the rate over the past century, as shown in the right-hand figure above
(adapted from the reference cited by the CSSR); in fact, the acceleration post-1990 is not statistically
different from the (presumably natural) acceleration experienced during the 1930s. Given the observed
variation prior to 1950 and the steady quadrupling of human influences since 1950, one must conclude
there are other important drivers of sea level rise beyond CO2.
Consensus projections of global sea level rise through 2100 are remarkably discordant with local
observations. The figure below shows the NOAA
record of monthly mean sea level (corrected for
seasonal variation) as measured at the San Francisco
station. Apart from obvious shifts due to station
movement, the record shows a steady rise at some 2
mm/year. To realize a 1 meter rise by 2100, roughly
the mean of IPCC projections, sea level would have to
rise six times more rapidly (12 mm/yr) averaged over the rest of this century, a slope illustrated by the
green arrow.
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Tropical cyclones: Another weather phenomenon of concern are the storms termed “hurricanes” in the
Atlantic and “typhoons” in the Pacific. The adjacent chart summarizes data on the number and strength
of these storms, which include the recent active North Atlantic 2017 season (even so, hurricanes Harvey
and Irma were not even among the Top 10 most intense recorded hurricanes). The upper figure shows
12-month running sums of the Global
Hurricane Frequency (for all and for
major storms). The top time series is
the number of global tropical
cyclones that reached at least
hurricane-force (maximum lifetime
wind speed exceeds 64-knots). The
bottom time series is the number of
global tropical cyclones that reached
major hurricane strength (96-knots+).
The lower figure shows the last four
decades of 24 month running sums of
Global and Northern Hemisphere
Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE).
ACE is a measure of aggregate storm
intensity (each storm is weighted by
the square of its wind velocity). Note
that the year indicated represents the
value of ACE through the previous 24-
months for the Northern Hemisphere
(bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/blue boxes). The area in between represents the
Southern Hemisphere total ACE.
Despite considerable multi-year variability in these data, there is no clear trend. In fact, NOAA’s
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory posted the following statement in Spring, 2016:
“It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas
emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic
hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. …”
Overview summary
To summarize this overview, the historical and geological record suggests recent changes in the climate
over the past century are within the bounds of natural variability. Human influences on the climate
(largely the accumulation of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion) are a physically small (1%) effect on a
complex, chaotic, multicomponent and multiscale system. Unfortunately, the data and our understanding
are insufficient to usefully quantify the climate’s response to human influences. However, even as human
influences have quadrupled since 1950, severe weather phenomena and sea level rise show no significant
trends attributable to them. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models
demonstrably unfit for the purpose. As a result, rising levels of CO2 do not obviously pose an immediate,
let alone imminent, threat to the earth’s climate.
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Section II: Answers to specific questions
Question 1: What caused the various ice ages (including the “little ice age” and
prolonged cool periods) and what caused the ice to melt? When they melted, by
how much did sea level rise?
The discussion of the major ice ages of the past 700 thousand years is distinct from the discussion of the
“little ice age.” The former refers to the growth of massive ice sheets (a mile or two thick) where periods
of immense ice growth occurred, lasting approximately eighty thousand years, followed by warm
interglacials lasting on the order of twenty thousand years. By contrast, the “little ice age” was a relatively
brief period (about four hundred years) of relatively cool temperatures accompanied by the growth of
alpine glaciers over much of the earth.
As evidence for the hundred thousand year cycle of major glaciation emerged, the Serbian astrophysicist
Milutin Milankovitch (1941) noted that there was always winter snow in the arctic, but that the growth of
glaciers depended on whether this snow survived the summer. He suggested that this would be
determined by the amount of sunlight reaching the arctic in summer, and that this quantity varied greatly
with the variations in the earth’s orbital parameters [primarily variations in the obliquity (order 40
thousand years), the precession of the equinoxes (order 20 thousand years, but modulated by the
eccentricity), and the variation of the eccentricity (order 100 thousand years)].
Arctic insolation in the summer is commonly referred to as the Milankovitch parameter. When reliable
time series for the Milankovitch parameter and for ice volume became available, it was noted that the ice
volume displayed spectral peaks corresponding to the orbital variations (Imbrie, 1984). However, doubts
about the theory were expressed because the correlation between the Milankovitch parameter and the
ice volume was not particularly good. This problem was independently resolved by Edvardsson et al.
(2002) and Roe (2006), both of whom noted that one should not be comparing ice volume with the
Milankovitch parameter, but rather one should be comparing the time rate of change of the ice volume
(i.e., d Ice Volume/dt).
The rate of change of the ice volume correlates remarkably will with the Milankovitch parameter [See
figure adjacent, which compares
the June insolation anomaly
(green) with the time rate of
change of ice volume (black).]
Note that the Milankovitch
parameter varies over some 100
W/m2, comparable to the global
average energy flows in the
climate system. Edvardsson et al.
(2002) showed that these variations were sufficient to account for the melting of the continental glaciers.
By contrast, the change in radiative forcing associated with the changes in CO2 that follow the changes in
temperature associated with the major glacial cycles is on the order of 2 W/m2.
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The last glacial episode ended somewhat irregularly. Ice coverage reached its maximum extent about
eighteen thousand years ago. Melting occurred between about twenty thousand years ago and thirteen
thousand years ago, and then there was a strong cooling (Younger Dryas) which ended about 11,700 years
ago. Between twenty thousand years ago and six thousand years ago, there was a dramatic increase in
sea level of about 120 meters followed by more gradual increase over the following several thousand
years. Since the end of the “little ice age,” there has been steady increase in sea-level of about 6 inches
per century.
As to the cause of the “little ice age,” this is still a matter of uncertainty. There was a long hiatus in solar
activity that may have played a role, but on these relatively short time scales one can’t exclude natural
internal variability. It must be emphasized that the surface of the earth is never in equilibrium with net
incident solar radiation because the oceans are always carrying heat to and from the surface, and the
motion systems responsible have time scales ranging from years (for example ENSO) to millennia.
There remains the interesting question of what was going on before 800,000 years ago. There were
episodes of glaciation beginning about 6 million years ago (Bender, 2013), but the temporal behavior
appears to be dominated by the obliquity cycles (about 40 thousand years). The reasons for this have not
been extensively studied, but a clue appears to be that the current cycle involves the growth and decay
of permanent ice, while during the earlier period there appear to have been periods almost completely
free of arctic ice.
The claim that orbital variability requires a boost from CO2 to drive ice ages comes from the implausible
notion that what matters is the orbital variations in the global average insolation (which are, in fact, quite
small) rather than the large forcing represented by the Milankovitch parameter. This situation is very
different than in the recent and more modest shorter-term warming, where natural variability makes the
role of CO2 much more difficult to determine.
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Question 2: What is the molecular difference by which CO2 absorbs infrared
radiation but oxygen and nitrogen do not?
Radiation is emitted or absorbed by time-dependent electrical charge and current densities of appropriate
spatial symmetry.
Thermal infrared radiation can be absorbed or emitted by a molecule if the vibrations and rotations of the
molecule occur at infrared frequencies AND if the vibrations and rotations of the molecules produce time-
varying electric dipole moments in the molecules.
As shown in the figure above, the two oxygen atoms O at either end of a linear CO2 molecule are negatively
charged and the carbon atom C in the center is positively charged. The magnitude of the charge on the C
atom is about half the positive charge on a proton. A bent CO2 molecule has an “electric dipole moment,”
that is, the “center” of positive charge is displaced from the “center” of negative charge.
Time-changing electric dipole moments can emit or absorb radiation very efficiently. As indicated in the
figure, a bent CO2 molecule will vibrate, much like a xylophone bar, and produce a vibrating electric dipole
moment pointing from the midpoint between the O nuclei and toward the C nucleus. The dipole moment
will efficiently emit or absorb radiation at the vibrational frequency ν2 . The simultaneous rotation of the
CO2 molecule spreads the range of frequencies that can be absorbed or emitted by the bending-mode
vibration.
CO2 molecules also have modes where the atoms vibrate along a straight line. These are called the
symmetric-stretch and the asymmetric stretch modes and they are labeled with the frequencies ν1 and
ν3 in the figure. The frequencies of the asymmetric-stretch mode is higher than most thermal radiation
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frequencies so it absorbs or emits thermal radiation much less efficiently than the bending mode. The
symmetric stretch mode has no electric dipole moment and it is therefore an extremely poor emitter or
absorber of radiation.
The negative charges of the two O atoms at the ends of a CO2 molecule come from electrons that have
been “robbed” from the C atom in the center. This leaves positive charge on the C atom. On the upper
right of the figure we sketch an O2 and an N2 molecule, the two dominant components of air. The two O
atoms at the ends of an oxygen molecule, O2, are uncharged since they have equal affinity for electrons.
For analogous reasons, the two N atoms of a nitrogen molecule, N2, are uncharged.
Both O2 and N2 molecules have stretching vibrations, analogous to the symmetric stretch vibration ν2 of
the CO2 molecule. The O2 and N2 molecules can also rotate. The combined frequencies of vibration and
rotation are equal to thermal infrared frequencies, but vibrating and rotating O2 and N2 do not absorb or
emit radiation efficiently since they have no time-dependent electric dipole moments. O2 and N2 do have
“electric quadrupole moments,” which change with vibrations and rotations, but vibrating quadrupole
moments of molecules emit and absorb thermal radiation at least a million times less efficiently than
dipoles. Diatomic molecules like NO or CO, which are not symmetric like O2 and N2, do have electric dipole
moments. They can efficiently emit or absorb thermal infrared radiation at their vibrational frequencies
and are diatomic greenhouse gases.
Molecules like CO2, H2O, CO or NO are called a greenhouse-gas molecules, because they can efficiently
absorb or emit infrared radiation, but they are nearly transparent to sunlight. Molecules like O2 and N2
are also nearly transparent to sunlight, but since they do not absorb or emit thermal infrared radiation
very well, they are not greenhouse gases. The most important greenhouse gas, by far, is water vapor.
Water molecules, H2O, are permanently bent and have large electric dipole moments.
Question 3: What is mechanism by which infrared radiation trapped by CO2 in
the atmosphere is turned into heat and finds its way back to sea level?
CO2 molecules radiate very slowly, requiring about a second to lose energy by emitting a quantum of
infrared radiation. But a CO2 molecule can also lose energy in nearly every collision that it has with an N2
or O2 molecule; these happen about a billion times per second at sea level. So any infrared radiation
absorbed by CO2 molecules almost instantaneously heats the surrounding air through “inelastic”
molecular collisions.
Unscattered infrared radiation is very good at transmitting energy because it moves at the speed of light.
But the energy per unit volume stored by the thermal radiation in the Earth’s atmosphere is completely
negligible compared to the internal energy of the air molecules.
Although CO2 molecules radiate very slowly, there are so many CO2 molecules that they produce lots of
radiation, and some of this radiation reaches sea level. The figure following shows downwelling radiation
measured at the island of Nauru in the Tropical Western Pacific Ocean, and at colder Point Barrow, Alaska,
on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.
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The horizontal scale here is the frequency of the radiation in wavenumbers. [If one could take a “snapshot”
of an infrared wave, the number of peaks in a 1 cm segment is the wave number.] The complicated solid
lines in the figure are the intensity of the observed downwelling radiation. The CO2 bending mode
produces the downwelling radiation with frequencies between about 580 cm-1 to 750 cm-1. Downwelling
radiation for frequencies less than 580 cm-1 and from more than 1200 cm-1 is from water vapor, H2O.
At Nauru much of the downwelling comes from CO2 and H2O molecules that are only a few hundred
meters above the surface. The air at these low altitudes has almost the same temperature as the surface,
300 K. The radiation with frequencies less than 750 cm -1 and more than 1200 cm -1, where there is strong
molecular absorption at nearly every frequency, differs little from thermal-equilibrium (Planck) radiation
at the 300 K surface temperature, which is shown as the dashed line. For frequencies between about 750
cm-1 and 1200 cm-1 there is considerably less downwelling radiation than the Planck limit, since there are
few molecular emission lines in this interval.
At Point Barrow, the surface temperature is much colder than at Nauru and there is a pronounced
temperature inversion with the air getting warmer instead of colder at higher altitudes. The downwelling
intensity at the 667 cm-1 center of the CO2 band implies a surface temperature of about 233 K, some 12
C colder than the temperature of the dashed blackbody curve, which corresponds to the temperature of
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higher-altitude, warmer air. The more intense “shoulders” of the CO2 downwelling come from this warmer
air. At Point Barrow, there is relatively little downwelling radiation from water vapor compared to CO2,
since the extreme cold has frozen out much of the moisture.
So the answer to the last part of the question, “What is the mechanism by which … heat … finds its way
back to sea level?” is that the heat is radiated to the ground by molecules at various altitudes, where there
is usually a range of different temperatures. The emission altitude is the height from which radiation
could reach the surface without much absorption, say 50% absorption. For strongly absorbed frequencies,
the radiation reaching the ground comes from low-altitude molecules, only a few meters above ground
level for the 667 cm-1 frequency at the center of the CO2 band. More weakly absorbed frequencies are
radiated from higher altitudes where the temperature is usually colder than that of the surface. But
occasionally, as the data from Point Barrow show, higher-altitude air can be warmer than the surface.
The extreme cold surface at Point Barrow implied by the data in the figure shows that the heat transfer
to space there is almost entirely by radiation. The data were taken in early spring when there was little
solar heating of the surface. Buoyant, upward convection of surface air cannot occur in regions of
temperature inversions.
Closely related to Question 3 is how heat from the absorption of sunlight by the surface gets back to space
to avoid a steadily increasing surface temperature. As one might surmise from the figure, at Narau there
is so much absorption from CO2 and by water vapor, H2O, that most daytime heat transfer near the surface
is by convection, not by radiation. Especially important is moist convection, where the water vapor in
rising moist air releases its latent heat to form clouds. The clouds have a major effect on radiative heat
transfer. Cooled, drier, subsiding air completes the convection circuit. Minor changes of convection and
cloudiness can have a bigger effect on the surface temperature than large changes in CO2 concentrations.
Question 4: Does CO2 in the atmosphere reflect any sunlight back into space, such
that the reflected sunlight never penetrates the atmosphere in the first place?
The short answer to this question is “No”, but it raises some interesting issues that we discuss below.
Molecules can either scatter or absorb radiation. CO2 molecules are good absorbers of thermal infrared
radiation, but they scatter almost none. Infrared radiant energy absorbed by a CO2 molecule is converted
to internal vibrational and rotational energy. This internal energy is quickly lost in collisions with the N2
and O2 molecules that make up most of the atmosphere. The collision rates, billions per second, are much
too fast to allow the CO2 molecules to reradiate the absorbed energy, which takes about a second. CO2
molecules in the atmosphere do emit thermal infrared radiation continuously, but the energy is almost
always provided by collisions with N2 and O2 molecules, not by previously absorbed radiation. The
molecules “glow in the dark” with thermal infrared radiation.
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In the figure above the radiation wavelength, in micrometers, is plotted along the horizontal axis. From
left to right, the top panel shows the ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infrared portions of the spectrum.
Typical visible wavelengths are 0.4 to 0.7 micrometers. Most thermal infrared wavelengths of the earth
are longer than 3 micrometers. The red line on the top left is the ideal radiation spectrum of the Sun, that
is, the solar power per wavelength increment. In this model, the Sun is assumed to have a temperature
of 5525 K. On the right are radiation spectra of the earth at various surface temperatures. The violet line
corresponds to a temperature of 310 K or about 98 F, a very hot summer day in temperate latitudes. The
blue line corresponds to a temperature of 250 K or about -10 F, a very cold winter day. The black curve is
for a temperature of 210 K or about -82 F, similar to the temperature of the ice cap in the wintertime
Antarctic. The spectral intensity curves are not to scale, but drawn to show the wavelengths of maximum
intensity.
The second panel from the top of the figure shows the fraction of radiation of a given wavelength that
can pass vertically from the surface to outer space without being scattered or absorbed by molecules of
air. The lower panels, 3 to 8, show contributions to the atmospheric opacity from water vapor (H2O),
carbon dioxide (CO2), oxygen and ozone (O2 and O3), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and Raleigh
scattering (to which all atmospheric molecules contribute). Blue skylight on a clear, sunny day is Raleigh-
scattered sunlight. Since CO2 molecules constitutes only about 0.04 % of the total number of molecules
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in the atmosphere, their contribution to Raleigh scattering is completely negligible, compared to that of
N2 and O2.
The figure shows that water vapor is by far the most important absorber. It can absorb both thermal
infrared radiation from the Earth and shorter-wave radiation from the Sun. Water vapor and its
condensates, clouds of liquid or solid water (ice), dominate radiative heat transfer in the Earth’s
atmosphere; CO2 is of secondary importance.
If Question 4 were “Do clouds in the atmosphere reflect any sunlight back into space, such that the
reflected sunlight never penetrates the atmosphere in the first place?” the answer would be “Yes”. It is
common knowledge that low clouds on a sunny day shade and cool the surface of the Earth by scattering
the sunlight back to space before it can be absorbed and converted to heat at the surface.
The figure shows that very little thermal radiation from the surface can reach the top of the atmosphere
without absorption, even if there are no clouds. But some of the surface radiation is replaced by molecular
radiation emitted by greenhouse molecules or cloud tops at sufficiently high altitudes that the there are
no longer enough higher-altitude greenhouse molecules or clouds to appreciably attenuate the radiation
before it escapes to space. Since the replacement radiation comes from colder, higher altitudes, it is less
intense and does not reject as much heat to space as the warmer surface could have without greenhouse-
gas absorption.
As implied by the figure, sunlight contains some thermal infrared energy that can be absorbed by CO2. But
only about 5% of sunlight has wavelengths longer than 3 micrometers where the strongest absorption
bands of CO2 are located. The Sun is so hot, that most of its radiation is at visible and near-visible
wavelengths, where CO2 has no absorption bands.
Question 5: Apart from CO2, what happens to the collective heat from tail pipe
exhausts, engine radiators, and all other heat from combustion of fossil fuels?
How, if at all, does this collective heat contribute to warming of the atmosphere?
Most of the energy humans use comes from fossil fuels, with nuclear and renewables making up the
balance, as shown in this figure:
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After that energy is used for heat, mobility, and electricity, the Second Law of Thermodynamics
guarantees that virtually all of it ends up as heat in the climate system, ultimately to be radiated into space
along with the earth’s natural IR emissions. [A very small fraction winds up as visible light that escapes
directly to space through the transparent atmosphere, but even that ultimately winds up as heat
somewhere “out there.”]
How much does this anthropogenic heat affect the climate? There are local effects where energy use is
concentrated, for example in cities and near power plants. But globally, the effects are very small. To see
that, convert the global annual energy consumption of 13.3 Gtoe (Gigatons of oil equivalent) to 5.6 × 1020
joules. Dividing that by the 3.2 × 107 seconds in a year gives a global power consumption of 1.75 × 1013
Watts. Spreading that over the earth’s surface area of 5.1 × 1014 m2 results in an anthropogenic heat flux
of 0.03 W/m2. This is some four orders of magnitude smaller than the natural heat fluxes of the climate
system, and some two orders of magnitude smaller than the anthropogenic radiative forcing.
The geothermal heat flux (largely from decay of radioactive elements in the earth) is a comparable source
of heat. While it can be quite large in localized sources (volcanoes, hot springs, geothermal vents on the
sea floor, …) the global average is 0.09 W/m2, three times larger than the direct heating from human
energy consumption, but still too small to have a meaningful direct effect on the climate’s power balance.
However, there can be indirect effects, such as the melting of ice by subglacial Antarctic volcanoes.
Question 6: In grade school many of us were taught that humans exhale CO2 but
plants absorb CO2 and return oxygen to the air (keeping the carbon fiber). Is this
still valid? If so why hasn’t plant life turned the higher levels of CO2 back into
oxygen? Given the increase in population on earth (four billion), is human
respiration a contributing factor to the buildup of CO2?
Plants and other photosynthetic organisms use energy from sunlight, together with a CO2 molecule and
water, to produce simple sugars (carbohydrates). One molecule of oxygen, O2, is released as a waste
product for every carbon dioxide molecule CO2 molecule used. The photosynthetic organism uses the
simple sugars and their chemical energy to build other organic compounds needed for life. These include
the fiber mentioned in the question, as well as starch, oils, nitrogen-containing amino acids, and many
others.
Photosynthetic organisms are estimated to fix about 1.05 x 1011 tons of carbon per year, which would
require 3.85 x 1011 tons of CO2. Since the total mass of the Earth’s atmosphere is about 5.15 x 1015 tons,
the mean molar weight of air is 29 grams and the molar weight of CO2 is 44 grams, this would amount to
about 50 ppm (parts per million by volume) of the CO2 in the air. At present, there is a little more than
400 ppm of CO2 in the air, so if large amounts of CO2 were not being added to the air by various
mechanisms (some of which we will discuss in the answer to Question 7) plants would use up the
atmospheric CO2 in about eight years and die of starvation.
Primary photosynthetic productivity is dominated by land plants, and most land plants are in the northern
hemisphere. During the northern summer, the growth of land plants is fast enough to cause a substantial
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drawdown of atmospheric CO2 as can
be seen in the figure below. During
the northern winter, when plant
growth slows or ceases over much of
the northern hemisphere, living
organisms, notably soil organisms
like fungi, oxidize or ferment some of
the organic matter accumulated the
past summer and return it to the air
as CO2. At Mauna Loa, the winter-
summer swings of CO2 are less than
10 ppm. But at more northerly
observatories the swings are more
extreme, for example, 20 ppm in the
high Arctic measured in Alert,
Canada.
If all of the CO2 produced by current combustion of fossil fuels remained in the atmosphere, the level
would increase by about 4 ppm per year, substantially more than the observed rate of around 2.5 ppm
per year, as seen in the figure above. Some of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions are being sequestered on
land or in the oceans.
There is evidence that primary
photosynthetic productivity has
increased somewhat over the
past half century, perhaps due
to more CO2 in the atmosphere.
For example, the summer-
winter swings like those in the
figure above are increasing in
amplitude. Other evidence for
modestly increasing primary
productivity includes the
pronounced “greening” of the Earth that has been observe by satellites. An example is the map above,
which shows a general increase in vegetation cover over the past three decades
The primary productivity estimate mentioned above would also correspond to an increase of the oxygen
fraction of the air by 50 ppm, but since the oxygen fraction of the air is very high (209,500 ppm), the
relative increase would be small and hard to detect. Also much of the oxygen is used up by respiration.
The average human exhales about 1 kg of CO2 per day, so the 7 billion humans that populate the Earth
today exhale about 2.5 x 109 tons of CO2 per year, a little less than 1% of that is needed to support the
primary productivity of photosynthesis and only about 6% of the CO2 “pollution” resulting from the
burning of fossil fuels. However, unlike fossil fuel emissions, these human (or more generally, biological)
emissions do not accumulate in the atmosphere, since the carbon in food ultimately comes from the
atmosphere in the first place.
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Question 7: What are the main sources of CO2 that account for the incremental
buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere?
The CO2 in the atmosphere is but one reservoir within the global carbon cycle, whose stocks and flows are
illustrated by Figure 6.1 from IPCC AR5 WG1:
Caption: Simplified schematic of
the global carbon cycle. Numbers
represent reservoir mass, also
called ‘carbon stocks’ in PgC (1 PgC
= 1015 gC = 3.8 GtCO2) and annual
carbon exchange fluxes (in PgC/yr).
Black numbers and arrows indicate
reservoir mass and exchange
fluxes estimated for the time prior
to the Industrial Era, about 1750;
red numbers and arrows indicate
current human influences.
There is a nearly-balanced
annual exchange of some 200
PgC between the atmosphere
and the earth’s surface (~80 Pg
land and ~120 Pg ocean); the
atmospheric stock of 829 Pg
therefore “turns over” in about
four years.
Human activities currently add 8.9 PgC each year to these closely coupled reservoirs (7.8 from fossil fuels
and cement production, 1.1 from land use changes such as deforestation). About half of that is absorbed
into the surface, while the balance (airborne fraction) accumulates in the atmosphere because of its multi-
century lifetime there. Other reservoirs such as the intermediate and deep ocean are less closely coupled
to the surface-atmosphere system.
Much of the natural emission of CO2 stems from the decay of organic matter on land, a process that
depends strongly on temperature and moisture. And much CO2 is absorbed and released from the oceans,
which are estimated to contain about 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. In the oceans CO2 is
stored mostly as bicarbonate (HCO3
-) and carbonate
(CO3
- -) ions. Without the dissolved CO2, the mildly
alkaline ocean with a pH of about 8 would be very
alkaline with a pH of about 11.3 (like deadly
household ammonia) because of the strong natural
alkalinity.
By geological standards, the Earth is currently starved
for atmospheric CO2. Past CO2 levels estimated from
various proxies are shown in the adjacent figure. The
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horizontal scale is geological time since the Cambrian, at about 550 million years ago. The vertical axis is
the ratio, RCO2, of past atmospheric CO2 concentrations to average values (about 300 ppm) during the
past few million years, This particular proxy record comes from analyzing the fraction of the rare stable
isotope 13C to the dominant isotope 12C in carbonate sediments and paleosols. Other proxies give
qualitatively similar results.
Only once in the geological past, the Permian period about 300 million years ago, have atmospheric CO2
levels been as low as now. Life flourished abundantly during the geological past when CO2 levels were
five or ten times higher than those today.
Returning to the present, human emissions of CO2 have
grown dramatically since 1900, as shown in the adjacent
AR5 WG1 Figure 6.8. Most of this CO2 comes from
combustion of fossil fuels for generating electrical power,
heating, and mobility, but about 4% is from cement
manufacture, where fossil fuel is used to bake limestone,
or calcium carbonate (CaCO3) to make calcium oxide (CaO)
and CO2. The natural land and ocean sinks have kept pace
with human emissions, maintaining the airborne fraction
at about one half.
Growing human emissions have increased the atmospheric
concentration of CO2, from about 280 ppm in 1900 to just
over 408 ppm today. The long atmospheric lifetime of CO2
and the roughly constant airborne fraction mean that this
concentration growth is proportional to the cumulative
human emissions. As shown in the chart below,
cumulative fossil fuel emissions to date have been
dominated by today’s developed countries, but cumulative
emissions in the future are expected to be dominated by
developing countries because of their scale and economic
growth. Note also that
because climate is
influenced
by the
concentration of CO2
(and hence cumulative
emissions), rather than
emissions themselves, it
is challenging to mitigate
human influences by
reducing emissions. For
example, CSSR Figure
ES.3 shows that all global
emissions must cease
beyond 2075 if human influences are to be stabilized at allegedly “safe” levels. The US and California
currently account, respectively, for about 14% and 1% of global emissions.
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Question 8: What are the main sources of heat that account for the incremental
rise in temperature on earth?
The only important primary heat source for the Earth’s surface is the Sun. But the heat can be stored in
the oceans for long periods of time, even centuries. Variable ocean currents can release more or less of
this stored heat episodically, leading to episodic rises (and falls) of the Earth’s surface temperature.
The “temperature” normally means the average surface temperature anomaly of the Earth. The actual
temperature varies tremendously with latitude and longitude and with altitude. It also varies daily and
diurnally: day-to-day or day-to-night temperature variations of 10 C are common. Daytime temperatures
of 40 C occur routinely in the tropics, and polar temperatures range from around 0 C in summer to as low
as -89 C in the Antarctic night. At the cruising altitudes of airliners, around 11 km, temperatures are often
around -60 C, as shown in the figure below. The incremental rises (and falls) in the global mean
temperature anomaly studied by climate scientists have been much smaller (about 1 degree Centigrade
over almost two centuries) than the natural variations of temperature mentioned above.
Incremental changes of the surface temperature anomaly can be traced back to two causes: (1) changes
in the surface heating rate; (2) changes in the resistance of heat flow to space. Quasi periodic El Nino
episodes are examples of the former. During an El Nino year, easterly trade winds weaken and very warm
deep water, normally blown toward the coasts of Indonesia and Australia, floats to the surface and
spreads eastward to replace previously cool surface waters off of South America. The average
temperature anomaly can increase by 1 C or more because of the increased release of heat from the
ocean. The heat source for the El Nino is solar energy that has accumulated beneath the ocean surface
for several years before being released.
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Longer-term ocean cycles that share some characteristics with El Ninos are the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. Like El Ninos, these longer-term oscillations episodically release
solar heat that has been stored at depth for many years, decades, or centuries.
The atmosphere, alone, is capable of internal variations on time scales of years. The Quasi-Biennial
Oscillation of the tropical stratosphere is an example, although it has almost no impact on surface
temperature. This is to be expected since the heat capacity of the stratosphere is very small compared to
that of the lower atmosphere, and heat exchange between the stratosphere and lower atmosphere is not
very efficient.
An example of a cause (2) [i.e., temperature increase due to a changing resistance to the heat flow to
space, with the same solar heating rate of the surface], is an increase in the concentration of the
greenhouse gas CO2. This greenhouse warming is such a central issue that we expand this part of the
answer to say a little more about it.
On average, the absorption rate of solar radiation by the Earth’s surface and atmosphere is equal to
emission rate of thermal infrared radiation to space. Much of the radiation to space does not come from
the surface but from greenhouse gases and clouds in the lower atmosphere, where the temperature is
usually colder than the surface temperature, as shown in the figure on the previous page. The thermal
radiation originates from an “escape altitude” where there is so little absorption from the overlying
atmosphere that most (say half) of the radiation can escape to space with no further absorption or
scattering. Adding greenhouse gases can warm the Earth’s surface by increasing the escape altitude. To
maintain the same cooling rate to space, the temperature of the entire troposphere, and the surface,
would have to increase to make the effective temperature at the new escape altitude the same as at the
original escape altitude. For greenhouse warming to occur, a temperature profile that cools with
increasing altitude is required.
The escape altitude will depend strongly on frequency, especially in
cloud-free areas, where it is dominated by the complicated absorption
bands of greenhouse-gas molecules. Some examples of cooling
infrared radiation observed by satellites over cloud-free regions are
given in the adjacent figure, which shows spectra of the thermal
radiation upwelling from the Earth to space. [“Apodized” means that
the raw data was processed to remove instrumental artifacts.] One
can see that the upwelling radiation varies greatly with location, being
most intense over the hot Sahara desert and weakest over the cold
Antarctic ice sheet. One can recognize various escape altitudes:
between about 800 cm-1 and 1200 cm-1, most of the radiation comes
from the surface since the atmosphere is largely transparent in this
“window” of frequencies. Over most of the CO2 absorption band
(between about 580 cm-1 and 750 cm-1) the escape altitude is the
nearly isothermal lower stratosphere shown in the first figure. The
narrow spike of radiation at about 667 cm-1 in the center of the CO2
band escapes from an altitude of around 40 km (upper stratosphere), where it is considerably warmer
than the lower stratosphere due heating by solar ultraviolet light which is absorbed by ozone, O3. Only at
the edges of the CO2 band (near 580 cm-1 and 750 cm-1) is the escape altitude in the troposphere where it
could have some effect on the surface temperature. Water vapor, H2O, has emission altitudes in the
troposphere over most of its absorption bands. This is mainly because water vapor, unlike CO2, is not well
mixed but mostly confined to the troposphere.
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Section III: Biographies
Dr. William Happer, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, is the
President of the CO2 Coalition, a non-profit (501 (c)(3)) organization established in 2015 to educate
thought leaders, policy makers and the public about the vital contribution made by carbon dioxide to our
lives and our economy. Dr. Happer began his professional career in the Physics Department of Columbia
University in 1964, where he served as Director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1976 to 1979.
He joined the Physics Department of Princeton University in 1980. From 1987 to 1990 he served as
Chairman of the Steering Committee of JASON. He served as Director of Energy Research in the U.S.
Department of Energy from 1991 to 1993. He is the Chairman of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. He
was a co-founder in 1994 of Magnetic Imaging Technologies Incorporated (MITI), a small company
specializing in the use of laser-polarized noble gases for magnetic resonance imaging. He invented the
sodium guidestar that is used in astronomical adaptive optics systems to correct for the degrading effects
of atmospheric turbulence on imaging resolution. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific
papers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences
and the American Philosophical Society.
Dr. Steven E. Koonin has been the director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress since its creation
in April 2012 by New York University, where he is also a University Professor, a Professor of Information,
Operations, and Management Sciences in the Stern School of Business and a Professor of Civil and Urban
Engineering in the Tandon School of Engineering. Prior to his current roles, Dr. Koonin served as
Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy from May 2009, following his confirmation
by the U.S. Senate, until November 2011. Prior to joining the government, Dr. Koonin spent five years,
from March 2004 to May 2009, as Chief Scientist for BP, p.l.c. From September 1975 to July 2006, Dr.
Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech and was the institute's Provost from February
1995 to January 2004. Dr. Koonin was a director of CERES, Inc., a publicly traded company pursuing
genetically enhanced bioenergy crops, from 2012 to 2015 and has been a Director of GP Strategies since
2016. His memberships include the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations and, formerly, the Trilateral Commission. He has been a
member of the JASON advisory group from July 1988 to May 2009, and from November 2011 to present,
and served as the group's chair from 1998 to 2004. Since 2014, he has been a trustee of the Institute for
Defense Analyses and has chaired the National Academies’ Divisional Committee for Engineering and
Physical Sciences. He also has served as an independent governor of the Los Alamos and Lawrence
Livermore National Security LLCs since July 2012 and of the Sandia Corporation from 2016 to 2017 and
was a member of the Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board from 2013 to 2016. Dr. Koonin holds a B.S. in
Physics from Caltech (1972) and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from MIT (1975) and has published some
200 peer-reviewed papers.
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences in the Department of Earth,
Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a specialist in
Atmospheric Physics. Dr. Lindzen received his B.S. in Physics in 1960, and his M.S. (1961) and Ph.D. (1964),
both in Applied Mathematics, from Harvard University, but his thesis (Radiative and photochemical
processes in strato- and mesospheric dynamics.) was in Atmospheric Physics. From 1968 to 1972 he served
of the faculty of the University of Chicago. From 1972 to 1983 he held the Gordon McKay and then the
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Robert P. Burden chairs in Meteorology at Harvard University where from 1980 until 1983, he was Director
of the Center for Earth and Planetary Physics. From 1983 until July 2013, he was the Alfred P. Sloan
Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of
the 2001 Scientific Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a member
of the Climate change science Program Product Development Advisory Committee of the Department of
Energy (term ended in 2009). . He has served as a member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Corporation and the Council of the American Meteorological Society. He received the Leo Prize of the
Wallin Foundation in Sweden (2006), the Distinguished Engineering Achievement Award of the Engineers’
Council (2009), and the Petr Beckmann Award of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (2012). He has
published over 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the American Meteorological
Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the
Norwegian Academy of Letters and Science.
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