Claim:
“The current warming period began about 1800 at the end of the little ice age, long before there was an appreciable increase of CO2. There have been similar and even larger warmings several times in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age. These earlier warmings clearly had nothing to do with the combustion of fossil fuels. The current warming also seems to be due mostly to natural causes, not to increasing levels of carbon dioxide. Over the past ten years there has been no global warming, and in fact a slight cooling. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC models.”
— Testimony to Senate Energy Committee by William Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics at Princeton University, February 25, 2009
Truth:
William Happer is a physics professor at Princeton University, but he is also the Chairman of the Board at the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC, which has been a leading voice in opposing global warming action. Between 1998 and 2006, the Marshall Institute received $715,000 from ExxonMobil.
Mr. Happer’s testimony before the Senate Energy Committee was misleading on a variety of fronts. The planet has indeed warmed and cooled in cyclical fashion for millennia. But that’s not the point. The inference – that the current warming trend is just another naturally occurring warm cycle – is not true, as this post from Climate 411 explains.