Sir Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses in all human history. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer … not so much.

Krauthammer has written a classic anti-science screed, “Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment,” that recasts many favorite anti-scientific denier memes in odd terms. You still hear and see all of these today, so let me touch on a few of them. And as I discuss in Part 2, the article is most useful because it is a very clear statement of the real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science– they hate the solution.

As a physicist, my favorite denier talking point is his strange version of the old claim that “scientists are flip floppers, constantly changing their theories.” He writes:

If Newton’s laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

Now that is a strange claim. Newton’s Laws of Motion are still taught in every high school, in every introductory physics class in college, and even in graduate physics classes. Indeed, they are widely used everywhere to explain and estimate wide varieties of motion. Heck, even NASA still uses them: “The motion of an aircraft through the air can be explained and described by physical principals discovered over 300 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton.”

But Professor Krauthammer says they were overthrown and that 200 years of experiments and observations were wrong. What gives? Why aren’t all our planes falling out of the sky?

Newton’s laws are “excellent approximations at the scales and speeds of everyday life” that, along with his law of gravitation and calculus techniques, “provided for the first time a unified quantitative explanation for a wide range of physical phenomena.”

They fail in very special cases — speeds close to the speed of light (where you need Einstein’s special theory of relativity), near large gravitational fields (where you need to Einstein’s general theory of relativity) or at a very, very small scales (where you need quantum mechanics). Interestingly, many of the laws of those three theories are written in the same form as Newton’s and they revert to Newton’s equations for everyday life (see an example at the end of this post).

So Krauthammer’s statement is absurdly misleading, since he is implying that “200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation” were “overthrown” — when they weren’t. So his implication that all the unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation of climate science will be overthrown is equally absurd. Indeed, anybody seeking to replace climate science will have to come up with a more comprehensive theory that still explains everything we know from existing climate science and observations.

This may seem like a small point, but in fact it is a large point, one that former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren, has repeatedly made. Let me discuss this in the context of another anti-scientific talking point of Krauthammer’s:

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Yesterday, the Bush administration issued “the strongest endorsement yet of a global scientific consensus on the causes of climate change.” The administration buckled to a court order and released “a fresh summary of federal and independent research” which echoes the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and predicts:

An increased frequency and severity of heat waves is expected, leading to more illness and death, particularly among the young, elderly, frail and poor.” It added that deaths from cold would decline, but said uncertainties on both projections made it impossible to characterize the overall risk.

While President Bush’s chief scientific adviser has previously expressed strong agreement for the IPCC conclusion that there is a 90 percent chance that human activity contributes to “global temperature increase[s],” the administration has been reluctant to officially acknowledge the consequences and causes of climate change.

Significantly, this report contradicts the allegations of climate change deniers and pressures the Bush administration to stop dragging its feet on climate change. Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which sued the Bush administration and forced them to complete the new study, suggests that the administration grudgingly conceded to the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community:

For almost eight years they denied and downplayed the science. It sounds like they’ve been forced to acknowledge the consensus science.

Unfortunately, the administration’s acknowledgment may be too little, too late. As Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) points out, “the three-year delay of this report is sadly fitting for an administration that has wasted seven years denying the real threat of global climate change. In these lost years, we could have slowed global warming and advanced clean energy solutions, but instead America’s climate change strategy has been at best rhetorical, not real.”

I have been saying for quite some time that if we don’t act immediately to make deep cuts in CO2 emissions then we are headed towards the unmitigated catastrophe of 1000 ppm (see my August 2007 post, “Are Scientists Overestimating — or Underestimating — Climate Change“). Turns out that’s what Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland believes.

Rowland is one of the world’s foremost authorities on atmospheric chemisty “who shared a Nobel Prize for his work revealing the threat to the ozone layer from CFC’s and similar synthetic chemicals,” as NYT‘s Andy Revkin explained (here). Wednesday, Revkin

asked Dr. Rowland two quick questions. The first: Given the nature of the climate and energy challenges, what is his best guess for the peak concentration of carbon dioxide?

His answer? “1,000 parts per million.”

My second question was, what will that look like?

“I have no idea,” Dr. Rowland said. He was not smiling.

Readers of Climate Progress have an idea, since I have done my best to describe this grim future that scientists rarely model because they can’t believe humanity would be so self-destructive as to let it happen:

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