Many readers know that my "other" issue is food addiction, driven by my experience of being above 300 pounds for most of the time between ages 16 and 33, topping out at 365 in 1991. I am as sure I'm an addict (now in recovery) as I am sure that I'm alive.

You may well believe that there is no such thing as food addiction, if you're in the mainstream.

Sometimes, in my efforts at persuasion, I ask those I'm speaking with to just pause and imagine if it were true, to just allow for the possibility, nd then to take in what the implications might be.

That's why I have at least some empathy for William Happer, the Princeton physicist in the video below. Testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, he contends that 80 million years ago, Earth had substantially more CO2 in its atmosphere and prospered, proving that a rise in CO2 now isn't a bad thing. "We're actually in a CO2 famine right now."

In exasperated reaction, chairwoman Barbara Boxer points out that "a lot has happened since then."

My empathy with Happer comes from knowing what it's like to try to convince people of something they "know" isn't true. If I read his body language correctly — and yes, I'm treading far from certainty here, but you can watch him and decide for yourself — he's spent most of his life on the outside and long ago resorted to the lonely comfort of his intellect, which I can tell you is unreliable shelter indeed.

Please note — and perhaps I should have been at pains to declare this earlier, for all the people who stopped reading at the pop psychology interlude — I don't buy his contention for a second. Whatever happened in the long course of time happened at nature's pace, and what's happening now is at humankind's. Organisms had the fullness of time to adapt, while what we're doing is whiplash.

Now, of course, I'm no scientist, and he's a Princeton physicist. I rely on what I've read — so does he, I guess, unless he was there 80 million years ago — but still, he has more book learnin', for sure.

The reactions I've seen online to Happer's testimony, as least in the places I hang out, are predictably sneering. Some commenters are particularly impressed by Happer's position as chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, a Washington think tank funded in part by Exxon.

I think that's germane, but I don't think the guy has been bought off, as so many of the commenters suggested. I think his views came first, and Exxon just found them to be the sort of ideas they could support. Conceivably, someone someday could hire me to promote the ideas that I hold, because the funder will have some strong motive (economic or not) to have the ideas spread widely. Nothing wrong with that.

So I say, let's stick to the substance. There's quite enough there to fault. ('Course, I'm right about the food addiction thing. No, really.) 

A footnote: I saw the video on Barry Katz's blog, tfigblog.com. I've found a few items recently that made me think, "ouch, I shoulda had that," and if he stops by, he will recognize recent subject matter, for sure. I think you should check him out.