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Joe Rogan Experience #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happerㅡ기후 위기 사기극

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt32chvO_iY

 

해당 출처는 **조 로건(Joe Rogan)**의 팟캐스트 녹취록으로, 은퇴한 학자들인 **리처드 린젠(Richard Lindzen)과 윌리엄 해퍼(William Happer)**가 출연하여 기후 변화 과학과 정치화에 대해 논의합니다. 그들은 특히 이산화탄소(CO2)가 기후 변화에 미치는 영향이 과장되었으며, 그 증가된 CO2가 실제로는 지구를 더 푸르게 만들었다는 주장을 펼칩니다. 이 대화는 "과학은 정립되었다(science is settled)"는 통념에 도전하고, 기후 변화 담론이 정치적 이득과 거대한 자금 흐름에 의해 어떻게 영향을 받고 있는지를 탐구합니다. 또한, 학계와 미디어가 반대 의견을 억압하고 있으며, 이는 과거의 우생학과 같은 유사한 이데올로기적 침해 사례와 비교됩니다.

 

Joe Rogan podcast Check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night All day Gentlemen first of all thank you very much for being here I really appreciate it Our pleasure My pleasure And if you don't mind would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your your resume like what you do i mean just a brief version of your uh credentials I'm Dick Linden and um my whole life has been in academia basically I finished my doctorate at Harvard and I did spend a couple of years uh at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder Colorado Then um part of that was because at Harvard uh I was working in atmospheric sciences but they had no one who dealt with observations So I went to Seattle for someone who did and then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there about three four years moved on to Harvard spent about 10 years there and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013 Um I've always enjoyed it I mean uh the field of atmospheric sciences when I entered it I mean the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable So you could uh look at phenomena One of them that I worked on was the some so-called quai bianial cycle Turns out the wind above the equator about 16 kilometers 20 kilometers goes from east to west for a year turns around goes the other way for the next year and so on and you know we worked out why that happened and there were other things like that So it was a very enjoyable period uh until global warming And sir would you uh tell everybody what your credentials are what you do where you from i'm Will Happer and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton And uh like uh Dick I'm a science nerd but I was actually born in India under the British Raj My father was a army officer in the Indian army Scottish and my mother was American And uh that was before World War II So when I came to America as a small child my mother was working in Oakidge for the Manhattan projec t So wow I remember you know the war days at Oakidge and uh that's probably why I went into physics Uh I thought this looks like interesting way to make a living and if I can do it I'll do it and and I have and I've uh done a number of things I spent a lot of time at universities at Colombia at Princeton I also uh served for a couple years in Washington as director of energy research uh under President Bush senior And uh I've learned a lot about climate from Dick my colleague here Uh I first became suspicious when I was director of energy research I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers money and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing And there was one exception that was the uh people working on climate and they would always be very resentful You know we work for Senator Gore we don't work for you And so I would tell them well okay let him pay for your next year's research I I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be glad to take my money That's interesting So Senator Gore has been involved in this whole climate thing for quite a long time then Oh yes Very long time When he was a senator before he was vice president That's right And when he made that movie An Inconvenient Truth what year was that again Jamie was like 98 or something Something like 99 that What is it oh really we're that off wow Okay So 2006 So when he made that film uh he he b there was always when I was a child I do remember Leonard Nemoy had a television show called In Search of Remember that show sure And on that show he warned of an oncoming ice age right do you remember that and I remember being a kid and freaking out like "Oh my god Spock is telling us the world's going to freeze This is terrifying." And then somewhere along the line it became global warming And uh initially in the 80s it was kind of funny People were saying "Well hairspray if more you use it you cou ld play golf deep in November." That was the ozone spray That was the ozone Yes But it was also a part of global warming They were worried about global warming but it they were worried about the ozone hole It wasn't CO2 as much back then CO2 seems to have really significantly become a part of the zeitgeist after this Al Gore film No no no It was before uh no it was a study in in terms of academic study for sure but in terms of people panicking when did CO2 look panicking I have no idea but now what happened was uh there was I would say with the first earth 1970 there was a real change in the environmental movement it began to focus is much more strongly on the energy sector and much less on saving the whales And there was a big difference I mean the energy sector involved trillions of dollars The whales not so much right and uh at that time it was cooling this global mean temperature which doesn't change much but you know you focus on one degree a half degree so it looks like something and it was cooling from the 1930s 1930s were very warm and it was getting cooler until the 70s and that's why they were saying well you know this is going to lead to an ice age and they focused on that for a while and then in the 70s and at that time well what do you say you know if you're worried about an ice age they said well it'll be the sulfates emitted by coal burning because that reflects light and the less light that we get the colder we'll get But then the temperature stopped cooling in the 70s and started warming and that's when they said well you have to warm now scare people with warming and uh you can't use the sulfates anymore but the scientist called uh Suki Manabi showed that even though CO2 doesn't do much in the way of warming doubling it will only give you a half degree or so but if you assumed med that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little you added water vapor which is a much more important greenhouse gas you had doubled the impa ct of CO2 which now gives you a degree which still isn't a heck of a lot but still it was saying you could increase it uh and that's when people started saying well now we better find CO2 it's increased because of industrialization and so on that began the demonization of CO2 Do you think there's just always people that are going to point to anything like this that's difficult to define and use it to their advantage oh yeah And this was a particular case Uh you you wanted to deal you know the energy sector is trillions of dollars anything you can do to overturn it change it replace fossil fuels it's big bucks right and one of the odd things I I think in politics I don't see it studied much Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars If you look at the K McKenzie report on uh you know eliminating CO2 net zero they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars Well if you're giving out that much you don't need that much of your politician All you need is millions for you r campaigning And all you're asking are the recipients of people who are getting the money that you are giving them A half percent a quarter percent you're you're golden So that's much better than giving out a h 100,000 and having all of it back Well the key though is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge There's no room for any rational debate And if you discuss it at all you are now a climate change denier Yeah Which is like being an antivaxer or you know fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing you could be called Now that that's a very interesting phenomenon I was looking at it On the one hand you're told the science is settled Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree which often makes you wonder I mean you went to college how many climate scientists did you know i mean a thousand But on the other hand if you read the IPCC reports they're pointing out for instance that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2 and we don't underst and them at all So here have the biggest phenomena we don't understand at all but the science has settled Who knows what that means well it's also there's this very bizarre dynamic of the Earth's temperature itself which has never been static No How would it remain static that would involve a hugely reactive system Doesn't make any sense And and but everyone seems to be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the earth is warming We have to act now You say everyone No I don't say everyone A lot of politicians A lot of polit politicians are very attractive to this because it gives them power right and it's hard to define and you can argue and if you argue against it you're a bad person You you do all that but uh you know we spend part of a year in France my wife is French You know ordinary people once you get to the countryside don't take this all that seriously right uh here too I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated Yes But unfortunately these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians decisions where they have to like in the UK they were getting rid of cows They were forcing people to kill cows paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills Right Right I mean it makes people poorer uh it's making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it and that involves billions of people No I mean it's doing phenomenal damage and pain but uh you know I think for politicians and for many people who are well off they need something that gives meaning to their life and saving the planet seems sufficiently yes uh grandiose but they're how would um how are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity okay Well by making it expensive by eliminating fossil fuels fossil fuels are cheaper Uh at least the experience in the UK is when you switch to quote renewables it tripled the price of electricity Right but what I'm talking about is like third wo rld countries parts of the world that are undeveloped they can't afford it And that's all it is They can't afford it And but they also to if they didn't follow these net zero policies what kind of plants are we talking about are we talking about coal plants coal anything whatever is available Yeah I mean you know so you think even though coal does pollute the environment and it releases particulates right it's that's an issue right how shall I put it you know it's always a matter of cost We have a plant I think in Alabama that has basically as clean as any other plant that burns coal You can clean it you can scrub it you can get rid of almost everything except CO2 Okay So um the particulates aren't as big of an issue as they used to be in the past Is that what it is they're more efficient Okay Yeah So stopping So this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world that do not have electricity And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants in and not bringing these people into the first world Yeah And there are of course the alternative natural gas and so on which are available in places uh you know there are places where you have you're lucky like in Norway or Canada you know Quebec where you have hydro which is intrinsically clean but uh there there's a problem with politicians I remember once being in DC and some Republican politicians came and said "You know what we just did we banned incandescent light bulbs." They said "Wasn't that a great thing?" I said "That's the stupidest thing I've heard today What What's the point?" Because at the time what was replacing it compact fluorescents which were awful all they had to do was wait and do nothing and LEDs would come along and people would say okay I prefer that instead uh they feel they have to do something and they would switch the fluoresence which turned out to be terrible for people yeah so incandescent aren't bad for you they wer e simply less efficient than the you know in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light I mean LEDs are phenomenal that way right they're the Yeah Well you know it's interesting when they have these decisions that they make like that that do turn out to be negative ultimately and that yet people still allow them to make silly decisions that don't seem to be making sense Yeah I think there's an old cliche money is the root of all evil Yeah that's what I was going to get to I this is the disturbing thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting especially a lot of very polite educated people that have followed the narrative that you follow if you're a good person and if you're a person who trusts science and that is that like we have a serious problem we have to address it now or there will be no America for our grandchildren This is the thing that we keep you mentioned a tough thing there the business trust science Yes It's not a great idea because th at isn't science is not a source of authority It's a methodology Uh it's based on challenge Right and so where did this narrative come from then trust the science the success of science You know in other words this is a relatively new way to approach the world I mean few hundred years Mhm And uh the notion is and I think it's been stated many times that you test things and if they fail to predict correctly they're wrong So you find out what's wrong with them You don't uh fudge them You don't change the rules Um it's uh led to immense improvements in life development of all sorts of things And so it has a good reputation Uh politicians have less of a reputation So they wish to co-opt the reputation of science Yes that's a very good point because try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing Yeah Cell phone technology nuclear power so many things that people go "That's incredible that they did that." Well that's also confusing technology with science the result of science right absolutely Yeah Which is also an issue right and when you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science you mentioned Gore at the beginning Yes You know with that thing he was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together And uh it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2 Yeah Greg Braden was on the podcast recently He was explaining there have been times where the CO2 was much higher in the atmosphere but the the temperature was colder Oh yeah So it's not like we can point to like look at the dinosaurs We don't want to live the way the dinosaurs live Look how much CO2 they had Like and then the other really inconvenient thing with CO2 is that the Earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time I mean I think we'll speak to that but I mean essentially the increased amount of CO2 in the industrial era has added greatly uh to the arable land And in fact there's a funny story Do you know the name Eio Wilson have you ever heard that name i do I have heard it but I don't know where he is He wrote he was a biologist at Harvard He wrote about sociology His specialty were ants and bees and things social insects And uh he was giving a talk and um it came up for reasons that were not obvious to me He was talking about the population of humanoids and he was mentioning that you go back uh you know a few hundred thousand years and uh you began the first humanoids and there they got to about a few million but then during the last glacial maximum the numbers went down to tens of thousands It was a complete wipeout of humans So I asked him afterwards I said "Do do you think this could have anything to do with the fact that CO2 was so low that there was no food?" And his response was to turn around and walk away That's an inconvenient truth sir It's just to me it's very strange to see an almost un animous acceptance of that we have settled this that's the science has settled from so many people and both the left and in academia and even on the right there's a lot of people on the right that believe that Yeah I know and it should be the first thing that makes you suspicious Yeah Right There's a consensus Yeah I mean this is how science is done and something that's never static This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer A nice cold Happy Dad is low carbonation gluten-free and easy to drink No bloating no nonsense Whether you're watching a football game or you're golfing watching a fight with your boys or out on the lake these moments call for a cold happy dad People are drinking all these seltzers and skinny cans loaded with sugar But Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in a normalsized can Can't decide on a flavor grab the variety pack Lemon lime watermelon pineapple and wild cherry They also have a grape flavor in collaboration with Death Row Records and Snoop Dog g They have their new lemonade coming out as well Happy Dad available nationwide across America and in Canada Go to your local liquor store or visit happydad.com For a limited time use the code Rogan to buy one Happy Dad Trucker hat and get one free Enjoy a cold Happy Dad Must be of legal drinking age Please drink responsibly Happy Dad Hard Seltzer tea and lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County California You mean the weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been you know from core samples over a long period of time It's this crazy wave and like no one was controlling it back then and we're supposed to believe that we can control it now that we can do something about it There's something else about it which I find funny and you might have some insight into it People pay no attention to the actual numbers Yeah I mean we're not talking about big changes You know in other words uh you know for the temperature of the globe as a whole between now and the last glacial maximum the difference was 5 degrees But that was because most of the earth was not affected much of the earth anyway very much But you know somebody says one degree a half degree what's his name cuchier at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for I mean doesn't anyone ask a half degree i mean I deal with that between you know 9:00 a.m and 10:00 a.m I mean it does seem crazy It just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people And what I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier How much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that's called save the world climate some something crazy like that where everybody goes they call it the inflation reduction act Oh even better Who doesn't want to reduce inflation and then next thing you know there's windmills killing whales and all kinds of nonsense But the the point b eing it's it it is a fascinating science Like the science itself is fascinating Oh yeah you get rid of the ideology and you stop attaching this thing versus you know you're either pro-science or anti-cience Just look at the actual data of it It's absolutely fascinating And these minute changes the fact that the procession of the equinoxes where the world earth wobbles like the whole thing is nuts Like the whole temperature and it has to stay relatively stable in order to keep us alive in terms of like can't go too low can't go too high We're in this goldilock zone The interesting thing is during the ice ages we almost get wiped out Got really close right and what's interesting about that is as far as temperature goes Okay Yeah The poles have gotten much colder You have ice covering Illinois 2 kilometers of ice That that's uninhabitable But you get south of 30° latitude not very different from today in terms of temperature And so you would think you had a 100,000 years people would sort of migrate to an area where it was now pleasant Trouble was without CO2 which went down to about 180 there wasn't enough food for the people Oh so there wasn't enough plant life Yeah Yeah Get down to 160 150 all life would die There would be not enough food for anything What's it at now like 240 no we're now 400 400 430 maybe today Yeah Okay Um when you first started discussing this and when you first started getting interested in this how much push back did you get um interesting question actually quite a lot but I mean it took very funny forms So for instance uh in let's see 1989 for instance I sent a paper to science magazine questioning whether this was something to worry about and they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest So I sent it to the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and they reviewed it and published it and the editor was immediately fired Wow About 10 years later working with some colleagues at NASA we found something called the iris e ffect That clouds which were greenhouse effect at the upper levels uh contracted when it got warm letting more heat out so cooling as a negative feedback And we got the paper put it got reviewed was published again The editor was fired immediately but the new editor came on immediately and said "He's inviting papers to criticize it." And suddenly there were tons of papers criticizing it looking for anything that differed from what we did including one that found a difference that actually uh made the CO2 even less important but it was different So he thought he could pass it through No it it's insane And even now there's something called gatekeepers I don't know Do are you familiar with the uh release of emails from East Anglia no I'm not Okay This is 20 years ago or something almost Uh somebody anonymous released the emails from a place in England the University of East Anglia which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm And they were communicating with other people like Michael Ma nn and so on And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on And that was all public And it had no impact at all How that sounds like that should be illegal Yeah Well you know the whole business with how shall I put it peer review it is not ancient Before World War II very few journals had peer review And in fact when I have students look at old journals from the 19th century one of the big surprises is they are less formal than today's papers They are literally discussions among scientists about their results their questions their uncertainties and so on There's real communication today I mean there's a much more formality in the papers There's also in my field the meteorological society actually did a poll or a study how often are papers referred to and it turns out the average paper is referred to once Wow I mean so you have these things papers are written to satisfy the funding agency Nobody seems to pay attention to them How did you get involved in this well uh I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy and that's what really sucked me into it I had never paid much attention to science climate science before but I was spending a lot of money the taxpayers's money on it and so I thought I ought to learn a little bit about it And uh I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not appreciate my questioning They were very strange because almost any other science when they got a call from Washington come in and tell us what you're doing they were just delighted to come and make a case about how important their work was But the climate scientists were completely different you know Did anybody engage with you yeah they had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn't come And so they would come you know and be very sullen and uh they wouldn't answer questions And you know you can't have a seminar without asking questions That's how you learn So they would come t o try to get funding from you and they wouldn't answer questions That's right That sounds crazy That sounds like people that don't think they have to convince you that what they're doing is important so they're entitled to that money Well that's right Well you know I was working for President uh Bush Senior and when uh Carter and Gore won the election you know Gore couldn't wait to uh fire me you know at the behest of all of his protees Mean Clinton and Gore Clinton and Gore Yeah that's right So he uh you know Washington fortunately it's very hard to make anything happen including firing someone you want to fire because you can't find them in the orchard So it took him two or three months to find me but they finally did fire me I was glad to be fired I wanted to go back to do research I was tired of being a bureaucrat So I'm you know grateful in some sense for that your colleagues that you that weren't working with you like other scientists were they reluctant to discuss this kind of i nformation with you guys when when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct well you know my field is actually hard physics You know I'm I'm a nuclear physics trained and I've done a lot of work with lasers and uh these are thing you you can measure They don't have much political influence A lot of them have a military significance And in fact the reason I was brought to Washington is because I invented a an important part of the Star Wars defense uh uh initiative which I can say about later but uh I had never really paid any close attention to science until then but I I was climate science Yeah Climate science I should say Yes So once I had this experience in Washington I started looking to it a little bit But I I didn't have time to look a lot because my own research was going still at Princeton and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company And so you know forming the company and getting it going and funded used up most of my time I didn't have time to look at climate but eventually that was behind me and I invited Dick to come give a seminar at u the colloquium at Princeton and that's really when I began to get very interested in it and I realized that it's just completely different from normal science you know it it uh completely politicized if you can't ask a question you know that's a bad bad sign and um and if you have a 100% consensus determining the truth That's an even worse sign because you know the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation and that wasn't true of the science the climate science community you know they would predict all these things and none of them ever happened and there was no consequence you know one failure after another and nothing ever happened the funding kept pouring in Now is this behind the scenes is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue t hat that causes or do they just accept it well I think for the most part speaking as a physicist I don't know how it is in other fields and and from Princeton I think most of my colleagues recognize that uh there's a lot of nonsense there but they're afraid to speak up right because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money We Dick mentioned that the love of money is the root of all evil and in universities for example but at Princeton we have enormous new building program it's funded to a large extent from overhead from climate grants you know and you're talking about you know not small change you know you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars you know for construction so it's it's like you know this famous drama of this Norwegian playwright Enemy of the people Ipsson And and uh the point of the drama was there was this uh resort town in Norway where you would come and you would uh uh be treated at the spa You drink the water and and go home healthy Well people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid And a local doctor said "You know we're killing people We're not curing them." And he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city So it's it's that syndrome It's an ancient human problem right so it's it's always been there and it's there in spades with climate It's part of it Uh another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue I mean in the US and I think that's in a way fortunate It's almost a right versus left issue Yeah And as a result uh you have people the universities are almost entirely on the left and so it's uh something they support You know the money end of it is sort of funny I mean I have the feeling at MIT that our president uh Sally Cornbluth you know probably spends her time worrying about uh how she can use climate money to support the music department I don't know I mean so when they get funding for climate they can allocate it as they wish oft en you know it is fungeable okay you get this huge overhead you know 50% 60% of your grant goes to the administration and not to your research you know they can do what they like with the overhead interesting yeah this episode is brought to you by Zip Recruiter you don't think about it too much but the holiday season comes with some pretty unique jobs like a haunted house worker a professional pumpkin carver gift wrapper elf or real bearded Santaas And all these jobs require a unique set of skills If you need to hire for a role like that or any role really Zip Recruiter is the way to go especially since you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/roganogen Whatever you're looking for Zip Recruiter can help you find the perfect match and it works fast You'll be able to find out if there are any people in your area who are qualified for your role right away You'll also have access to their advanced resume database which helps you connect with top candidates sooner Let Zip Recruiter find the right people for your roles seasonal or otherwise Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day And right now you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/roganogen Again that's ziprecruiter.com/rogan Zip recruiter the smartest way to hire And if they take a a a step outside of the narrative and say I think we need to reexamine what's going on with CO2 in the atmosphere and it seems there's a politicalization of this subject and that's bad for science that's bad for education it's bad for everything Let's take a step back They would immediately lose so much fun Well the the main thing it's bad for is for overhead income to the university Exactly Exactly from an administrator By the way I mean this is something that the press didn't deal with very much Trump was cutting the overhead He was uh saying that he didn't want to have that included in grants I don't think the public realized how significant that was for better or for wors e Yeah Well I think most people have no idea where grants go They they don't even think about it No I mean uh and the amount of money that's involved Yeah When I was active if I got a grant I'm a theoretician so I didn't need laboratory work It mainly was for support of students and so but then 50% of it went to the administration Yeah It's like a lot of charities almost Yeah A lot of money goes to overhead A lot of money goes to executives A lot of money goes to the administration on grants It's and some of it is reasonable Sure But but it's also you're kind of attached to keeping that money flowing in And there's a gigantic incentive to not rock the boat and not discuss it the same way you would discuss nuclear science right Oh yeah and and the attraction I mean if you're an administrator if you're a president of a university uh that often overrides everything else you know that uh you're raising money I remember years ago I started college at Wensler and I made the mistake of mentio ning to someone that I appreciated the fact they never bothered me I transferred out after my sophomore year so it began bothering me and I realized the president of Wensler was making over a million and a half dollars This is years ago probably making much more now And the uh fundraiser came back to me and said "Do you know how much money she raises?" And I said "Oh so she's on commission." Yeah right Yeah that that is kind of what's going on Yeah that it gets real weird when you bring that kind of stuff up and people get very reluctant to have these discussions They don't want to rock the boat I've I've talked to a lot of friends in academia and they say people pull you aside like in quiet corners to discuss how this is kind of bullshit But there's also the alumni I find this with Harvard especially A lot of the people who graduate from Harvard really love the place for better or for worse and uh they will do anything to protect it Mhm And does it make sense Especially since to stick your neck out there's not a whole lot of benefit unless you're writing a book about you know how ridiculous current climate change models are A lot of people did at first Enhoff A lot of politicians wrote books saying this is a hoax this and they managed to ride that out I mean by just keeping on demanding that it be accepted It's interesting It is interesting It's because it's universally accepted on the left Any discussion at all about I've had conversations with people and I say "What do you why do you think that?" Like "What do you know about climate change?" And almost none of them have any idea what the actual predictions are how wrong they've been what Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie which is so far off If you He thought we were all going to be dead today right there's very little change between 2006 and today right i mean as I mentioned before I think for some people its importance is it gives quote meaning to their life Yes um it becomes a part of an ideology and it's very cult-like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things unfortunately Um what do you think are the major factors you talked about water vapor CO2 there's methane There's a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the Earth moving in any direction Correct Okay Yeah I let me back off that a little because one of the things that is sort of strange is the narrative itself deals with global temperature Not clear what that is I mean uh some average over the whole globe How do you take it what do you do with it but more than that uh what is climate and you know there is a definition it's an arbitrary definition and uh it's that uh it's time it's time variation on time scales longer than 30 years It's pretty arbitrary Yeah But it distinguishes it from weather which is changes from day to day or week to week It's right So if they can see a rise in temperature over 30 years they start getting concerned They start calling it climate Okay Now you can take data from every station and filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years That's called a lowass filter And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe And it turns out very poorly because most climate change by that definition is regional So for instance uh in this area let's say the states like Louisiana Alabama Gulf states they had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming Nobody paid much attention to it because that's normal Different areas do different things Um you have reasons why it's local I mean if you're near a coast near a body of water the circulations in the ocean are bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time on time scales ranging from a few years for El Nino and so to a thousand years And so this has nothing to do with the global average Um the whole business that the global average is an issue was something that was created for people studying different planets And so you'd look at t he average for each planet and that varied quite a lot So that was useful But for looking at the Earth's climate I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device That makes sense How much of a factor does the sun play obviously a lot It heats us up but like yeah the changing of you know that's something there's argument about uh I think you know for instance uh a man called Malankovich in around 1940 made a convincing argument and I think now it's correct that orbital variations created a change in insulation incoming sunlight in the Arctic in summer and that controlled the ice ages and the the thinking was pretty simple Uh he was saying that uh you know every winter is cold every winter has snow but what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt you build a glacier M takes thousands of years but you know eventually it's big and uh in recent years for instance uh there have been young people who have shown that that works It's interesting there was even a national program called climap to study this It's around 1990 or so and they found something peculiar They found that uh there were peaks in the solar the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume but that the time series were not lining up right The young people looking at this said you're looking at the wrong thing If you're looking at the insulation you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume not just the ice volume And then the correlations were excellent So this was a theory Malanchovich that I think has been reasonably sustained Uh but it the people doing this got no credit nothing cuz you know early in my career these people would have been rewarded Now it didn't contribute to global warming Nobody pays attention to it Joe let let me add to what Dick has said which I agree with Um but uh you asked about the sun and as Jake says that uh is a controversial issue The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it It's all CO2 CO2 is the control knob Don't confuse me with other possibilities But nobody is is quite sure about the sun We have not got good records of the sun for a long time So we're stuck with proxies of uh how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago And uh one of the proxies is uh when the sun activity changes it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere Things like carbon 14 or burillium 10 These stick around for long you know thousands of years or longer And you can from that infer how many of them were made uh 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago And they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant It's very clear for example that the amount of carbon 14 you know this radioactivity uh that's produced changes from year to year If you don't take that into account you get all the dates wrong from carbon 14 dating you know where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon 14 in it and you get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies There's a pretty good historical record of that So it's clear the sun is is always changing And over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum there have been many warmings and coolings very large warmings and coolings And that's particularly not noticeable near the Arctic you know in high latitudes in the north For example my father's home in Scotland I was a kid I would walk up into the hills south of Edinburgh and you could see these farms from the year 1000 where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today It was it's too cold today but it was clearly warm enough in the year 1000 which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland So what caused those it was not uh people burning oil and coal you know right and so I think the best uh guess as to what it was is some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days because they do correlate with the carbon 14 That's absolutely fascinating Mhm Now when we have estimates like say of the the Jurassic or any any dinosaur age was there is there enough of an understanding of the differences in temperatures back then that we know whether or not they ever experienced ice ages oh yeah So we can go back 65 100 million years You can go 500 million years 500 million years and evidence of ice ages Absolutely There always been There's always been an ice age and a warming and they don't they don't correlate very well with CO2 You can also estimate the past CO2 levels and they don't correlate with ice ages What's special about the recent ice ages is they're pretty periodic So for 700,000 years almost every 100,000 years you have a cycle Wow Uh if you go back further than that you begin seeing that fa ll apart And for about 3 million years 40,000 years is the dominant period And then you go back further than that and you don't have ice ages for a long time Wow Yeah It's very very poorly understood I would say And so and there's also no way to track it Like there's no way to tell what's going to happen to the sun They they have some sort of an understanding there's increased activity It's not clear that solar activity was the issue could have been many factors Well you know how shall I put it uh with the ice ages as I say orbital theory was the main thing Uh the fact that you have you know various factors determining the orbit of the earth versus the sun and so on uh give you periodic changes in the incoming radiation as a function of geography in the earth Joe let me add again to what Dick has said that uh he correctly said that the current ice ages which are queer periodic really only began 3 million years or so ago and at first they were oscillating a lot faster than today and tha t was approximately the time that the ismas of Panama closed So one of the suspicions is that when the Panama Ismas closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific that made a huge difference in the transport of heat and things like the Gulf Stream For example the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe And that was about the time that the these fluctuating ice ages began Wow But you know we've set back the the serious study of climate I think by 50 years by this manic focus on CO2 If your theory doesn't have CO2 in it forget it You know you won't get funding And so the the the true answer I mean to me you know there was a period uh 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was flegiston There was this magic subject uh you know non-existent But everyone had to believe in plagistine and it turned out it was nonsense It wasn't there at all But but you couldn't get anyone to sup port you unless you believed in pluggistan So I call this the plagistan era of climate science where plagistan is CO2 You know well this is what confused me You gentlemen are academics You're obviously very intelligent people There's other very intelligent people that are involved in academia How does this problem get solved like how do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance well I think stopping the funding for uh this massive funding for climate would help because it's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds If you're willing to support the narrative you will be handsomely rewarded and you'll be elected to societies you'll win prizes and you'll be shunned again if you don't That That's right So I think for example if some administration in Washington wants to slow this down and get some sanity they should cut the funding or or they should at least open up the funding to alternate uh theories of what is controlli ng climate because the the theory that the control knob is CO2 doesn't work It's completely clear it doesn't work and it just seems so insane that if we move in the same direction and we as you say if it does if it really is holding back climate science by 50 years like that that's a travesty Well you know Dick would have made a lot more progress and his colleagues would have made a lot more progress if they hadn't been forced to deal with this CO2 cult and we might understand climate today without that There there are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general Uh you know one of them is numbers I mean uh it isn't having more people work on something Uh you want to have an environment where there's freedom um often think I mean Will is familiar with this There's a photograph from 1929 of all the world's physicists at a Salv conference This is a golden age of physics Um if you quintupled the number of people working on physics would you have improved the situation i doub t it And so you know I think freedom is much more important than just piling on There's the photo things Yeah you have that Great There they are Not quite It's not the same Mhm But that's a Saltway Conference Absolutely Now the 1929 had the Curies Well Pierre might be there Sorry it's okay Yeah Either way we I guess we Yeah but I mean I wondered at times you know when you had uh the Soviet competition with the US and uh they were the first ones into space and we suddenly began a program to get more and more kids to get into STEM Mhm um that has its downside First of all uh you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much And the second thing is with peer review I mean peer review is new I mean it wasn't that common before World War II but people have pointed out uh it has its virtues but uh you know you can see the the Royal Medological Society for instance used to give you instructions and the instructions were you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error t hat you can identify I or if it's plagiarized it's repeating something that already exists And that was pretty fair because how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not or so on that that's asking too much of that But today peerreview is almost a process to enforce conformity uh if you're not going with the flow you can get rejected And that's a lot of things structurally need to be I think rethought a little bit The physicists have done pretty well with archive where they have a publication vehicle using the internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what's up on it But all sorts of things like that need to happen I mean what will is saying is true I'm sure I science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this Well it just seems like it's bad for any kind of science and that open free discussion and debating ideas based on their merit and what data you have That's what it's supposed to be about It's not supposed to be attac hed to an ideology and I just don't understand how it got this far and how it can be separated So when when did it really become a problem where ideology started invading into certain segments of science well it's happened many times in the past Joe Climate is only the most recent Uh so it's just a natural thing that happens Well for example there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe where the claim was that uh the great gene pool you know of the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low Italians and Eastern European Jews and China It was all completely nonsense But they had learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that And you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton Alexander Graham Bea Bell being great eugenicist you know protecting the American genome and it was all nonsense It just complete bullshit And yet uh and the only thing that stopped it really was uh was the Nazis because they took it over with a vengeance You know they were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and and Britain and they took it to its you know absurd extreme extreme They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America a man called Laughlin But oh my goodness No I mean uh what Will is saying I mean it had a practical consequence by the way It actually led to the immigration restriction act of 1924 which held that America was going to restrict immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century So there would be a quotota for England and Scotland which was fine a little bit less for Germany almost nothing for Eastern Europe almost nothing for Italy and so on And and that was used in the runup to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe Wow Um and it was only changed in 1960 So essentially you were keeping out Jews Eastern Europeans Chinese until then because of eugenics in 1924 We you know the average person that's not involved in science a lways wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals or they're trying to figure out how the world works When you hear stories like that you hear that kind of stuff and you're just like "Oh this has always been a problem You're dealing with people human beings That's the problem right that that's that's getting to the heart problem Yeah Joe Joe says this this famous quote by Emmanuel Kant you know from the crooked timber of mankind no straight thing was ever made Oo that goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society What could have been done to protect the scientific process from this sort of an ideological invasion or at least shelter it somewhat to to make sure that something like eugenics doesn't ever get pushed or climates or any anything that's just not logical and doesn't fit with the data well the trouble is you know when something like eugenics comes around uh the population is told that this is science right and uh how are they going to say no i mean you had uh bar various uh famous laboratories devoted to this And it it wasn't a fringe thing right and so I don't know how you would distinguish it at that time from science Today there are books on it and you know you have the correspondence of biologists who are saying well it's a little bit dicey but they're saying it's it's bringing it to the fore of public attention So maybe that's a good thing M well it just makes you shudder to think like what happens if the Nazis didn't take over Germany and eugenics continued to progress in America That's terrifying to think where we would be today Right Right We've been a much poorer country because so many leading Americans you know creative productive people have immigrated you know fairly recently also probably would have led to some horrific actions in order to enact this Mhm Yeah I mean when you put things in the hands of politicians um there is a disconnect I mean the business with the light bulbs I ment ioned right it wasn't malice it was ignorance And you combine ignorance with power and you often get nonsense and the narrative that you're doing something good for everybody Yeah Yeah Yeah Dick has often made the point which I agree with that politicians and and sort of society leaders are the worst in situations like this The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable Yeah So for example I like to tease Dick because he's a Harvard grad about the Salem witch trials but they were orchestrated by people from Harvard You know it was not the common people Have you ever read into that at all yeah I've looked into it carefully What do you think about the Urgot poisoning theory well um does it make sense i I don't know Uh most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Tunberg by the way And uh you know they had these visions uh of uh the person they were accused u consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of seeing things and uh that was accepted as testimony It was called spectral evidence And so when wow when finally the trials were stopped it wasn't for the right reason which is that there's no such thing as witches You know they were stopped because spectral evidence you know was uh shaky It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point So it was getting very dangerous you know but one of them was selling a book on how to how to detect witches cotton matter you know Well I've read that as well about the printing press When the printing press was first devised a lot of people like oh we're going to get so much knowledge No a lot of the early books were like how to detect witches right that's right Malus Maliporum you know the hammer of the evildoers That was the first book on witches What I'd read about Salem though was that they had core samples that detected a late frost and that they believe this late frost might have contributed to uh urgot growth cuz apparently that's that does happen a lot when the plants grow and then they freeze and then they get mold on them and that mold could contain urgot and that has LSD- like properties which totally makes sense if they're eating LSD laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch but either way Yeah Yeah it took I I think that's a kinder explanation of what happened I'm less generous Well you know more about the behind the scenes Yeah No but I mean people I think what Will is saying is there are people who always want to have a chance to do in their neighbor Yes Sure And if you could say your neighbor's a witch what better way we can't have witches in our neighborhood Let's burn them or drown them at the time right that's what they did to people Yeah Yeah Well that that's one of the parts of Orbal's 1984 that many people forget but a big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate And so people seem to have this need for hatred You know you have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or someb ody And so if you're hating CO2 at least that's better than hating your neighbor Well if you're on Twitter you're you're using up a lot more than two minutes of hate Uh-huh Well you know but even with political figures I'm always surprised I mean seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear probably does not mean well Yeah And yet we continually fall over and over again Yeah All of them And you know other countries do the same pattern Oh yeah That's what's dark It just seems like we're terrified of being terrified and we want safety and we want someone comes along and scares the shit out of us and vows to protect us Yep Yeah Well children do this all the time Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself Well there is also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world Um but when you have a just everything scares the shit out of everybody everything is the end of the world and climate being one of the key ones that I hear all the time with young people In fact there were some recent surveys that were done if you know about these like the things that give young people the most anxiety and climate is at the very top of that list Yeah I mean it's really strange to think that this is causing young people not to want to have children not to want to continue to have no hope for the future This is bizarre and just live in constant fear Yeah Of one day But meanwhile is anybody paying attention to all these rich people buying shoreline property yeah Like do you think they're stupid do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumbass cuz he's buying these giant mansions like right on the ocean like do you really think the water's going to raise that much that's how I put it I mean you know even the people who are pushing it at MIT I mean buy houses on the shore Obama did They got that beautiful house and Martha's Vineyard It's like if you've looked at the timelines I'm sure you have like time-lapse video of the shoreline from like 1980 all the way up to 2025 It doesn't move I mean it goes a little bit in Malibu and there's a lot of they go back much further than that Yes Yeah I think Joe it's true Sea level is rising It's different at different shores because the land is also rising You're sinking but it's not very much And it hasn't accelerated the it there's no evidence that CO2 has made any difference It started rising roughly 1,800 at the end of the little ice age and it's not not changing very much And wasn't there like an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that's increased recently That's right Well I mean that that's always variable right but when that happens how come that doesn't hit the news if if the ice goes away then it's going to hit the news Oh my god look at this We lost a chunk the size of Manhattan and everybody freaks out Well we were supposed to be ice free 20 years ago Yes Yeah Uh no you know our girl was just off by a little bit He's just give him some decades to be vindicated That is the point that I think u h people have made A test usually means if you fail it you've done something wrong Yes uh only in theology does it mean that you change the goals Right Right Especially when you invented the theology because climate is very much like a religion or at least the adherence to it is very religious like or I should say cultlike Right Because it's not like there's a higher power It's it's everyone's just terrified and you have to change everything you do now cuz you're guilty And it used to be that like the sign of virtue would have was to have an electric car and then every my favorite thing is going up behind Teslas now and they have bumper stickers that say I bought this before Elon went crazy So now they don't I mean it's just everyone is trying to figure out what they're supposed to do in order to still be accepted by their group And the climate one is one that if you bring it up with people it's almost like you're talking about witches Like they want to get out of there Like if you act ually looked at Oh yeah Yeah Yeah It's a religious thing or a cultlike thing Absolutely Yeah And they don't really It's not like they've studied it a lot and like Yeah It's really interesting And this is why I think that we've got to reduce CO2 and you have like this informed discussion with someone You go "Oh okay So when did you start reading about this what book was that where you know did you see this and did you see that?" And okay And you now you're having an informed discussion But that's not what it's like It's like you bring it up and they're like "Oh god climate change is settled Climate change is settled." Okay you don't believe in Even Bernie when I had him on when he was talking about climate change is a real a giant problem and we started showing the Washington Post thing that says that we're in a global cooling period and it's raised up sometime over the last but if you look at like the peaks and valleys the main thing is like this has never been static And I said to Ber nie I'm like there's a lot of money in this Bernie Like you've got to admit this like this isn't something that we have to act on now to save each other It might be something that we're being fucked with And that's what it seems like to me It's like well the question is why does he find it so enthus why is he so enthusiast wonderful for funding I think he's overall a very good person I really do And I think he he would have been a fascinating president But uh I think there are too many things to concentrate on in the world And if you really want to do a deep dive into the actual science of climate and CO2's impact on climate and what actually causes us to get warmer or colder that's a lot of work It's a lot of work And I don't know if the senator of Vermont has enough time to do that work and to really do it objectively or to talk to someone like you to have an informed conversation with someone who studied it for decades and go "Okay there's a lot more to this than I thought and why d oes it fit in the same damn pattern where people get attached to an idea?" because that idea is attached to their ideology But you're hitting on a problem and I think Will knows this as well A lot of this stuff is actually tough material Yes I mean for instance uh you know the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole that's actually handled in a third-year graduate course uh you know it deals with hydrodnamic instability which is a complicated subject and it it's a real problem in a field It's true throughout science where you're trusting people to behave I think decently uh but the m material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone and how you deal with it how you approximate I mean the same is true with uh nuclear power with other things these are technical ical issues They're not trivial and you're asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions That's a tough issue Um it involves a certain amount of trust and what we're describing is a situation where the trust is being uh violated Yeah There's this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loves so much Trust but verify Yes And um it's hard to verify you know if you're an average citizen Yeah Something about climate Yeah Right That's what's so frustrating about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated when they're like climate change is a giant issue Like there's so many times I've seen they're very fun YouTube speak um videos where they catch people at these protests and some joker just starts interviewing them and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for It's fascinating that you left the house like you you had nothing better to do You don't know why you're protesting but you're there and you got a sign and you still don't even understand it That's how powerful this thing has become in our society And the fact that they've been so that the powers that be or whoever is involved has been s o successful at pushing this narrative that it's number one of the number one anxieties that young people have about the future in a place where we may very well be involved in wars like but the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency How dare you right there you go lady But you notice how quickly she changed She flipped up Now it's Palestine You got to mix it up People get bored with the climate You got to you listen you want to be someone that's in the news you got to keep moving You got to keep it moving You know you stop doing rap music start acting You got to keep it moving And that's you know she's an entertainer Well she had a very unfortunate experience um with that blockade in uh Israel So maybe she's out of the business now but I doubt it But when you're taking a 16-year-old kid and having her as a face of climate change like and as you said this is something insanely difficult to digest for the average person and you know she doesn't have this data at her fingertips It's not just digest I mean it's how many people can solve partial differential equations I mean this is one of the complaints I have which is sort of odd People blame this on models And what the models are doing is they're taking the equations of fluid mechanics something called the Navier Stokes equation and they're doing it by dividing it into discrete intervals and seeing how things change with distance and time and so on And one of the things that uh we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution Uh but but it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on At any rate so they do this and they do I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can and um they get answers that will often be wrong But as best I can tell none of these models predict catastrophe uh Coon made the point I think correctly that even with the UN's models you're talking about uh a 3% reduction in uh n ational product or gross domestic product by 2100 That's not a great deal It's not the end of the earth You're already much richer than you are today So what what's the panic and uh it's true the models don't give you anything to be that panicked over So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models but they blame the models So you know it's it's a confusing situation I mean the models have a use They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is You can use them to see what interacts with what and then study it further Let let Joe let me uh just uh say a little more about what Dick commented on the Navier Stokes equation which describes fluid motion the atmosphere the oceans and uh it really is a very hard uh mathematical problem to solve because they're not only partial differential equations they're what are called nonlinear partial differential equations And so there's a joke about uh Veriner Heisenberg who was uh the inventor of uh quantum mechanics uh a very bright guy and he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II and so he was captured by the Americans and the British and uh because of this activity was forbidden to work on nuclear physics uh later you know after the victory and So he decided to work on fluid mechanics on solving the Navier Stokes equation and uh he was a as I said a tremendously uh talented physicist and but he found it very hard he didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations And so one one of his students supposedly said to him "Well you know Professor Heisenberg um they say that if you've been a good uh physicist when you die and you go to heaven that um the Almighty allows you to ask two questions and uh he will answer any question you ask." And uh what will you ask him and Eisenberg supposedly said well I will ask him why general rel ativity and uh why turbulence turbulence is the Navier Stokes equation He says and I think he will be able to answer the first one That's funny That's funny And this is what's you know the the best assumption or the best measurements of what's controlling the temperature on Earth Well you know they're they're asking you to have great confidence in a calculation involving this miserable equation that is so hard to solve uh at least very far into the future You can solve it for a short time but it's very hard to go much further one of Dick's colleagues at MIT a man named Lorent Uh why don't you tell him about Lorent well no Lorent is credited with chaos theory but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable Um whether that's true or not is still an open question but it has a lot of those characteristics and detail I mean you know for instance it wouldn't be a surprise if you're looking at a bubbling brook and you have all those little eddies and so on You know are you actua lly able to track the whole thing accurately probably not How accurately would you have to do it if you scaled it up to climate who knows yeah The the typical description of this theory was that it's as though a butterfly flapping its wings in the Gulf of Alaska causes hurricanes two years later in Florida Yeah that one's funny Yeah Yeah People repeat that and you're like "No that's not how it works at all." I don't think it works I know Of course not But it's funny when people like to bring that what it I think he meant was rather simpler than that You know the hurricane is likely to occur The flipping of a butterflyy's wings might have actually changed it from one day to another It wouldn't it would have an influence downstream Everything has an influence Everything is tied in together Now when we make models based on incorrect data about like CO2 levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like at what point in time do you think another country needs to screw up t he same way Nazi Germany ran with eugenics and it ruined eugenics in the United States where they're like "Oh my god this is a horrific idea." Do you think something like that has to happen in another country where they have to take this climate change green energy thing to its full end you think so i think that's how it will end Yes I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country because Germany has shut off a couple of their nuclear power plants Correct Right All of their nuclear power plants Oh god Mhm And they did it all for green energy That makes no sense Well I think they did it because of the Fukushima thing and because the Green Party is so powerful in Germany and they not only turned off their plants and not nuclear and coal as well but they blew a lot of them up you know you see these pictures of the plants you know being blown up by dynamite just to make sure that nobody restarts them So they're fanatics Oh my god The real fanatics Yeah That's so crazy Yeah Yeah A nd so at some point some country like Germany they'll lose all their jobs all the industry will move There will be no jobs People will all be on welfare There's no money to pay them And at that point sudden someone will realize you know we've taken a wrong turn here I can't believe they blew their plants up That is nuts And what are they replacing with right now you have Russian gas windmills windmills Yeah And imported But you're right They're importing fossil fuels and importing electricity from France which still has a large nuclear power base How but how is Germany so smart and so dumb at the same time because they have tremendous engineers They make some of the best automobiles ever They're making them in Hungary Oh but that but that's an a profound question is how is it that this country of poets and philosophers Yeah had the Nazis had the Nazis Exactly And Dietrich Bonhaofer was one of the few German theologians who had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany He was invited to com e to the US But he he said "I'm going to stay with my people." And he was eventually hung by the German by the Nazis He didn't survive But he had this theory that it was um stupidity And it's a very interesting theory If you look on the internet you can read about Bonhaofer's theory of stupidity But he um his view was that all of these Nazi supporters they didn't really believe in it all They were just dumb You know it's hard for me When I first read about this I couldn't believe it But the more I look at it I I think that every nation has the problem that most of us are pretty stupid There's a large percentage of us that will believe almost anything And we could point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now that people wholeheartedly believe in that makes zero sense Yeah Yeah Yeah That could go with that And you would go okay there's there's some part of this has to be attributed to low intelligence So like what percentage of of people in this country are incap able of thinking for themselves and it's not a small number Maybe it's 10 maybe it's 20 whatever percentage It's it's enough where it's a giant problem That's one thing But also intelligence itself is a complex issue There are people who like us may be idiots of there are things that we can do very well and other things we don't Yeah Absolutely I mean you know math departments are famous that way Well I think it's a sign of almost any great person at anything Yeah There's usually areas in their life where they're just completely lacking whether it's hygiene or relationships or what they're obsessed by what they do and that's why they're great at what they do You know look there are great writers who can't do arithmetic right uh I don't know you know where you put them in that category right well and there's great physical athletes that they have an intelligence of moving their body in a way that they understand things at a much higher level than anybody else that does whatever their at hletic pursuit is They probably don't wouldn't do that well on an ACT test Doesn't mean that they're not intelligent It's just it's a different kind of intelligence Yeah Yeah And that makes the world a more interesting place by and large It really does But what's scary is when you count on the people that are supposed to be the people that are obsessed and studying this one thing like this climate change emergency that we're supposed to be under and then you find out oh wait a minute this is not this isn't like an exact science Oh we started with Gore right and Gore you know flunked out of Harvard did he yeah And his father who was a senator got him back in Uh I was teaching there at the time Oh really interesting And the person he attributes his awareness of CO2 to Roger Rall was teaching a sort of science for poets course and he got a D minus in it Is he made the most money off of this because he's made a lot of money off of you know he's made a few hundred million I don't know these days small change right still there there's a a very clear motivation to keep that graph going You know it's um especially now with social media There's so many people that can like we were talking about Greta Thurberg I mean I don't know what her motivations are but I do know that there's a lot of people out there that have large social media platforms that all they want to do is connect themselves to something that people are talking about all the time And there's a lot of money in that and there's a lot of you know a lot of power in wielding that influence And to to do so then just hop on any bandwagon that comes along and not really know what you're talking about is it's it's a real problem that we have in society today And and it's a in a way a new problem given social media Yeah Yeah The social media aspect of it is a new problem Another new problem is AI and fakes like that you you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles and it's just like you it's very it takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything uh especially climate change or you you could scare the shit out of somebody very quickly with a nice video and it doesn't even have to be real Well that was the reason for extreme weather being chosen I mean it's interesting For quite a few years the climate issue was temperature And you'll have noticed the last 15 20 years it's extreme weather right and that shows that you know it was fake because um it's trivial I mean we looked it up uh the average uh month there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred year events So each of them makes for a good video and you have four or five a month and they're each only on one that's in a hundred years and people aren't putting it together that you know once in aundred year events occurring four or five times a month but you know you always have a picture of a flood s omeplace or a rise or this or that and those are used to scare people It's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers right it's extreme weather events I keep that's what I keep hearing The hurricanes are getting stronger They're getting more frequent And they repeat that And I don't think that's necessarily true No No Uh for years the IPCC the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related The last one they had to say something because the politicians control what's in the IPCC but even with that they were saying no and uh that had nothing to do with the public relations said to hell with it even if there's no relation we'll say there is because that gives us visuals M god Now when people like Bill Gates start talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the earth and protect us from the sun's rays like where is all that coming from especially if like you would imagine even even Wills said it comes from dumbness Well I'm sure But even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms Like hey a few people can't make a decision that will literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all Yeah Why because you made Microsoft Like why do you get to do this that seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on and they would have to be like really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be Mhm Well I'd have I have to hope that most of the world agrees with you and me and and that Bill Gates will never be permitted to do something like that The fear is that someone would let him though The fear is that a country would let them you get the right politicians in place and the right fear-mongering in place and you let them try or what you let somebody try and these people that do try get large grants and they're making a lot of money to do thi s and that's what scares the shit out of me that this could be a a way that people could try something out on the whole world that could be catastrophic Well just technically um it would be extremely difficult because the amount of material you have to get up to the stratosphere to mimic a large strata volcano Yeah You know I even Bill Gates probably can't afford that and I'm not sure the US treasurer could either So is it just theoretical at this point like the I think you know it's an interesting thing you're pointing that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeur based on the fact that he's fabulously wealthy Yeah Um but as a practical matter that particular approach probably is not going to be as dangerous as you think It won't work It won't work Yeah Well it's just the idea that someone would even propose something like that based on what you gentlemen have discussed so far today No your point is right I mean you have people who have the means to try things and uh they're getti ng a free ride on this Yes that's the thing They're getting a lot of money to implement these changes That's why these green new deals and these green energy initiatives and all these green things like people have to understand why are you hearing about this all the time because it's it's a PR campaign It's a PR campaign for a a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money That's what this is all about And the more you get on board the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff and the more money these companies make And the whole thing is about money Much of it is money They're not really worried about you That's what you have to understand If they ever say that they're worried about your future for the the betterment of our people we have to make sure that everybody's okay We got to protect the climate They don't care That's not real What they really want to do is make sure a lot of money comes in And if a lot of money coming in is dependent upon them scarin g the shit out of you that's what they lean towards And you know money and its transferability and fungeability its influence its feedbacks it's this Yeah but that's always been true Yes Yeah Joel let me bring up another targeted group and that is uh farmers and ranchers you know because of uh their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming Uh just a couple years ago I was invited to come down to Paraguay by uh uh some farmers there who were worried about the uh upcoming climate talks in the Persian Gulf And the European bankers were demanding that uh Paraguay uh turn most of its ranch land back into forest you know to save the planet and otherwise they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay And so the the ranchers were worried that they're going to be put out of business and their families put out of business And uh so I was there for a week and I talked to the president and luckily it turned out they had a very sensible president and he didn't need me uh to recognize it was nonsense and u h but he was I think grateful to have someone with a science background confirm his suspicion that it was all nonsense So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers you know to go to hell and they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay So there were no consequences and the the ranchers did not suffer But you know everybody's under the gun and Well there were consequences in Ireland Yeah Yes They had to kill half their cattle Yeah Which is nonsense Total nonsense and insane And if you pay attention to what regenerative farmers will tell you is that like if you do it correctly there's the it's actually carbon neutral at least carbon neutral at least carbon neutral and and possibly contri manure Manure f fertilizes the plants It's all real simple It's been around forever And this idea that all of a sudden cow farts and burps are a giant issue and they're going to kill us all and we need to kill all the cows Like who are you like who's saying this and how'd you get to talk l ike this is how'd you get to kill half their cows like you should go to jail They should go to jail You're so stupid You're criminally stupid You killed their cows But when it comes to attractive drugs power is one of the worst Oh it it might be the worst Yeah Yeah it might be the worst And it's if people can get people to do their bidding they often love to do it Even if it's preposterous like getting you to kill half your cows so that you have a less high methane count you're releasing from your organization I mean you know Will has worked on this and others but you know the methane thing is an example of uh innumeracy In other words what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO2 And so cutting back methane will have a big effect But there's so little methane in the atmosphere that he got rid of all of it It would have almost no effect compared to CO2 And you know somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost Yeah Simple arithmetic They just can't do simple arithmetic Yeah It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in in social media It's it's really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants It's it seems very coordinated and actually kind of impressive that they've managed to silence questioning scientists and really put the fear of God into people that read things and don't agree with it It began right at the beginning of the issue as I was mentioning I mean already by 1989 Science magazine was let me in fact one of the ironies with Science magazine which is you know important magazine It had an editor who was Marsha McNut who actually had an op-ed appear in Science magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this Wow And you know what her reward was she became president of the National Academy of Science She was a good girl Yeah Follow the rules Yeah But you know Dick's point about forbidding questioning It's just unbelievable I When I was a young man my first job was at Colombia and the grand old man there was uh Robbie Robbie I I Robbie And uh Robbie uh came from a Eastern European Jewish family and his mother had a very poor education but she was determined that he would get a good education And so he would always tell me you know when I would go home from school every day my mother wouldn't ask me "What did you learn today in school Izzy?" She called him Izzy is and he would uh tell her and then she would say and did you ask a good question today So he said she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question which would meant that the wheels were turning in his head than whether he had memorized something and I always took that to heart I think that was a very wise uh mother and it's it he turned out very well as a result Do you think there's more uniformity in thinking in academia now with the pressure of social media and the pressure of these echo chambers that people find themselves so there's of course ye ah that's that's terrible because you you know you'd have thought with the internet one of the things the internet is going to be a balanced resource or resource of information You're going to have the answers to any questions you want and we'll be able to sort out what's true and what's not true Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science That's right No I mean the internet not surprisingly was an unpredictable phenomenon Yes I mean completely Yeah I mean you know you saw it but uh well you're seeing it yourself I mean you have media that they were looking for a 100,000 subscribers With the internet you're dealing with millions And that's considered small in some cases Yeah There's people like Mr Beast some fun guy on YouTube that I think he has what does he have and how many million subscribers does he have something insane Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before Mhm Yeah Nobody saw it coming did it on his own Yeah it's it 's a weird time And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media which is also disturbing Which is uh also deserved right also deserved That's a problem as well And when you see mainstream media uh also going along with all these climate change ideologies and these the all these different things that are attached to the narrative that you're not allowed to deviate from It's just like it gets very frustrating Yeah I mean I'm not sure about this but my recollection was as a kid in New York that you had newspapers like the New York Times that were always sort of center right left but you had others the Journal American and so on and they differed in their coverage but on the whole they covered the same news uh if something happened it would appear in both I realize in retrospect that wasn't always true But today I have the feeling that if I look at uh the Post in New York or the New York Times I'm looking at two different worlds Right Right And there's something wrong with that Very Y eah Something very wrong with it And I don't I don't know what the answer is to how to solve it or if those things need to just go away and independent media needs to replace them But you're you're seeing a massive dissolving of trust in these main like when I was a kid I used to deliver the New York Times and I delivered the Boston Globe but I delivered the New York Times as well because it was prestigious I thought it was cool to deliver the New York Times and it was a long route I had it was a lot longer than my Boston on Sunday as well Yes I did Yes I did But fortunately the ads didn't work So I didn't get a big thick ad chunk like you do with the Boston Globe because it's like local ads But the point being is that like it was a it was the paper of record and now today it's just another blog It's just like it's an ideologically captured online blog that's very left-leaning I think people have pointed out the correct reason for that the end of the classified ads Yeah Uh they used to have to satisfy the people paying for ads right now they have to satisfy their readers and so the readers only want to hear one thing Yeah Yeah It's a real problem It's a real problem But I guess just like all things that happen there'll be some sort of a course correction or some new players will enter in And it was you know it would be fine if the newspapers took different positions but covered the same items Right Right Right And here I will say and maybe there's a bias in this If I listen to MSNBC there are whole areas of what's going on that I will hear nothing about Fox may cover things differently but they're less guilty of leaving stuff out They may take a different view of it but you'll hear about it that certain media now are not even mentioning things that they don't want you to know about is a little bit disturbing It is It is But again it gives rise to independent media Gives rise to the very good independent journalists that exist today But the thing is like the average person is not going to find them They don't know where to look Well this is an opportunity to put in a good word for Al Gore since uh he was an inventor of the internet Yeah he did kind of take credit for part of that Right Right Yeah What did he say exactly i think he said I had a hand in that or something like that So I I did too I bought a computer once I had a hand in that I played a part of the economy of the internet Yeah Yeah Yeah Well it's um uh I think it's these kind of conversations with uh people like yourself that uh will help because the more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that also question it and to where you get a kind of understanding of this pattern that does go back to like what you were talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history Yeah You go there's there's times where you're on the wrong side of things you don't realize it because you've been lied to and you've been yo u know these politicians but it's also the abuse of science uh is too much of a temptation for politicians I mean uh science it's hard to say but uh you know if there are way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority it's a methodology And that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology uh you're anti-science Whether that helps or not maybe people don't care but I think people do but they're scared to deviate again from the narrative Like how do you think do you think it's possible to get in people's heads hey we have to at the academic level especially separate ideology from truth and you can't attach believing in something that is like so firmly a part of being a progressive person or being a conservative person that you're unwilling to look at the data and look at facts That has to be shunned right so how does that go about i think you're hitting on something important You can't do it every place Can't but with the funding agencies Uh the government is in a position to say funding agencies must take an open view of certain subjects or all subjects for that matter and uh not lay down rules that you cannot question Yeah let let me add to that I think one of the great strengths of American uh science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington but you know you could get funding from the National Science Foundation or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research or from some other or organization and they all competed with each other and they didn't like each other very much And so if you couldn't get a grant from NSF someone would help you from the army or some other place So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country and people used to talk we we need an office of science So I thought that was a terrible idea you know to that means onepoint failure You know there was someone in a position to throttle you know some important thing Department of Energy tried to do both sides for a long time and they held out longer than other departments Mhm But eventually for some reason they were all forced into the same box Money starts talking baby Yeah Money There's a lot of money Department of Energy Wasn't that the department where uh from the time Trump won the election to Biden leading office they gave out something like $93 billion in loans I think it was EPA or maybe it was No loans could have must have been energy Must have been energy Yeah Like it more than had been given out in the last 15 years Yeah Yeah Yeah I'm sure all was smart well spent money that we definitely couldn't get by without spending Um it's kind of funny like that's pathetic Yeah it is kind of pathetic but it's also kind of funny like how in this day of transparency you know there's so much information that's available today so easy to find things out that they would try to pull something like that off and then do it successfully right in front of everybody's face Well having spent time in you know Department of Energy headquarters um it doesn't surprise me I I believe you Um how difficult has this been for you gentlemen to like debate this stuff and to bring it up with people and have conversations have you experienced a lot of resistance yeah I mean it it's interesting how it evolved I think in the '9s there was still a certain openness about it and uh you know if there were a conference people on both sides would be invited and so on Somehow by the 21st century uh it came down hard Uh there was absolutely nothing open anymore But I have to say when I invited uh Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton it's a good university and he gave a good colloquium The next day a Nobel Prize winner from my department walked in and said "What son of a bitch invited Linden to give this talk." I said "Well I'm the son of a bitch Get out of my offic e." Oh wow Yeah And what did you have to did you try to engage with him at all about why you were upset why he was upset rather no Just wasn't even worth it It wasn't worth it Yeah Wow It's just hard to believe as someone who's outside of academia It's hard to believe there's close-minded people at universities The point was he he didn't know the first thing about that issue Not not a thing Yeah But he was very leftwing and Yeah that's the point That's why No this was the political polarization Yeah Yeah But it's it's also there's no deviation There's no people like you know everybody's either one side or the other allin or not And if you're not you get cast out of the kingdom It's very weird Mhm They just it's just just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities If someone come up to you and say I think it's worse in universities Wow How did that get started like when did So was it the same thing as like the climate was it with everything like somewhere ar ound the 21st century like when Yeah I you know I'll take something that was much less publicized uh the what was the program uh with your device uh oh the uh the uh star the stars the sodium guide star Yeah Yeah Yeah I mean universities treated that as something you could not discuss the notion that you wanted to have a defense against nuclear Really yeah What Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because early uh in the um Star Wars era we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles And so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high power lasers And so during a classified summer study in 1982 uh there were some people from the air force some generals and uh technical people and talked about the problem is if you even have a beautiful blue clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward Austin by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead it br eaks up into hundreds of little speckles not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers But the inverse problem of star does the same thing When you focus it on a photographic plate you don't get a point You get lots of speckles And so astronomers knew how to solve that You know the the problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere They're little warm patches and cool patches And so uh what you can do is you reflect the incoming star light from a anti-rinkled mirror So it comes in wrinkled it bounces it is nice and flat then it focuses and you get a point And you you could do the same thing when you're trying to shoot a incoming missile You pre-rinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile it actually focuses all the power onto the missile So it's called adaptive optics And the the mirror is called a rubber mirror It's a mirror that you can adjust and but to to do that you know you ne ed to know how to adjust the mirror So you have to have some information to how do I wrinkle it push here pull there etc And the way the astronomers did it was they used a very bright star in the sky and then for nearby stars you could use the bright star to correct your mirror for all the neighboring stars But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars And so unless the Russians attacked us from the during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies we couldn't do anything with our lasers Oh wow So I I said "Well I know how to fix this All you need to do is make an artificial star wherever you like because there's a layer of sodium at 100 kilometers and we now have lasers that will excite that." And so you can make a yellow star that's plenty bright enough to use that light to adjust the mirror wherever you like And nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during the This was top secret meeting When you say make a star do you mea n like a satellite star like a small a bright a bright source of light shining down through the atmosphere Most of the problem is fairly close to the ground The first kilometer or two up And what would this be made out of sodium So the if you go to 100 kilometers the earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system And so we're constantly burning up little micrometeorites And they're all loaded with sodium atoms And so they get released into the upper atmosphere and they stay there and make a layer that's about 10 km thick And not many people know about that I happen to know about it and I knew you could use it you know for this method That's why I got called to Washington was making this It was a highly secret invention for 10 years Wow Yeah That's fascinating When the Soviet Union collapsed then uh this was declassified thanks to the effort of a Livermore friend and colleague Clare Max a a woman physicist astronomer but they she finally persuaded the Department of Defense to dec lassify it So if you go to any big telescope now around the world it has one of these sodium lasers pointing up at the sky at night You'll see this bright yellow beam going up Oh wow look at that right there Oh there it is Yeah Wow Yeah That's And so the point where they're coming this is actually green light And so for the sodium most of them are yellow for sodium but that's the basic idea And so this was a difficult thing to discuss in academia Well I couldn't discuss It was highly classified So I couldn't even mention it until about 1995 I think 40 94 95 when it was declassified but I'd invented it you know 12 years earlier you know but you know the point was in academia you could not discuss uh you couldn't you couldn't discuss working for defense of the country that was uh you know somehow immoral you know defending the country I wasn't trying to attack Russia I was trying to defend ourselves right you know yeah that's a ridiculous position to think we don't need defense against m issiles Well you know they're they're hard to defend against but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try right yeah Exactly I mean at MIT you had all sorts of people saying you know you shouldn't try It's silly It's impossible And so on What was the point of that i mean you have a problem you try and solve it Yeah It seems like that's what science is supposed to be for Now it it's you know if you probe I think into these issues you realize that climate is an extreme case but politics interfacing science is not new Well it just seems like human behavior human behavior and anything else It's like the the same patterns you you'll find them in big businesses You find them in a lot of different you find them in almost all communities and groups of human beings There's people that get into control and they force certain narratives And the fact that that happens with the highest levels of academia and with science though is con is really confusing to people like myself that are counting on everyb ody like you to get it right We're as much we're as much part of the crooked timber of mankind as anyone else I mean such a great quote Yeah Yeah I mean you know I've often mentioned I mean my family you know immigrated here from Germany 38 but uh when Hitler came to power in 33 every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood before Hitler even asked Mhm So universities are not uh bastions of independent thinking What could be done to make them more so you know the Canadians did something that I thought had potential every faculty member especially junior faculty immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for And so in that system every one of their faculty could function as a research scientist You know students were paid for otherwise And there at least one link in the chain of influence was broken You had an open system there Even there though uh other pressures came to bear But it you know it seemed like a good idea or at least a better idea Yeah But it again unfortunately it just seems like that just pattern of human behavior just pops its ugly head up over and over and over again Yep Well you know Joe Dick just gave up You know it's worth going back to the founding of this country because if you read the things like the federalist papers which was uh the theory of our government what comes through loud and clear was that uh our founders believe that humans were extremely corrupt and uh you know not very reliable and given that how do you make a system that will function even with that and that's what they tried to do you know that was the whole reason for the balance of power and and all the things that are in there And so I you know it was partially successful It certainly worked better than other systems for a long time Better than all the other ones Yeah But it amazingly astute Yeah Yeah Better than papers I mean they've held up well Yeah Um anything else to add before we wrap this up gentlemen is there anything else you thin k people should know well trust but verify Yeah I mean how shall I put it destroying the world is not an easy thing to do It shouldn't be the top of your list of worries Yeah Um you mean destroying the world with climate change yeah It's not really what it is and it's very overmagnified Absolutely I mean how shall I put it its origins were almost entirely political I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all I you know uh we're discussing you know can it happen is this is it warming is it cooling is extreme weather increasing it's amazing to me that politicians can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously I wonder what it how it would have worked if it wasn't for an inconvenient truth If that movie hadn't been made I wonder because sometimes people need something like that in that sort of a form for it to really take hold as an idea You may be right I mean uh something was needed to make it catch on Uh it had been around for quite a few years without catching on quite that way Yeah But it was also the confluence you know the UN really got interested in it Uh you had the World Meteorological Organization all of them saw something they could gain in it And so it began to seem almost overwhelming but it did you know it reached the right people I mean the funding agencies the NSF got taken over almost immediately NASA took about 10 years Department of Energy took 10 years but they worked on it It's kind of stunning At least from the outside you know from my perspective it's kind of stunning It's it's stunning how successful it is And again like I said if you're in polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up well we've got to do something about climate change you just go like the record skips like how much do you know right it turns out very little most people And then it turns out according to you it's almost impossible to figure out anyway the actual I know I mean the not ion that there's a crisis has taken hold right even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis And the main movie that started off that crisis from 2006 is entirely wrong All of its predictions and what's supporting it now is the extreme weather which is a fake but it provides visual visuals Yeah Um it's very hard for people to swallow but uh I encourage them to look at the data of hurricanes historically and you realize like oh pretty stable It's pretty It's up and down and all over the place but it's not any worse now than it has been before Oh I mean growing up in the Bronx in the 40s every autumn there were hunger hurricanes Mhm You could wake up in the morning the streets were lined with the trees that had been blown down Interestingly enough that has not recurred in New York for about 30 years 40 50 years I think the last one I remember when I lived in Boston was Gloria Yeah Yeah They don't get hit by hurricanes anymore If they did they'd freak out Climate change But then 38 was a g igantic hurricane And uh I was born in a town on a lake in New Massachusetts called uh Lake Chagmanag Shabun That's a real name Yes that's a real name Wow But at any rate in that lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of 1938 Just local stuff around Really Wow But that also killed a lot of people because we didn't have the information of it coming right and I'm sure buildings weren't really designed to withstand those either No I mean if how shall I put it i'm glad it came then not now I suppose if it came now it would be proof right actually the worst hurricane on record on the east coast was the last year of the American Revolution and it had a big impact on winning the war What happened was this enormous hurricane mostly in the Caribbean but it wiped out the British fleet It wiped out the French fleet There was nothing left you know really It was just tremendous hurricane And so the uh the reason it affected the war was um the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet So that when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be uh rescued uh you know with all of the partisans coming after him he um didn't worry about the French and so but the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane They had had 12 months and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake and when Cornwallis got there he was trapped because he could the British couldn't come in to rescue him you know from Rhode Island or wherever they were And so he had no choice He had to surrender Wow That was the end of the war And we can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly As well as the French The French And the French God bless God bless the French Yeah What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of like recent years 34 35 1930 What was it like then it was in the peak of the Dust Bowl and it was uh I don't know s everal degrees warmer than I don't know the exact figure but you can look at the records They're pretty clear Yeah It's you know you're not going to see gigantic numbers but again that global metric is a little bit confusing Locally it was a huge effect but it globally yeah that what you're what you're saying completely makes sense It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature unless you're studying other planets Yeah Yeah What matters is where people live What's the temperature there Right Right Well um listen gentlemen I really appreciate your bravery and talking about this stuff and and sharing all this information It's hope for the best Very enlightening Yeah it really it helps These kind of conversations they move the needle They really do So I really appreciate you guys Thanks Thanks for being here I really enjoyed it Thank you Bye everybody

 

 

참석자:

• Joe Rogan (진행자)
• Richard Lindzen (MIT 기상학 명예교수)
• William Happer (프린스턴 물리학 명예교수)

주요 논의 주제:

1. 기후 변화 과학의 정치화 - 두 교수는 기후 과학이 과도하게 정치화되었으며, CO2의 영향이 과장되었다고 주장
2. 과학적 합의에 대한 의문 - "과학은 정해졌다"는 주장이 실제 과학적 방법론과 모순된다고 비판
3. 역사적 맥락 - 과거 빙하기, 온난기 등 지구 온도는 항상 변화해왔음
4. 자금과 이해관계 - 기후 연구에 막대한 자금이 투입되며, 이것이 객관적 연구를 방해한다고 주장
5. 극단적 기상 현상 - 허리케인 등이 실제로 증가하지 않았다는 데이터 제시
6. 학계의 검열 - 기후 변화에 회의적인 연구자들이 논문 게재 거부, 해고 등을 경험

핵심 메시지:

• 기후 과학이 이념화되어 자유로운 토론이 불가능해졌다
• CO2보다 다른 요인들(태양 활동, 수증기 등)이 더 중요할 수 있다
• 정치적·경제적 이해관계가 과학적 진실을 왜곡하고 있다

 

제공된 자료는 Joe Rogan Experience 팟캐스트의 Richard Lindzen과 William Happer와의 대화 내용을 담고 있으며, 기후 과학의 정치화, 과학적 방법론, 그리고 이와 관련된 재정적 인센티브에 대한 광범위한 논의를 포함하고 있습니다.

1. 출연진 및 배경

• Joe Rogan Experience 팟캐스트의 진행자인 Joe Rogan은 두 명의 손님을 환영합니다.

• **Dick Lindzen (딕 린든)**은 하버드에서 박사 학위를 마친 후 워싱턴 대학교, 노르웨이, 콜로라도 볼더, 시카고, 하버드 (약 10년), 그리고 MIT (약 35년) 등 주로 학계에서 경력을 쌓았으며 2013년에 은퇴한 대기 과학 분야 전문가입니다. 그는 대기 과학 분야에 뛰어들었을 때 풀 수 있는 문제들이 많았기 때문에 즐거웠다고 언급했습니다. 그가 연구했던 현상 중 하나는 **'준 2년 주기 진동(quai bianial cycle)'**으로, 적도 상공 약 16에서 20 킬로미터의 바람이 1년 동안 동쪽에서 서쪽으로 불다가 다음 해에는 반대 방향으로 바뀌는 현상입니다.

• **Will Happer (윌 해퍼)**는 프린스턴 대학교의 은퇴한 물리학 교수입니다. 그는 핵물리학 교육을 받았고 레이저 연구를 많이 했으며, 조지 H. W. 부시 대통령 시절 워싱턴에서 에너지 연구 책임자로 2년간 근무했습니다. 그는 동료인 딕에게 기후에 대해 많이 배웠다고 말했습니다.

2. 기후 과학의 정치화 및 자금 문제

Will Happer는 에너지 연구 책임자로 일했을 때 기후 과학자들이 납세자의 돈을 어떻게 쓰고 있는지 설명해 달라는 요청에 다른 과학자들과 달리 매우 분개하며 응대하는 것을 보고 처음 의심을 품게 되었다고 밝혔습니다. 그들은 종종 "우리는 고어 상원의원을 위해 일하지 당신을 위해 일하지 않는다"고 말했다고 합니다.

A. 자금 지원 및 학계의 인센티브

• Happer는 기후 과학 커뮤니티가 질문에 답하려 하지 않으면서도 자금을 얻으려 했다는 점이 비정상적이었다고 지적했습니다.

• Lindzen은 에너지 부문은 수조 달러와 관련되어 있어 화석 연료를 대체하는 등 어떠한 조치라도 엄청난 돈이 걸려 있다고 설명했습니다.

• 기후 과학은 "완전히 정치화"되었으며, 일반적인 과학과는 완전히 다르다고 Happer는 주장합니다.

• 학계 내에서 기금을 확보하는 것이 이 현상을 주도했습니다. 내러티브를 지지하는 사람들은 후하게 보상을 받고 학회 회원으로 선출되며 상을 받지만, 그렇지 않은 사람들은 외면당합니다.

• 프린스턴과 MIT 같은 대학들은 기후 보조금에서 발생하는 간접비(overhead)를 통해 막대한 금액을 확보하여 새로운 건물 프로그램 등에 자금을 지원합니다. Lindzen에 따르면, 보조금의 50\%에서 60\%가 연구가 아닌 행정 부서로 돌아가며, 대학 행정관들은 이 돈을 원하는 대로 배분할 수 있습니다.

• Happer는 **"돈에 대한 사랑이 모든 악의 근원"**이라는 클리셰를 언급하며, 기후에 대한 집착이 과학 발전을 최소 두 세대나 후퇴시켰다고 믿습니다.

B. 과학적 방법론에 대한 이데올로기의 침해

• 과학은 **"권위의 원천이 아니라 방법론"**이며, 도전을 기반으로 한다고 Lindzen은 강조했습니다. 정치인들은 과학의 좋은 평판을 이용하려 합니다.

• 오늘날 동료 심사(peer review)는 **"순응을 강제하는 과정"**이 되었으며, 흐름에 따르지 않으면 논문이 거절될 수 있습니다.

• Lindzen은 1989년 자신의 논문 (기후 변화에 대한 우려에 의문을 제기하는 내용)을 Science지에 보냈을 때 관심 없다는 이유로 즉시 반려되었고, 다른 저널에 실린 후에는 편집자가 즉시 해고당하는 등 학계에서 엄청난 반발을 겪었다고 회고했습니다. 또 다른 논문이 발표되었을 때도 편집자가 즉시 해고되고, 새로운 편집자는 비판 논문을 초대했습니다.

• Science지의 한 편집자는 기후 문제에 의문을 제기하는 어떤 논문도 수락하지 않겠다고 논평을 냈으며, 그 대가로 국립 과학 아카데미 회장이 되었습니다.

3. 기후 변화 논란 및 과학적 주장

A. \text{CO}_2의 역할과 지구 온도

• 과거에는 (1970년대) 오히려 다가오는 빙하기를 경고했으며, 당시에는 석탄 연소로 방출되는 **황산염(sulfates)**이 빛을 반사하여 지구를 차갑게 만들 것이라는 우려가 있었습니다.

• 1970년대에 온도가 다시 상승하기 시작하자, 사람들을 겁주기 위해 지구 온난화로 초점을 바꾸었습니다.

• Lindzen은 과학자 Suki Manabi의 연구를 인용하며 CO2​를 두 배로 늘려도 겨우 0.5도 정도의 온난화만 발생시키지만, 상대 습도가 일정하게 유지된다고 가정하면 (훨씬 더 중요한 온실가스인 수증기가 추가됨) CO2​의 영향이 두 배가 되어 1도 정도가 된다고 설명했습니다. 이것도 그리 대단한 수치는 아니지만, 이것이 CO2​의 악마화가 시작된 계기가 되었다고 주장합니다.

• CO2​는 최근 수십만 년 동안의 빙하기와 온난화 주기와 상관 관계가 높지 않습니다.

• 실제로 산업 시대 이후 CO2​ 증가로 인해 경작 가능지가 크게 늘어났습니다. Lindzen은 마지막 빙하 최대기 (Last Glacial Maximum) 동안 CO2​가 약 180 수준으로 낮았을 때 인류가 멸종 위기에 처했던 사례를 언급하며, CO2​ 수치가 160 또는 150까지 떨어지면 모든 생명체가 죽을 것이라고 경고했습니다. 현재 CO2​는 약 400에서 430 수준입니다.

B. 기상 현상 및 모델의 한계

• 기후 변화에 대한 논의는 수년 동안 온도에 초점을 맞추다가 최근 15~20년 동안 **"극단적인 날씨(extreme weather)"**로 바뀌었습니다. 이는 숫자로 사람들을 겁주기가 어려워졌기 때문입니다.

• 실제로는 허리케인 발생률이 역사적으로 안정적이며, IPCC(기후 변화에 관한 정부 간 협의체)조차 극단적인 날씨와 기후 변화의 연관성을 찾지 못했다고 오랫동안 인정해 왔지만, 대중 관계(PR)에서는 여전히 시각적 자료를 제공하기 위해 이를 사용합니다.

• 기후 모델은 유체 역학 방정식인 **나비에-스토크스 방정식 (Navier Stokes equation)**을 사용하며, 이는 **비선형 편미분 방정식 (nonlinear partial differential equations)**이어서 풀기가 매우 어렵습니다. 양자 역학이나 상대성 이론보다 훨씬 어렵습니다.

• Lindzen은 자신의 MIT 동료인 Lorent(로렌츠)가 카오스 이론을 통해 이러한 시스템이 예측 불가능하다는 주장을 펼쳤다고 언급했습니다. 이 시스템은 "알래스카만의 나비 날갯짓이 2년 뒤 플로리다에 허리케인을 유발하는 것과 같다"는 식의 특성을 가집니다.

• Lindzen은 UN 모델조차도 2100년까지 국내총생산(GDP)이 3% 감소하는 정도만을 예측할 뿐이며, 이는 재앙적인 수준이 아니라고 주장합니다. 따라서 정치인과 환경 운동가들은 모델과 관계없이 극단적인 시나리오를 만들어 공포를 조성합니다.

C. 태양 및 기타 요인

• 주류 서사는 태양이 기후에 거의 영향을 미치지 않는다고 주장하지만, Happer는 태양 활동이 끊임없이 변하며, 과거 1만 년 동안 많은 온난화와 냉각기가 있었다고 지적했습니다.

• **밀란코비치 (Malankovich)**는 1940년경 궤도 변동이 여름철 북극의 일사량 변화를 일으켜 빙하기를 통제했다는 주장을 펼쳤는데, Lindzen은 이 이론이 합리적으로 유지되었다고 평가했습니다.

• 최근의 빙하기는 약 300만 년 전 파나마 지협이 닫히면서 대서양과 태평양 사이의 물 순환이 막히고 멕시코 만류(Gulf Stream)와 같은 열 전달 방식이 바뀌었을 때 시작되었을 수 있다는 의혹이 있습니다.

4. 이데올로기의 위험성과 역사적 유사점

• Lindzen과 Happer는 현재 기후 과학에서 나타나는 이데올로기의 침투가 새로운 현상이 아니며, 역사적으로도 유사한 사례가 있었다고 강조합니다.

• 우생학(Eugenics): 20세기 초 미국과 유럽에서는 우생학 운동이 있었으며, 하버드, 스탠퍼드, 프린스턴 등 명문 대학 총장들까지 이를 지지했습니다. 이들은 인종의 유전자 풀 보호를 주장했으나 이는 "완전한 헛소리"였습니다. 이 운동은 1924년 이민 제한법(immigration restriction act)을 초래하여 유대인, 동유럽인, 중국인의 이민을 제한하는 결과를 낳았으며, 이는 루즈벨트가 2차 세계 대전 이전에 유대인들이 유럽을 탈출하는 것을 막는 데 사용되었습니다. 우생학이 멈춘 것은 나치 독일이 이를 극단적으로 가져갔기 때문이었습니다.

• 플로지스톤(Phlogiston) 비유: Happer는 현재의 기후 과학 시대를 **"플로지스톤 시대"**라고 부릅니다. 플로지스톤은 200년 전 열의 근원으로 여겨졌던 마법의 비실재 물질이었는데, 당시에는 이를 믿지 않으면 아무도 지지해 주지 않았습니다. 현재 기후 과학에서 CO2​가 그 플로지스톤 역할을 한다고 비유했습니다.

• 정치인의 무지: 정치인들이 권력과 무지를 결합할 때 종종 헛소리를 만들어냅니다. 예를 들어, 백열전구 금지 조치(incandescent light bulbs)는 당시 대체품인 형광등(compact fluorescents)이 끔찍했음에도 불구하고, 뭔가 해야 한다는 정치인들의 압박에서 비롯된 것이었습니다.

• 대중의 반응: 일반 대중, 특히 시골 사람들은 기후 변화를 그리 심각하게 받아들이지 않는 경향이 있지만, 교육받은 사람들(학계)에게는 이념적, 종교적, 또는 사이비 종교적인 문제로 자리 잡았습니다. 특히 젊은 세대의 가장 큰 불안 요인 중 하나가 기후 변화로 꼽힐 정도로 이 서사가 성공적으로 주입되었습니다.

5. 해결 방안과 독립적인 사고

• 이 문제의 해결책 중 하나는 기후 과학에 대한 대규모 자금 지원을 중단하거나, 적어도 CO2​ 외의 대안적인 이론에 자금 지원을 열어주는 것이라고 Lindzen과 Happer는 제안합니다.

• Happer는 미국 과학 기술의 강점 중 하나는 워싱턴에 단 하나의 자금 지원 기관이 없었다는 점을 언급했습니다 (NSF, 해군 연구청 등). 기관들이 서로 경쟁했기 때문에 자금 지원의 활력이 유지되었으나, 단일 기관으로 모이는 것은 "원 포인트 실패"로 이어질 수 있는 끔찍한 생각이라고 우려했습니다.

• Lindzen은 학문적 수준에서 이데올로기와 진실을 분리하고, 자금 지원 기관이 질문을 허용하지 않는 규칙을 만들지 않도록 해야 한다고 주장했습니다.

• Happer는 **엠마누엘 칸트 (Emmanuel Kant)**의 유명한 인용문인 "인류의 굽은 목재에서 곧은 것은 만들어지지 않았다 (from the crooked timber of mankind no straight thing was ever made)"를 언급하며, 이는 과학을 포함한 인간 사회의 모든 측면에 적용된다고 말했습니다.

• Happer와 Lindzen은 대중에게 **"신뢰하되 확인하라 (Trust but verify)"**는 로널드 레이건이 좋아했던 러시아 속담을 인용하며, 과학이 권위가 아닌 방법론임을 이해해야 한다고 조언했습니다. Lindzen은 세상을 파괴하는 것은 그리 쉬운 일이 아니며, 기후 변화에 대한 걱정이 사람들의 걱정 목록에서 최상위에 있을 필요는 없다고 덧붙였습니다.