Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition joins me to talk about his recent trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the Heartland Institute's 13th International Conference on Climate Change, where he was keynote speaker at the Trump International Hotel.
00:07:00.520The other thing, and they're trying to really get this meme into the public mind, and that is climate delusion.
00:07:07.240It says, second, we ask that you frequently tweet about the climate delusion to break through the media blackout
00:07:14.520that has kept much of the public from learning about the climate realist position.
00:07:18.880So we're asking President Trump to use his influence to get out this idea that climate delusion is really influencing the public,
00:07:26.540and we want people to understand it is a delusion because it's not based on real data.
00:07:32.040You know, since 1880, we've seen a one degree, slightly more than one degree temperature rise, which is certainly not dangerous.
00:07:39.580So the whole climate scare is based on these computer models.
00:07:43.040And during the conference, various scientists showed us how badly these models are working.
00:07:47.880Depending on what data you compare it with, it's either double or triple the, you know,
00:07:52.640the amount of warming that's being forecast is double or triple what's really happening.
00:07:57.860So we also heard about the benefits of fossil fuels and the fact that if we want to go back to the 1800s with our, you know, level of prosperity,
00:08:59.900And, of course, the liberal controlled media.
00:09:03.340You know, the bottom line is these are scientists from all over the world who have many peer-reviewed published papers.
00:09:08.820Neer Shaviv, for example, from Israel, was speaking about how the sun is undoubtedly a very heavy influencer on climate.
00:09:16.580And Dr. Ball points out that that's a real problem because by the middle of this century,
00:09:21.440we're going to be getting to a time when the sun is in what's called a grand solar minimum.
00:09:26.620And if it's like previous grand solar minimums, we're going to see the coldest conditions in centuries.
00:09:32.540And yet the Canadian government is planning for warming.
00:09:35.260You know, the point that really is crazy is if it warms a little bit, then Canada can simply use the farming practices that are used in Arkansas.
00:09:44.540But if it cools, we lose our crops because there's nobody farming north of us.
00:09:49.520So this cooling threat, and, you know, Professor Abdus Sametab from the Polkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg in Russia, he's another.
00:09:57.300And there are many of them that are now saying that the whole climate debate is upside down.
00:10:01.580First of all, it's more likely to be cooling than warming.
00:10:05.200And secondly, we should be helping people adapt to climate change.
00:10:11.180And this is what should really upset social justice warriors.
00:10:14.000I think we spoke about this last time, is that 95 percent of the billion dollars a day that goes to climate finance is going to try to stop climate change.
00:10:23.860There's only one twentieth of it, one, you know, five percent that is going to help real people now.
00:10:29.260And if this cooling is coming, people are going to need help.
00:10:33.240There's all sorts of things we can do to help them.
00:10:39.720Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the hypocrisy of the climate change movement.
00:10:45.600It's always a theme when I do interviews with the denier side.
00:10:49.800I wanted to, you know, I'm always apprehensive of talking about Greta Thunberg because she is a child and I think a mentally ill child being exploited by the adults around her.
00:11:01.060But she's she's actually given up or so she says airline travel to fight climate change.
00:11:08.700She's putting her money where her mouth is.
00:11:10.400But she's going to travel to North America and I guess the Americas in general because she's going to the climate change conference in in Chile later on in the year.
00:11:24.740But she's traveling in a state of the art sailboat and she claims this is low carbon.
00:11:30.100But the boat itself is aluminum and is just rife with technology that you need fossil fuels to extract.
00:11:59.920And, of course, the actual manufacture of aluminum itself takes huge amounts of energy and it's got to be reliable, dependable energy, something like hydro, for example.
00:12:08.660Again, wind and solar just doesn't cut it.
00:12:11.880And, you know, one of the things that that she doesn't seem to understand is that in many ways, wind and solar are not environmentally friendly.
00:12:21.560Dr. Elizabeth Anderson gave a talk recently at Carleton, two talks, one on solar and one on wind, on the real environmental costs of these things.
00:12:31.000And, you know, they mine, for example, for the rare earths to go into the supermagnets in wind turbines.
00:12:36.280They do that in China under terrible environmental conditions.
00:12:40.340In fact, you could say, and that's not even counting the bird deaths and the bat deaths.
00:12:45.220Bats are even more threatened than birds.
00:12:47.620You could say wind, in many ways, is the most dirty power on the planet.
00:12:52.260And similarly with solar, you know, she was showing that the manufacture of solar plants, solar cells, photovoltaics in China is done in an extremely dirty way.
00:13:04.080In fact, interestingly, their green city, in which they generate a lot of these energy sources, is one of the most polluted cities in the world.
00:13:13.300And so I encourage people to look into that more deeply because wind and solar, boy, you know, they have a lot of problems.
00:13:20.040The bat kill problem is something people don't know much about.
00:13:22.980They should, though, because there are more bats being killed than birds.
00:13:26.060And sadly, bats can be killed just by passing near a turbine blade, because if they pass into a region of very low pressure, there's a sack in their head that bursts and they die.
00:13:37.460So, and, you know, bats typically eat about a thousand mosquitoes in a night.
00:13:41.900So, yeah, we don't want to get rid of bats, that's for sure.
00:13:44.520But it's sad when I see a child really influenced like that, because, you know, one of the greatest threats to survival in the world today is a pessimistic anticipation of the future.
00:13:57.460I mean, this is something that a lot of psychologists have looked at, and they basically say what we really need is a positive worldview for where humanity is going as a species.
00:14:07.280And so it's very sad to see when children have such a negative worldview.
00:14:11.060That's one of the reasons that I'm so enthusiastic about the space program.
00:14:14.960Not only was I an aerospace engineer, but it's a positive alternative future where we can do new things and move forward as a species.
00:14:23.120And that's the kind of thing I wish children would focus on.
00:14:25.520And that's one of the reasons that I write in that field as well.
00:14:29.340Speaking of a pessimistic anticipation of the future, what a great way to put it.
00:14:35.200I've got some terrible news for you, Tom.
00:14:38.600We're all going to die in 18 months and not 12 years, like they keep promising us.
00:14:44.620A headline from the BBC, climate change, 12 years to save the planet, make that 18 months.
00:14:50.980These people are like a doomsday cult.
00:14:52.960They're just anticipating the comet to come, and they're going to, you know, just jump on the comet and go somewhere else.
00:14:59.320It's really frightening to see how they, it's, like you say, there's a hopelessness for the future that I think is really bad to instill in an entire generation of people.
00:15:14.660But I think they just need the urgency so that they can justify how much they want to tax me.
00:15:20.860Well, also, I think it's that media, you know, mainstream media thrive on negative news.
00:15:26.600And in particular, on this issue, I was actually speaking to an editor of a leading Eastern Canadian newspaper.
00:15:32.020I won't say who, because it's somewhat confidence.
00:15:35.260I asked him, you know, why don't you show both sides of the climate debate?
00:15:39.740He said, oh, we agree with David Suzuki.
00:15:41.640I said, yes, but do you have anybody on staff who has even a Bachelor of Science so that you could actually judge as to who is more likely right?
00:16:02.080A big headline that says, you know, global temperature has risen a trivial amount in the last, well, since the beginning of the 20th century, it's virtually nothing.
00:16:10.120And even since 1880, we're talking about one degree, which has been a beneficial thing.
00:16:15.640That kind of headline doesn't sell press.
00:16:17.860So if you're going for high circulation numbers, yes, catastrophe sells.
00:16:34.720Now, if you spend $12,000 on a newspaper ad, the last thing you want is Tim Patterson or Tim Ball or Ian Clark writing an op-ed on the other side saying you can't stop climate change.
00:17:28.520But somehow the CBC and their guest blamed it on climate change.
00:17:33.780And the viewer had actually written to the ombudsman saying this is unscientific kookery.
00:17:38.640And you could have at least presented not even just the anti-climate change side of the debate, but just someone with the common sense to say ocean currents erode things.
00:17:53.040And the CBC ombudsman wrote him back saying it is our policy not to provide balance on issues of climate change because the scientific consensus says the science is settled.
00:18:06.340Which is actually an unscientific phrase in and of itself.
00:18:28.740And, of course, it took a little pressure.
00:18:30.620But he finally, the ombudsman, David Bazet, actually, he's passed away.
00:18:34.140But he's finally sent me 10 pages of answer in which he showed there was a consensus in the media that there was a consensus in the climate change community.
00:18:46.380He didn't actually interview a single scientist or a single scientific organization in supporting this contention.
00:18:52.980So, in fact, it was the media where there was a consensus.
00:18:59.240And, you know, it's interesting, none of these polls, this famous 97 percent thing, is nonsense because they either don't ask the right question or they don't ask the right people.
00:19:10.480They'll ask in these polls, they'll ask, do you think climate change is real?
00:19:13.940Do you think humans contribute to climate change?
00:19:18.320The question is, are we causing climate change so dangerous it's worth billions of dollars a day to try to stop?
00:19:25.600They don't ask scientists that question, and the reason they don't is because scientists would say, I don't know, or they would say probably not.
00:19:34.600Very few of them would say yes, because that billion dollars a day could go to so many other important causes.
00:19:40.340And the other thing is they're often not asking the right people.
00:19:43.380They have to ask people who don't work for government, because, of course, those people are going to say what they're told to say, have to ask independent scientists who study the causes of climate change.
00:19:53.240You know, not bark beetle experts who study what climate change does.
00:19:57.480We want to know from the people who study the causes.
00:20:00.300And I think, Sheila, that if they did that, they would find there was kind of a bell curve where most scientists would say, I don't know if some of the evidence says we are, some we aren't.
00:20:09.620I think some scientists would say definitely not, like Tim Ball.
00:20:13.180And then you'd have Jim Hansen and others saying definitely yes.
00:20:16.060But I think the vast majority of them would say, wow, this is a really immature field.
00:20:22.520I mean, things like clouds, for example, we don't understand.
00:20:25.820And yet clouds have 10 times the influence of all human activities combined.
00:20:30.220So until we understand natural climate change, how can we understand how much humans are contributing?
00:20:36.280And that's the point Dr. Ball makes all the time, is our understanding of natural climate change is really bad for one simple, well, a number of reasons.
00:21:09.960There's huge areas of the Earth across the oceans in Africa, Antarctica.
00:21:14.760I mean, you know, most of the world is ocean.
00:21:17.080We don't have sensors to give us proper surface readings.
00:21:20.600So until and so that's the first thing we need to do.
00:21:22.900If we're really serious about this, we need to get data to best understand what's really going on.
00:21:29.660And in fact, I'll read you a little quote here from the Tim Ball speech that I gave, because Dr. Ball, as I say, he went back to university to study why weather forecasting was so bad.
00:21:41.860It led him to produce a long-term record to accommodate some of the short and medium-term cycles.
00:21:47.820You see, Tim is a fan of Sherlock Holmes' warning.
00:22:40.700Yeah, he's really been put through the ringer.
00:22:44.440I just jotted down a quick note as you were talking about the surface readings to detect overall trends in weather patterns and temperature.
00:22:56.780And I think it was Willie Soon, Dr. Willie Soon.
00:23:00.260I was at a Friends of Science event in Calgary.
00:23:04.800For those who don't know, Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and a geoscientist.
00:23:08.500And he was pointing out the fact that many of the places where they take the readings, these weather stations where they take the readings and then put them into the computer and crank out their models, a lot of these are not in places where they should be.
00:23:29.880For example, they are in the middle of a parking lot, a paved parking lot or they're on a roof, a dark roof.
00:23:38.600So where the conditions around them affect the temperature readings.
00:23:43.700And yet that's the data that they're using to predict or to create these climate models.
00:23:49.620And then they're using those climate models to tax me.
00:24:30.960We don't know what's happening to the Earth's climate right now, let alone 50 years in the future.
00:24:36.120I wanted to talk to you about something.
00:24:39.780It just sort of wandered into my mind because you were talking about how wrong weather predictions always are.
00:24:45.900And the Weather Network, the other day, they had tweeted something about if Canadians want to fight climate change, we need to stop eating meat.
00:24:55.780And then just a couple of days later, I see Tim Hortons is offering some mung bean abomination masquerading as an egg for their new like beyond meat breakfast sandwich needs an exorcism.
00:25:11.020What do you think the what do you think the motive is for all these companies and all these organizations now saying, OK, well, you got to use less fossil fuels to fight climate change, but also you need to live off insects basically now to save the planet in 18 months?
00:25:30.840Well, I think in most cases, it's just a desire to be politically correct.
00:25:35.100And, you know, the left have defined essentially what political correctness is.
00:25:39.360And sadly, it's not giving inexpensive electricity to the poor.
00:25:43.600It's trying to save the planet or everybody should go vegan or something.
00:25:47.600But but I think that in general, we have to expose the consequences of the climate scare because the consequences are disastrous.
00:25:56.700It's not just that we'll lose our conveniences. It's that millions of people will starve around the world if we, in fact, are not able to use fossil fuels to for agriculture and for heating and all those sorts of things, because fossil fuels is the lifeblood of civilization.
00:26:13.240And this is one of the things that they pointed out in the conference.
00:26:15.900We had economists there who were showing a very interesting phenomena that most people on the left don't understand.
00:26:22.080And that is that once you get to a certain point in development, the richer you become, the more you protect the environment.
00:26:29.620OK, it's actually an upside down you at the beginning, as you industrialize, the environment gets worse.
00:26:35.460But you get to a certain point when beyond that, the richer you are, the more you protect the environment.
00:26:43.420And in fact, President Trump, in his Earth Day speech of this year, back on the 22nd of April, he didn't reference the curve, but he referenced the idea, the idea.
00:27:42.720If you're interested in seeing some of the discussions that happened at the Heartland Institute's 13th Annual International Conference on Climate Change,