The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

00:00:03.000 The Joe Logan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Join my day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

00:00:12.000 Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here.

00:00:14.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:15.000 Our pleasure.

00:00:16.000 My pleasure.

00:00:17.000 And if you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your uh your resume, like what you do.

00:00:24.000 I mean, just a brief version of your credentials.

00:00:29.000 I'm Dick Linson.

00:00:31.000 And uh my whole life has been in academia.

00:00:35.000 Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard.

00:00:39.000 And I did spend a couple of years.

00:00:43.000 Uh at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado.

00:00:51.000 Then uh part of that was because at Harvard uh I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations.

00:01:02.000 So I went to Seattle for someone who did.

00:01:05.000 And then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there for about three, four years, moved on to Harvard, spent about ten years there, and then to MIT for about the last thirty-five years until I retired in 2013.

00:01:28.000 I've always enjoyed it.

00:01:30.000 I mean, uh the field of atmospheric science is when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable.

00:01:41.000 So you could uh look at phenomena.

00:01:44.000 One of them that I worked on was the some so-called quasi biennial cycle.

00:01:50.000 Turns out the wind above the equator, about sixteen kilometers, twenty kilometers, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year, and so on.

00:02:01.000 And you know, we worked out why that happened and there were other things like that.

00:02:06.000 So it was a very enjoyable period uh until global warming.

00:02:12.000 And sir, would you uh tell everybody what your credentials are, what you do, where you're from?

00:02:17.000 I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton.

00:02:23.000 And uh like uh Dick, I'm a science nerd.

00:02:29.000 But I was actually born in India under the British Raj.

00:02:32.000 My father was a army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American, and uh that was before World War II.

00:02:41.000 So when I came to America uh as a small child, uh my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project.

00:02:48.000 So wow.

00:02:49.000 I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge, and uh that's probably why I went into physics.

00:02:55.000 Uh I thought this looks like interesting way to make a living.

00:03:00.000 And if I can do it, I'll do it.

00:03:02.000 And and I have, and I've uh done a number of things.

00:03:06.000 Uh spent a lot of time at universities at Columbia at Princeton.

00:03:10.000 I also uh served for a couple of years in Washington as director of energy research uh under President Bush Sr.

00:03:19.000 And uh I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here.

00:03:24.000 Uh I first became suspicious when I was director of energy research.

00:03:28.000 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.

00:03:39.000 And there was one exception, that was the uh people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful.

00:03:45.000 You know, we work for Senator Gore, we we don't work for you.

00:03:48.000 And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research.

00:03:52.000 Uh I I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be uh glad to take my money.

00:03:58.000 That's interesting.

00:03:58.000 So Senator Gore has been involved in this whole climate thing for quite a long time though.

00:04:03.000 Oh, yes.

00:04:04.000 When he was a senator, before he was vice president.

00:04:04.000 Very long.

00:04:06.000 That's right.

00:04:07.000 And when he made that movie an inconvenient truth, what year was that again, Jamie?

00:04:13.000 Ninety and eight or something?

00:04:15.000 Yeah.

00:04:15.000 Something like that.

00:04:16.000 Yeah, 99.

00:04:17.000 That's what is it?

00:04:20.000 Oh, really?

00:04:21.000 With that off.

00:04:21.000 Wow.

00:04:22.000 Okay.

00:04:22.000 So 2006.

00:04:23.000 So when he made that film, uh he ba there was always when I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nimoy had a television show called In Search of.

00:04:32.000 Sure.

00:04:32.000 Remember that show?

00:04:33.000 And on that show he warned of an oncoming ice age.

00:04:36.000 Right.

00:04:37.000 Do you remember that?

00:04:38.000 And I remember being a kid and freaking out like, oh my God, Spock is telling us the world's going to freeze.

00:04:43.000 This is terrifying.

00:04:44.000 And then somewhere along the line, it became global warming.

00:04:48.000 And uh initially in the 80s it was kind of funny.

00:04:51.000 People were saying, well, hairspray, more you use it, you could play golf deep into November.

00:04:56.000 That was the ozone.

00:04:59.000 But it was also part of global warming.

00:05:01.000 They were worried about global warming, but it would they were worried about the ozone hole.

00:05:04.000 It wasn't CO2 as much back then.

00:05:06.000 CO2 seems to have really significantly become a part of the zeitgeist after this Al Gore film.

00:05:14.000 No?

00:05:14.000 No.

00:05:15.000 It was before.

00:05:15.000 No.

00:05:18.000 No, it was study in in terms of academic study for sure, but in terms of people panicking, when did CO2.

00:05:25.000 Panicking, uh I have no idea.

00:05:29.000 No, what happened was uh there was I would say with the first Earth Day, 1970.

00:05:39.000 There was a real change in the environmental movement.

00:05:43.000 It began to focus much more strongly on the energy sector and much less on saving the whales.

00:05:53.000 And there was a big difference.

00:05:56.000 I mean, the energy sector involved trillions of dollars, the whales not so much.

00:06:01.000 Right.

00:06:03.000 And uh at that time it was cooling, this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much.

00:06:10.000 But you know, you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something.

00:06:15.000 And it was cooling from the 1930s.

00:06:19.000 1930s were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the 70s.

00:06:25.000 And that's why they were saying, well, you know, this is going to lead to an ice age.

00:06:30.000 And they focused on that for a while.

00:06:32.000 And then in the 70s, and at that time, well, what do you say?

00:06:37.000 You know, if 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.

00:06:52.000 But then the temperature stopped cooling in the 70s and started warming.

00:06:57.000 And that's when they said, well, you have to warn now scare people with warming, and uh you can't use the sulfates anymore.

00:07:06.000 But the scientists called uh Suki Minabi 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.

00:07:20.000 But if you assumed 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 impact 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.

00:07:42.000 Uh and that's when people started saying, well, now we better find CO2.

00:07:47.000 It's increased because of industrialization and so on.

00:07:51.000 And that began the demonization of CO2.

00:07:54.000 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?

00:08:04.000 Oh yeah.

00:08:05.000 And this was a particular case.

00:08:10.000 You know, the energy sector is trillions of dollars.

00:08:13.000 Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, r replace fossil fuels, it's big bugs.

00:08:20.000 Right.

00:08:21.000 And one of the odd things I I think in politics, I don't see it studied much.

00:08:27.000 Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars.

00:08:31.000 If you look at the Kint McKinsey report on uh, you know eliminating CO2, net zero, they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.

00:08:46.000 Well, if you're giving out that much, you don't need that much of your politician.

00:08:53.000 All you need is millions for your campaigning.

00:08:57.000 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.

00:09:08.000 So that's much better than giving out a hundred thousand and having all of it back.

00:09:12.000 Trevor Burrus Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge.

00:09:18.000 There's no room for any rational debate, and if you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier.

00:09:24.000 Yeah.

00:09:25.000 Which is like being an anti-vaxxer or you know, fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing you could be called.

00:09:25.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:09:30.000 Now that that's a very interesting phenomenon.

00:09:30.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:09:33.000 I mean, as looking at it, on the one hand, you're told the science is settled.

00:09:40.000 Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder.

00:09:46.000 I mean, you went to college, how many climate scientists did you know?

00:09:51.000 I mean, those 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 understand them at all.

00:10:05.000 So here you have the biggest phenomena we don't understand it all, but the science is settled.

00:10:09.000 Who knows what that means?

00:10:11.000 Well, it's also there's this very bizarre dynamic of the Earth's temperature itself, which has never been static.

00:10:16.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:10:17.000 How would it remain static?

00:10:17.000 No.

00:10:19.000 That would involve a hugely reactive system.

00:10:23.000 Doesn't make any sense.

00:10:23.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:10:24.000 And and but everyone seems to uh uh be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the earth is warming, we have to act now.

00:10:33.000 Trevor Burrus You say everyone.

00:10:35.000 No, I'm not sure everyone.

00:10:36.000 A lot of politicians are politicians are very attractive to this because it gives them power.

00:10:42.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:10:42.000 Right.

00:10:43.000 And it's hard to define.

00:10:44.000 And you can argue and if you argue against it, you're a bad person.

00:10:48.000 Well, you you do all that, but uh you know, we spend part of a year in France, my wife is French.

00:10:56.000 You know, ordinary people, once you get to the countryside, don't take this all that seriously.

00:11:01.000 Right.

00:11:02.000 Uh here too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.

00:11:11.000 Aaron Powell Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians' decisions where they have to in the U.K. they were getting rid of cows, they were forcing people to kill cows.

00:11:25.000 Right.

00:11:26.000 I mean, it makes people poorer.

00:11:29.000 Uh it's making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it.

00:11:35.000 And that involves billions of people.

00:11:38.000 No, I mean uh it's doing phenomenal damage and pain.

00:11:42.000 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 uh grandiose but how would um how are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity?

00:12:08.000 Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels.

00:12:13.000 Fossil fuels are cheaper.

00:12:16.000 Uh at least the experience in the U.K. is when you switch to, quote, renewables.

00:12:23.000 It tripled the price of electricity.

00:12:25.000 But what I'm talking about is like third world countries, parts of the world that are undeveloped.

00:12:25.000 Right.

00:12:25.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:12:28.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:12:29.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And that's all it is, that they can't afford it.

00:12:29.000 They can't afford it.

00:12:32.000 And but they also to if they didn't follow these net zero policies, what kind of plants are we talking about?

00:12:38.000 Are we c talking about coal plants?

00:12:40.000 Cool.

00:12:41.000 Anything, whatever is available.

00:12:42.000 Yeah.

00:12:43.000 I mean, you know, so you think even though coal does pollute the environment and uh releases particulates, right?

00:12:49.000 It's that's an issue, right?

00:12:50.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:12:51.000 How should I put it?

00:12:52.000 You know, it's always a matter of cost.

00:12:56.000 We have a plant, I think in Alabama that has basically as clean as any other plant that burns coal.

00:13:04.000 You can clean it, you can scrub it, you can get rid of almost everything except CO2.

00:13:09.000 Okay.

00:13:10.000 So um the particulates aren't as big of an issue as they used to be in the past, is that they're more efficient.

00:13:15.000 Yeah.

00:13:15.000 Okay.

00:13:16.000 So uh stopping so this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world that do not have electricity.

00:13:24.000 And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants into not bringing these people into the first world.

00:13:31.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:13:32.000 And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on, which are available in places.

00:13:37.000 Uh you know, there are places where you have you you're lucky, like in Norway or Canada, you know, Quebec where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean.

00:13:49.000 But uh there's a problem with politicians.

00:13:53.000 I remember once being in D.C. and some Republican politicians came and said, you know what we just did?

00:14:00.000 We banned incandescent light bulbs.

00:14:04.000 They said, wasn't that a great thing?

00:14:06.000 I said, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today.

00:14:09.000 Uh what what's the point?

00:14:11.000 Because at the time, what was replacing it?

00:14:13.000 Compact fluorescence, which were awful.

00:14:16.000 All they had to do was wait and do nothing, and LEDs would come along and people would say, okay, I prefer that.

00:14:24.000 Instead uh they feel they have to do something.

00:14:27.000 And they would switch the fluorescence, which turned out to be terrible for people.

00:14:30.000 Yeah.

00:14:31.000 So incandescents aren't bad for you?

00:14:31.000 Yeah.

00:14:34.000 They were simply less efficient than the you know, in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light.

00:14:42.000 I mean, LEDs are phenomenal that way.

00:14:45.000 Right.

00:14:45.000 They're the best.

00:14:45.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:14:46.000 Yeah.

00:14:47.000 Well, you know, it's interesting when they have these decisions that they make like that that do turn out to be negative ultimately.

00:14:54.000 And that yet people still allow them to make silly decisions that don't seem to be making sense.

00:15:01.000 Yeah, I think there's an old cliche.

00:15:05.000 Money is the root of all evil.

00:15:07.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to get to.

00:15:08.000 I d 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.

00:15:22.000 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.

00:15:29.000 This is the thing that we keep.

00:15:30.000 You mentioned a tough thing there.

00:15:31.000 The the business trust science.

00:15:33.000 Yes.

00:15:35.000 It's not a great idea because that isn't science is not a source of authority.

00:15:41.000 It's a methodology.

00:15:45.000 It's based on challenge.

00:15:47.000 Right.

00:15:48.000 And so where this narrative come from then.

00:15:51.000 Trust the science.

00:15:52.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr. the success of science.

00:15:55.000 In other words, this is a relatively new way to approach the world, I mean, a few hundred years.

00:16:02.000 And uh the notion is, and I think it's been stated many times, you test things, and if they fail to predict correctly, they're wrong, so you find out what's wrong with them.

00:16:15.000 You don't uh fudge them, and you don't change the rules.

00:16:20.000 Um it's uh led to immense improvements in life, development of all sorts of things.

00:16:32.000 And so it has a good reputation.

00:16:36.000 Uh politicians have less of a reputation, so they wish to co-opt the reputation of science.

00:16:42.000 Yes.

00:16:42.000 That's a very good point.

00:16:44.000 Try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid.

00:16:48.000 You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing.

00:16:51.000 Yeah.

00:16:52.000 Cell phone technology, nuclear power, so many things that people go, that's incredible that they did that.

00:16:57.000 Well, that's also confusing technology with science.

00:17:00.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:17:01.000 The result of science.

00:17:02.000 Absolutely.

00:17:02.000 Right.

00:17:02.000 Yeah.

00:17:03.000 Which is also an issue, right?

00:17:03.000 Yeah.

00:17:05.000 And when you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science.

00:17:11.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:17:12.000 You mentioned Gore at the beginning.

00:17:14.000 Yes.

00:17:14.000 You know, with that thing, i he was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together.

00:17:23.000 And uh it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2.

00:17:31.000 Yeah, Greg Braden was on the podcast recently.

00:17:33.000 He was explaining there have been times where the CO2 was much higher in the atmosphere, but the the temperature was colder.

00:17:38.000 Oh, yeah.

00:17:39.000 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.

00:17:44.000 Look how much CO2 they had.

00:17:46.000 And then the other really inconvenient thing with CO2 is that the earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time.

00:17:52.000 I mean, I think we'll speak to that.

00:17:55.000 But I mean, essentially the increased amount of CO2 in the industrial era has added greatly to the arable land.

00:18:08.000 And in fact there's a funny story.

00:18:11.000 Do you know the name E. O. Wilson?

00:18:13.000 Have you ever heard that name?

00:18:14.000 I do.

00:18:15.000 I have heard it, but I don't know where is he wrote a he was a biologist at Harvard.

00:18:20.000 He wrote about sociobiology.

00:18:23.000 His specialty were ants and bees and things, social insects.

00:18:28.000 And uh he was giving a talk and uh it came up for reasons that were not obvious to me.

00:18:39.000 He was talking about the population of humanoids.

00:18:43.000 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.

00:19:08.000 There was a complete wipeout of humans.

00:19:10.000 So I asked him afterwards, I said, do you think this could have anything to do with the fact that CO2 is so low that there was no food?

00:19:21.000 And his response was to turn around and walk away.

00:19:25.000 That's an inconvenient truth, sir.

00:19:31.000 It's just to me, it's very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance of that we have seen.

00:19:38.000 settled this that's the science is 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.

00:19:49.000 Yeah I know and it should be the first thing that makes you suspicious.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:53.000 Right.

00:19:54.000 There's a consensus something so it's never static.

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00:21:13.000 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.

00:21:20.000 It's this crazy wave and like no one was controlling it back then.

00:21:24.000 And we're supposed to believe that we can control it now, that we can do something about it now.

00:21:28.000 There's something else about it, which I find funny, and you might have some insight into it.

00:21:33.000 People pay no attention to the actual numbers.

00:21:36.000 Yeah.

00:21:38.000 I mean, we're not talking about big changes.

00:21:42.000 In other words, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees.

00:21:56.000 But that was because most of the Earth was not affected, much of the Earth anyway, very much.

00:22:04.000 but you know somebody says one degree a half degree what's his name Cucieres at the U.N. says the next half degree and we're done for doesn't anyone ask a half degree I mean I deal with that between you know 9 a.m and 10 a.m.

00:22:23.000 It does seem crazy.

00:22:25.000 It's 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.

00:22:37.000 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?

00:22:44.000 Some some crazy like that where everybody goes.

00:22:47.000 They call it the inflation reduction act.

00:22:50.000 Even better.

00:22:50.000 Who doesn't want to reduce inflation?

00:22:52.000 And then next thing you know, there's windmills killing whales and all kinds of nonsense.

00:22:57.000 But the point being it's it it is a fascinating science.

00:23:01.000 Like the science itself is fascinating.

00:23:03.000 Oh yeah.

00:23:04.000 You get rid of the ideology and you stop attaching this thing versus you know, you're either pro-science or anti-science.

00:23:12.000 Just look at the actual data of it.

00:23:14.000 It's absolutely fascinating.

00:23:16.000 And these minute changes, the fact that the procession of the equinoxes or the world earth wobbles, like the whole thing.

00:23:24.000 The whole temperature and it has to stay relatively stable in order to keep us alive in terms of like it can't go too low, can't go too high.

00:23:32.000 We're in this bully log zone.

00:23:34.000 The interesting thing is during the ice ages, we almost get wiped out.

00:23:40.000 And what's interesting about that is as far as temperature goes.

00:23:45.000 Okay, yeah, the polls have gotten much colder.

00:23:48.000 You have ice covering uh Illinois, two kilometers of ice, that that's in uninhabitable.

00:23:54.000 But you get south of thirty degrees latitude, not very different from today in terms of temperature.

00:24:02.000 And so you would think you had a hundred thousand years, people would sort of migrate to an area where it was now pleasant.

00:24:13.000 Trouble was without CO two, which went down to about one eighty, there wasn't enough food for the people.

00:24:21.000 Oh, so there wasn't enough plant life.

00:24:23.000 Yeah.

00:24:24.000 Yeah.

00:24:25.000 Get down to 160, 150.

00:24:28.000 All life would die.

00:24:29.000 There would be not enough food for anything.

00:24:35.000 What's it at now, like 240?

00:24:37.000 No, we're now 400 something.

00:24:39.000 Yeah.

00:24:40.000 400.

00:24:41.000 430, maybe today, yeah.

00:24:43.000 Okay.

00:24:44.000 Um you first started discussing this, and when you first started getting interested in this, how much pushback did you get?

00:24:54.000 Um interesting question.

00:24:58.000 Actually quite a lot, but I mean it took very funny forms.

00:25:04.000 So for instance, uh in 1989, for instance.

00:25:14.000 I sent a paper to Science Magazine questioning whether this was something to worry about.

00:25:22.000 And they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest.

00:25:28.000 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.

00:25:40.000 Wow.

00:25:41.000 About ten years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the iris effect that clouds, which were greenhouse effects at the upper levels, uh contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling as a negative feedback.

00:26:04.000 And we got the paper, put it, got reviewed, it was published.

00:26:09.000 Again, the editor was fired immediately.

00:26:12.000 But the new editor came on immediately and said he's inviting papers to criticize it.

00:26:20.000 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 it.

00:26:41.000 No, i it's insane.

00:26:43.000 And even now there is something called gatekeepers.

00:26:47.000 I don't know.

00:26:48.000 Do you are you familiar with the uh release of emails from East Anglia?

00:26:54.000 No, I'm not.

00:26:54.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:26:55.000 Okay.

00:26:56.000 This is twenty years ago or something almost.

00:27:00.000 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 Mann and so on.

00:27:20.000 And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on.

00:27:27.000 And that was all public.

00:27:30.000 And it had no impact at all.

00:27:32.000 That sounds like that should be illegal.

00:27:35.000 Yeah.

00:27:36.000 Well, you know, the whole business with how should I put it?

00:27:42.000 Peer review.

00:27:45.000 It is not ancient.

00:27:48.000 Before World War II, very few journals had peer review.

00:27:54.000 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.

00:28:08.000 They are literally discussions among scientists about the results, the questions or uncertainties and so on.

00:28:19.000 Today, I mean, there's a much more formality in the papers.

00:28:23.000 There's also in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll or a study.

00:28:31.000 How often are papers referred to?

00:28:34.000 It turns out the average paper is referred to once.

00:28:38.000 Wow.

00:28:39.000 I mean, so you have these things papers are written to satisfy the funding agency.

00:28:46.000 Nobody seems to pay attention to them.

00:28:50.000 How did you get involved in this?

00:28:52.000 Well, uh I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy, and that's what really sucked me into it.

00:28:59.000 I had never paid much attention to sci uh climate science before.

00:29:04.000 But I was spending a lot of money, the taxpayers' money on it, and so I thought I ought to learn a little bit about it.

00:29:10.000 And uh I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not uh appreciate my questioning.

00:29:17.000 Uh 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.

00:29:32.000 Did anybody engage with you?

00:29:34.000 Yeah, they had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn't come.

00:29:38.000 And so they would come, you know, and and be very sullen and uh they wouldn't answer questions.

00:29:45.000 And you know, you can't have a seminar without asking questions.

00:29:49.000 Uh that's how you learn.

00:29:50.000 So they would come to try to get funding from you and they wouldn't answer questions.

00:29:54.000 That's right.

00:29:55.000 That sounds crazy.

00:29:57.000 That sounds like people that don't think they have to convince you that what they're doing is important.

00:30:01.000 So they're entitled to that money.

00:30:03.000 Well, that's right.

00:30:04.000 Well, you know, I was working for President uh Bush Sr.

00:30:09.000 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 proteges to me Clinton.

00:30:21.000 Clinton and Gore.

00:30:22.000 Clinton and Gore, yeah.

00:30:23.000 That's right.

00:30:25.000 So he uh 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 org chart.

00:30:34.000 So it took them two or three months to find me.

00:30:39.000 But they finally did fire me.

00:30:41.000 I was glad to be fired.

00:30:42.000 I wanted to go back to do research.

00:30:43.000 I was tired of being a bureaucrat, so I you know, grateful in some sense for that.

00:30:48.000 Now, your colleagues that you that uh weren't working with you, like other scientists.

00:30:53.000 Yeah.

00:30:53.000 Were they reluctant to discuss this kind of information with you guys when when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?

00:31:01.000 Well, you know, my field is actually hard physics, you know.

00:31:05.000 I'm I'm a nuclear physics trained and have done a lot of work with lasers, and uh these are things you you can measure, they don't have much political influence.

00:31:14.000 A lot of them have a military significance.

00:31:16.000 And in fact, uh the reason I was brought to Washington is because I invented uh an important uh part of uh the Star Wars defense uh uh initiative, which I can say about later, but uh I I had never really paid any close attention to science until then.

00:31:35.000 But I I was climate science.

00:31:37.000 Climate science, I should say, yes.

00:31:40.000 So once I had this experience in Washington, I started looking into 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.

00:32:03.000 I didn't have time to look at climate.

00:32:06.000 But eventually that was behind me, and I uh I invited Dick to come give a seminar at uh a colloquium at Princeton, and that's really when I began to get very interested in it.

00:32:17.000 And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science, you know.

00:32:21.000 It it uh completely politicized if you can't ask a question, you know, that's a bad, bad sign.

00:32:27.000 Yeah.

00:32:28.000 And um and if you have a hundred percent 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 uh the climate science community.

00:32:45.000 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 it nothing ever happened.

00:32:53.000 The funding kept pouring in.

00:32:55.000 Now, is this behind the scenes, is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists.

00:33:00.000 Do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue that that causes?

00:33:05.000 Or do they just accept it?

00:33:06.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:33:07.000 Well, I think for the most part.

00:33:09.000 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 because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money.

00:33:26.000 The love of money is the root of all evil, and in universities.

00:33:29.000 For example, at Princeton, we have enormous new building program.

00:33:33.000 It's funded to a large extent from overhead from climate grants, you know.

00:33:37.000 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.

00:33:45.000 So it's it's like, you know, this famous uh drama uh of this Norwegian playwright enemy of the people, Ibsen.

00:33:54.000 And uh 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.

00:34:04.000 You drink the water and and go home healthy.

00:34:06.000 Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid.

00:34:12.000 A local doctor said, you know, we're killing people, we're not curing them, and uh he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city.

00:34:22.000 So it's it's that syndrome.

00:34:23.000 It's an ancient human problem.

00:34:25.000 Right.

00:34:26.000 So it's it's always been there.

00:34:28.000 And it's there in spades with climate.

00:34:30.000 It's part of it.

00:34:32.000 Uh another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue.

00:34:40.000 I mean, in the U.S., and I think that's in a way fortunate, it's almost a right versus left issue.

00:34:48.000 Yeah.

00:34:49.000 And as a result, uh you have people entirely on the left.

00:34:57.000 And so it's uh something they support.

00:35:02.000 Uh you know, the money end of it is sort of funny.

00:35:05.000 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.

00:35:19.000 I don't know.

00:35:20.000 I mean it's so when they get funding for climate, they can allocate it as they wish.

00:35:28.000 Well f you know, uh it is fungible.

00:35:30.000 Okay.

00:35:31.000 You get this huge overhead, you know, 50 percent, 60 percent of your grant goes to the administration and not to your research.

00:35:39.000 Uh huh.

00:35:40.000 You know, they can do what they like with the overhead.

00:35:42.000 Interesting.

00:35:42.000 Yeah.

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00:36:53.000 And if they take uh 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.

00:37:09.000 Let's take a step back.

00:37:10.000 They would immediately lose so much vote.

00:37:12.000 Well, the main thing it's bad for is for overhead income to the university.

00:37:16.000 Exactly.

00:37:17.000 Some administrators.

00:37:18.000 By the way, I mean, this is something that the press didn't deal with very much.

00:37:23.000 Trump was cutting the overhead.

00:37:27.000 He was uh saying that he didn't want to have that included in grants.

00:37:33.000 I don't think the public realized how significant that was, for better or for worse.

00:37:39.000 Yeah.

00:37:39.000 Well, I think most people have no idea where grants go.

00:37:43.000 They they don't even think about it.

00:37:45.000 No, I mean uh the amount of money that's involved.

00:37:48.000 When I was active, if I got a grant, I'm a theoretician, so I didn't need laboratory work.

00:37:48.000 Yeah.

00:37:55.000 It mainly was for support of students.

00:37:59.000 And so but then fifty percent of it went to the administration.

00:38:06.000 It's like a lot of charities almost.

00:38:06.000 Yeah.

00:38:09.000 Yeah.

00:38:10.000 A lot of money goes to overhead, a lot of money goes to executives, a lot of money goes to the administration on grants.

00:38:15.000 It's some of it is reasonable.

00:38:18.000 Sure.

00:38:19.000 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.

00:38:30.000 Yeah.

00:38:30.000 Right.

00:38:31.000 Oh yeah.

00:38:31.000 And and the attraction.

00:38:33.000 I mean, if you're an administrator, if you're a president of a university.

00:38:40.000 That often overrides everything else, you know, that uh you're raising money.

00:38:45.000 I remember years ago I started college at Rensleyer, and I made the mistake of mentioning someone that I appreciated the fact they never bothered me.

00:38:55.000 I transferred out after my sophomore year.

00:38:59.000 So it began bothering me.

00:39:01.000 And I rele realized the president of uh Rensler was making over a million and a half dollars.

00:39:08.000 This is years ago, probably making much more now.

00:39:11.000 And the uh fundraiser came back to me and said, Do you know how much money she raises?

00:39:16.000 And I said, Oh, so she's on commission.

00:39:24.000 Right.

00:39:25.000 Yeah.

00:39:26.000 That that is kind of what's going on.

00:39:28.000 Yeah.

00:39:29.000 That it gets real weird when you bring that kind of stuff up, and people get very reluctant to have these discussions.

00:39:35.000 They don't want to rock the boat.

00:39:37.000 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.

00:39:46.000 But there's also the alumni.

00:39:49.000 I find this with Harvard, especially.

00:39:52.000 A lot of the people who graduate from Harvard really love the place.

00:39:58.000 For better or for worse.

00:40:00.000 And uh they will do anything to protect it.

00:40:05.000 Yeah.

00:40:06.000 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.

00:40:15.000 A lot of people did at first in half.

00:40:18.000 A lot of politicians wrote books saying this is a hoax.

00:40:21.000 This is a and they managed to ride that out.

00:40:25.000 I mean, by just keeping on demanding that it Be accepted.

00:40:31.000 It's interesting.

00:40:32.000 It is interesting.

00:40:33.000 It's because it's universally accepted on the left.

00:40:37.000 Any discussion at all about.

00:40:39.000 I've had conversations with people, and I say, what do you why do you think that?

00:40:42.000 Like what do you know about climate change?

00:40:44.000 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.

00:40:57.000 If you he thought we were all going to be dead today.

00:41:00.000 There's very little change between 2006 and today.

00:41:03.000 I mean, as I mentioned before, I think for some people its importance is it gives, quote, meaning to their life.

00:41:12.000 Yes.

00:41:14.000 It becomes a part of an ideology, and it's very cult-like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things, unfortunately.

00:41:22.000 What do you think are the major factors?

00:41:25.000 You talked about water vapor, CO2, there's methane.

00:41:31.000 There's a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the Earth moving in any direction.

00:41:37.000 Yeah.

00:41:38.000 I uh 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.

00:41:53.000 Not clear what that is.

00:41:55.000 I mean, uh some average over the whole globe, how do you take it?

00:42:00.000 What do you do with it?

00:42:01.000 But more than that, uh what is climate?

00:42:07.000 And you know, there is a definition, it's an arbitrary definition.

00:42:12.000 And uh it's that uh it's time it's time variation on time scales longer than 30 years.

00:42:21.000 It's pretty arbitrary.

00:42:23.000 But it distinguishes it from weather, which is changes from day to day or week to week or something.

00:42:23.000 Yeah.

00:42:29.000 Right.

00:42:30.000 So if they can see a rise in temperature over 30 years, they start getting concerned.

00:42:34.000 They start calling it climate.

00:42:36.000 Okay.

00:42:37.000 Now you can take data from every station and filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years.

00:42:46.000 That's called a low-pass filter.

00:42:50.000 And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe.

00:42:59.000 It turns out very poorly.

00:43:02.000 Because most climate change, by that definition, is regional.

00:43:10.000 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.

00:43:26.000 Nobody paid much attention to it, because that's normal.

00:43:30.000 Different areas do different things.

00:43:34.000 You have reasons why it's local.

00:43:36.000 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 Niño and so to a thousand years.

00:43:55.000 And so this has nothing to do with the global average.

00:44:01.000 The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets.

00:44:10.000 And so you'd look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot, so that it was useful.

00:44:16.000 But for looking at the Earth's climate, I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device.

00:44:23.000 That makes sense.

00:44:24.000 How much of a factor does the sun play?

00:44:27.000 Obviously a lot.

00:44:28.000 It heats us up, but like the changing of the Trevor Burrus, I you know, that's something there's argument about.

00:44:35.000 Uh I think, you know, for instance, uh a man called Milankovich 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.

00:45:04.000 And the the thinking was pretty simple.

00:45:07.000 Uh he was saying that uh, you know, every winter is cold.

00:45:12.000 Every winter has snow.

00:45:15.000 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.

00:45:27.000 And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier.

00:45:32.000 Takes thousands of years, but you know, eventually it's big.

00:45:36.000 And uh in recent years, for instance, uh there have been young people who have shown that that works.

00:45:45.000 It's interesting.

00:45:46.000 There was even a national program called CliMAP to study this.

00:45:52.000 It's around 1990 or so.

00:45:56.000 And they found something peculiar.

00:45:59.000 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.

00:46:16.000 The young people looking at this said you're looking at the wrong thing.

00:46:21.000 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.

00:46:32.000 And then the correlations were excellent.

00:46:36.000 So this was a theory, Milankovich, that I think has been reasonably sustained.

00:46:43.000 Uh but it the people doing this got no credit, nothing.

00:46:51.000 Because, you know, early in my career these people would have been rewarded.

00:46:58.000 Now it didn't contribute to global warming.

00:47:00.000 Nobody pays attention to it.

00:47:03.000 Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with.

00:47:07.000 Um but uh you asked about the sun, and as Jack says that uh is a controversial issue.

00:47:14.000 The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it, it's all CO2, CO2 is the controlled knob.

00:47:22.000 Don't confuse me with other possibilities.

00:47:27.000 But nobody is is quite sure about the sun.

00:47:30.000 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 five hundred years ago or five thousand years ago.

00:47:41.000 And uh one of the proxies is uh when the sun activity changes, it it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-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.

00:48:07.000 And they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant.

00:48:13.000 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.

00:48:22.000 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.

00:48:44.000 There's a pretty good historical record of that.

00:48:47.000 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 noticeable here.

00:49:03.000 The Arctic, you know, in high latitudes in the north.

00:49:06.000 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.

00:49:21.000 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.

00:49:30.000 So what caused those?

00:49:31.000 It was not uh people burning oil and coal, you know.

00:49:36.000 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 fourteen.

00:49:47.000 That's absolutely fascinating.

00:49:49.000 Now, when we have estimates like, say, of the Jurassic or any any dinosaur age.

00:49:59.000 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?

00:50:06.000 Aaron Ross Powell, Well, yeah.

00:50:07.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So we can go back 65, 100 million years.

00:50:10.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: You can go up 500 million years.

00:50:12.000 500 million years and before.

00:50:13.000 Evidence of ice ages, absolutely.

00:50:16.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: There always been.

00:50:17.000 There's always been an ice age and a warming.

00:50:19.000 Trevor Burrus, And they don't they don't correlate very well with CO2.

00:50:22.000 You can also estimate the past CO2 levels, and they don't correlate with ice ages.

00:50:26.000 What's special about the recent ice ages is they're pretty periodic.

00:50:33.000 So for 700,000 years, almost every hundred thousand years you have a cycle.

00:50:38.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:50:39.000 Wow.

00:50:40.000 If you go back further than that, you begin seeing that fall apart and for about three million years, 40,000 years is the dominant period.

00:50:50.000 And then you go back further than that and you don't have ice ages for a long time.

00:50:56.000 Wow.

00:50:56.000 Yeah.

00:50:57.000 It's very very poorly understood, I would say.

00:51:00.000 And so the and and there's also no way to track it.

00:51:04.000 Like there's no way to tell what's going to happen to the sun.

00:51:10.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:51:11.000 That solar activity was the issue.

00:51:13.000 Trevor Burrus Could have been many factors.

00:51:15.000 Trevor Burrus Well, you know.

00:51:17.000 How shall I put it?

00:51:19.000 With the ice ages.

00:51:21.000 Trevor Burrus As I say, orbital theory was the main thing.

00:51:27.000 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.

00:51:43.000 Trevor Burrus Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said that uh he correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi periodic really only began three million years or so ago, and at first they were oscillating a lot faster than today.

00:52:00.000 And that was approximately the time that the isthmus of Panama closed.

00:52:05.000 So one of the suspicions is that when the uh Panama isthmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat in things like the Gulf Stream.

00:52:20.000 For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe.

00:52:26.000 And that was about the time that the these uh fluctuating ice ages began.

00:52:31.000 But you know, we've set back the the serious study of climate, I think by fifty years by this manic focus on CO2.

00:52:31.000 Wow.

00:52:39.000 If your theory doesn't have CO2 in it, forget it, you know, you won't get funding.

00:52:44.000 And so the the the true answer, uh I mean, uh to me, you know, there was a period uh 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was uh phlagiston.

00:52:53.000 There was this magic subject uh, you know uh non existent, but everyone had to believe in phlagistin.

00:53:01.000 And it turned out it was nonsense, it wasn't there at all.

00:53:04.000 But but you couldn't get anyone to support you unless you believed in phlagiston. 0.96

00:53:08.000 So I call this phlagistin era of climate science where phlagistin is CO2.

00:53:14.000 You know, well, this is what confuses me.

00:53:17.000 You gentlemen are academics, you're obviously very intelligent people.

00:53:20.000 There's other very intelligent people that are involved in academia.

00:53:24.000 Uh how does this problem get solved?

00:53:27.000 Like how do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?

00:53:35.000 Well, I think stopping the funding uh for uh this massive funding for climate would help, because it's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds.

00:53:47.000 If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you'll be elected to societies, you'll win prizes.

00:53:53.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:53:54.000 And you'll be shunned again if you don't.

00:53:56.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

00:53:56.000 That's right.

00:53:57.000 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 uh what is controlling climate because the the the theory that the control knob is CO2 doesn't work.

00:54:18.000 It's completely clear it doesn't work.

00:54:20.000 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 fifty years.

00:54:29.000 That that's a travesty.

00:54:31.000 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. 1.00

00:54:40.000 And we might understand climate today without that.

00:54:43.000 There are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general.

00:54:48.000 You know, one of them is numbers.

00:54:55.000 I mean, it isn't having more people work on something.

00:55:02.000 You want to have an environment where there's freedom.

00:55:11.000 think I mean Will is familiar with this there's a photograph from nineteen twenty of all the world's physicists at a SALVA conference this is a golden age of physics uh if you quintupled the number of people working on physics would you have improved the situation?

00:55:36.000 I doubt it.

00:55:38.000 And so you know I think freedom is much more important than just piling on things.

00:55:46.000 Yeah.

00:55:47.000 You have that great there they are not quite it's not the same.

00:55:52.000 But that's a Solway conference absolutely 1929 had the Curie's well Pierre might be there.

00:56:09.000 It's okay.

00:56:09.000 Yeah.

00:56:10.000 Either way we I guess we can but I mean I wondered at times, you know, when you had uh the Soviet competition with the U.S. 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 that has its downside first 0.77

00:56:41.000 First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much.

00:56:47.000 And the second thing is with peer review.

00:56:50.000 I mean, peer review is new.

00:56:53.000 I mean, it wasn't that common before World War II.

00:56:56.000 But people have pointed out it has its virtues.

00:57:03.000 But, you know, you can see the Royal Meteorological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions and, and the instructions were you can only reject the paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify or if it's plagiarized.

00:57:25.000 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.

00:57:40.000 That's asking too much of that.

00:57:43.000 But today peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity if you're not going with the flow you can get rejected.

00:57:58.000 And that's a lot of things structurally need to be I think rethought a little bit the physicists have done pretty well with archiv, where they have a publication vehicle using the Internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what's up on it.

00:58:20.000 But all sorts of things like that need to happen.

00:58:24.000 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 d debating ideas based on their merit and what data you have.

00:58:46.000 That's what it's supposed to be about.

00:58:48.000 It's not supposed to be attached to an ideology.

00:58:50.000 And I just don't understand how it got this far and how it can be separated.

00:58:56.000 So when when did it really become a problem where ideology started invading into certain segments of science it's happened many times in the past.

00:59:07.000 Joe climate is only the most recent so it's just a natural thing that happens.

00:59:12.000 Trevor Burrus Well for example there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and uh Western Europe where the claim was that uh the the great gene pool you know of the Anglo Saxon race was being diluted by all these low queue Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen.

00:59:32.000 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 Bell being great eugenicist, you know, protecting the American genome and it was all nonsense.

00:59:51.000 It was 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 uh you know absurd extreme extreme.

01:00:11.000 They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America, a man called Laughlin.

01:00:17.000 But— Oh, my goodness. 0.63

01:00:20.000 No, I mean, what Will is saying—I mean, it had a practical consequence, by the way.

01:00:28.000 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.

01:00:48.000 So there would be a quota 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.

01:00:59.000 And and that was used in the run up to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

01:01:13.000 Wow.

01:01:15.000 And it was only changed in 1960 so essentially you were keeping out Jews, Eastern Europeans, Chinese until then because of eugenics in 1924 Phew We you know the average person that's not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals or they're trying to figure out how the world works.

01:01:44.000 When you hear stories like that, you hear that kind of stuff and you're just like oh this has always been a problem.

01:01:48.000 Trevor Burrus You're dealing with people.

01:01:50.000 Trevor Burrus Human beings.

01:01:50.000 Yeah.

01:01:51.000 That's the problem, right?

01:01:52.000 That's that's getting to the heart of the problem.

01:01:54.000 Trevor Burrus Joe says this this famous quote by Immanuel Kant, you know, from the crooked timber of mankind no straight thing was ever made.

01:02:06.000 That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.

01:02:10.000 Trevor Burrus 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 climate or any anything that's just not logical and doesn't fit with the data.

01:02:27.000 Trevor Burrus Well the trouble is you know when something like eugenics comes around the population is told that this is science and uh how are they going to say no?

01:02:46.000 I mean you had uh bar various uh famous laboratories devoted to this it wasn't a fringe thing.

01:02:58.000 Trevor Burrus Right and so I don't know how you distinguish it at that time from science.

01:03:04.000 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.

01:03:20.000 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. 0.81

01:03:32.000 That's terrifying.

01:03:34.000 We think of where we would be today.

01:03:35.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:03:36.000 Right, right.

01:03:37.000 We'd have been a much poorer country because uh so many leading Americans, you know, creative, productive people have immigrated, you know, fairly recently.

01:03:48.000 Also probably would have led to some horrific actions in order to enact this.

01:03:55.000 Yeah, I mean when you put things in the hands of politicians.

01:04:00.000 Um there is a disconnect.

01:04:04.000 I mean, the business with the light bulbs I mentioned.

01:04:07.000 It wasn't malice.

01:04:07.000 Right.

01:04:09.000 It was ignorance.

01:04:12.000 And you combine ignorance with power, and you often get nonsense.

01:04:16.000 And the narrative that you're doing something good for everybody.

01:04:20.000 Yeah.

01:04:21.000 Dick has often made the point, and which I agree with that politicians and and sort of society leaders are the worst in situations like this.

01:04:31.000 The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and uh more reasonable.

01:04:37.000 Yeah.

01:04:38.000 So for example, I'd 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.

01:04:47.000 It was not the common people.

01:04:49.000 Have you ever read into that at all?

01:04:50.000 Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

01:04:50.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:04:51.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:04:51.000 What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory?

01:04:55.000 Well, um, does it make sense?

01:04:58.000 I I don't know.

01:04:59.000 Uh uh most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way.

01:05:06.000 And uh, you know, they had these visions uh of uh the person they were accused uh consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of uh obscene things and uh that was accepted as testimony.

01:05:19.000 It was called uh spectral evidence.

01:05:21.000 And so when finally the trials were stopped, it wasn't for the right reason, which is that there's no such thing as witches.

01:05:29.000 You know, they were stopped because spectral evidence, you know, w was uh shaky.

01:05:34.000 It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point, so it was getting very dangerous.

01:05:41.000 You know, but one of them was selling the book on how to how to detect witches, cotton matter, you know.

01:05:46.000 Well I've read that as well about the printing press.

01:05:49.000 When the printing press was first devised, a lot of people like, oh, we're gonna get so much knowledge.

01:05:53.000 No, f a lot of the early books were like how to detect witches.

01:05:56.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:05:56.000 Right.

01:05:56.000 That's right.

01:05:58.000 Malius Molecorum, you know, the hammer of the evildoers.

01:06:02.000 That was the first book on witches.

01:06:03.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:06:04.000 What I'd read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost, and that they believed this late frost might have contributed to uh ergot growth.

01:06:14.000 Because apparently th 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 ergot and that has LSD like properties, which totally makes sense if they're eating LSD laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch.

01:06:31.000 But either way, it took...

01:06:34.000 I think that's a kinder explanation of what happened at the time.

01:06:37.000 I'm less generous.

01:06:38.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:06:39.000 Well, you know more about the behind the scenes.

01:06:41.000 Yeah.

01:06:42.000 No, but I mean people I think what Will is saying is there are people who are always uh want to have a chance to do in their neighbor.

01:06:52.000 Yes, sure.

01:06:53.000 And if you could say your neighbor's a witch, what better way we can't have witches in our neighborhood? 0.66

01:06:57.000 Let's burn them.

01:06:58.000 Or drown them at the time, right?

01:06:59.000 That's what they did for people.

01:07:00.000 Yeah.

01:07:01.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, that that's one of the parts of Orwell's 1984 that many people forget, but a big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate.

01:07:10.000 And so people seem to have this uh need for hatred, you know.

01:07:15.000 You have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or somebody and so if you're hating CO2, at least that's better than hating your neighbor.

01:07:23.000 Well, if you're on Twitter, you're you're using up a lot more than two minutes of hate.

01:07:27.000 Well, you know, but even with political figures, I'm always surprised.

01:07:32.000 I mean, it seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear probably does not mean well.

01:07:43.000 Yeah.

01:07:44.000 And yet we continually fall.

01:07:46.000 Over and over again.

01:07:46.000 Yeah.

01:07:47.000 All of them.

01:07:47.000 Yeah.

01:07:48.000 And you know, other countries do the same pattern.

01:07:50.000 Oh yeah.

01:07:51.000 That's what's dark.

01:07:52.000 It just seems like we're terrified of being terrified.

01:07:56.000 And we want safety.

01:07:57.000 And we want someone who comes along and scares the shit out of us and vows to protect us.

01:08:02.000 Yep.

01:08:02.000 Yeah.

01:08:04.000 Well, children do this all the time.

01:08:06.000 Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself.

01:08:11.000 Well, there is also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world.

01:08:16.000 But when you have a just everything scares the shit out of everybody.

01:08:21.000 Everything is the end of the world.

01:08:23.000 And climate being one of the key ones that I hear all the time with young people.

01:08:27.000 In fact, there were some recent surveys that were done.

01:08:29.000 If you you know about these like uh the things that give young people the most anxiety, and climate is at the very top of that list.

01:08:38.000 I mean, uh 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.

01:08:38.000 Yeah.

01:08:49.000 This is bizarre.

01:08:50.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:08:50.000 And just to live in constant fear.

01:08:52.000 Yeah.

01:08:54.000 But meanwhile, is anybody paying attention to all these rich people buying shoreline property?

01:08:58.000 Yeah.

01:08:59.000 Like, do you think they're stupid?

01:09:00.000 Do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumbass because he's buying these giant mansions like right on the ocean?

01:09:06.000 Like, do you really think the water is going to raise that much?

01:09:08.000 That's why I put it, I mean, you know, even the people who are pushing it at MIT, I mean, buy houses.

01:09:17.000 Obama did.

01:09:18.000 He got that beautiful house and Martha's Vineyard.

01:09:21.000 It's like if you've looked at the the timelines, I'm sure you have like time-lapse video of the shoreline from like 1980 all the way up to 2025.

01:09:31.000 It doesn't move.

01:09:32.000 I mean, it goes a little bit in Malibu and there's a lot of they go back much further than that.

01:09:38.000 I think Joe, uh it's true, sea level is rising.

01:09:41.000 It it's different at different shores because the land is also rising and sinking.

01:09:46.000 But it's not very much, and it hasn't accelerated the uh it there's no evidence that CO2 has made any difference.

01:09:52.000 It started rising roughly eighteen hundred at the end of the little ice age, and it's not changing very much.

01:09:59.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:09:59.000 And then wasn't there like an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that's increased recently?

01:10:04.000 That's right.

01:10:05.000 Well, I mean that that's always variable.

01:10:08.000 But when that happens, how come that doesn't hit the news?

01:10:08.000 Right.

01:10:11.000 If if the ice goes away, then it's gonna hit the news.

01:10:14.000 Oh my god, look at this.

01:10:15.000 Uh we lost a chunk the size of Manhattan and everybody freaks out.

01:10:19.000 Well, w we were supposed to be ice free twenty years ago.

01:10:22.000 Yes.

01:10:23.000 Yeah.

01:10:24.000 Uh no, you know.

01:10:27.000 Give him some decades to be vindicated.

01:10:30.000 That is the point that I think uh people have made.

01:10:35.000 A test usually means if you fail it, you've done something wrong.

01:10:40.000 Yes.

01:10:41.000 Uh only in theology does it mean that you change the goals.

01:10:46.000 Right.

01:10:47.000 Right.

01:10:48.000 Especially when you invented the theology.

01:10:50.000 Because climate is very much like a religion.

01:10:52.000 Or at least the adherence to it is very religious like or c I should say cult-like.

01:10:57.000 Because it's not like there's a higher power.

01:10:57.000 Right.

01:10:59.000 Right.

01:11:00.000 It's everyone's just terrified and you have to change everything you do now.

01:11:05.000 Because you're guilty.

01:11:06.000 And it used to be that like the sign of virtue would just have was to have an electric car.

01:11:10.000 And then every my favorite thing is going up behind Tesla's now and they have bumper stickers to say, I bought this before Elon went crazy.

01:11:18.000 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.

01:11:27.000 And the climate one is one that if you bring it up with people, it's almost like you're talking about witches.

01:11:34.000 Like they want to get out of there.

01:11:35.000 Like if you actually looked at the It's a religious.

01:11:41.000 It is.

01:11:44.000 And they don't really it's not like they've studied it a lot and like, yeah, it's really interesting.

01:11:49.000 And this is why I think that we've got to reduce CO2.

01:11:51.000 And you have like this informed discussion with someone you go, oh, okay.

01:11:54.000 So when did you start reading about this?

01:11:56.000 Where you know, do you see this and you see that?

01:11:56.000 What book was that?

01:11:58.000 And okay.

01:11:59.000 And you and now you have an informed discussion, but that's not what it's like.

01:12:03.000 It's like you bring it up and they're like, oh God.

01:12:05.000 Climate change is settled.

01:12:06.000 Climate change is settled.

01:12:08.000 You don't believe in even Bernie, when I had him on while he was talking about climate change is the real pro giant problem.

01:12:08.000 Okay.

01:12:15.000 And we started showing the Washington Post thing that says that we're in a global cooling period.

01:12:19.000 And that's raised up some time over the last hundred.

01:12:22.000 But if you look at like the peaks and valleys, the main thing is like this has never been static.

01:12:26.000 And I said to Bernie, I'm like, there's a lot of money in this, Bernie.

01:12:29.000 Like you've got to admit this.

01:12:30.000 Like this isn't something that we have to act on now to save each other.

01:12:33.000 It might be something that we're being fucked with.

01:12:36.000 And that's what it seems like to me.

01:12:38.000 It's like the question is, why does he find it so enthusi why is he so enthusiastic?

01:12:44.000 Wonderful for funding.

01:12:45.000 Yeah.

01:12:46.000 I think he's overall a very good person.

01:12:48.000 And uh I think you he would have been a fascinating president.

01:12:48.000 I really do.

01:12:51.000 But uh I think there are too many things to concentrate on in the world.

01:12:55.000 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.

01:13:07.000 It's a lot of work.

01:13:08.000 And I don't know if the Senator Vermont has enough time to do that work and to really do it objectively, or to talk to someone like you.

01:13:14.000 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 does it fit in the same damn pattern where people get attached to an idea because that idea is attached to their ideology?

01:13:27.000 You're hitting on a problem, and I think Will knows this as well.

01:13:34.000 A lot of this stuff is actually tough material.

01:13:37.000 Yes.

01:13:38.000 I mean, for instance, uh, you know, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole.

01:13:48.000 That's actually handled in a third-year graduate course.

01:13:54.000 Uh you know, it deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject.

01:14:01.000 And it it's a real problem in a field.

01:14:05.000 Uh it's true throughout science, where you're trusting people to behave, I think decently.

01:14:17.000 Uh but that material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone.

01:14:25.000 And how you deal with it, how you approximate it.

01:14:28.000 I mean, the same is true with uh nuclear power, with other things.

01:14:34.000 These are technical issues, they're not trivial.

01:14:38.000 And you're asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions.

01:14:46.000 It's a tough issue.

01:14:49.000 Um it involves a certain amount of trust.

01:14:53.000 And what we're describing is the situation where the trust is being uh violated.

01:14:59.000 Yeah, there's this nice Russian proverb that uh Ronald Reagan loves so much.

01:15:04.000 Uh trust but verify.

01:15:06.000 Yes.

01:15:07.000 And um it's hard to verify, you know, if you're an average citizen something about climate.

01:15:13.000 Right.

01:15:13.000 Yeah.

01:15:14.000 That's what's so frustrating about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated.

01:15:18.000 Mm-hmm.

01:15:18.000 When they're like, climate change is a giant issue.

01:15:20.000 Like there's so many times I've seen they're very fun YouTube speech 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.

01:15:33.000 But it's fascinating.

01:15:34.000 You left the house.

01:15:35.000 Like you you had nothing better to do.

01:15:36.000 You 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.

01:15:43.000 That's how powerful this thing has become in our society.

01:15:48.000 And the fact that they've been so that the powers that be or whoever is involved has been so successful with 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.

01:16:09.000 How dare you?

01:16:11.000 There you go.

01:16:11.000 Right.

01:16:13.000 But you notice how quickly she changed.

01:16:16.000 Now it's Palestine. 0.97

01:16:16.000 She flipped up. 0.97

01:16:17.000 You gotta mix it up.

01:16:18.000 People get bored with the climate, you gotta you listen, you want to be someone that's in the news, you gotta keep moving.

01:16:23.000 You gotta keep it moving.

01:16:24.000 You know, you stop doing rap music, start acting.

01:16:27.000 You gotta keep it moving.

01:16:28.000 And that's you know, she's an entertainer.

01:16:30.000 Well, she had a very unfortunate experience um with that b blockade in uh Israel, so maybe she's out of the business now, but I doubt it. 0.69

01:16:38.000 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.

01:16:48.000 And you know she doesn't have this data at her fingertips. 0.58

01:16:50.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:16:51.000 It's not just digest.

01:16:52.000 I mean, it's how many people can solve partial differential equations.

01:16:58.000 I mean, th this is one of the complaints I have, which is sort of odd.

01:17:04.000 People blame this on models. 1.00

01:17:07.000 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.

01:17:26.000 And one of the things that uh we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution.

01:17:38.000 Uh but it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on.

01:17:44.000 At any rate, so they do this, and they do uh I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can.

01:17:54.000 And uh they get answers that will often be wrong.

01:18:03.000 But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe.

01:18:09.000 Uh Kuhnin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about uh a 3% reduction in uh national product or gross touristic product by 2100.

01:18:30.000 That's not a great deal.

01:18:31.000 It's not the end of the earth.

01:18:33.000 Uh you're already much richer than you are today.

01:18:36.000 So what what's the panic?

01:18:40.000 And uh it's true, the models don't give you anything to be that panicked over.

01:18:48.000 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.

01:19:02.000 So, you know, it's uh it's a confusing situation.

01:19:06.000 I mean the the models have a use.

01:19:09.000 They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is.

01:19:13.000 You can use them to see what interacts with what then study it further.

01:19:20.000 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.

01:19:43.000 And so there's a joke about uh Verner 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. 0.52

01:20:00.000 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 uh later, you know, um after the victory.

01:20:12.000 And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics on solving the Navier-Stokes equation.

01:20:18.000 And uh he was a as I said, a tremendously uh talented physicist, and but he found it very hard.

01:20:25.000 He didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations.

01:20:34.000 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.

01:20:54.000 And uh what will you ask him?

01:20:57.000 And Eisenberg supposedly said, well, I will ask him why general relativity.

01:21:05.000 And uh why turbulence, turbulence is the Navier-Stokes equation.

01:21:10.000 He says and I think he will be able to answer the first one.

01:21:18.000 That's funny.

01:21:20.000 That's funny.

01:21:21.000 And this is what's, you know, the the best assumption of the best measurements of what's controlling the temperature on Earth.

01:21:29.000 Aaron Ross Powell Well, you know uh 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 f very far into the future, you can solve it for a short time, but it's very hard to go much further.

01:21:47.000 One of Dick's colleagues at MIT, uh a man named Lorentz.

01:21:51.000 Uh why don't you tell him about Lorentz?

01:21:53.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:21:53.000 Well, no.

01:21:54.000 Lorentz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable.

01:22:03.000 Um whether that's true or not is still an open question.

01:22:08.000 But it has a lot of those characteristics and detail.

01:22:12.000 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.

01:22:21.000 You know are you actually able to track the whole thing accurately?

01:22:27.000 Probably not.

01:22:30.000 How accurately would you have to do it if you scaled it up to climate?

01:22:36.000 Who knows?

01:22:39.000 Yeah, the the typical uh uh uh 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.

01:22:53.000 Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that one's funny.

01:22:55.000 Trevor Burrus Yeah.

01:22:56.000 People repeat that and they're like, no, that's not how it works at all.

01:23:00.000 I don't think it works.

01:23:01.000 I know, of course not.

01:23:02.000 But it's funny when people like that.

01:23:03.000 But it does what it I think he meant was rather simpler than that.

01:23:08.000 You know, the hurricane is likely to occur.

01:23:13.000 The flipping of a butterfly's wings might have actually changed it from one day to another.

01:23:19.000 It wouldn't it would have an influence downstream.

01:23:23.000 Everything has an influence.

01:23:25.000 Everything is tied in together.

01:23:27.000 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.

01:23:39.000 At what point in time do you think another country needs to screw up the 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. 0.63

01:23:49.000 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?

01:23:58.000 I think that's how it will end, yes.

01:23:58.000 You think so?

01:23:58.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:24:00.000 I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country. 0.87

01:24:05.000 Because Germany has shut off a couple of their nuclear power plants, correct?

01:24:08.000 All of their nuclear power plants.

01:24:08.000 Right.

01:24:10.000 Oh God.

01:24:13.000 And they did it all for green energy?

01:24:14.000 That makes no sense.

01:24:16.000 Well, I think they did it because of the Fukushima thing, and because the Green Party is so powerful in Germany.

01:24:22.000 And they not only turned off their plants, and not nuclear and coal as well, but they blew a lot of them up.

01:24:28.000 You know, you see these pictures of the plants, you know, being blown up by dynamite just to make sure that nobody restarts them.

01:24:35.000 So they're fanatics.

01:24:36.000 Oh my god.

01:24:37.000 They're real fanatics, yeah.

01:24:38.000 That's so crazy.

01:24:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:41.000 And so at some point some country like Germany uh they'll lose all their jobs, all the industry will move.

01:24:48.000 There will be no jobs, people will all be on welfare, there's no money to pay them.

01:24:52.000 And at that point, suddenly someone will realize, you know, we've taken a wrong turn here.

01:24:59.000 I can't believe they blew their plants up.

01:25:01.000 That is nuts.

01:25:03.000 And what are they replacing it with right now?

01:25:05.000 You have Russian gas.

01:25:06.000 Windmills.

01:25:07.000 Windmills?

01:25:08.000 Yeah.

01:25:10.000 But you're right.

01:25:10.000 They're importing fossil fuels.

01:25:13.000 And importing electricity from France, which still has a large nuclear power base.

01:25:19.000 Aaron Ross Powell, How but how is Germany so smart and so dumb at the same time? 0.88

01:25:23.000 Because they have tremendous engineers.

01:25:25.000 They make some of the best automobiles ever.

01:25:27.000 They're making them in Hungary.

01:25:29.000 Oh.

01:25:31.000 But the but that's a uh a profound question is how is it the this country of poets and philosophers had the Nazis.

01:25:40.000 Uh had the Nazis, exactly.

01:25:42.000 And uh Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few German theologians who uh had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany.

01:25:51.000 He was invited to come to the U.S., but he he said, I'm going to stay with my people.

01:25:57.000 And he was eventually hung by the Germ by the Nazis. 0.91

01:26:00.000 He didn't survive.

01:26:02.000 But he had this theory that it was um stupidity.

01:26:07.000 And it it's a very interesting theory.

01:26:09.000 If you look on the Internet, you can read about Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity.

01:26:14.000 But he um his view was that all of these Nazi supporters, they didn't really believe in it all.

01:26:22.000 They were just dumb.

01:26:24.000 You know, it it's hard for me to when I first read about this, I couldn't believe it.

01:26:28.000 But the more I look at it, I I think that every nation has a problem that most of us are pretty stupid.

01:26:34.000 There's a large percentage of us that will believe almost anything.

01:26:37.000 Right.

01:26:38.000 And we could point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now.

01:26:42.000 Yeah.

01:26:43.000 And that people wholeheartedly believe in that makes zero sense.

01:26:46.000 They could go with that.

01:26:46.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:26:47.000 And you would go, okay, there's this some part of this has to be attributed to low intelligence.

01:26:53.000 So like what percentage of of people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves.

01:26:59.000 It's not a small number.

01:27:00.000 Maybe it's ten, maybe it's twenty, whatever percentage.

01:27:03.000 It's enough where it's a giant problem.

01:27:05.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:27:05.000 That's one thing.

01:27:06.000 But also intelligence itself is a complex issue.

01:27:11.000 There are people who like us may be idiots of aunts.

01:27:15.000 There are things that we can do very well and other things we don't.

01:27:21.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:27:22.000 I mean, you know, math departments are famous, though.

01:27:26.000 Well, I think it's a sign of almost any great person at anything.

01:27:29.000 There's usually areas in their life where they're just completely lacking, whether it's hygiene or relationships or whatever, they're obsessed by what they do, and that's why they're great at what they do.

01:27:40.000 You know, look, there are great writers who can't do arithmetic.

01:27:44.000 Right.

01:27:46.000 Uh I don't know, you know, where you put them in that category.

01:27:50.000 Right.

01:27:51.000 Well, and this is 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 athletic pursuit is.

01:28:03.000 They probably don't wouldn't do that well on an ACT test.

01:28:07.000 It doesn't mean that they're not intelligent.

01:28:08.000 It's just it's it's a different kind of intelligence.

01:28:12.000 Yeah.

01:28:13.000 And uh, that makes the world a more interesting place by and it really does.

01:28:18.000 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.

01:28:34.000 Well we started with Gore.

01:28:36.000 Right.

01:28:37.000 And Gore, you know, flunked out of Harvard.

01:28:40.000 Yeah.

01:28:40.000 Did he?

01:28:41.000 And his father, who was a senator, got him back in.

01:28:46.000 Uh I was teaching there at the time.

01:28:48.000 Oh, really?

01:28:50.000 And the person he attributes his awareness of CO2 to, Roger Ravel, was teaching a sort of science for poets course, and he got a D minus in it.

01:29:05.000 Is he made the most money off of this?

01:29:07.000 Because he's made a lot of money off of Climate.

01:29:09.000 Yeah, he's made a few hundred million, I don't know.

01:29:11.000 These days, right.

01:29:14.000 Still.

01:29:19.000 You know.

01:29:20.000 It's um especially now with social media.

01:29:23.000 There's so many people that can like we were talking about Greta Thurnberg.

01:29:27.000 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.

01:29:38.000 And there's a lot of money in that.

01:29:40.000 And there's a lot of you know, a lot of power in wielding that influence.

01:29:44.000 And to d to do so than just hop on any bandwagon that comes along and not really know what you're talking about.

01:29:56.000 And it's a in a way a new problem given social media.

01:30:00.000 Yeah.

01:30:01.000 The social media aspect of it is a new problem.

01:30:03.000 Another new problem is AI and fakes.

01:30:06.000 Like the you you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles, and it's like you it's very it takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today.

01:30:16.000 And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, uh especially climate change, right?

01:30:25.000 And it doesn't even have to be real.

01:30:27.000 Well, that was the reason for extreme weather being chosen.

01:30:32.000 I mean, it's interesting for quite a few years the climate issue was temperature.

01:30:38.000 And you'll have noticed the last 15, 20 years, it's extreme weather.

01:30:44.000 Right.

01:30:45.000 And that shows that, you know, it was fake.

01:30:51.000 Because uh it's trivial.

01:30:54.000 I mean, if we looked it up.

01:30:56.000 Uh the average uh month, there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred-year events.

01:31:11.000 So each of them makes for a good video.

01:31:17.000 And you have four or five a month, and they each only oneness in a hundred years, and people aren't putting it together that you know, once in a hundred year events occurring four or five times a month.

01:31:31.000 But you know, you always have a picture of a flood subplacer a rise or this or that, and those are used to scare people.

01:31:38.000 It's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers.

01:31:43.000 Right.

01:31:43.000 It's extreme weather events.

01:31:44.000 I keep that's what I keep hearing.

01:31:46.000 The hurricanes are getting stronger.

01:31:47.000 They're getting more frequent.

01:31:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:31:48.000 And they repeat that, and I don't think that's necessarily true.

01:31:52.000 Aaron Powell No, no.

01:31:53.000 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.

01:32:07.000 The last one they had to say something because the politicians control what's in the IPCC.

01:32:15.000 But even with that they were saying no.

01:32:18.000 And uh that had nothing to do with the public relations.

01:32:23.000 Said to hell with it, even if there's no relation, we'll say there is, because that gives us visuals.

01:32:31.000 God.

01:32:33.000 Now, when people like Bill Gates are talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the earth and protect us from the sun's rays.

01:32:43.000 Like where is all that coming from?

01:32:45.000 Especially if like you would imagine even.

01:32:48.000 Even Wills said it comes from dumbness.

01:32:51.000 Well, I'm sure, but um even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms.

01:32:56.000 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.

01:33:07.000 Why?

01:33:08.000 Because you're made Microsoft?

01:33:10.000 Like, why do you get to do this?

01:33:11.000 That seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on.

01:33:15.000 And they would have to be like really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.

01:33:21.000 Well, I'd have uh I have to hope that most of the world agrees with you and me and and that uh Bill Gates will never be permitted to do something like that.

01:33:31.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:33:31.000 The fear is that someone would let them, though.

01:33:33.000 The fear is that a country would let them.

01:33:35.000 You get the right politicians in place and the right fear-mongering in place, and you let 'em try.

01:33:41.000 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 this.

01:33:49.000 And that's what scares the shit out of me, that this could be uh a way that people could try something out on the whole world that could be catastrophic.

01:33:59.000 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 stratovolcano.

01:34:11.000 You know, I d even Bill Gates probably can't afford that, and I'm not sure the U.S. treasurer could either.

01:34:11.000 Yeah.

01:34:16.000 So it's just theoretical at this point.

01:34:16.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:34:18.000 Yeah, like the idea of the Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:34:19.000 I think, you know.

01:34:21.000 It's an interesting thing.

01:34:22.000 You're pointing that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeur based on the fact that he's fabulously wealthy.

01:34:30.000 Yeah.

01:34:31.000 Uh But as a practical matter, that particular approach probably is not going to be as dangerous as you think.

01:34:42.000 It won't work.

01:34:43.000 It won't work.

01:34:44.000 Yeah.

01:34:45.000 Well, it's just the idea that someone would even propose something like that.

01:34:52.000 No, your point is right.

01:34:54.000 I mean, you have people who have the means to try things and uh they're getting a free ride on it.

01:35:04.000 Yes, that's the thing.

01:35:05.000 They're getting a lot of money to implement these changes.

01:35:08.000 That's why these green New Deals and these green energy initiatives and all these green things.

01:35:13.000 People have to understand why are you hearing about this all the time?

01:35:15.000 Because it's there's a PR campaign.

01:35:18.000 It's a PR campaign for a a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money.

01:35:22.000 That's what this is all about.

01:35:23.000 And the more you get on board, the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff.

01:35:28.000 And the more money these companies make.

01:35:30.000 And the whole thing is about money.

01:35:33.000 Much of it is money.

01:35:34.000 They're not really worried about you.

01:35:37.000 That's what you have to understand.

01:35:38.000 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.

01:35:44.000 We've got to protect the climate.

01:35:46.000 They don't care.

01:35:47.000 That's not real.

01:35:49.000 What they really want to do is make sure a lot of money comes in.

01:35:52.000 And if a lot of money coming in is dependent upon them scaring the shit out of you, that's what they lean towards.

01:35:57.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:35:57.000 And you know, money and its transferability and fungibility, it's influence, it's feedbacks.

01:36:06.000 Yeah.

01:36:07.000 But that's always been true.

01:36:08.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:36:09.000 Yes.

01:36:10.000 Joel, let me bring up another targeted group and that is farmers and ranchers.

01:36:16.000 You know, because of uh their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming.

01:36:21.000 Uh just a couple of 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 and the Persian Gulf and the European bankers were demanding that uh uh Paraguay uh turn most of its ranch land back into forest, you know, to save the planet.

01:36:47.000 And otherwise they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay.

01:36:50.000 And so the the ranchers were worried that they're gonna be put out of business and their families put out of business.

01:36:56.000 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 uh he didn't need me uh to recognize that it was nonsense and uh but he was I think grateful to have someone with a science background confirm his suspicion that it was all nonsense.

01:37:18.000 So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers, you know, to go to hell.

01:37:24.000 And uh they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay.

01:37:27.000 So there were no consequences and the the ranchers did not suffer.

01:37:32.000 But you know, everybody's under the gun.

01:37:34.000 Yeah.

01:37:35.000 But there were consequences in Ireland.

01:37:37.000 Yeah.

01:37:38.000 Yes.

01:37:39.000 They had to kill half their cattle. 0.81

01:37:40.000 Yeah, which is nonsense.

01:37:42.000 Total nonsense and insane.

01:37:44.000 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.

01:37:53.000 At least carbon neural.

01:37:53.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:37:54.000 At least carbon neutral and and possibly contribu.

01:37:57.000 It's like the whole thing is nature.

01:38:00.000 This is how this is how it's all set up.

01:38:03.000 Animals eat grass, they poop manure, manure federal fertilizes the plants.

01:38:07.000 It's all real simple.

01:38:08.000 It's been around forever.

01:38:10.000 And this idea that all of a sudden cow farts and burps are a giant issue and they're gonna kill us all.

01:38:15.000 We need to kill all the cows. 1.00

01:38:16.000 Like who are you?

01:38:18.000 Like who's saying this?

01:38:19.000 And how'd you get to talk?

01:38:20.000 Like this is how'd you get to kill half their cows?

01:38:23.000 Like you should go to jail.

01:38:24.000 They should go to jail.

01:38:25.000 You're so stupid.

01:38:26.000 You're criminally stupid.

01:38:27.000 You killed their cows.

01:38:28.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:38:28.000 Well, when it comes to attractive tr drugs, power is one of the worst.

01:38:34.000 Oh, it might be the worst.

01:38:36.000 Yeah, it might be the worst.

01:38:37.000 And it's if people can get people to do their bidding, they often love to do it.

01:38:43.000 Even if it's preposterous, like getting you to kill half your cows so that you have a l less high methane count you're releasing from your organization.

01:38:52.000 I mean, you know, Will has worked on this and others.

01:38:55.000 But you know, the methane thing is an example of uh enumeracy.

01:39:02.000 In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO two.

01:39:17.000 And so cutting back methane will have a big effect.

01:39:22.000 But there's so little methane in the atmosphere that he got rid of all of it.

01:39:26.000 It would have almost no effect compared to CO2.

01:39:31.000 Somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

01:39:36.000 Yeah, simple arithmetic they just can't do simple arithmetic, yeah.

01:39:39.000 Trevor Burrus It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in in social media.

01:39:46.000 It's it's really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants.

01:39:53.000 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.

01:40:07.000 Trevor Burrus It began right at the beginning of the issue.

01:40:10.000 As I was mentioning, I mean already by 1989 Science Magazine was one of the ironies with Science magazine, which is, you know important magazine, it had an editor who was Marsha McNutt, who actually had an op-ed appear in Science magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this.

01:40:39.000 Wow.

01:40:40.000 And you know what her reward was she became president of the National Academy of Science.

01:40:48.000 She was a good girl.

01:40:49.000 Yeah.

01:40:49.000 Let's follow the rules.

01:40:52.000 But you know Dick's point about forbidding questioning, it's just unbelievable.

01:40:59.000 When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia, and the grand old man there was— Robbie.

01:41:07.000 Robbie, I, Robbie.

01:41:08.000 And Robbie came from an Eastern European Jewish family, and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education.

01:41:21.000 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?

01:41:32.000 She called him Izzy, Isidore.

01:41:34.000 And he would tell her, and then she would say, and did you ask a good question today?

01:41:41.000 So he said she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question, which would mean that the wheels were turning in his head than whether he had memorized something.

01:41:52.000 and I always took that to heart.

01:41:54.000 I think that was a very wise uh mother and it's it he turned out very well as a result.

01:42:01.000 Aaron Ross Powell 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.

01:42:13.000 Yeah.

01:42:14.000 That's that's terrible because you you know you'd have thought with the internet one of the things is the internet's going to be a balanced resource or resource of information you're gonna have the answers to any questions you want and we'll be able to sort out what's true and what's not true.

01:42:26.000 Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science.

01:42:34.000 No I mean the Internet not surprisingly was an unpredictable phenomenon.

01:42:41.000 Yes.

01:42:42.000 Completely you saw it but uh well you're seeing it yourself I mean you have media and the they were looking for a hundred thousand subscribers with the internet you're dealing with millions and that's considered small in some cases.

01:43:02.000 Aaron Ross Powell Yeah there's people like Mr Beast some fun guy on YouTube that I think he has what does he have a hundred and how many million subscribers does he have something insane.

01:43:13.000 Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before nobody saw it coming.

01:43:19.000 Did it on his own yeah it's it's a weird time.

01:43:23.000 And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media which is also disturbing which is uh also deserved.

01:43:30.000 Trevor Burrus Right.

01:43:31.000 Also deserved that's a problem as well.

01:43:33.000 And when you see mainstream media uh also going along with all these climate change ideologies and these c all these different things that are attached to the narrative that you're not allowed to deviate from.

01:43:48.000 It's just it's it gets very frustrating.

01:43:51.000 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.

01:44:07.000 But you had others, the Journal American and so on.

01:44:12.000 And they differed in their coverage, but on the whole, they covered the same news.

01:44:21.000 If something happened, it would appear in both.

01:44:26.000 I realize in retrospect that wasn't always true.

01:44:30.000 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.

01:44:40.000 Right.

01:44:41.000 Right.

01:44:42.000 And there's something wrong with that.

01:44:44.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:44:45.000 Very.

01:44:45.000 Yeah, something very wrong with it.

01:44:47.000 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.

01:44:56.000 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.

01:45:07.000 And I delivered the Boston Globe, but I delivered the New York Times as well because it was prestigious.

01:45:12.000 I thought it was cool to deliver the New York Times.

01:45:15.000 And it was a long route.

01:45:16.000 I had it it was a lot longer than my Boston.

01:45:18.000 Did you have to deliver it on Sunday as well?

01:45:20.000 Yes, I did.

01:45:21.000 Yes, I did.

01:45:22.000 But fortunately the ads didn't work, so they didn't get a big thick ad chunk like you do with the Boston Globe, because it's like local ads.

01:45:28.000 But the point being is it like it was uh it was the paper of record.

01:45:32.000 And now today it's just another blog.

01:45:34.000 It's just that like it's an ideologically captured online blog that's very left-leaning.

01:45:40.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:45:41.000 I think people have pointed out uh the correct reason for that.

01:45:44.000 The end of the classified ads.

01:45:48.000 Yeah.

01:45:49.000 Uh they used to have to satisfy the people's uh paying for ads.

01:45:55.000 Right.

01:45:56.000 Now they have to satisfy their readers.

01:46:00.000 And so the readers only want to hear one thing.

01:46:05.000 Yeah, it's a real problem.

01:46:07.000 It's a real problem.

01:46:08.000 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.

01:46:24.000 Right, right.

01:46:24.000 Right.

01:46:25.000 And here I will say, and maybe there's a bias in this.

01:46:31.000 If I listen to MSNBC, there are whole areas of what's going on that I will hear nothing about.

01:46:42.000 Fox may cover things differently, but they are less guilty of leaving stuff out.

01:46:50.000 They may take a different view of it, but you'll hear about it.

01:46:55.000 That certain media now are not even mentioning things that they don't want you to know about is a little bit disturbing.

01:47:04.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

01:47:04.000 It is.

01:47:05.000 But again, it gives rise to independent media, gives rise to the very good independent journalists that exist today.

01:47:11.000 But the thing is like the average person is not going to find them.

01:47:14.000 They don't know where to look.

01:47:16.000 Well, this is an opportunity to put in a good word for Al Gore since uh he was an inventor of the Internet.

01:47:26.000 Yeah.

01:47:27.000 He did kind of take credit for part of that, right?

01:47:29.000 Right.

01:47:30.000 Yeah.

01:47:30.000 What did he say exactly?

01:47:32.000 I think he said I had a hand in that or something like that.

01:47:35.000 So I think that's a great question.

01:47:36.000 I did too.

01:47:37.000 I bought a computer once.

01:47:38.000 I had a hand in that.

01:47:40.000 I played a part of the economy of the Internet.

01:47:42.000 Yeah.

01:47:44.000 Well, it's um I think it's these kind of conversations with uh people like yourself that uh will help.

01:47:53.000 Because the more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that also question it.

01:48:01.000 Well, you get a kind of understanding of this pattern that does go back to like what you're talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history.

01:48:08.000 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, you know, these politicians are not.

01:48:17.000 But it's also the abuse of science is too much of a temptation for politicians.

01:48:25.000 I mean, uh science it's hard to say, but uh, you know, if there are a way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority.

01:48:39.000 It's a methodology.

01:48:42.000 And that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology, uh you're anti-science.

01:48:56.000 Whether that helps or not, maybe people don't care.

01:49:00.000 But I think y people do, but they're scared to deviate again from the narrative.

01:49:04.000 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.

01:49:16.000 And you can't attach uh 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.

01:49:27.000 That has to be shunned, right?

01:49:29.000 So how does that go about it?

01:49:31.000 I think you're hitting on something important.

01:49:35.000 You can't do it every place.

01:49:37.000 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.

01:50:00.000 Yeah, let me add to that, I think one of the great strengths of American uh science and technology over the last fifty 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.

01:50:27.000 And so if you couldn't get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the Army or some other place.

01:50:34.000 So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country.

01:50:43.000 And people used to talk we we need an office of science.

01:50:46.000 I thought that was a terrible idea, you know, to that means one point failure, you know.

01:50:51.000 You know, there was someone in a position to throttle, you know, some important thing.

01:50:55.000 The Department of Energy tried to do both sides for a long time.

01:51:00.000 And they held out longer than other departments.

01:51:04.000 But eventually, for some reason, they were all forced into the same box.

01:51:10.000 Money starts talking, baby.

01:51:12.000 Yeah, money.

01:51:12.000 It's a lot of money.

01:51:13.000 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?

01:51:26.000 I think it was EPA, or maybe it was the No, loans could have must have been energy.

01:51:32.000 Like it more than had been given out in the last 15 years.

01:51:36.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:51:38.000 I'm sure all was smart, well-spent money that we definitely couldn't get by without spending.

01:51:45.000 Um It's kind of funny.

01:51:49.000 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.

01:51:57.000 It's 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.

01:52:04.000 Well, having spent time in, you know, a Department of Energy headquarters on it doesn't surprise me.

01:52:12.000 I believe you.

01:52:14.000 Um how difficult has this been for you gentlemen to like debate this stuff and to bring it up with people and have conversations.

01:52:23.000 Have you experienced a lot of resistance?

01:52:24.000 Yeah.

01:52:25.000 I mean, it it's interesting how it evolved.

01:52:28.000 I think in the 90s, There was still a certain openness about it.

01:52:36.000 And uh, you know, if there were a conference, people on both sides would be invited and so on.

01:52:43.000 Somehow by the twenty-first century, uh it came down hard.

01:52:49.000 Uh there was absolutely nothing open anymore.

01:52:54.000 But I have to say, when I invited uh Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, which is a good university, uh, 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 Lindzen to give this talk?

01:53:15.000 I said, Well, I'm the son of a bitch, get out of my office.

01:53:19.000 Oh, wow.

01:53:20.000 And what did you have to did you try to engage with him at all about why you were upset?

01:53:24.000 Why he was upset, rather?

01:53:26.000 No.

01:53:27.000 Just it wasn't even worth it.

01:53:28.000 It wasn't worth it.

01:53:29.000 Yeah.

01:53:30.000 It's just hard to believe.

01:53:30.000 Wow.

01:53:32.000 Someone who's outside of academia, it's hard to believe there's closed-minded people at universities.

01:53:36.000 The point was he he didn't know the first thing about that issue.

01:53:39.000 Not a thing.

01:53:40.000 Yeah.

01:53:40.000 But he was very left-wing.

01:53:42.000 Yeah, that's the point.

01:53:43.000 That's why it's a good thing.

01:53:44.000 Well, no, this was the political polarization.

01:53:46.000 Yeah.

01:53:47.000 Yeah.

01:53:49.000 But it's it's also there's no deviation.

01:53:52.000 There's no people like, eh, you know, everybody's either one side or the other.

01:53:56.000 All in or not.

01:53:58.000 And if you're not, you get cast out of the kingdom.

01:54:00.000 It's very weird.

01:54:01.000 It's just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities.

01:54:07.000 If someone comes up to you and says, I think it's worse than universities.

01:54:11.000 Wow.

01:54:11.000 How did that get started?

01:54:13.000 Like when did so it was it the same thing as like the climate?

01:54:16.000 Was it with everything?

01:54:18.000 Like somewhere around the twenty-first century?

01:54:19.000 Like when Yeah.

01:54:20.000 I you know, uh I'll take something that was much less publicized.

01:54:26.000 Uh the what was the program uh with your device uh oh the uh the uh uh Star Wars the Star Wars the uh sodium guide star.

01:54:43.000 Yeah.

01:54:44.000 I mean universities treated that as something you could not discuss.

01:54:52.000 The notion that you wanted to have a defense against nuclear.

01:54:57.000 Yeah, what what Dick is talking about is that uh I got called to Washington because early uh in the um Star Wars era.

01:54:57.000 Really?

01:55:09.000 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-powered lasers.

01:55:20.000 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 uh 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,

01:55:40.000 by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target.

01:55:51.000 And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers, but the inverse problem a star does the same thing.

01:55:57.000 When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point, you get lots of speckles.

01:56:02.000 And so astronomers knew how to solve that.

01:56:04.000 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-wrinkled mirror, so it comes in wrinkled, it bounces, it is nice and flat, then it focuses and you get a point.

01:56:25.000 And you you could do the same thing when you're trying to shoot a incoming missile.

01:56:29.000 You pre-wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile.

01:56:35.000 So it's called adaptive optics, and the the mirror is called a rubber mirror, it's a mirror that you can adjust.

01:56:42.000 And uh but to to do that, you know you need to know how to adjust the mirror, so you have to have some information to how do I wrinkle it, push here, pull there, et cetera.

01:56:52.000 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 near neighboring stars.

01:57:05.000 But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars.

01:57:10.000 And so unless the Russians attacked us from the during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies.

01:57:17.000 We couldn't do anything with our lasers.

01:57:19.000 Oh wow.

01:57:20.000 So I I said, well I know how to fix this.

01:57:22.000 All you need to do is make an artificial star wherever you like, because there's a layer of sodium at a hundred 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.

01:57:39.000 And uh nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during the this was top secret meeting.

01:57:44.000 Trevor Burrus When you say make a star, do you mean like a satellite star?

01:57:48.000 Like a small source of light shining down through the atmosphere.

01:57:54.000 Most of the problem is fairly close to the ground, the first kilometer or two up.

01:57:58.000 Trevor Burrus And what would this be made out of?

01:58:01.000 Sodium.

01:58:02.000 So the if you go to a hundred kilometers, the earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system and so it we're constantly burning up little micro meteorites.

01:58:12.000 And they're all loaded with sodium atoms and so they get released into the upper atmosphere and they stay there and make a a layer that's about 10 kilometers thick.

01:58:22.000 And not many people know about that.

01:58:24.000 I happen to know about it and I knew you could use it, you know, for this method.

01:58:28.000 That's why I got called to Washington was making it this it was a highly secret invention for 10 years.

01:58:34.000 Wow.

01:58:35.000 That's when the Soviet Union collapsed then uh this was declassified thanks to the effort of a uh livermore friend and colleague Claire Max a a woman physicist astronomer but they she finally persuaded the Department of Defense to declassify it.

01:58:53.000 So if you go to any big telescope now around the world it has one of these uh sodium lasers you're pointing up at the sky at night you'll see this bright yellow beam going up right there.

01:59:04.000 Oh there it is yeah wow yeah th th that's and so the point where there come this is actually green light and so for the sodium most of them are yellow for sodium but that's the basic idea.

01:59:18.000 And so this was a difficult thing to discuss in academia?

01:59:24.000 Well, I couldn't discuss it.

01:59:25.000 It was highly classified, so I couldn't even mention it until about 1995, I think, 94, 95, when it was declassified.

01:59:33.000 But I'd invented it, you know, 12 years earlier.

01:59:36.000 But, you know, the point was in academia you could not discuss defensive issues.

01:59:46.000 You couldn't discuss working for defense of the country.

01:59:49.000 That was, you know, somehow immoral, defending the country.

01:59:53.000 I wasn't trying to attack Russia.

01:59:55.000 I was trying to defend ourselves.

01:59:56.000 Right.

01:59:57.000 Yeah, that's a ridiculous position to take.

02:00:00.000 We don't need defense against missiles.

02:00:02.000 Well, yeah.

02:00:04.000 know they're they're hard to defend against but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

02:00:09.000 Yeah exactly I mean w at MIT you had all sorts of people saying you know you shouldn't try it's uh silly it's impossible and so on.

02:00:09.000 Right.

02:00:20.000 What was the point of that I mean you have a problem you try and solve it.

02:00:27.000 It seems like that's what science is supposed to be for 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 it just seems like human behavior.

02:00:27.000 Yeah.

02:00:51.000 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.

02:01:08.000 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 everybody like you to get it right.

02:01:21.000 We're as much we're as much part of the crooked timber of mankind as anyone else.

02:01:29.000 No I mean you know I've often mentioned I mean my family you know emigrated here from Germany 38 but uh when Hitler came to power in 3, every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood before Hitler even asked.

02:01:52.000 So universities are not uh bastions of independent thinking.

02:02:01.000 What could be done to make them more so you know the Canadians did something that I thought had potential.

02:02:10.000 Every faculty member, especially junior faculty, immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for.

02:02:24.000 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.

02:02:44.000 You had an open system there.

02:02:47.000 Even there, though, uh other pressures came to bear.

02:02:52.000 But it you know, it seemed like a good idea.

02:02:56.000 Or at least a better idea.

02:02:58.000 Yeah.

02:02:59.000 But it again, uh unfortunately it just seems like that just pattern of human behavior just pops its ugly head up over and over and over again.

02:03:07.000 Yep.

02:03:09.000 You know, Joe, it just gave up.

02:03:13.000 You know, it's it's worth going back to the founding of this country because if you read the things like the Federalist Papers, uh 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?

02:03:40.000 And that's what they tried to do.

02:03:42.000 You know, that was the whole reason for the balance of power and and all the things that are in there.

02:03:47.000 And so I, you know, it was partially successful.

02:03:50.000 It certainly worked better than other systems for a lot of people.

02:03:53.000 Better than all the other ones.

02:03:54.000 But it uh amazingly astute.

02:03:54.000 Yeah.

02:03:57.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:03:58.000 Federalist papers, I mean, they've held up well.

02:04:01.000 Yeah.

02:04:02.000 Um anything else to add before we wrap this up, gentlemen?

02:04:05.000 Is there anything else you think people should know?

02:04:08.000 Well, trust but verify.

02:04:13.000 Yeah, I mean, how shall I put it?

02:04:16.000 Destroying the world is not an easy thing to do.

02:04:19.000 It shouldn't be the top of your list of worries.

02:04:25.000 Um you mean destroying the world with climate change.

02:04:25.000 Yeah.

02:04:28.000 It's not really what it is, and it's very overmagnified.

02:04:28.000 Yeah.

02:04:33.000 Absolutely.

02:04:34.000 I mean, how should I put it?

02:04:37.000 Its origins were almost entirely political.

02:04:41.000 I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all.

02:04:47.000 I you know, uh we're discussing, you know, can it happen?

02:04:52.000 Is this, is it warming, is it cooling, is extreme weather increasing.

02:04:57.000 It's amazing to me that politicians can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.

02:05:11.000 I wonder what it how it would have worked if it wasn't for an inconvenient truth, if that movie hadn't been made.

02:05:17.000 I wonder because sometimes people need something like that in that sort of a form for it to really take hold as an idea.

02:05:23.000 You may be right.

02:05:24.000 I mean, uh something was needed to make it catch on.

02:05:29.000 Uh it had been around for quite a few years without catching on quite that way.

02:05:38.000 Yeah.

02:05:40.000 But it was also the confluence, you know, the UN really got interested in it.

02:05:46.000 Uh you had the World Meteorological Organization, all of them saw something they could gain in it.

02:05:53.000 And so it began to seem almost overwhelming.

02:05:57.000 But it did, you know, it reached the right people.

02:06:01.000 I mean, the funding agencies, the NSF got taken over almost immediately.

02:06:07.000 NASA took about ten years.

02:06:09.000 Department of Energy took ten years, but they worked on it.

02:06:16.000 It's kind of stunning.

02:06:18.000 At least from the outside, you know, from my perspective.

02:06:20.000 It's kind of stunning.

02:06:21.000 It's it's stunning how successful it is.

02:06:23.000 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.

02:06:29.000 Yeah.

02:06:31.000 Like the record skips.

02:06:32.000 Like how much do you know?

02:06:34.000 Right.

02:06:35.000 It turns out very little, most people.

02:06:37.000 And then it turns out according to you, it's almost impossible to figure out anyway, the actual.

02:06:42.000 The notion that there's a crisis has taken hold.

02:06:45.000 Right.

02:06:46.000 Even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis.

02:06:49.000 Trevor Burrus And the main movie that started off that crisis from 2006 is entirely wrong.

02:06:54.000 All of its predictions.

02:06:56.000 And what's supporting it now is the extreme weather, which is a fake.

02:07:02.000 But it provides visuals visuals.

02:07:05.000 Yeah.

02:07:06.000 It's very hard for people to swallow.

02:07:08.000 But uh I encourage them to look at the data of hurricanes historically.

02:07:12.000 And you realize like, oh, pretty stable.

02:07:15.000 It's up and down and all over the place.

02:07:18.000 But it's not any worse now than it has been before.

02:07:21.000 Oh.

02:07:22.000 I mean, growing up in the Bronx in the 40s, every autumn there were hunger hurricanes.

02:07:31.000 Mm-hmm.

02:07:31.000 You could wake up in the morning and the streets were lined with the trees that had been blown down.

02:07:38.000 Interestingly enough, that has not recurred in New York for about 30 years, 40, 50 years.

02:07:45.000 I think the last one I remember when I lived in Boston was Gloria.

02:07:49.000 Yeah.

02:07:50.000 They don't get hit by hurricanes anymore.

02:07:52.000 If they did, they'd freak out.

02:07:53.000 Climate change.

02:07:54.000 Trevor Burrus But then 38 was a gigantic hurricane.

02:07:59.000 And uh uh I was born in a town on a lake in New Massachusetts called uh Lake Chagaga Gogma Chagagog Shabunagoguma.

02:08:10.000 That's a real name?

02:08:11.000 Yes, that's a real name.

02:08:12.000 Whoa.

02:08:13.000 But at any rate, in that lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of 1938, just local stuff around.

02:08:23.000 Really?

02:08:23.000 Yeah.

02:08:24.000 Wow.

02:08:26.000 But that also killed a lot of people because we didn't have the information of it coming.

02:08:32.000 Right.

02:08:34.000 And I'm sure buildings weren't really designed to withstand those either.

02:08:37.000 No, I mean if how shall I put it?

02:08:41.000 I'm glad it came then, not now, I suppose.

02:08:44.000 If it came now, it would be proof.

02:08:46.000 Right.

02:08:48.000 Actually the worst hurricane on record on the East Coast was uh the last year of the American Revolution and it had a big impact on uh winning the uh war.

02:08:59.000 What happened was it's 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.

02:09:09.000 Really?

02:09:10.000 It was just tremendous hurricane.

02:09:12.000 And so the uh the reason it affected the war was um the British just assumed that the French were uh incapable of restoring their fleet, so they when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be uh rescued, uh you know, with all of the partisans coming after him.

02:09:38.000 He um didn't worry about the uh French.

02:09:43.000 And so but the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane.

02:09:48.000 They had had twelve months and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake.

02:09:52.000 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.

02:10:01.000 And so he had no choice.

02:10:03.000 He had to surrender.

02:10:04.000 Wow.

02:10:05.000 That was the end of the war.

02:10:06.000 And we can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly.

02:10:10.000 As well as the French.

02:10:11.000 The French and the French.

02:10:12.000 God bless the French, yeah.

02:10:13.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.

02:10:14.000 What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of like recent years?

02:10:20.000 What was it like then?

02:10:22.000 It was in the peak of the Dust Bowl, and it was uh, I don't know, several degrees warmer than I don't know the exact figure, but you can look at the records, they're pretty clear.

02:10:32.000 Yeah.

02:10:34.000 It's you know, you're not gonna see gigantic numbers, but again, that global metric is a little bit confusing.

02:10:45.000 Locally, it was a huge effect.

02:10:50.000 But globally, yeah, what you're saying completely makes sense.

02:10:54.000 It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature unless you're studying other planets.

02:10:59.000 Yeah.

02:11:01.000 What matters is where people live, right?

02:11:03.000 What's the temperature there?

02:11:04.000 Yeah.

02:11:06.000 Well, um, listen, gentlemen, I really appreciate your bravery in talking about this stuff and and sharing all this information.

02:11:12.000 It's very enlightening.

02:11:14.000 Yeah, it really it helps.

02:11:16.000 These kind of conversations, they move the needle.

02:11:18.000 They really do.

02:11:18.000 So I really appreciate you guys.

02:11:20.000 Thank you very much.

02:11:20.000 Thanks for being here.

02:11:21.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:11:22.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 21, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

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