In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with Dick Linson, a retired professor of physics at Princeton, to talk about global warming and the movie 'An inconvenient truth' directed by Al Gore.
00:00:43.000Uh at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado.
00:00:51.000Then uh part of that was because at Harvard uh I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations.
00:01:02.000So I went to Seattle for someone who did.
00:01:05.000And 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.
00:01:44.000One of them that I worked on was the some so-called quasi biennial cycle.
00:01:50.000Turns 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.
00:02:01.000And you know, we worked out why that happened and there were other things like that.
00:02:06.000So it was a very enjoyable period uh until global warming.
00:02:12.000And sir, would you uh tell everybody what your credentials are, what you do, where you're from?
00:02:17.000I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton.
00:02:23.000And uh like uh Dick, I'm a science nerd.
00:02:29.000But I was actually born in India under the British Raj.
00:02:32.000My father was a army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American, and uh that was before World War II.
00:02:41.000So when I came to America uh as a small child, uh my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project.
00:03:02.000And and I have, and I've uh done a number of things.
00:03:06.000Uh spent a lot of time at universities at Columbia at Princeton.
00:03:10.000I also uh served for a couple of years in Washington as director of energy research uh under President Bush Sr.
00:03:19.000And uh I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here.
00:03:24.000Uh I first became suspicious when I was director of energy research.
00:03:28.000I 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.
00:03:39.000And there was one exception, that was the uh people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful.
00:03:45.000You know, we work for Senator Gore, we we don't work for you.
00:03:48.000And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research.
00:03:52.000Uh I I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be uh glad to take my money.
00:04:23.000So 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.
00:06:32.000And then in the 70s, and at that time, well, what do you say?
00:06:37.000You 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.
00:06:52.000But then the temperature stopped cooling in the 70s and started warming.
00:06:57.000And that's when they said, well, you have to warn now scare people with warming, and uh you can't use the sulfates anymore.
00:07:06.000But 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.
00:07:20.000But 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.
00:07:42.000Uh and that's when people started saying, well, now we better find CO2.
00:07:47.000It's increased because of industrialization and so on.
00:07:51.000And that began the demonization of CO2.
00:07:54.000Do 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?
00:08:21.000And one of the odd things I I think in politics, I don't see it studied much.
00:08:27.000Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars.
00:08:31.000If 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.
00:08:46.000Well, if you're giving out that much, you don't need that much of your politician.
00:08:53.000All you need is millions for your campaigning.
00:08:57.000And 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.
00:09:08.000So that's much better than giving out a hundred thousand and having all of it back.
00:09:12.000Trevor Burrus Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge.
00:09:18.000There's no room for any rational debate, and if you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier.
00:09:33.000I mean, as looking at it, on the one hand, you're told the science is settled.
00:09:40.000Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder.
00:09:46.000I mean, you went to college, how many climate scientists did you know?
00:09:51.000I 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.
00:10:05.000So here you have the biggest phenomena we don't understand it all, but the science is settled.
00:11:02.000Uh here too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.
00:11:11.000Aaron 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.
00:11:38.000No, I mean uh it's doing phenomenal damage and pain.
00:11:42.000But 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?
00:12:08.000Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels.
00:13:16.000So 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.
00:13:24.000And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants into not bringing these people into the first world.
00:13:32.000And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on, which are available in places.
00:13:37.000Uh 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.
00:13:49.000But uh there's a problem with politicians.
00:13:53.000I remember once being in D.C. and some Republican politicians came and said, you know what we just did?
00:15:07.000Yeah, that's what I was going to get to.
00:15:08.000I 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.
00:15:22.000And that is that like we have a serious problem, we have to address it now, or there will be no America for our grandchildren.
00:15:52.000Trevor Burrus, Jr. the success of science.
00:15:55.000In other words, this is a relatively new way to approach the world, I mean, a few hundred years.
00:16:02.000And 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.
00:16:15.000You don't uh fudge them, and you don't change the rules.
00:16:20.000Um it's uh led to immense improvements in life, development of all sorts of things.
00:18:23.000His specialty were ants and bees and things, social insects.
00:18:28.000And uh he was giving a talk and uh it came up for reasons that were not obvious to me.
00:18:39.000He was talking about the population of humanoids.
00:18:43.000And 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.
00:19:08.000There was a complete wipeout of humans.
00:19:10.000So 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?
00:19:21.000And his response was to turn around and walk away.
00:19:31.000It's just to me, it's very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance of that we have seen.
00:19:38.000settled 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.
00:19:49.000Yeah I know and it should be the first thing that makes you suspicious.
00:19:54.000There's a consensus something so it's never static.
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00:21:13.000The 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.
00:21:20.000It's this crazy wave and like no one was controlling it back then.
00:21:24.000And we're supposed to believe that we can control it now, that we can do something about it now.
00:21:28.000There's something else about it, which I find funny, and you might have some insight into it.
00:21:33.000People pay no attention to the actual numbers.
00:21:38.000I mean, we're not talking about big changes.
00:21:42.000In other words, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees.
00:21:56.000But that was because most of the Earth was not affected, much of the Earth anyway, very much.
00:22:04.000but 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.
00:22:25.000It'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.
00:22:37.000How 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?
00:22:44.000Some some crazy like that where everybody goes.
00:22:47.000They call it the inflation reduction act.
00:23:16.000And these minute changes, the fact that the procession of the equinoxes or the world earth wobbles, like the whole thing.
00:23:24.000The 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.
00:24:58.000Actually quite a lot, but I mean it took very funny forms.
00:25:04.000So for instance, uh in 1989, for instance.
00:25:14.000I sent a paper to Science Magazine questioning whether this was something to worry about.
00:25:22.000And they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest.
00:25:28.000So I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it and published it, and the editor was immediately fired.
00:25:41.000About 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.
00:26:04.000And we got the paper, put it, got reviewed, it was published.
00:26:09.000Again, the editor was fired immediately.
00:26:12.000But the new editor came on immediately and said he's inviting papers to criticize it.
00:26:20.000And 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.
00:26:56.000This is twenty years ago or something almost.
00:27:00.000Uh 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.
00:27:20.000And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on.
00:27:48.000Before World War II, very few journals had peer review.
00:27:54.000And 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.
00:28:08.000They are literally discussions among scientists about the results, the questions or uncertainties and so on.
00:28:19.000Today, I mean, there's a much more formality in the papers.
00:28:23.000There's also in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll or a study.
00:28:52.000Well, uh I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy, and that's what really sucked me into it.
00:28:59.000I had never paid much attention to sci uh climate science before.
00:29:04.000But 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.
00:29:10.000And uh I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not uh appreciate my questioning.
00:29:17.000Uh 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.
00:30:04.000Well, you know, I was working for President uh Bush Sr.
00:30:09.000And 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.
00:30:25.000So 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.
00:30:34.000So it took them two or three months to find me.
00:30:53.000Were they reluctant to discuss this kind of information with you guys when when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?
00:31:01.000Well, you know, my field is actually hard physics, you know.
00:31:05.000I'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.
00:31:14.000A lot of them have a military significance.
00:31:16.000And 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.
00:31:40.000So 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.
00:32:03.000I didn't have time to look at climate.
00:32:06.000But 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.
00:32:17.000And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science, you know.
00:32:21.000It it uh completely politicized if you can't ask a question, you know, that's a bad, bad sign.
00:32:28.000And 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.
00:32:45.000You 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.
00:33:09.000Speaking 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.
00:33:26.000The love of money is the root of all evil, and in universities.
00:33:29.000For example, at Princeton, we have enormous new building program.
00:33:33.000It's funded to a large extent from overhead from climate grants, you know.
00:33:37.000And you're talking about, you know, not small change, you know, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, for construction.
00:33:45.000So it's it's like, you know, this famous uh drama uh of this Norwegian playwright enemy of the people, Ibsen.
00:33:54.000And 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.
00:34:04.000You drink the water and and go home healthy.
00:34:06.000Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid.
00:34:12.000A 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.
00:34:49.000And as a result, uh you have people entirely on the left.
00:34:57.000And so it's uh something they support.
00:35:02.000Uh you know, the money end of it is sort of funny.
00:35:05.000I 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.
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00:36:53.000And 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.
00:38:19.000But 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.
00:38:33.000I mean, if you're an administrator, if you're a president of a university.
00:38:40.000That often overrides everything else, you know, that uh you're raising money.
00:38:45.000I 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.
00:38:55.000I transferred out after my sophomore year.
00:39:37.000I'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.
00:40:06.000Especially 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.
00:40:39.000I've had conversations with people, and I say, what do you why do you think that?
00:40:42.000Like what do you know about climate change?
00:40:44.000And 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.
00:40:57.000If you he thought we were all going to be dead today.
00:41:00.000There's very little change between 2006 and today.
00:41:03.000I mean, as I mentioned before, I think for some people its importance is it gives, quote, meaning to their life.
00:41:38.000I 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.
00:43:02.000Because most climate change, by that definition, is regional.
00:43:10.000So 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.
00:43:26.000Nobody paid much attention to it, because that's normal.
00:43:36.000I 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.
00:43:55.000And so this has nothing to do with the global average.
00:44:01.000The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets.
00:44:10.000And so you'd look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot, so that it was useful.
00:44:16.000But for looking at the Earth's climate, I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device.
00:44:28.000It heats us up, but like the changing of the Trevor Burrus, I you know, that's something there's argument about.
00:44:35.000Uh 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.
00:45:04.000And the the thinking was pretty simple.
00:45:07.000Uh he was saying that uh, you know, every winter is cold.
00:45:15.000But what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle.
00:45:27.000And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier.
00:45:32.000Takes thousands of years, but you know, eventually it's big.
00:45:36.000And uh in recent years, for instance, uh there have been young people who have shown that that works.
00:45:59.000They 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.
00:46:16.000The young people looking at this said you're looking at the wrong thing.
00:46:21.000If you're looking at the insulation, you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume, not just the ice volume.
00:46:32.000And then the correlations were excellent.
00:46:36.000So this was a theory, Milankovich, that I think has been reasonably sustained.
00:46:43.000Uh but it the people doing this got no credit, nothing.
00:46:51.000Because, you know, early in my career these people would have been rewarded.
00:46:58.000Now it didn't contribute to global warming.
00:47:03.000Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with.
00:47:07.000Um but uh you asked about the sun, and as Jack says that uh is a controversial issue.
00:47:14.000The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it, it's all CO2, CO2 is the controlled knob.
00:47:22.000Don't confuse me with other possibilities.
00:47:27.000But nobody is is quite sure about the sun.
00:47:30.000We 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.
00:47:41.000And 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.
00:48:07.000And they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant.
00:48:13.000It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, you know, this radioactivity uh that's produced changes from year to year.
00:48:22.000If 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.
00:48:44.000There's a pretty good historical record of that.
00:48:47.000So 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.
00:49:03.000The Arctic, you know, in high latitudes in the north.
00:49:06.000For 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.
00:49:21.000It 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.
00:49:31.000It was not uh people burning oil and coal, you know.
00:49:36.000And 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.
00:49:49.000Now, when we have estimates like, say, of the Jurassic or any any dinosaur age.
00:49:59.000Was 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?
00:51:21.000Trevor Burrus As I say, orbital theory was the main thing.
00:51:27.000The 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.
00:51:43.000Trevor 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.
00:52:00.000And that was approximately the time that the isthmus of Panama closed.
00:52:05.000So 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.
00:52:20.000For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe.
00:52:26.000And that was about the time that the these uh fluctuating ice ages began.
00:52:31.000But you know, we've set back the the serious study of climate, I think by fifty years by this manic focus on CO2.
00:52:39.000If your theory doesn't have CO2 in it, forget it, you know, you won't get funding.
00:52:44.000And 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.
00:52:53.000There was this magic subject uh, you know uh non existent, but everyone had to believe in phlagistin.
00:53:01.000And it turned out it was nonsense, it wasn't there at all.
00:53:04.000But but you couldn't get anyone to support you unless you believed in phlagiston.
00:53:08.000So I call this phlagistin era of climate science where phlagistin is CO2.
00:53:14.000You know, well, this is what confuses me.
00:53:17.000You gentlemen are academics, you're obviously very intelligent people.
00:53:20.000There's other very intelligent people that are involved in academia.
00:53:27.000Like how do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?
00:53:35.000Well, 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.
00:53:47.000If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you'll be elected to societies, you'll win prizes.
00:53:57.000So 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.
00:54:18.000It's completely clear it doesn't work.
00:54:20.000And 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.
00:54:31.000Well, 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.
00:54:40.000And we might understand climate today without that.
00:54:43.000There are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general.
00:54:55.000I mean, it isn't having more people work on something.
00:55:02.000You want to have an environment where there's freedom.
00:55:11.000think 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?
00:56:10.000Either 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
00:56:41.000First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much.
00:56:47.000And the second thing is with peer review.
00:56:53.000I mean, it wasn't that common before World War II.
00:56:56.000But people have pointed out it has its virtues.
00:57:03.000But, 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.
00:57:25.000It'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.
00:57:43.000But today peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity if you're not going with the flow you can get rejected.
00:57:58.000And 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.
00:58:20.000But all sorts of things like that need to happen.
00:58:24.000I 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.
00:58:46.000That's what it's supposed to be about.
00:58:48.000It's not supposed to be attached to an ideology.
00:58:50.000And I just don't understand how it got this far and how it can be separated.
00:58:56.000So 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.
00:59:07.000Joe climate is only the most recent so it's just a natural thing that happens.
00:59:12.000Trevor 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.
00:59:32.000It 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.
00:59:51.000It 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.
01:00:11.000They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America, a man called Laughlin.
01:00:20.000No, I mean, what Will is saying—I mean, it had a practical consequence, by the way.
01:00:28.000It 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.
01:00:48.000So 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.
01:00:59.000And and that was used in the run up to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.
01:01:15.000And 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.
01:01:44.000When you hear stories like that, you hear that kind of stuff and you're just like oh this has always been a problem.
01:01:48.000Trevor Burrus You're dealing with people.
01:01:52.000That's that's getting to the heart of the problem.
01:01:54.000Trevor Burrus Joe says this this famous quote by Immanuel Kant, you know, from the crooked timber of mankind no straight thing was ever made.
01:02:06.000That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.
01:02:10.000Trevor 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.
01:02:27.000Trevor 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?
01:02:46.000I mean you had uh bar various uh famous laboratories devoted to this it wasn't a fringe thing.
01:02:58.000Trevor Burrus Right and so I don't know how you distinguish it at that time from science.
01:03:04.000Today 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.
01:03:20.000Well, 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.
01:03:37.000We'd have been a much poorer country because uh so many leading Americans, you know, creative, productive people have immigrated, you know, fairly recently.
01:03:48.000Also probably would have led to some horrific actions in order to enact this.
01:03:55.000Yeah, I mean when you put things in the hands of politicians.
01:04:21.000Dick 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.
01:04:31.000The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and uh more reasonable.
01:04:38.000So 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.
01:04:59.000Uh uh most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way.
01:05:06.000And 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.
01:06:04.000What 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.
01:06:14.000Because 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.
01:07:01.000Trevor 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.
01:07:10.000And so people seem to have this uh need for hatred, you know.
01:07:15.000You 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.
01:07:23.000Well, if you're on Twitter, you're you're using up a lot more than two minutes of hate.
01:07:27.000Well, you know, but even with political figures, I'm always surprised.
01:07:32.000I mean, it seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear probably does not mean well.
01:08:23.000And climate being one of the key ones that I hear all the time with young people.
01:08:27.000In fact, there were some recent surveys that were done.
01:08:29.000If 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.
01:08:38.000I 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.
01:09:18.000He got that beautiful house and Martha's Vineyard.
01:09:21.000It'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.
01:11:06.000And it used to be that like the sign of virtue would just have was to have an electric car.
01:11:10.000And 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.
01:11:18.000So 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.
01:11:27.000And the climate one is one that if you bring it up with people, it's almost like you're talking about witches.
01:12:51.000But uh I think there are too many things to concentrate on in the world.
01:12:55.000And 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.
01:13:08.000And 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.
01:13:14.000To 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?
01:13:27.000You're hitting on a problem, and I think Will knows this as well.
01:13:34.000A lot of this stuff is actually tough material.
01:15:18.000When they're like, climate change is a giant issue.
01:15:20.000Like 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.
01:15:35.000Like you you had nothing better to do.
01:15:36.000You 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.
01:15:43.000That's how powerful this thing has become in our society.
01:15:48.000And 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.
01:16:28.000And that's you know, she's an entertainer.
01:16:30.000Well, 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.
01:16:38.000But 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.
01:16:48.000And you know she doesn't have this data at her fingertips.
01:17:07.000And 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.
01:17:26.000And one of the things that uh we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution.
01:17:38.000Uh but it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on.
01:17:44.000At 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.
01:17:54.000And uh they get answers that will often be wrong.
01:18:03.000But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe.
01:18:09.000Uh 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.
01:18:40.000And uh it's true, the models don't give you anything to be that panicked over.
01:18:48.000So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models.
01:19:02.000So, you know, it's uh it's a confusing situation.
01:19:09.000They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is.
01:19:13.000You can use them to see what interacts with what then study it further.
01:19:20.000Joe, 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.
01:19:43.000And 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.
01:20:00.000And 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.
01:20:12.000And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics on solving the Navier-Stokes equation.
01:20:18.000And uh he was a as I said, a tremendously uh talented physicist, and but he found it very hard.
01:20:25.000He didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations.
01:20:34.000And 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.
01:21:21.000And this is what's, you know, the the best assumption of the best measurements of what's controlling the temperature on Earth.
01:21:29.000Aaron 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.
01:21:47.000One of Dick's colleagues at MIT, uh a man named Lorentz.
01:21:51.000Uh why don't you tell him about Lorentz?
01:21:54.000Lorentz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable.
01:22:03.000Um whether that's true or not is still an open question.
01:22:08.000But it has a lot of those characteristics and detail.
01:22:12.000I 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.
01:22:21.000You know are you actually able to track the whole thing accurately?
01:22:39.000Yeah, 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.
01:22:53.000Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that one's funny.
01:23:27.000Now, when we make models based on incorrect data about like CO2 levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like.
01:23:39.000At 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.
01:23:49.000Do 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?
01:27:22.000I mean, you know, math departments are famous, though.
01:27:26.000Well, I think it's a sign of almost any great person at anything.
01:27:29.000There'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.
01:27:40.000You know, look, there are great writers who can't do arithmetic.
01:27:51.000Well, 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.
01:28:03.000They probably don't wouldn't do that well on an ACT test.
01:28:07.000It doesn't mean that they're not intelligent.
01:28:08.000It's just it's it's a different kind of intelligence.
01:28:13.000And uh, that makes the world a more interesting place by and it really does.
01:28:18.000But 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.
01:28:50.000And 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.
01:29:05.000Is he made the most money off of this?
01:29:07.000Because he's made a lot of money off of Climate.
01:29:09.000Yeah, he's made a few hundred million, I don't know.
01:29:20.000It's um especially now with social media.
01:29:23.000There's so many people that can like we were talking about Greta Thurnberg.
01:29:27.000I 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.
01:30:06.000Like 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.
01:30:16.000And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, uh especially climate change, right?
01:30:56.000Uh the average uh month, there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred-year events.
01:31:11.000So each of them makes for a good video.
01:31:17.000And 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.
01:31:31.000But you know, you always have a picture of a flood subplacer a rise or this or that, and those are used to scare people.
01:31:38.000It's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers.
01:31:53.000Uh 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.
01:32:07.000The last one they had to say something because the politicians control what's in the IPCC.
01:32:15.000But even with that they were saying no.
01:32:18.000And uh that had nothing to do with the public relations.
01:32:23.000Said to hell with it, even if there's no relation, we'll say there is, because that gives us visuals.
01:32:33.000Now, 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.
01:32:45.000Especially if like you would imagine even.
01:32:48.000Even Wills said it comes from dumbness.
01:32:51.000Well, I'm sure, but um even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms.
01:32:56.000Like, 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.
01:33:11.000That seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on.
01:33:15.000And they would have to be like really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.
01:33:21.000Well, 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.
01:33:31.000The fear is that someone would let them, though.
01:33:33.000The fear is that a country would let them.
01:33:35.000You get the right politicians in place and the right fear-mongering in place, and you let 'em try.
01:33:41.000Or 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.
01:33:49.000And 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.
01:33:59.000Well, 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.
01:34:11.000You know, I d even Bill Gates probably can't afford that, and I'm not sure the U.S. treasurer could either.
01:36:10.000Joel, let me bring up another targeted group and that is farmers and ranchers.
01:36:16.000You know, because of uh their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming.
01:36:21.000Uh 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.
01:36:47.000And otherwise they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay.
01:36:50.000And so the the ranchers were worried that they're gonna be put out of business and their families put out of business.
01:36:56.000And 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.
01:37:18.000So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers, you know, to go to hell.
01:37:24.000And uh they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay.
01:37:27.000So there were no consequences and the the ranchers did not suffer.
01:37:32.000But you know, everybody's under the gun.
01:37:44.000And 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.
01:38:37.000And it's if people can get people to do their bidding, they often love to do it.
01:38:43.000Even 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.
01:38:52.000I mean, you know, Will has worked on this and others.
01:38:55.000But you know, the methane thing is an example of uh enumeracy.
01:39:02.000In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO two.
01:39:17.000And so cutting back methane will have a big effect.
01:39:22.000But there's so little methane in the atmosphere that he got rid of all of it.
01:39:26.000It would have almost no effect compared to CO2.
01:39:31.000Somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.
01:39:36.000Yeah, simple arithmetic they just can't do simple arithmetic, yeah.
01:39:39.000Trevor Burrus It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in in social media.
01:39:46.000It's it's really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants.
01:39:53.000It'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.
01:40:07.000Trevor Burrus It began right at the beginning of the issue.
01:40:10.000As 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.
01:41:08.000And 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.
01:41:21.000And 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?
01:41:34.000And he would tell her, and then she would say, and did you ask a good question today?
01:41:41.000So 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.
01:41:54.000I think that was a very wise uh mother and it's it he turned out very well as a result.
01:42:01.000Aaron 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.
01:42:14.000That'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.
01:42:26.000Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science.
01:42:34.000No I mean the Internet not surprisingly was an unpredictable phenomenon.
01:42:42.000Completely 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.
01:43:02.000Aaron 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.
01:43:13.000Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before nobody saw it coming.
01:43:19.000Did it on his own yeah it's it's a weird time.
01:43:23.000And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media which is also disturbing which is uh also deserved.
01:43:31.000Also deserved that's a problem as well.
01:43:33.000And 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.
01:43:48.000It's just it's it gets very frustrating.
01:43:51.000Yeah, 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.
01:44:07.000But you had others, the Journal American and so on.
01:44:12.000And they differed in their coverage, but on the whole, they covered the same news.
01:44:21.000If something happened, it would appear in both.
01:44:26.000I realize in retrospect that wasn't always true.
01:44:30.000But 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.
01:44:47.000And 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.
01:44:56.000But 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.
01:45:07.000And I delivered the Boston Globe, but I delivered the New York Times as well because it was prestigious.
01:45:12.000I thought it was cool to deliver the New York Times.
01:45:22.000But 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.
01:45:28.000But the point being is it like it was uh it was the paper of record.
01:46:08.000But 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.
01:47:44.000Well, it's um I think it's these kind of conversations with uh people like yourself that uh will help.
01:47:53.000Because the more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that also question it.
01:48:01.000Well, 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.
01:48:08.000You 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.
01:48:17.000But it's also the abuse of science is too much of a temptation for politicians.
01:48:25.000I 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.
01:48:42.000And that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology, uh you're anti-science.
01:48:56.000Whether that helps or not, maybe people don't care.
01:49:00.000But I think y people do, but they're scared to deviate again from the narrative.
01:49:04.000Like 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.
01:49:16.000And 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.
01:49:37.000Can'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.
01:50:00.000Yeah, 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.
01:50:27.000And so if you couldn't get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the Army or some other place.
01:50:34.000So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country.
01:50:43.000And people used to talk we we need an office of science.
01:50:46.000I thought that was a terrible idea, you know, to that means one point failure, you know.
01:50:51.000You know, there was someone in a position to throttle, you know, some important thing.
01:50:55.000The Department of Energy tried to do both sides for a long time.
01:51:00.000And they held out longer than other departments.
01:51:04.000But eventually, for some reason, they were all forced into the same box.
01:51:13.000Department 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?
01:51:26.000I think it was EPA, or maybe it was the No, loans could have must have been energy.
01:51:32.000Like it more than had been given out in the last 15 years.
01:51:49.000It 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.
01:51:57.000It'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.
01:52:04.000Well, having spent time in, you know, a Department of Energy headquarters on it doesn't surprise me.
01:52:25.000I mean, it it's interesting how it evolved.
01:52:28.000I think in the 90s, There was still a certain openness about it.
01:52:36.000And uh, you know, if there were a conference, people on both sides would be invited and so on.
01:52:43.000Somehow by the twenty-first century, uh it came down hard.
01:52:49.000Uh there was absolutely nothing open anymore.
01:52:54.000But 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?
01:53:15.000I said, Well, I'm the son of a bitch, get out of my office.
01:55:09.000We 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.
01:55:20.000And 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,
01:55:40.000by 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.
01:55:51.000And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers, but the inverse problem a star does the same thing.
01:55:57.000When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point, you get lots of speckles.
01:56:02.000And so astronomers knew how to solve that.
01:56:04.000You 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.
01:56:25.000And you you could do the same thing when you're trying to shoot a incoming missile.
01:56:29.000You pre-wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile.
01:56:35.000So it's called adaptive optics, and the the mirror is called a rubber mirror, it's a mirror that you can adjust.
01:56:42.000And 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.
01:56:52.000And 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.
01:57:05.000But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars.
01:57:10.000And so unless the Russians attacked us from the during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies.
01:57:17.000We couldn't do anything with our lasers.
01:57:20.000So I I said, well I know how to fix this.
01:57:22.000All 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.
01:57:39.000And uh nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during the this was top secret meeting.
01:57:44.000Trevor Burrus When you say make a star, do you mean like a satellite star?
01:57:48.000Like a small source of light shining down through the atmosphere.
01:57:54.000Most of the problem is fairly close to the ground, the first kilometer or two up.
01:57:58.000Trevor Burrus And what would this be made out of?
01:58:02.000So 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.
01:58:12.000And 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.
01:58:35.000That'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.
01:58:53.000So 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.
01:59:04.000Oh 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.
01:59:18.000And so this was a difficult thing to discuss in academia?
02:00:20.000What was the point of that I mean you have a problem you try and solve it.
02:00:27.000It 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.
02:00:51.000Human 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.
02:01:08.000And 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.
02:01:21.000We're as much we're as much part of the crooked timber of mankind as anyone else.
02:01:29.000No 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.
02:01:52.000So universities are not uh bastions of independent thinking.
02:02:01.000What could be done to make them more so you know the Canadians did something that I thought had potential.
02:02:10.000Every faculty member, especially junior faculty, immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for.
02:02:24.000And 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.
02:02:59.000But 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.
02:03:13.000You 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?
02:04:37.000Its origins were almost entirely political.
02:04:41.000I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all.
02:04:47.000I you know, uh we're discussing, you know, can it happen?
02:04:52.000Is this, is it warming, is it cooling, is extreme weather increasing.
02:04:57.000It's amazing to me that politicians can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.
02:05:11.000I wonder what it how it would have worked if it wasn't for an inconvenient truth, if that movie hadn't been made.
02:05:17.000I wonder because sometimes people need something like that in that sort of a form for it to really take hold as an idea.
02:06:21.000It's it's stunning how successful it is.
02:06:23.000And 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.
02:08:48.000Actually 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.
02:08:59.000What 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.
02:09:12.000And 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.
02:09:38.000He um didn't worry about the uh French.
02:09:43.000And so but the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane.
02:09:48.000They had had twelve months and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake.
02:09:52.000And 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.
02:10:22.000It 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.