The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 329. The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong ｜ Dr. Judith Curry

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00:01:06.700 Hello everyone on YouTube and associated platforms. I'm here today with another climate

00:01:26.360 denialist because, you know, I've been racking those up. It's all part of my attempt to become

00:01:31.200 the most reprehensible commentator on YouTube. And so, at least in the eyes of those who think

00:01:36.900 they're my enemies. Anyways, I'm talking to Dr. Judith Curry today, a very accomplished scientist.

00:01:41.720 She's an American climatologist with a Bachelor in Science degree in Geography. She earned that at

00:01:47.760 Northern Illinois University and a Geophysical Sciences PhD from the University of Chicago.

00:01:53.260 Curry is the Professor Emerita and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

00:01:58.660 at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She's had an accomplished career working with NASA,

00:02:04.000 the U.S. government, and numerous academic institutions in the field of climate change.

00:02:08.680 A real scientist with 190 publications, Curry advocates, so reprehensibly, for a non-alarmist

00:02:16.840 approach acknowledging Earth's rising temperature with a grain of salt. The grain being in-field research

00:02:22.540 and a refusal to shut the doors of science to those with contrary views and findings.

00:02:27.540 In 2017, Dr. Curry retired from her position at the Georgia Institute of Technology, citing

00:02:33.880 the poisonous nature of the scientific discussion around man-made climate change

00:02:39.020 as a key factor. Curry co-founded and acts as president of the Climate Forecast Applications

00:02:45.900 Network, a company, a private company, which seeks to translate cutting-edge weather and climate

00:02:51.220 research into tenable forecast products. Insurance companies, financial institutions rely on Dr.

00:02:57.300 Curry to provide them with information that can guide them with regard to their future financial

00:03:02.200 decision-making. She's a controversial figure on the climate front, being somewhat of a contrarian 0.98

00:03:07.640 in regard to the hypothetical scientific consensus on the climate apocalypse front.

00:03:13.640 So the first thing I'd like to ask you, Dr. Curry, is if you would walk people through

00:03:18.020 your professional qualifications and to let everyone know why it is that you might be regarded as a

00:03:26.700 credible commentator on such issues. Okay, well, I received my PhD in 1982 in geophysical sciences from

00:03:35.820 the University of Chicago. And I spent my entire career in academia with jobs at the University of

00:03:45.500 Wisconsin-Madison-Madison, Purdue University, Penn State University, University of Colorado-Boulder, and most

00:03:54.460 recently at the Georgia Institute of Technology. And at Georgia Tech, I served as chair of the School of Earth and

00:04:01.980 Atmospheric Sciences for 13 years. I've written several books and published about 190 journal articles. I'm a fellow of

00:04:16.960 several major professional societies, have, you know, received some recognition for my research. I left my university

00:04:28.140 position in 2017. I felt it was too constraining. I wanted to do a broader range of things. And I had started a company

00:04:41.100 about 10 years before. It was a startup under Georgia Tech's, you know, venture lab program. And so then I

00:04:51.720 started devoting full time to it after I left academia. I inadvertently stepped into the limelight on the

00:05:03.600 global warming issue in 2005. If you recall, at the time of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans,

00:05:13.880 I and my co-authors, I and my co-authors had a paper that was published in the journal Science two weeks after

00:05:22.300 Katrina hit. And we had found that the percentage of category four and five hurricanes had doubled in recent

00:05:33.620 decades. Okay. And so this was met with rather explosive media attention. And this was, you know,

00:05:43.880 the first time, you know, that I did TV interviews or anything like that. And it was a very,

00:05:49.580 a very antagonistic debate. People were coming at us from all sides. Of course, the Enviro advocacy

00:05:58.360 groups thought, you know, I was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But there were a lot of people on the

00:06:04.900 other side of the debate, you know, thought I was absolutely evil. So for the first time, I started

00:06:13.620 you know, giving a lot of public lectures and it, and people would invariably ask me questions that

00:06:20.720 were, you know, outside of my expertise or knowledge. Everyone was asking about the hockey stick, for

00:06:25.800 example, or what's going on with the sun and all these kinds of things. I figured, oh my gosh,

00:06:31.240 you know, I really need to just step out beyond my personal areas of expertise and try to understand

00:06:39.220 a lot more of this, you know, so, so which I did. And eventually the hurricane and global warming

00:06:47.920 issues settled down a little bit. And then a few years later, climate gates struck. This was in

00:06:56.780 November of 2009 with the unauthorized release of emails from the University of East Anglia. It was,

00:07:05.220 it was a big, it was a very big scandal at the time. IPCC authors hiding the decline, you know,

00:07:12.660 Mike's nature trick, all this kind of stuff. You know, and it, it was hugely important politically,

00:07:19.060 and it's believed to have derailed the Waxman-Markey bill that was, you know, making progress,

00:07:26.700 you know, towards being passed. And then this just pretty much derailed it. And I took the controversial,

00:07:33.780 you know, step of saying, you know, we need to do better. We need to make all of our data publicly

00:07:42.780 available. We need to make our methods transparent. We need to pay more attention to uncertainty

00:07:48.280 and be more honest about the level of confidence we actually have in this stuff.

00:07:53.980 And we also need to pay attention to skeptics, you know, and treat them with respect and, you know,

00:08:02.240 pay attention to their arguments and refute them if they're serious. And, you know, to me,

00:08:07.880 this sounded like motherhood and apple pie. Right, right, absolutely. Okay, but the people

00:08:15.720 within the climate community were very angry at me saying that I needed to be more sensitive to the

00:08:21.580 feelings of these scientists who were involved. Excuse me, no one was sensitive to my feelings

00:08:29.180 during the hurricane and global warming wars. And also, I wasn't worried about their feelings.

00:08:34.820 I was worried about the IPCC and the credibility of it. And, you know, what we should be doing about

00:08:43.340 this. You know, there were much bigger issues at stake here than the feelings of these scientists.

00:08:51.040 Yes. Well, anybody, any scientist who talks to you about whether you're hurting their feelings when

00:08:57.180 you're launching a discussion of the factual basis of their claims has immediately stepped outside of

00:09:02.820 the scientific domain. I mean, one of the things I loved about being a scientist was that the rules

00:09:09.060 of engagement at professional conferences, let's say, that were genuinely scientific in nature were

00:09:14.700 pretty damn clear. I mean, we were discussing the empirical and statistical reliability and validity

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00:11:02.060 That was that. And if we weren't doing that, it wasn't science. And so the idea that what you

00:11:09.880 should be attending to when you're criticizing someone's work, which doesn't mean denigrating

00:11:14.420 it, it means trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, by the way, that has nothing to do with

00:11:19.160 your regard for the emotional well-being of your, say, antagonist. I mean, you could be polite,

00:11:24.800 and that's helpful, but it's also not mandatory.

00:11:27.260 Right. But, well, there's a subtlety here, because I was not so much criticizing the substance

00:11:33.040 of the science, but the behavior of the scientists that I felt violated the norms of science in

00:11:40.840 terms of, you know, everybody, you know, universalism. You know, everybody should, you know, have a

00:11:47.600 chance or a shot, you know, at the data. We should listen to skeptics, you know, and we should

00:11:55.960 try to keep politics out of our science to the extent that we can. I mean, these are the kind of

00:12:03.620 behaviors, you know, these emails reveal people trying to get editors fired, you know, playing

00:12:11.360 fast and loose with the guidelines of the IPCC, evade Freedom of Information Act requests from people

00:12:20.540 they thought would challenge their research. This kind of behavior that I strenuously objected to

00:12:25.460 and I thought that we should not defend and we should call out. So I was not challenging the

00:12:30.520 substance of anybody's science. It was really the behavior in the public debate on climate change.

00:12:38.380 Well, right. Well, that is a form of, that is a form in some sense of methodological criticism,

00:12:43.160 right? I mean, your point was that there's rules to the investigative process and the communication

00:12:49.580 process and politicization breaks those rules. And the response on the front of the climate

00:12:55.000 apocalypse, let's say, you see this with biologists who are concerned about extinction from time to

00:13:00.320 time too, is that, well, this issue is so important that it's unethical to abide by those normative

00:13:07.280 principles because we need to do everything we can to draw as much attention to this looming

00:13:11.600 catastrophe as possible. And in some sense, all is fair in love and war. And that would be fine if they

00:13:17.480 were correct and 100% correct possibly, although I still think they're violating the science-politics

00:13:24.340 distinction. But when there's doubt and there's substantial doubt here, then that's a real problem.

00:13:30.880 I wanted to take apart some of the things you said. So you came at this in a very interesting way in

00:13:35.440 some sense, because the first time that you rose to something approximating public prominence,

00:13:40.660 you were actually putting forth a set of propositions that you could argue supported a more dire

00:13:47.300 view of climate outcome, right? Making the claim that these hurricanes, severe hurricanes,

00:13:51.960 had increased in frequency. Do you believe now that, have they continued to increase in frequency? Or was

00:13:57.600 that a momentary spike? Do you know that literature still?

00:14:00.860 Oh, yes. It's, okay, first off, there were lots of pot shots thrown at us. Okay, the couple of

00:14:08.440 criticisms turned out to be valid. One is that the global data before 1985 is pretty dodgy. You know,

00:14:17.260 we went back to the 1970s. So we, you know, so realistically, you have to throw out 15 years.

00:14:23.900 And the other thing was looking at, you know, just the natural variability. And could we really

00:14:30.160 distinguish a warming signal from the natural variability? And at this point, we still can't,

00:14:36.700 with a lot of confidence. Yeah, well, a big part of the problem here is, you know, what time frame

00:14:43.560 over, this is a huge problem, and I don't even know how you solve it in some sense. If you're trying

00:14:47.620 to define something like a trend towards cooling, or warming, or increased or decreased variability,

00:14:55.880 the question that immediately arises, well, are you talking about 100 years, or 1,000, or 10,000,

00:15:01.020 or a million, like, there's an infinite number of time frames to consider?

00:15:05.220 Exactly. That is a key challenge. And one of my major themes, you know, coming out of the climate

00:15:11.780 gate thing was a more serious look at uncertainty. And I wrote a paper called Climate Change and the

00:15:20.000 Uncertainty Monster. And I used that paper, a series of, you know, to launch my blog, Climate,

00:15:26.720 et cetera, judithcurry.com, in 2010. And again, this was people outside the clique of establishment

00:15:38.420 climate scientists thought this was great, this is important, this is obvious. However, within the

00:15:43.860 clique, they viewed me as trying to destroy a consensus that they had been trying to build for 20

00:15:50.600 years. Well, this was a manufactured consensus, and it was on very flimsy ground, you know? So,

00:15:58.240 and there was no... Okay, how would you care, how would you characterize that so-called consensus? Is

00:16:03.240 that associated with this idea? I talked to Richard Franzen about this recently. Is that associated

00:16:09.840 with the idea that, like, 97% of scientists agree that, well, it isn't clear what they agree,

00:16:15.800 that's the issue, is that climate change is a severe and catastrophic problem, which is...

00:16:20.640 That statement in itself is not true by any stretch of the imagination. What's the consensus here?

00:16:25.560 Okay, the issue is the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They did their first

00:16:32.720 assessment report in, like, 1991. And following that, I mean, that was a good report. It was a good

00:16:38.860 assessment at the time. And then the powers that be says we need to strive for consensus

00:16:44.600 in our statements. And so this sort of narrowed the framing, and the people they were picking to be

00:16:51.560 on the committee were people who were all going to agree. And so they were working to manufacture

00:16:57.020 a consensus. You know, it was their view of how the policy process deals with uncertainty. So it was

00:17:06.300 sort of a speaking consensus to power approach. And this was, like, formalized by the IPCC.

00:17:13.960 And, you know, people challenging the consensus, and there's many dimensions to it, but the most

00:17:23.120 fundamental one is that most of the warming that we've seen since 1950 is caused by humans. I mean,

00:17:31.140 that's the most central consensus type statement.

00:17:34.880 Well, and that there is warming, that there is warming, even though now the narrative has changed,

00:17:38.900 that there is warming. There's a certain idea about its potential magnitude. And then, hypothetically,

00:17:44.500 the consensus is that, what, about 50% of that is due to human activity?

00:17:49.740 No, no, no.

00:17:50.060 They used to make the statement more than half, but they really meant 100%.

00:17:54.720 Okay, but there's certainly no scientific consensus that 100% of the global warming that's occurring

00:18:03.120 at the moment is anthropogenic. That, I don't believe it. Am I wrong about that?

00:18:07.340 No, no, no. No, there isn't. Okay. There's no measure. I mean, when you have a complex, highly

00:18:16.420 uncertain situation like this, the issue of consensus is scientifically meaningless. It's

00:18:22.800 only meaningful, you know, for political purposes, this whole idea of speaking consensus to power,

00:18:32.220 that that was some pathway, you know, to policymaking. It hasn't really turned out to be.

00:18:39.640 It, yeah, so, yeah, there's no consensus. The most...

00:18:44.760 Well, it's also a preposterous claim scientifically because the way science works is that a great

00:18:52.360 scientist is the first person who challenges the consensus. That's kind of how you define a

00:18:58.140 great scientist. And one of the things that's so wonderful about science is that it can reveal

00:19:02.600 when the universal consensus is wrong. And it's powerful in its methods precisely because of that.

00:19:10.420 And you know that as a practicing researcher is that the probability that you're going to do a study

00:19:15.180 and that the data is going to reveal the consensus of your lab's theory, the validity of the consensus

00:19:22.200 of your lab's theory, is basically zero. Something unexpected is going to crop up when you actually

00:19:27.900 test your idea against reality itself. So the idea that science is consensus-based is...

00:19:34.120 It's wrong. It's wrong. Okay.

00:19:36.160 It's, yeah, it's amazing that the idea got anywhere.

00:19:39.980 Okay. Look at the social factors in play. Okay. There was a big drive by the UN,

00:19:47.360 you know, to deal with human, you know, dangerous anthropogenic climate change. Again,

00:19:53.160 this was a 1992 treaty before we even had any evidence of human-caused warming at all. Okay. And

00:20:00.580 then you had scientists become invested in this, you know, and their career goals and the funding.

00:20:05.700 That comes into the field and all of this kind of stuff. There was this sort of social contract

00:20:11.760 between the scientists and the policymakers that perpetuated this situation. And, you know,

00:20:19.260 and they were the policymakers. We need, you know, more, you know, we need more and more confident

00:20:26.040 statements from the IPCC, even though the dimensions of the problem were growing and growing and growing

00:20:33.220 every year and clearly becoming more complex and obvious that there were a lot of things that we

00:20:39.060 didn't understand. But there was this drive, you know. Well, it's not as if the IPC documents

00:20:46.640 themselves are even that radical. I mean, my understanding of the IPC documents is that

00:20:52.920 the projection is something like one to two degrees of further warming with some increase in variability,

00:21:00.520 especially in the polar regions, and a small degree of sea level rise. No indication in the IPCC reports that

00:21:10.640 this will produce runaway, out-of-control feedback loops that will have a devastating consequence. No real vision

00:21:16.920 of apocalypse. And so... That's not quite correct. Until recently, people were looking at projections of

00:21:26.720 four to five degrees centigrade more warming over the course of the 21st century. Okay, the issue was

00:21:36.980 wildly ridiculous emissions projections, which are now believed to be implausible.

00:21:43.040 The more recent IPCC assessment report with more plausible emissions scenarios is looking at more

00:21:51.600 two to three degrees centigrade of warming. And we've already had one degree, so it's an additional

00:21:59.940 one to two degrees centigrade of warming that people expect based on the climate models. So they were

00:22:07.040 pretty alarming up until recently, because everyone was focused on this extreme emissions scenario, which is now

00:22:16.000 widely accepted as implausible, if not impossible. So there was a lot of alarm. And all the, you know, when you talk

00:22:24.880 about all the projections of extreme weather events, and we won't be able to grow wine in California, and crazy

00:22:32.320 projections of sea-level rise, all these projections were tied to that extreme emissions scenario.

00:22:38.880 And it's taken the community a long time to reject it. In fact, this extreme emissions scenario was still the

00:22:47.600 most often, the most widely used in the sixth assessment report, which was published only like

00:22:55.680 two years ago. So, I mean, this is still pervasive, these excessively alarming

00:23:04.160 projections of what could happen in the 21st century, mostly driven by

00:23:11.520 implausible to impossible emissions scenario, but also driven by climate models that are running too hot.

00:23:18.900 Okay, let's go into that a bit. So, I talked to Richard Lindzen about a week ago, about the problems with

00:23:27.000 models. He said, for example, that the models are based on cells, let's say, so those would be, the whole earth

00:23:35.440 can't be modeled, so you have to oversimplify it, you have to clump it into chunks, and the chunks are about 70 miles

00:23:41.500 wide. They don't, they can't really model cloud activity very well. There's a lot of error in relationship to

00:23:47.960 projecting and forecasting the effect of water vapor, the model.

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00:24:59.260 The models have to build a lot of assumptions in, and that doesn't mean that we shouldn't build

00:25:06.700 models, but it does mean that they have very large potential for error, and that error is magnified

00:25:14.460 as you project out into the future. And so I've read, for example, you tell me if you think this is

00:25:20.120 accurate, that our estimates of the cumulative effect of carbon dioxide on global warming or climate

00:25:27.860 change are smaller than our estimates of the magnitude of our error in measuring the effect

00:25:33.420 of water vapor. And like, that's a big problem because water vapor is a major contributor to

00:25:38.700 warming in principle. And so if carbon dioxide effects are under the size of the error in that

00:25:44.520 measurement, that's really, well. Well, I wouldn't put it that way. We have a pretty good idea of how

00:25:52.960 much water vapor is in the atmosphere. The question is, how is that going to change with warming?

00:25:58.780 The bigger issue is the clouds, what clouds are doing. Clouds have a huge, and they're not

00:26:05.680 modeled very well, and the observational basis for, you know, understanding how they're trending,

00:26:14.240 you know, only goes back a few decades. So, you know, that's a tough one. But the net result of

00:26:21.840 these uncertainties in water vapor and cloud feedback is that we don't know how sensitive the

00:26:27.320 climate is to increasing CO2, because the way the model's treated is that CO2 and clouds amplify the

00:26:36.180 warming. And I think the cloud feedback might even be negative. Water vapor does overall amplify the

00:26:46.920 warming. But in the tropics, where Richard Lindzen has done his research, he proposes that there is a

00:26:54.960 negative feedback. And that's something that's hotly debated. But I think the clouds are the bigger

00:26:59.820 issue. But apart from what's going on in the atmosphere, to me, it's really the oceans and the

00:27:05.580 sun that are the biggest sources of uncertainty in terms of understanding what's going on and be able

00:27:13.600 to project into the future. So there are... Okay, why the oceans? Oh, my goodness. Okay, the oceans have

00:27:20.760 these large circulation systems overturning. Okay, El Nino, La Nina, people are familiar with that.

00:27:30.760 That's a mode of natural internal variability. There's also decadal and multi-decadal

00:27:36.940 oscillation cycles that change the patterns of clouds, the whole patterns of sea surface temperature,

00:27:44.720 influence the snowfall on Greenland, the Arctic sea ice, rainfall, regional climates, etc. And the

00:27:51.360 models don't treat these very well. There's a whole spectrum of these ocean circulations all on out to

00:27:57.740 10,000 years. You have millennial scale overturning that influences the climate. And the models have

00:28:05.640 far too little power, you know, in that part of the spectrum. So we're just missing that.

00:28:14.540 And then... And so is that a consequence? Does that mean that the degree to which the ocean takes up

00:28:21.220 carbon dioxide is permeated by error in measurement? Is it also an indication of our lack of understanding

00:28:28.260 of how the temperature of the ocean itself is regulated by the motion of water from the depths

00:28:34.160 up to the top? All of that? Oh, yeah.

00:28:37.040 Is that where the error is? Well, no. Vertical transport of heat and carbon in the ocean is part

00:28:43.160 of the consequences of the uncertainty in these large-scale circulations. But more fundamentally,

00:28:49.660 these large-scale, you know, they change the weather patterns and change the clouds,

00:28:53.680 among other things. So, you know, this is trying to get all that modeled right, let alone

00:29:00.880 making credible predictions into the future. We're not there. I mean, not even close to being

00:29:06.800 there. Okay. And then if you, once you get into the sun, it's even, you know, crazier. I mean,

00:29:14.580 the IPCC has pretty much dismissed the role of the sun, you know, in the last 150 years. But the

00:29:24.380 interesting thing is that in the Sixth Assessment Report, Chapter 6, they finally acknowledged the

00:29:30.760 great uncertainty in the amount of solar forcing in the late 20th century. And this arises from...

00:29:38.100 There was a gap in the satellites measuring the sun output that occur at the time of the Challenger

00:29:46.320 shuttle disaster, if you recall that. And so one solar sensor was running out, and they were supposed

00:29:55.260 to launch another one, but all the launches were put off for a number of years until they sorted out

00:30:01.100 what was going on at NASA with the launches and everything. So there's this so-called gap. And

00:30:08.440 depending on what was actually happening in that gap, you know, you can tune the solar variability to

00:30:16.480 high variability or low variability. So all the climate models are being run with low solar variability

00:30:23.740 forcing. But for the first time, Chapter 2 in the observational chapter of the Sixth Assessment Report

00:30:31.080 acknowledged this issue that there is huge amount of variability. And this doesn't even factor in the

00:30:37.660 so-called solar indirect effects in terms of there's a lot of... It's not just the heat from the sun.

00:30:43.780 There's a lot of issues related to ultraviolet and stratosphere and cosmic rays and magnetic fields and all

00:30:51.400 these other things that really aren't being factored in. They're at the forefront of research, but they're

00:30:56.920 certainly not factored into the climate models. So there are so many uncertainties out there

00:31:04.760 that affect certainly the projections of what might happen in the 21st century, but also our

00:31:11.400 interpretation of what's been going on with the climate for the last hundred years ago and exactly what's been causing what.

00:31:22.360 Well, so I would say that those who object to the line of reasoning that you're putting forward,

00:31:27.320 I believe, would make an argument analogous to the following. They would say, well, look, we have,

00:31:32.120 despite all the objections on the measurement front, we have pretty good evidence that there's a warming trend.

00:31:38.280 We have reasonable evidence that at least a reasonable proportion of that is a consequence of

00:31:43.160 anthropogenic activity, most particularly the production of carbon dioxide. The potential consequence of

00:31:50.600 this could be apocalyptic 100 years down the road or 50 years down the road. Even with all those doubts

00:31:57.400 in mind, it's incumbent upon us to take something like emergency action now so that we ameliorate this

00:32:04.280 risk of apocalyptic transformation. And so this is just obstructionist hand-waving your objections.

00:32:12.120 And if you were moral and on board, you'd see that this issue is so serious and so apocalyptic that

00:32:18.520 it's inappropriate to stand in the way of the amelioration. And so what what do you think about

00:32:24.120 that as a counter proposition? Okay, the weakest part of their argument is whether all this is dangerous.

00:32:29.880 You know, the sea level rise is, you know, creeping up, you know, the ice cap,

00:32:38.360 Greenland, Antarctic, you know, it changes from year to year with a little bit of melting,

00:32:44.600 but there's no catastrophe looming on those fronts. And so they've turned to extreme weather.

00:32:51.560 Oh, global warming is calling, and I have to say the hurricane and global warming first put this

00:32:56.680 idea into their head. Ah, you know, if we can show that even one degree can cause something bad,

00:33:03.800 like more category five hurricanes, then we have something. So this started this whole trend of

00:33:09.880 every extreme weather event is associated with human-caused global warming, which just isn't

00:33:17.000 true. And if you look back, and they tend to go back to 1970 or 1950, oh, this is the

00:33:25.000 warmest year, the worst storm or the biggest drought or whatever since 1970, maybe since 1950. But if you

00:33:31.160 look in to the first half of the 20th century, the weather was way worse. Certainly in North America,

00:33:39.480 and over much of the globe also. Right now in the U.S. West, we're being assaulted by these

00:33:49.480 atmospheric river events, bringing huge amounts of rain and snow, which is going to cause flooding.

00:33:58.120 It's still snow yet. And you know, this is horrible global warming and everything like that.

00:34:04.440 But if you go back to the winter of 1861 and 1862, 15 inches of rain fell in central

00:34:18.840 California over a period of a couple of months, which huge floods over a very widespread area

00:34:25.400 that lasted for absolute months. Okay. And paleoclimate evidence showed that these tend to happen about

00:34:33.640 every 200 years or so, where you have this massive accumulation of these atmospheric rivers. So this is

00:34:40.280 nothing at all unusual. So if you look back into the historical record, or better yet, the paleoclimate

00:34:46.680 record, invariably, you will find worse weather events.

00:34:50.360 Right. So that's part of the time frame problem, right? It's like, well, over what span do you

00:34:56.360 evaluate these events before you draw your conclusions? Right. But you can't...

00:35:00.360 So do you believe that any of the tipping point hypotheses... Franzen told me something

00:35:06.120 interesting. You know, this was kind of a technical proposition. He said that in complex systems with

00:35:12.040 many degrees of freedom on the entropy front, so many ways they can potentially react,

00:35:17.320 the probability of a tipping point positive feedback loop, you know, like the runaway global warming or

00:35:24.840 something like that, the melting of the Greenland ice caps because we hit a tipping point, said in

00:35:30.200 complex systems that have multiple potential outcomes, that kind of all-or-none tipping point

00:35:36.200 is unlikely. You get that more likely in a simple system that's characterized by the probability of

00:35:42.120 radical state change, like water freezing, for example. And so I thought that... I can't evaluate

00:35:47.880 that argument, you know, it's outside my domain of scientific competence, but it struck me as an

00:35:53.160 interesting idea. Well, to some extent, it's true. There is one sort of tipping point

00:36:00.840 that we could encounter. And if this does happen, I would expect that human-caused global warming would

00:36:08.360 play only a small part. And this is the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is an unstable ice sheet. So if you

00:36:15.640 took the ice sheet away, the continent would actually be underwater. But what it is, you have this huge ice

00:36:21.320 sheet that sits on the continent, and part of it's above water, okay? And it has an overhang. And because...

00:36:30.360 And this is just a dynamically unstable situation, and it moves fairly fast. Underneath this ice sheet are

00:36:38.760 lots of inactive volcanoes, even the occasional active volcanoes. So if these volcanoes became active,

00:36:47.960 and we had, you know, a greater heat source under this, combined with sea level rise and a little bit of

00:36:54.200 global warming, this could accelerate. And on the timescale of, you know, three or four centuries, we could see

00:37:04.200 this collapse, you know, which could lead to a substantial sea level rise. So that's the one kind, you know, if we saw that

00:37:13.400 happening, are there engineering ways of dealing with it? I don't know. But it was something that would be a slow process.

00:37:21.200 But that's the only one of the so-called tipping points that I see could happen. Because, you know, if there's

00:37:31.200 going to be some solid Earth, you know, if the Earth wants to have an earthquake or a big volcanic eruption,

00:37:37.200 you know, there aren't a lot of, you know, negative feedbacks in the Earth's system to prevent that.

00:37:43.200 So to me, that's the one, like, bad thing that could happen, but it would take centuries.

00:37:49.200 But the other ones, yeah, I don't see it.

00:37:55.200 So what do you think, when you look at the IPCC reports now, and you look 50 years ahead or 100 years ahead,

00:38:02.200 what would you regard as a credible representation of the so-called climate science?

00:38:10.200 Do you accept the new IPCC prognostications, or do you think the models are so error-ridden that even the hypothesis of one to two degrees warming isn't reliable enough,

00:38:23.200 even though it's the best we have?

00:38:25.200 Well, the interesting thing is that the IPCC's sixth assessment report working group one, they also sort of rejected the climate models to some extent.

00:38:36.200 They were guided by them in their projections, but they also, you know, defined a plausible range of climate sensitivity and looked at the projections from there.

00:38:46.200 So even the IPCC is stepping back from the global climate models as being useful for projections.

00:38:53.200 And people are going to these climate emulators, these simple climate models.

00:38:58.200 Well, for this amount of warming, you know, run it through a damage model or an economic assessment model or something like that.

00:39:06.200 So people are really stepping back from these big global climate models, and it's about time.

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00:40:30.200 The innovations that I've been undertaking in my projection work, and this is what I do for clients of my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network, is that I look at it.

00:40:47.200 I don't just look at the IPCC scenarios, and I choose the low-end ones, because I think those are more credible, but I also look at scenarios of what the ocean circulations could be doing, you know, scenarios of volcanic eruptions, and solar variation scenarios, and try to put forward a broader range of what we might be looking at.

00:41:11.200 And so I have like a network-based approach to combine all this into producing a much broader range of scenarios.

00:41:20.200 And at least over the next three decades, like the natural variability piece of this is pointing towards cooling rather than amplifying the warming.

00:41:30.200 You know, it would tamp down the global warming of whatever magnitude it is from fossil fuel emissions.

00:41:38.200 So that's the approach that I'm taking.

00:41:41.200 Okay, so let's go into that a bit.

00:41:43.200 Earlier, you indicated that you left the university in 2017 to pursue an entrepreneurial activity that you had initiated at Georgia Tech.

00:41:54.200 And you just made allusion to that again.

00:41:58.200 So tell me, if you would, how you are modeling, and you've laid out some of the conclusions, but who's interested in your models?

00:42:09.200 And obviously, you're doing this on an entrepreneurial basis, so people are willing to pay you for your opinion, which gives, I think, some, what would you say, indication of their faith in its credibility, because people are actually spending money on it.

00:42:22.200 Like, how are your models different than the models that are more broadly publicized, let's say?

00:42:29.200 And who is it that is paying you to produce these models?

00:42:34.200 Why is there interest in that?

00:42:35.200 And why are they doing it?

00:42:37.200 Okay, well, insurance companies, financial institutions have an interest in Atlantic hurricanes.

00:42:45.200 What are we looking at over the next three decades in terms of Atlantic hurricane activity?

00:42:51.200 A big issue is a potential shift to the cold phase of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation.

00:42:57.200 This is one of those multidecadal oscillations that I talked about, which we would expect would start to tamp down the Atlantic hurricane activity.

00:43:09.200 So this is a very big deal for them.

00:43:11.200 Another client was wind farm owners who wanted to know, is the wind going to keep blowing for the next 30 years?

00:43:21.200 And are my wind farms in the right location?

00:43:23.200 Okay, they wanted to know that.

00:43:25.200 Some electric utilities want to know what could we be looking at in terms of, like, how frequent these really bad situations could be, you know, for renewable power, like a massive cold air outbreak that lasts for weeks, the wind doesn't blow, and it's wintertime and there's no sun.

00:43:48.200 And, you know, how bad can it get and how frequently might these occur?

00:43:53.200 So these are some of the things that I've been looking at.

00:43:58.200 And also people interested in sea level rise projections, you know, in their particular location, looking at scenarios of what their location, a lot of interest from people in Florida, San Francisco, along the Atlantic coast.

00:44:14.200 You know, what could we be looking at?

00:44:19.200 Yeah, we see that those projections from the IPCC, which of those should we believe, but we already know that, you know, how are the ocean circulation patterns going to influence their local sea level rise?

00:44:33.200 What kind of trends do I see for the vertical land motion, both from local effects and large, more planetary scale up and down kind of effects?

00:44:52.200 So those are some of the projects that I've been working on, looking at scenarios out, say, 30 to 50 years.

00:45:00.200 So why do these companies believe that your models are credible enough for them to pour economic resources into?

00:45:08.200 And why do you believe that your models are credible enough to provide them with accurate guidance?

00:45:13.200 I mean, we talked about some of the limitations of models.

00:45:15.200 And so what is it that you're doing that is credible to the companies?

00:45:20.200 And why do you believe scientifically that you're providing accurate information?

00:45:24.200 Okay, the first thing that I did, and I did this before most other people did, I say, look, you're wasting your time looking at that extreme emissions scenario.

00:45:37.200 You know, if you look at the International Energy Agency, their scenarios show emissions being fairly flat for the next several decades.

00:45:50.200 And I think this is a much more plausible scenario.

00:45:54.200 So let's focus on that one.

00:45:56.200 And this is apart from trying to predict what policy is going to do and how much they're going to change.

00:46:03.200 But the thinking is now that emissions are going to stay fairly flat for the next few decades.

00:46:10.200 And I saw this, and, you know, I saw the journal publications, and this is what I was pushing to my clients.

00:46:16.200 If you want something realistic, this is what you should be looking at.

00:46:20.200 The other thing is not accepting the extremely high values of climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling.

00:46:33.200 I don't go as low as Richard Lindzen does, but I'm certainly on the low end, and I justify why, to them, based on publications, including some of my own,

00:46:45.200 why we shouldn't be looking at these very high sensitivity values.

00:46:50.200 And I run it through a range so they can look, but I'm saying, you know, so I give them all the scenarios they want.

00:46:58.200 I'll give the high emission scenario, I'll give the high climate sensitivity, low climate sensitivity.

00:47:05.200 I'll say my best judgment is that this is what it is.

00:47:10.200 But then I uniquely put in scenarios of the natural variability.

00:47:15.200 And they really like this.

00:47:17.200 They get it.

00:47:18.200 I mean, they've seen it.

00:47:20.200 Okay, they've seen it, and they understand it's out there.

00:47:23.200 They've just never seen anybody try to project it before.

00:47:27.200 And I have publications on this.

00:47:29.200 They can parameterize their risk given your plethora of models.

00:47:32.200 So they can say, well, here's the worst case scenario.

00:47:35.200 Exactly.

00:47:36.200 Here's the best case scenario.

00:47:37.200 Here's the likely scenario.

00:47:38.200 Here's the range.

00:47:39.200 And then they can calculate how to mitigate their risk across those scenarios.

00:47:45.200 Exactly.

00:47:46.200 I mean, a lot of times they want to know, well, what's the worst case?

00:47:50.200 What's the worst plausible case?

00:47:52.200 Okay, and so I give them that.

00:47:54.200 And so they have this whole range.

00:47:57.200 Okay, so for example, in the wind farm profitability study, I gave them 81 scenarios.

00:48:05.200 Okay, different scenarios of how this could play out over the next 30 years.

00:48:11.200 And these different, you know, there was a cluster of scenarios, you know, in a certain area.

00:48:18.200 And I say, you know, you might infer that these are the most plausible outcomes

00:48:24.200 because there's multiple different pathways for reaching that.

00:48:29.200 But here's your plausible worst case.

00:48:32.200 Here's your plausible best case.

00:48:34.200 Okay, and this gives them some information, okay, for making their decision.

00:48:41.200 Right.

00:48:42.200 So you admit right up front in some sense that there are inputs into your models that are

00:48:49.200 somewhat arbitrary, right?

00:48:51.200 That you have to decide about.

00:48:53.200 And those might be, for example, your projections of carbon dioxide output.

00:48:58.200 And then you say, given a variety of initial assumptions, here's a variety of outcomes.

00:49:04.200 But a lot of the models tend to converge at this vision, you know, this range of visions.

00:49:09.200 And so if the convergence of multiple models constitutes evidence, which we generally assume it does,

00:49:15.200 then this seems to be the most plausible pathway, right?

00:49:18.200 And so how does that differ from the IPCC approach?

00:49:21.200 Okay, well, I don't say it's the more...

00:49:24.200 Well, first they neglect all the elements of natural variability that I conclude.

00:49:29.200 They're not giving scenarios of volcanic eruptions.

00:49:32.200 They're not giving different scenarios of sun activity.

00:49:39.200 They don't have...

00:49:42.200 They do a bunch...

00:49:43.200 They have a bunch of different, you know, scenarios of what the internal ocean variability is doing.

00:49:50.200 But I can anchor it more closely to what the observations are and my own network model

00:49:57.200 in terms of what the plausible trajectories are.

00:50:00.200 So I'm giving them a more plausible trajectory for the ocean oscillations.

00:50:07.200 And generally, going out 30 years, these other scenarios are cooler than the IPCC scenarios.

00:50:17.200 Well, and do they actually point to cooling or just less rapid warming?

00:50:24.200 Some of them go as far as cooling, okay?

00:50:27.200 And others are less rapid warming.

00:50:30.200 And there have been another of publications, you never see them publicized,

00:50:34.200 that show for certain combinations of these ocean circulations or volcanic eruptions or solar activity

00:50:42.200 that you could see cooling for a decade or two during the 21st century.

00:50:49.200 That could happen.

00:50:51.200 And the IPCC AR6 did, you know, if you read the fine print deep in the chapters,

00:50:57.200 you know, you'll see these papers referenced and it is acknowledged.

00:51:01.200 But it's not something that you hear, you know, in the public debate.

00:51:08.200 It's just this relentless warming that we're going to be seeing.

00:51:11.200 Okay, okay.

00:51:12.200 So that's interesting because, you know, the warming advocates are doubtful enough about their own prognostication

00:51:21.200 so that it's no longer appropriate to refer to global warming.

00:51:26.200 You're supposed to refer to climate change, which I think is a terrible sleight of hand.

00:51:31.200 But in any case, that's what's happened.

00:51:33.200 But nonetheless, the apocalyptic prognostications are still predicated on this idea of warming.

00:51:39.200 Now, your claim is that the consensus that that might be apocalyptic was never there to begin with,

00:51:46.200 and the initial estimates of the magnitude of warming were out by about a factor of two,

00:51:51.200 partly because people accepted equally apocalyptic, in some sense, prognostications of carbon dioxide output.

00:51:59.200 But then you're taking that further.

00:52:01.200 You're saying that the models are so prone to variability that there is some non-trivial possibility

00:52:10.200 that there'll be a global cooling trend over the next 30 years instead of a global warming trend.

00:52:15.200 And so in the face of all that, someone might ask themselves,

00:52:19.200 well, if the situation with regards to these models is as uncertain as you suggest,

00:52:26.200 and also, you know, it's interesting, just as an aside, that financial companies will pay you for your prognostications,

00:52:34.200 which is another form of validation of your opinion.

00:52:37.200 Why in the world are we stampeding madly to spend untold, literally, trillions of dollars

00:52:45.200 trying to ameliorate a problem that we haven't properly measured?

00:52:48.200 Like, what's going on here, as far as you can tell?

00:52:51.200 Okay, you have to go back. Okay, the policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse from the very beginning.

00:53:02.200 In the 1980s, the U.N. Environmental Program, you know, was looking for something.

00:53:09.200 You know, we hate capitalism, we don't like the oil companies, we like world government, all this kind of thing.

00:53:15.200 And they latched on to the climate change, the CO2 global warming is what it was called back then.

00:53:25.200 And this seeded, you know, the formation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

00:53:31.200 And there was a treaty signed by 192 nations in 1992, including the U.S.

00:53:37.200 Okay, this was before we knew anything.

00:53:40.200 We were to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, before we had any idea of any of this.

00:53:47.200 And so this frame, the climate problem, you know, in a very narrow frame,

00:53:54.200 all of climate is now caused by CO2, and by definition, warming is dangerous.

00:54:01.200 And why was that such an attractive political hypothesis?

00:54:05.200 Like, why did politicians decide that in the absence of this, you know, stringently produced scientific evidence,

00:54:12.200 that the proper place for the world's political community to focus was on the cardinal danger of global warming that was anthropogenically produced?

00:54:21.200 Like, what the hell is going on there?

00:54:23.200 Especially because it's so expensive.

00:54:25.200 Okay, well, people didn't pay much attention to it for decades.

00:54:28.200 I mean, the Kyoto Protocol, a bunch of countries in 1997, a bunch of countries signed on to reduce their emissions.

00:54:36.200 But even the ones who signed on didn't really reduce their emissions.

00:54:40.200 And of course, the U.S. never signed on.

00:54:42.200 And reduced its emissions, weirdly enough.

00:54:45.200 So that's pretty funny.

00:54:46.200 I know.

00:54:47.200 And it wasn't really until the Paris Agreement that they came up with, you know, this more voluntary thing.

00:54:55.200 And then they started phrasing it.

00:54:58.200 And there was a spate of, you know, bad weather, big El Nino and stuff like that, that they latched on to, you know, this extreme, you know, if we just got rid of all this, the weather would be nicer.

00:55:12.200 We'd get rid of all these floods and droughts and hurricanes and whatever else and heat waves that was plaguing humanity.

00:55:19.200 And so people bought that kind of simple argument.

00:55:24.200 And then once, there was a real shift in 2018.

00:55:30.200 After the Paris Agreement, you know, the rhetoric was, you know, climate crisis, climate emergency from the world leaders, the UN, President Obama, Macron, Merkel, all of these leaders saying this.

00:55:45.200 But in 2018, people started paying attention.

00:55:49.200 And Greta, this is when Greta Thunberg came onto the scene. 1.00

00:55:56.200 And she was, you know, she's a remarkable person.

00:56:00.200 She's wrong on a lot of things, but a remarkable person nevertheless.

00:56:05.200 But this, what she was doing spawned the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, all this kind of stuff.

00:56:12.200 And the journalists amplified this, the climate crisis, the climate emergency.

00:56:17.200 Ten years ago, climate, even ten years ago, climate change was like really a fringe topic at journals.

00:56:26.200 Now major media outlets have a climate desk.

00:56:29.200 You know, I have a whole team of journalists.

00:56:31.200 And there's huge money going into things like Carbon Brief, things that focus specifically on climate change.

00:56:42.200 And so it's just exploded.

00:56:44.200 And again, there's this social contract between the policymakers, the media, and the scientists.

00:56:49.200 It's great for the scientists.

00:56:51.200 There's nobody.

00:56:52.200 Ten years ago, people with a PhD in climate science, you know, would be trying to get a postdoc and whatever.

00:57:00.200 And now the universities can't even hang on to them.

00:57:03.200 There's so many jobs in the media and the private.

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00:58:21.200 That, you know, this is just a hot thing.

00:58:24.200 Every university now has some sort of climate-y department, institute.

00:58:31.200 It's just big business for everybody.

00:58:33.200 And so there's this mutual reinforcement between the scientists, the policy makers, and the media.

00:58:38.200 Right.

00:58:39.200 That's where the positive feedback loops are.

00:58:41.200 That's right.

00:58:42.200 In the tipping points.

00:58:43.200 Right.

00:58:44.200 They're on the sociological side.

00:58:45.200 Yeah, definitely.

00:58:46.200 Definitely.

00:58:47.200 Yeah.

00:58:48.200 Well, it's quite something to behold.

00:58:49.200 So now, what has been the consequences?

00:58:52.200 I mean, you've been pilloried, I believe.

00:58:55.200 I don't believe I'm overstating this.

00:58:57.200 You've been pilloried or satirized as a sort of fringe figure on the client denial front.

00:59:03.200 I think that's fair to say.

00:59:05.200 And it's pretty easy to smear someone with tactics like that.

00:59:09.200 And it's psychologically very effective.

00:59:12.200 I mean, what has it...

00:59:14.200 You know, you said you rose to public prominence, partly because you formulated an argument,

00:59:19.200 at least to begin with, that could be latched onto by the climate apocalypse quite effectively.

00:59:26.200 But then you produced all sorts of other material, mitigating, producing a mitigated view.

00:59:34.200 What's been the consequence for you of being involved in this?

00:59:38.200 Okay.

00:59:39.200 Let me tell you what my sin was.

00:59:43.200 People don't object to my science.

00:59:46.200 I mean, I'm within, you know, the likely range of the IPCC for the most part on the low end.

00:59:54.200 You know, it's not fringe perspectives.

00:59:57.200 And I commonly cite the IPCC.

01:00:00.200 What happened, the reason I was shuffled off into denier camp is because I criticized the behavior of climate scientists.

01:00:11.200 I criticized the IPCC for some ethical violations as well as not paying enough attention to uncertainty.

01:00:19.200 So that was my sin.

01:00:21.200 Okay.

01:00:22.200 I offended and criticized the grand poobahs of the climate community. 1.00

01:00:27.200 And then I was very quick...

01:00:29.200 And most importantly, in, was it 2011?

01:00:33.200 I criticized Michael Mann's hockey stick on my blog.

01:00:38.200 And then he started calling me a denier.

01:00:41.200 And that was really the beginning of the end.

01:00:43.200 So my sin...

01:00:44.200 Yeah, so let's talk about that terminology for a second, just so everybody knows.

01:00:48.200 So this is quite the rhetorical move on the part of the climate purveyors of apocalyptic doom.

01:00:55.200 And so we already established in our society, broadly speaking in the West, that to object to the idea that the Holocaust was a historical reality puts you outside the pale of normative and reasonable political discussion.

01:01:08.200 And so you can be a Holocaust denier, and if you are such a creature, then you're lumped in with the Nazis and put on the shelf for no further contact, right? 0.52

01:01:18.200 You've entered the realm of the reprehensible.

01:01:21.200 Now, one of the most effective rhetorical moves of the people who were making a great living or putting themselves forward morally as climate apocalyptic doomsayers was to target people who objected to their views with terminology that was derived directly from that rhetorical move.

01:01:37.200 So now, if you're a climate change denier, the connotation is you occupy the same category morally as people who refuse to believe on the grounds of their appalling antisemitism and their blind historical ignorance that the Holocaust was a historical reality.

01:01:54.200 And so, in some sense, there's no real difference between labelling someone a climate change denier and labelling them a Nazi enabler.

01:02:03.200 And the rhetorical move was designed precisely to produce that outcome.

01:02:06.200 And so I'm not a big fan of that kind of rhetorical move.

01:02:09.200 And let's talk about Michael Mann for a second, too, now, because a lot of people listening and watching, they're not going to know what that hockey stick graph was.

01:02:16.200 And they don't know what cardinal role the scandal around that graph has produced in the discussion.

01:02:23.200 So do you want to walk through the hockey stick graph a little bit?

01:02:26.200 Okay.

01:02:27.200 If you go back to 2001, this was the release of the third assessment report from the IPCC.

01:02:35.200 And Sir John Houghton, who was the head of the IPCC, was giving the press release.

01:02:41.200 And the backdrop behind him was this image, a curve that looked like a hockey stick, which was meant to portray that, you know, the climate was very stable for the last thousand years.

01:02:55.200 And all of a sudden, you've got this big uptick, you know, that is caused by humans.

01:03:02.200 Okay.

01:03:03.200 And this was based on the work of Michael Mann, who was a recent PhD.

01:03:09.200 This was his postdoc work.

01:03:11.200 Before the ink was dry on his PhD, he was appointed a lead author of the IPCC, which was a fairly unusual move to appoint someone.

01:03:23.200 No, that's an insane move.

01:03:25.200 Let me let everybody watching and listening know, like, your PhD is putting your foot in the, or your toe in the water of scientific endeavor.

01:03:35.200 So, I mean, so Judith has 190 publications.

01:03:39.200 And just so those of you who are listening know, generally speaking, a PhD thesis requires approximately as much work as three scientific publications, if it's a high quality PhD.

01:03:51.200 And so, when you get your PhD, you've entered the domain of genuine scientific contribution.

01:03:58.200 The PhD is actually a marker of that.

01:04:00.200 And if you do a postdoc, that means that you have the opportunity to do a little bit more research work to establish your credibility now as a more independent researcher who isn't dependent on the ideas of your supervisor.

01:04:13.200 So, you're a neophyte. You're a beginner when you do a PhD and a postdoc.

01:04:17.200 And maybe you have to do one or maybe two, and then maybe you can get hired as a junior professor.

01:04:22.200 But you're by no means at the peak of your career.

01:04:24.200 And it's very, very rare for initiatory research that might be done at the PhD level to be regarded as canonical, unless you're a Nobel Prize winning, you know, genius, by the scientific community.

01:04:37.200 And so, the fact that man's work got so much attention, even though it was done at this initial level of scientific investigation, I mean, that doesn't speak to its validity.

01:04:47.200 But my point is, it's an aberration in the process.

01:04:50.200 And it also points to this problem we discussed earlier of timeframe.

01:04:53.200 I mean, when you construct graphs, you can play with their psychological impact in all sorts of inappropriate ways.

01:05:00.200 You can expand and contract the timeframe. You can expand and contract the scale on the left.

01:05:07.200 And you can make what's really a small effect across some historical span of time look big by playing with the scale.

01:05:15.200 And you can make an effect that isn't very large, temporally speaking, by shrinking the timescale of evaluation.

01:05:23.200 And so, the man's graph showed this uptick in climate transformation that was attendant on human industrial activity.

01:05:32.200 But he picked a very narrow timeframe and a very particularized scale so that this maximized the psychological impact of the graph.

01:05:41.200 And so, but that does bring us to this problem of timescale.

01:05:44.200 It's like, well, and variability. How much has things changed over 10,000 years?

01:05:50.200 Like, what's the right timescale here? And that's a very difficult problem.

01:05:53.200 Well, the issues of the hockey stick were not so much that.

01:06:03.200 The trigger, the hockey stick trigger, important one, is around 2000.

01:06:09.200 Right after that, this was viewed by a mining engineer.

01:06:14.200 Steve McIntyre said, hockey stick, hockey stick, I've seen these things.

01:06:18.200 This is usually a con game trying to get somebody to buy mining stocks.

01:06:22.200 He says, you know, and then he got intrigued. He wanted to look at the data.

01:06:25.200 So, he asked for the data. They gave him some of it.

01:06:28.200 And he and Ross McKittrick, Canadian economics professor, took a look at this.

01:06:37.200 And they found all sorts of errors, you know, mishandling of data, inappropriate statistical methods, on and on it goes.

01:06:45.200 And Mann went after these guys big time, rather than, you know, constructively trying to deal with these criticisms.

01:06:55.200 He went after these guys, and this turned into a pretty big flame war.

01:07:00.200 And then McIntyre and McKittrick published two additional papers in 2005.

01:07:06.200 And the controversy, you know, was just explosive.

01:07:10.200 There were congressional hearings on this, and on and on it went.

01:07:14.200 So, it was this huge controversy.

01:07:17.200 And these ClimateGate emails that were released in 2009 revealed all sorts of skulldudgery, you know, trying to keep data away from McIntyre and McKittrick, trying to put pressure on journal editors not to publish their papers, and on and on it goes.

01:07:39.200 And, you know, and so this was revealed in ClimateGate.

01:07:43.200 Right.

01:07:45.200 So, those were more egregious sins than just picking a convenient timeframe and a convenient scale.

01:07:50.200 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:07:51.200 But there is a graphical issue.

01:07:53.200 And this was the theme of my blog post, Hiding the Decline.

01:07:58.200 So, the paleoclimate record just, you know, showed these little oscillations.

01:08:03.200 And to get that sort of hockey stick piece, they spliced on the observational record on top of that.

01:08:10.200 Okay.

01:08:11.200 Okay.

01:08:12.200 And it wasn't clear in the IPCC report that was done.

01:08:18.200 It was sort of in some sort of a footnote or an obscure reference.

01:08:22.200 But it never occurred to me, as someone in the field, that this is what had been done.

01:08:28.200 So, no, I don't understand that.

01:08:30.200 Go into that in more detail.

01:08:31.200 I don't understand exactly what was done there.

01:08:34.200 Okay.

01:08:35.200 So, okay, if you look at the actual tree, the tree ring rate data that went into their analysis, it was just like the flat handle.

01:08:46.200 To get the blade, the uptick of the blade, they spliced on the historical temperature record.

01:08:54.200 Completely different data set.

01:08:56.200 Oh, oh, I see.

01:08:57.200 I see.

01:08:58.200 Because the tree rings weren't showing this uptick.

01:09:02.200 This is a so-called hide the decline.

01:09:05.200 And so, you know, to me, this is something without doing that is a bad idea, but doing that without explaining it is marginal.

01:09:17.200 And this is known in some circles subsequently would be given a label as image fraud.

01:09:26.200 And so, this is what I wrote my blog post about.

01:09:30.200 And I wasn't particularly attacking Mann because he wasn't the only person involved in this little deception.

01:09:39.200 But, you know, this got a lot of attention and apparently Michael Mann was unhappy.

01:09:46.200 And pretty soon after that, you know, he was calling me a denier on Twitter and then I started appearing on all these misinformer lists.

01:09:55.200 And by 2012, you know, I was firmly established as a denier.

01:10:00.200 And the Society of Environmental Journalists put together a list, a description of all the climate blogs.

01:10:10.200 And my blog was under the list of denier blogs.

01:10:14.200 And the description says, unlike most other denier blogs, Curry is a real scientist.

01:10:20.200 She looks at both sides of the issues, digs deep into the issues, discusses the uncertainties and all this other stuff.

01:10:28.200 And I said, well, that's a beautiful description of my blog.

01:10:31.200 But why did they accept prima facie that my blog is a denier blog? 1.00

01:10:37.200 I mean, it just shows how pervasive and how stupid this whole thing was. 0.99

01:10:42.200 So, you know, I got tossed into the denier camp. 1.00

01:10:45.200 I don't align myself with either side.

01:10:50.200 You know, I preciously fought for my independence, which included resigning my academic position.

01:10:59.200 So, you know, I think for myself.

01:11:01.200 I think deep.

01:11:02.200 I look at the evidence, make judgments.

01:11:05.200 And it's mostly about trying to better characterize uncertainties and what we don't know.

01:11:11.200 This is a key part of rational policy making is to understand the uncertainties and what we don't know.

01:11:19.200 Well, we've got we've got a threefold problem here by the sounds of things in some real sense.

01:11:24.200 And the first problem is kind of a positive feedback loop that you alluded to is that a lot of attention was paid to this potential issue.

01:11:32.200 A lot of money was put into funding investigation into it that incentivized the growth of a huge scientific enterprise that incentivized people who were primarily motivated by the money, including the grants.

01:11:46.200 And I mean, it's hard not to be motivated by that if you want to be a practicing scientist.

01:11:50.200 And so there was a lot of financial and practical pressure to produce a an environmentally apocalyptic story.

01:11:58.200 And then you can imagine that's amplified by the fact that reporting that there's no problem on the climate front is not something that's going to produce an attention grabbing headline,

01:12:09.200 especially in the era of declining attention being paid to paid to legacy media outlets.

01:12:16.200 And so we know perfectly well that human beings are much more sensitive to negative information, comparatively speaking, than to positive information,

01:12:24.200 and that you can attract attention with a story of gloom and threat much more effectively than one that states there's no story here at all or something positive.

01:12:35.200 So that's a big problem.

01:12:37.200 And then the third problem, I would say, is that it's easy for venal and narcissistic politicians, and that's not all of them,

01:12:44.200 to latch on to a convenient money-generating apocalyptic nightmare to put themselves forward as white knights on the moral front

01:12:54.200 and to pull the wool over the eyes and maybe even their own eyes in relationship to whether or not they're making any practical progress in the actual world.

01:13:02.200 And so there is a situation where we have a set of positive feedback loops operating in sociological space that are producing a kind of chicken little outcome.

01:13:13.200 And so we're running around claiming that the sky is falling and dumping, tilting our economic systems in a dangerous direction

01:13:21.200 and spending untold hundreds of billions of dollars addressing a problem that is ill-defined and likely nowhere near of the magnitude that we think it is.

01:13:32.200 And so, and then I want to follow that with a, I tried to make a strong case for why you might be regarded with a certain degree of apprehension from the perspective of the climate apocalypse.

01:13:45.200 But I'm also curious about this.

01:13:47.200 The piece of data that has really emerged as most striking to me on the environmental front over the last 20 years

01:13:56.000 is the recent observations, or they've been going on for about 5 years or 10 years perhaps,

01:14:02.560 that one of the consequences of extra carbon dioxide output is that the planet has greened 15% since the dawn of the millennia.

01:14:15.840 And that most of that greening has taken place in what would have otherwise been semi-arid and rather denuded areas.

01:14:23.780 And so I don't see a statistic on the anti-carbon front that's as powerful negatively as the statistic that the planet is 15% greener

01:14:35.680 and that our crops are also, in a consequence, quite a lot more productive on the pro-carbon dioxide front.

01:14:41.960 So, you know, you made the claim earlier that maybe we're in for a period of cooling.

01:14:46.120 That's within the error predictions of the models.

01:14:48.600 But I would like to say, well, why shouldn't I look at the fact that the planet has got 15% greener in 15 years,

01:14:56.100 that's an area bigger than the United States, and say, well, why are we so sure that carbon dioxide output is a bad thing at all?

01:15:04.600 I mean, some of the people who initially hypothesized about the greenhouse effect

01:15:08.520 were quite effusive in their predictions that this would produce a greener, more lush, and more productive world,

01:15:14.480 a more habitable world.

01:15:16.240 So is it unreasonable to put that forward as a proposition?

01:15:24.260 Again, the apocalyptites are pushing extreme weather events as being caused by warming.

01:15:31.980 You know, the hurricanes, the Pakistan flooding, the heat waves, you know, unusual this, that, and the other.

01:15:38.480 This is what they're pushing as being caused by warming.

01:15:41.840 You know, it's conceivable that there is some element of contribution from fossil-fueled warming to this,

01:15:53.240 but it's because of the large amount of natural weather and climate variability, it's impossible to discern.

01:16:01.980 I mean, if we were to immediately stop emitting fossil fuels,

01:16:06.280 we probably wouldn't notice any change in the weather, you know, throughout the rest of the 21st century.

01:16:14.920 So this is the key error in logic that people have been made.

01:16:21.300 Well, I mean, it's not an error in logic.

01:16:24.520 It's a very effective selling point for the alarmists, but people have bought it.

01:16:29.800 And people have weather amnesia.

01:16:32.200 I mean, if you just look back to the 50s, to the 1950s, to the 1930s, or whatever, the weather was much worse,

01:16:40.120 certainly in North America.

01:16:42.820 So it's just something that doesn't make sense.

01:16:47.020 Does that mean we should just keep amping up the fossil fuel emissions?

01:16:50.960 No, we just really don't quite understand the consequences of this.

01:16:56.780 But neither does it imply that we should urgently reduce emissions

01:17:05.360 and disrupt the global energy systems that will make people less off and, you know,

01:17:12.820 less well off and more vulnerable to whatever extreme weather and climate events might happen to occur.

01:17:19.460 So we're hurting ourselves.

01:17:22.680 We're not doing much in the way of reducing emissions anyways.

01:17:27.180 And we're just making ourselves less prosperous and more vulnerable to extreme weather events.

01:17:35.440 Well, okay, so there's two consequences of that, I would say.

01:17:38.720 The first is, if we do make people less well off by making energy much more expensive,

01:17:44.520 by restricting fossil fuel use, like, unreasonably, let's say,

01:17:48.340 or by not pursuing nuclear power, for example, as an alternative,

01:17:52.700 the major consequence of that will be that a lot of poor people who are right on the edge,

01:17:57.680 and there's lots of them, are poorer than they need to be and will be, you know, off the edge.

01:18:03.480 And the consequence of that is, as you already pointed out,

01:18:06.660 that if anything untoward does happen on the weather front,

01:18:09.660 they're going to be much more vulnerable to that.

01:18:11.420 Like, I mean, distinguishing between infrastructure inadequacy and weather catastrophe is very, very difficult.

01:18:19.060 Even when Katrina hit New Orleans, you could say that it was a natural disaster.

01:18:25.400 But you could also say it was an abject failure of planning,

01:18:28.400 because the Army Corps of Engineer dikes were only designed to withstand a one-in-a-hundred-year storm,

01:18:34.440 whereas when the Dutch built dikes, they designed them to withstand a one-in-10,000-year storm.

01:18:40.080 So whether that was a natural disaster or a consequence of human foolishness is not precisely obvious.

01:18:46.420 And the same thing applies on the energy front.

01:18:49.020 You know, if we impoverish the already poor by making energy expensive,

01:18:53.960 not only do we expose them to much more risk to life and limb, let's say, and property,

01:18:59.420 but we also decrease the probability that those self-same people are going to be able to take an environmentally-oriented view,

01:19:05.820 because the data indicates that if you can get people up to producing or benefiting from economic growth

01:19:13.940 to the tune of about $5,000 a year in average GDP,

01:19:17.880 then they start to take a medium-to-long-term view of the future

01:19:21.740 and start to attend much more carefully to what you might describe as environmental concerns.

01:19:26.280 So panicking about climate in the way that we're doing,

01:19:30.740 if the consequence is to raise energy prices and impoverish people,

01:19:34.880 looks like it's going to kill more people, first, because they'll be more vulnerable,

01:19:38.880 and second, that it's going to make, it's going to deliver us far fewer people

01:19:43.640 who are capable of taking the kind of medium-to-long-term view of sustainability

01:19:47.460 that would be actually beneficial to producing a more livable planet. 0.98

01:19:53.240 And I still want to ask your opinion about the greening.

01:19:57.040 Yeah, the greening's happening.

01:19:58.860 I think it's attributed mostly to carbon dioxide,

01:20:01.540 but also more rainfall and warmer temperatures.

01:20:04.680 I mean, help.

01:20:06.980 So the greening is definitely a benefit.

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01:21:03.340 The greening is happening over a big, big portion of the globe, actually.

01:21:13.500 So it's clearly a benefit.

01:21:17.920 Well, it's also so perverse, eh?

01:21:19.720 Because one of the...

01:21:21.260 It's perverse is the fact that the Americans decreased their carbon output

01:21:25.180 by turning to fracking.

01:21:26.940 Nobody predicted that.

01:21:28.100 But here we have a situation where not only is the planet not getting browner and drier,

01:21:34.620 which was the apocalyptic vision,

01:21:37.480 but many of the areas that were really brown and dry,

01:21:40.880 like the southern edge of the Sahara Desert,

01:21:43.480 are actually seeing the ingress of vegetation in a manner that's, well,

01:21:48.720 unprecedented even up to 15 years ago.

01:21:51.180 And so, you know, not only is that not what was predicted,

01:21:56.260 it's the very opposite of what's predicted.

01:21:59.120 And it's the opposite in a very, very massive manner.

01:22:05.720 I mean, 15% increase in greening is just...

01:22:08.900 It's almost beyond comprehension.

01:22:10.480 As I said, that's an area bigger than the continental United States.

01:22:14.660 And then to say as well that that's also produced quite an increment

01:22:18.000 in the productivity of human crops and enabled us to grow more food in less area.

01:22:23.300 It's like that's...

01:22:24.060 Those are facts that need to be taken with dead seriousness.

01:22:27.140 They're very positive.

01:22:28.580 Perhaps, I mean, you could argue that maybe that rate of vegetation change

01:22:32.720 brings with it threats that we haven't yet envisioned.

01:22:35.820 And that could be the case.

01:22:37.500 But nonetheless, it certainly isn't the spreading of the deserts

01:22:42.600 that we were led to be apprehensive of.

01:22:45.960 Well, that's correct.

01:22:47.100 Again, the framing of this, going back to 1992,

01:22:50.640 was around dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.

01:22:57.240 So the focus was on dangers.

01:22:59.580 They were looking for dangers.

01:23:01.100 The benefits, you know, weren't even acknowledged

01:23:04.300 until maybe the fifth assessment report in the IPCC.

01:23:11.660 I mean, everything, they were just looking for dangers.

01:23:13.960 That there was no counterweight of the benefits.

01:23:18.500 So...

01:23:18.940 Right, right.

01:23:19.820 And no cost-benefit analysis.

01:23:22.280 I mean, I've talked to Bjorn Lomberg a lot.

01:23:24.480 Yeah.

01:23:24.640 And the reason for that was that

01:23:26.140 I looked through all the data that you're describing for a long period of time.

01:23:30.500 One of the things that struck me and struck me as well about the multiplicity of goals

01:23:35.640 that the UN was hypothetically pursuing was that no one was assessing these risks and benefits

01:23:41.860 in any systematic manner, ranking them.

01:23:45.060 And then I came across Lomberg's work and he tried to do a cost-benefit analysis

01:23:48.680 looking at our capacity to adapt and ranking the problems that face us

01:23:53.900 in terms of their severity and also what we could do about those problems in some effective manner.

01:23:59.120 And Lomberg, like you, accepts the IPCC prognostications of a mild warming trend over the next hundred years.

01:24:07.200 But he's done calculations showing that the net consequence of that,

01:24:12.240 even if it is somewhat detrimental economically,

01:24:15.660 if we factor all those costs into account,

01:24:17.700 is that we'll be less, more rich than we would otherwise be, right?

01:24:22.680 Because our GDP is going to increase something like 400% on average in the next hundred years.

01:24:28.960 And one of the negative consequences of global warming

01:24:32.020 will be that it'll be slightly less than 400%.

01:24:35.180 And that it's clear that we can manage that in any real sense

01:24:38.640 and that we're very good at adapting to a huge range of weather situations and climate scenarios.

01:24:46.100 Some of us live in damn near Arctic conditions and other people live in the desert.

01:24:50.720 And so it's not outside the realm of human adaptation

01:24:53.220 to adapt to a one or two degree climate transformation.

01:24:57.720 And animals should be able to do the same,

01:24:59.440 assuming that we don't, you know,

01:25:01.180 that we're reasonably intelligent on the environmental conservation front.

01:25:05.420 And so, I don't know, are you aware of Lomberg's work?

01:25:10.160 What do you think of...

01:25:11.520 Oh, yeah, no, Bjorn and I are in close contact

01:25:15.600 and I'm very well aware of what he's doing.

01:25:18.520 And he's doing a very good job of making those points.

01:25:22.640 The thing that, you know, the UN has the 17 sustainability goals.

01:25:28.400 I think the first one is to eliminate poverty.

01:25:33.400 The second one is to eliminate hunger.

01:25:36.160 Maybe number seven is energy, affordable energy for all.

01:25:42.940 And then number 13 is climate action.

01:25:46.160 And you've got to wonder, how did climate action,

01:25:48.800 even one piece of that, which is, you know, elimination of fossil fuels,

01:25:53.260 come to trump elimination of poverty and elimination of hunger?

01:26:00.200 For development aid from the UN, from the World Bank and whatever,

01:26:05.860 is now focused on mitigation.

01:26:08.340 The traditional objectives of economic development and help with adaptation,

01:26:13.620 those are put on the back burner.

01:26:15.760 Right, right.

01:26:16.840 That's insane.

01:26:17.560 In favor of mitigation.

01:26:19.360 And this is making...

01:26:20.080 That's insane.

01:26:20.960 This is making people less well off

01:26:23.320 and we're squandering opportunities for human development.

01:26:26.640 And, you know, for senseless objectives

01:26:30.820 that aren't expected to improve anyone's life

01:26:35.020 over the course of the 21st century

01:26:37.480 and could very well make us all worse off.

01:26:40.160 Okay, so this is part of the incomprehensibility of this to me

01:26:44.200 because it looks to me like a lot of the arguments, for example,

01:26:49.340 that would force us to take the apocalyptic prognostications

01:26:53.900 of the doomsayer seriously.

01:26:55.520 The moral arguments go something like this.

01:26:58.120 Well, you know,

01:27:01.280 a hundred years, if there's a lot of climate change,

01:27:04.420 it's primarily going to be the world's poor

01:27:06.420 who pay the largest price for that.

01:27:07.980 The world's poor and oppressed.

01:27:09.940 And to mitigate against that,

01:27:11.540 we have to adopt policies that,

01:27:14.020 however painful they are in the short term,

01:27:17.000 will mitigate against that

01:27:18.680 because of our concern for the long-term viability of,

01:27:21.780 let's say, these poverty-stricken people.

01:27:24.400 But the problem with that is that

01:27:25.940 the models aren't very reliable

01:27:27.560 and it's absolutely 100% certain

01:27:30.200 that if we raise energy prices,

01:27:31.720 which we have been doing quite effectively,

01:27:33.740 and food prices,

01:27:35.520 we're going to make life much more difficult

01:27:38.540 for impoverished people

01:27:39.680 throughout the developing world right now.

01:27:41.720 And in a way that's going to kill plenty of people

01:27:44.240 and it's certainly going to deprive many others

01:27:46.460 of educational opportunity

01:27:47.740 and optimal nutritional input

01:27:51.240 and all of that.

01:27:52.100 100% certain that's going to occur.

01:27:55.100 But the moral aspect is,

01:27:58.680 well, we shouldn't be doing things

01:28:00.080 that would endanger those people

01:28:02.100 who are oppressed and poor.

01:28:03.800 But the policies we're pursuing

01:28:05.560 do precisely that.

01:28:07.720 So, again, I'm still left

01:28:10.100 with this complete incapacity

01:28:11.740 to understand

01:28:12.500 how this can possibly be the case.

01:28:14.920 I don't get it.

01:28:16.660 Because there's lots of other things

01:28:17.940 we could be doing.

01:28:19.820 Well, leaders in Africa 0.99

01:28:21.800 are quite outspoken.

01:28:23.960 They're on the front lines

01:28:25.180 of being the victims of all this.

01:28:27.480 They refer to green colonialism,

01:28:30.160 energy apartheid,

01:28:31.840 you know, that they're facing

01:28:33.040 over this global warming policies.

01:28:37.220 Right, right, right.

01:28:38.380 And they can't get loans

01:28:40.860 from development banks

01:28:42.880 to build, you know,

01:28:44.080 they have plenty of fossil,

01:28:45.480 natural gas, coal,

01:28:47.120 a lot of fossil fuel resources

01:28:48.800 in Africa.

01:28:50.520 They can't get loans

01:28:52.060 to build their own power plants.

01:28:56.240 The only thing that they're able to do

01:28:58.060 is sell their fuel to Europe.

01:29:01.700 So Europe is exploiting them doubly

01:29:04.260 by taking their fuel

01:29:06.400 but not allowing, you know,

01:29:10.060 it's politically incorrect

01:29:11.620 for these banks

01:29:12.740 to fund the development

01:29:14.960 of power plants

01:29:16.020 so Africans can develop

01:29:18.600 their own economy. 0.95

01:29:19.700 It's just evil

01:29:20.820 and I think green colonialism

01:29:22.300 and energy apartheid

01:29:23.900 are perfect descriptors

01:29:25.240 for what's going on.

01:29:26.700 Well, it's just,

01:29:27.620 again, it leaves me

01:29:29.680 open-mouthed in amazement

01:29:31.600 that we in the developed world

01:29:34.120 with our functional economies

01:29:36.280 and our high level

01:29:37.140 of luxury and security

01:29:38.380 can say to developing worlds,

01:29:41.440 the developing world,

01:29:42.320 well, you know,

01:29:43.460 we've got it pretty good here

01:29:44.580 and we're probably willing

01:29:45.400 to cut back a little bit

01:29:46.580 but you guys down there

01:29:48.260 in the developing countries,

01:29:49.620 you know,

01:29:50.300 you should be pretty damn careful

01:29:51.660 about your carbon output

01:29:52.900 because, you know,

01:29:54.020 we've only got one planet

01:29:55.140 and so it isn't really obvious

01:29:57.040 that any of you

01:29:57.880 should have the same kind

01:29:58.820 of benefits that we have.

01:30:00.220 The planet can't sustain

01:30:01.540 that level of luxury

01:30:02.660 and security

01:30:03.280 and so we're just not

01:30:04.780 going to let you

01:30:05.360 have any money.

01:30:06.920 We're not going to help you

01:30:07.900 develop your economy

01:30:08.860 so that you can benefit

01:30:10.020 from the same industrial revolution

01:30:11.860 that has enabled us

01:30:15.340 to educate our children

01:30:16.320 and to have plenty to eat

01:30:17.540 and to be warm in the winter

01:30:18.960 and cool in the summer.

01:30:20.380 And then what's even more preposterous

01:30:22.620 is it's the very people

01:30:23.840 who are constantly clamoring

01:30:25.540 about the oppressive nature

01:30:27.260 of Western culture

01:30:28.740 who are foisting

01:30:30.260 this very story

01:30:31.540 on these developed countries?

01:30:33.920 Yeah, the irony

01:30:34.720 is that even if

01:30:35.980 the African nations

01:30:37.860 were given, you know,

01:30:40.840 the carbon credits

01:30:41.640 or whatever

01:30:42.200 and allowed to develop

01:30:43.520 to where they want to be

01:30:46.020 and where anyone

01:30:46.720 expects them to be,

01:30:48.860 at most they would be

01:30:50.420 emitting like 5 or 6%

01:30:52.520 of global emissions

01:30:53.740 and this is for like

01:30:55.300 a billion people

01:30:56.940 in the population.

01:30:58.780 So, we're not talking

01:31:00.760 about a lot of extra emissions

01:31:02.780 to allow them to develop.

01:31:05.100 I mean, it just makes

01:31:06.360 absolutely no sense

01:31:07.620 and it's evil.

01:31:08.960 It's absolutely evil.

01:31:10.440 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:31:11.880 That's how it looks to me too.

01:31:13.320 Well, I'm glad to hear

01:31:14.100 that you regard Lomberg

01:31:16.380 as a credible commentator

01:31:18.460 on such things.

01:31:19.380 Well, you know,

01:31:19.940 I've looked across

01:31:21.760 a wide variety

01:31:23.120 of political

01:31:23.840 and scientific thinkers

01:31:25.000 over a 20-year period

01:31:26.380 trying to identify people

01:31:28.420 that I believe

01:31:29.220 to be credible

01:31:30.240 on the interface

01:31:31.740 between economic development

01:31:33.380 and energy

01:31:34.680 and environmental management.

01:31:36.640 And I like Schellenberger.

01:31:40.020 I think Elick Epstein

01:31:41.660 has some interesting things

01:31:42.920 to say.

01:31:43.440 I like Marion Toopey. 1.00

01:31:44.760 what's the English

01:31:48.480 what's his name?

01:31:51.420 Richard Tull?

01:31:52.180 Matt Ridley.

01:31:53.000 I think Ridley is good.

01:31:54.720 Yeah, yeah.

01:31:55.280 And so, but of all those people

01:31:56.740 I think Lomberg

01:31:57.740 has done the most credible job.

01:31:59.560 And he's also been given 0.88

01:32:00.800 a damn rough ride 0.89

01:32:01.900 in the media. 0.99

01:32:02.520 I mean, he's doing pretty well now

01:32:03.860 I think promoting his message

01:32:05.180 which is a

01:32:05.740 it's such a lovely

01:32:07.200 what he lays out

01:32:08.480 is such a lovely scenario

01:32:09.640 because he shows

01:32:10.980 how much good

01:32:11.660 we could do

01:32:12.380 in the world

01:32:13.100 especially

01:32:13.840 with regard to

01:32:14.960 the amelioration

01:32:15.680 of absolute poverty

01:32:16.620 and the provision

01:32:17.300 of education

01:32:18.000 at such a tiny fraction

01:32:20.480 of the amounts of money

01:32:21.540 that are being devoted

01:32:22.540 to this insane

01:32:23.940 what prevention

01:32:25.800 of a non-existent

01:32:26.780 climate apocalypse.

01:32:28.000 And well, you know

01:32:28.920 I've been doing

01:32:29.400 everything I can

01:32:30.140 for whatever it's worth

01:32:31.060 to draw attention

01:32:31.800 to his work

01:32:32.620 but you know

01:32:34.020 the fact that he's

01:32:35.360 been pilloried

01:32:35.980 like you've been pilloried

01:32:37.560 makes it

01:32:38.520 well, there's always

01:32:40.320 a question lurking

01:32:41.120 in the back of my mind

01:32:42.080 it's sort of like

01:32:42.680 well, where there's smoke

01:32:43.580 there's fire

01:32:44.300 if people are constantly

01:32:45.780 being attacked

01:32:46.480 for their views

01:32:47.280 on moral grounds

01:32:48.240 you know, maybe

01:32:48.840 there's something to that

01:32:50.020 but I certainly

01:32:51.180 I haven't been able

01:32:52.220 to find that

01:32:52.780 my analysis of your work

01:32:54.100 or Franzen's

01:32:55.060 I certainly have seen

01:32:56.240 none of that whatsoever

01:32:57.520 in relationship to Lomborg

01:32:59.500 so the mystery

01:33:01.700 still remains for me.

01:33:03.340 Okay, they went after Lomborg

01:33:04.740 early on

01:33:05.660 you know

01:33:06.320 2003, whatever

01:33:08.480 following his book

01:33:10.480 The Skeptical Environmentalist

01:33:12.100 and

01:33:13.020 the issue

01:33:14.720 was

01:33:17.400 that he didn't regard

01:33:20.800 you know

01:33:21.420 the reduction

01:33:22.120 of fossil fuel emissions

01:33:23.720 as the be-all

01:33:24.760 and end-all

01:33:25.420 you know

01:33:26.100 there were more important

01:33:27.300 things to do

01:33:28.120 and

01:33:28.980 for that

01:33:29.740 he got labeled

01:33:30.580 you know

01:33:30.940 that was a very dangerous

01:33:32.420 perspective

01:33:33.100 because they were just

01:33:33.760 so set

01:33:34.620 on this one

01:33:35.700 particular policy

01:33:37.160 for reasons

01:33:40.000 for poorly justified

01:33:41.640 reasons

01:33:42.400 and for reasons

01:33:43.620 that became

01:33:44.540 harder to justify

01:33:47.620 as time went on

01:33:49.120 and they're still

01:33:50.580 stuck on this

01:33:51.560 and it just

01:33:52.960 defies logic

01:33:54.000 and it's going to

01:33:55.960 cause a lot of

01:33:56.800 damage in the world.

01:33:57.740 It defies logic

01:33:59.160 unless your primary goal

01:34:00.540 is easy moral virtue

01:34:01.720 so imagine

01:34:02.620 you know

01:34:03.000 the problem with

01:34:03.780 Lomborg's work

01:34:04.740 fundamentally

01:34:05.620 and this is the problem

01:34:06.440 with marketing it too

01:34:07.460 is that

01:34:07.900 he offers

01:34:09.220 a multivariate

01:34:10.440 and multi-dimensional

01:34:11.580 analysis

01:34:12.140 of the problems

01:34:13.040 besetting the world

01:34:13.940 he says

01:34:14.500 well we don't just

01:34:15.360 have one problem

01:34:16.280 climate apocalypse

01:34:17.460 we have like

01:34:18.180 a hundred problems

01:34:19.600 and then we have

01:34:20.600 the problem

01:34:21.100 of how to rank order

01:34:22.220 these problems

01:34:23.060 and then we have

01:34:24.080 the problem

01:34:24.540 of generating

01:34:25.400 actual solutions

01:34:26.580 and assessing them

01:34:27.900 and that actually

01:34:28.860 requires a lot

01:34:29.860 of cognitive effort

01:34:30.860 you know

01:34:31.540 to walk through those

01:34:32.560 and so

01:34:33.240 but if you're

01:34:35.040 a climate apocalypse

01:34:36.000 you can reduce

01:34:36.920 the entire

01:34:37.620 panoply

01:34:38.700 of human problems

01:34:40.300 to one problem

01:34:41.380 and then you can

01:34:42.680 put yourself forward

01:34:44.100 as a moral person

01:34:45.040 by just saying

01:34:45.700 well I'm definitely

01:34:47.180 concerned about

01:34:47.960 the fate of the planet

01:34:49.100 and that's all

01:34:50.060 anybody reasonable

01:34:51.000 should be concerned about

01:34:52.200 and because I'm

01:34:53.340 concerned in that manner

01:34:54.860 I'm a fully

01:34:55.980 credible

01:34:56.720 and reputationally

01:34:58.580 remarkable person

01:34:59.980 and that's part

01:35:01.060 of the psychological

01:35:02.020 proclivity

01:35:02.660 that is

01:35:03.800 behind this

01:35:05.400 okay

01:35:05.740 and so everything

01:35:06.520 bad that happens

01:35:07.740 someone finds

01:35:09.220 a path

01:35:10.380 to blame it

01:35:10.940 on climate change

01:35:11.940 okay

01:35:13.040 and the media

01:35:14.200 amplifies it

01:35:15.260 and this gives

01:35:16.240 politicians

01:35:16.920 an easy out

01:35:17.940 so rather than

01:35:18.980 dealing with

01:35:19.540 their real problems

01:35:20.940 you know

01:35:22.080 poor land use

01:35:24.100 poor regulations

01:35:25.100 poor whatever

01:35:26.060 inadequate infrastructure

01:35:27.640 whatever might be

01:35:29.520 the cause

01:35:30.340 of their

01:35:30.920 actual problems

01:35:32.580 they simply

01:35:33.240 blame it

01:35:33.820 on global warming

01:35:34.820 and so

01:35:35.460 it gives them

01:35:36.120 an easy out

01:35:37.120 yeah I read

01:35:38.380 an article yesterday

01:35:39.240 that climate change

01:35:40.160 was increasing

01:35:40.920 the risk

01:35:41.480 that women 0.97

01:35:41.900 were being abused

01:35:42.700 in their homes

01:35:43.420 that was just

01:35:45.100 a classic

01:35:45.780 example

01:35:46.440 you know

01:35:46.840 I mean

01:35:47.680 you know

01:35:48.220 you could make

01:35:48.720 the case

01:35:49.140 that whatever

01:35:49.960 produces economic

01:35:51.060 instability

01:35:51.600 is going to

01:35:52.280 raise the

01:35:52.680 rates of abuse

01:35:54.700 but to link

01:35:55.860 it directly

01:35:56.620 to climate change

01:35:57.460 is a really

01:35:58.100 egregious example

01:35:59.140 of exactly

01:35:59.720 the kind of thing

01:36:00.360 that you're describing

01:36:01.060 alright well look

01:36:02.320 we're out of time

01:36:03.960 on this segment

01:36:04.720 I'm going to talk

01:36:05.800 to Dr. Curry

01:36:06.600 for an additional

01:36:07.640 half an hour

01:36:08.200 on the Daily Wire

01:36:08.860 Plus platform

01:36:09.640 for those of you

01:36:10.260 who are watching

01:36:10.800 and listening

01:36:11.240 you might be

01:36:11.720 interested in that

01:36:12.360 where I'm going to

01:36:13.140 talk about

01:36:13.540 the development

01:36:14.060 of her interest

01:36:14.980 in her scientific

01:36:16.640 endeavors

01:36:17.040 and in her

01:36:17.920 entrepreneurial

01:36:18.380 endeavors as well

01:36:19.480 hello everyone

01:36:21.460 I would encourage

01:36:22.440 you to continue

01:36:23.140 listening to my

01:36:24.240 conversation

01:36:24.800 with my guest

01:36:25.660 on

01:36:26.400 dailywireplus.com

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - February 06, 2023

329. The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong ｜ Dr. Judith Curry

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