TRIGGERnometry - Are We Being Told the Truth About Climate Change？ Patrick Moore

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kisson. And this is a

00:00:10.320 show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest

00:00:16.060 today is the co-founder of Greenpeace and the director of the CO2 Coalition in Arlington,

00:00:21.380 Virginia. Patrick Moore, welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be with you, Constantin. And Francis,

00:00:26.480 we're both here. It's good to have you on the show. Oh, and Francis. That's right. Don't worry

00:00:33.200 about him. You don't really need to talk to him. Patrick, but welcome. It's great to have you on

00:00:38.400 the show. We had Roger Hallam, who is the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, on our show some time ago.

00:00:45.880 And we had a chat with him about environmentalism and all of those things. So we wanted to bring in

00:00:51.380 a different perspective, which is why we're delighted to welcome you to the show.

00:00:55.320 So before we get into the conversation itself, tell everybody a little bit about who are you?

00:01:01.300 How are you where you are? What has been the journey that you've had through life? Because

00:01:05.280 it's an interesting one. You know, I introduced you as a co-founder of Greenpeace. You did,

00:01:09.780 you were involved with that movement, then you moved away from it. And just tell us a little bit

00:01:14.220 about how all of that has happened. Well, I grew up on the very northwest tip of Vancouver Island

00:01:21.260 in a completely remote wilderness area with no road to it. So I grew up with boats. I went to school

00:01:29.360 by boat. I had a boat when I was six. I had a motor for it when I was 12. So I had a completely unique

00:01:36.460 childhood in the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island in the rainforest by the Pacific.

00:01:42.500 And I learned to love nature at an early age as a result. So when I was sent away to boarding school

00:01:49.120 after the one room schoolhouse here only went to grade eight, I had to go to Vancouver where I learned

00:01:56.760 city ways and went into life science in a big way, biology, biochemistry and genetics. And by the time

00:02:05.480 I got to university, I already was well versed in those subjects and did a BSc honors in biology and

00:02:14.140 forestry, the industry that I grew up in up here on the north end of Vancouver Island, where there are

00:02:19.920 far more trees than people and anything else you can name. And so I then found out about the science

00:02:29.080 of ecology during a lunchtime lecture by an expat Czechoslovakian who had come here to get away from

00:02:38.600 the communists as he'd been in the underground against them after the Second World War. And he taught

00:02:44.000 me about ecology and forest ecology. And that was it for me. That's what I decided I wanted to spend my

00:02:51.640 life studying. That word had not yet been printed in the public press. The environment was being talked

00:02:58.400 about a lot by the early 1970s. When I joined this small group in a church basement in Vancouver,

00:03:04.840 that's where Greenpeace began, to take a voyage across the North Pacific with 12 other people in a

00:03:13.100 small fishing boat against the US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We had the temerity at that time,

00:03:20.640 looked like a bunch of hippies, but actually we were all professionals of one sort or another by that

00:03:25.420 time, to take on the world's largest and most powerful organization, the US Atomic Energy

00:03:32.180 Commission at the time at the height of the Cold War. And we won. President Nixon, partly as a result

00:03:40.140 of providing a focal point for media attention to the nuclear tests, we had tens of thousands of people

00:03:47.340 marching in the streets as a result of our voyage being shown on television around the world. And

00:03:55.060 when that bomb went off, we didn't stop that one. But when it went off, people came from both sides of

00:04:02.640 the US-Canada border, the largest undefended border in the world, to join hands against nuclear testing

00:04:09.520 and the threat of nuclear war. And so this became kind of the cusp of the Cold War. We were right

00:04:19.300 there at that time. We didn't do it, but we sure put an exclamation mark on it. And when President

00:04:26.120 Nixon canceled those remaining tests, it began the de-escalation of nuclear weapons buildup and the

00:04:33.480 talks to reduce nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union, as Russia was called then, and the United

00:04:40.600 States of America. And we were just a bunch of Canadians trying to do something useful at that

00:04:47.940 time in history. So I spent the next 15 years full-time with Greenpeace in the top committee. I was a

00:04:55.120 director all the way through. I was the ostensible leader for a couple of years in between there. And then

00:05:01.500 when we created Greenpeace International in 1979 to bring together all the different groups that had sprung up

00:05:09.700 in Australia, New Zealand, France, Britain, Netherlands, Canada, and all over the United States, we became a quite

00:05:18.760 powerful force, going on eventually to stop French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific, the

00:05:26.960 slaughter of 30,000 whales every year in the world's oceans, and then on to toxic waste. At that time

00:05:35.880 in the late 1970s, pretty well all the rivers in Europe and Britain were dead because of factories putting

00:05:43.080 poison in through pipes coming in underwater. And we created the riverboat named the Beluga, a smaller boat

00:05:52.360 than we'd been using on the high seas. And we took it up the rivers and frogmen went down and plugged the

00:05:58.620 pipes of these factories and backed the effluent up into the factory itself. And just the image of that

00:06:07.320 made really good media. And today, the Rhine, the Rhône, the Elbe, the Thames have fish in them.

00:06:15.560 And that's very much because of what we did back then. Well, as time went on, we evolved from a group

00:06:23.940 of volunteers into a famous environmental organization with people throwing money at us.

00:06:30.680 And pretty soon, we had a fairly big payroll with lots of people working at doing good things. And

00:06:37.860 then when you have a payroll, you have to do fundraising. And fundraising suddenly, over time,

00:06:44.260 became maybe more important than it should have been. And pretty soon, you're a business, basically,

00:06:52.820 and with a payroll to meet. And gradually, that sort of took over the importance of what campaign you

00:07:01.560 were doing. And in the late 70s into the early 80s, my fellow directors, there were six of us in

00:07:11.140 Greenpeace International as directors, decided, none of whom had any formal science education as

00:07:17.820 I did, decided Greenpeace should take on a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. And I'm going like,

00:07:26.480 hey, you guys, that's one of the elements in the periodic table, you know, like one of the building

00:07:31.100 blocks of the universe, and probably shouldn't be trying to ban that just now, maybe a little more

00:07:38.080 subtle approach would be in order. But in, you know, that a bit of a joke there. But in fact,

00:07:45.800 chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding it to drinking water was

00:07:52.100 the most important move in public health in history. And 85% of our medicines are based on chlorine

00:08:00.680 chemistry. 25% of them actually have chlorine in them. We ingest it in order to cure ourselves.

00:08:08.840 So banning it worldwide was not a good idea. I tried to impress them of that. And they went on

00:08:15.280 anyways to do it. So that was sort of the micro reason why I had to leave Greenpeace as I couldn't

00:08:21.440 be part of an organization that wanted to ban the most important element for public health and medicine.

00:08:26.120 But that kind of reflected on the larger philosophical issue. By this time, many members

00:08:31.920 of the Green Movement were beginning to call people the enemies of the earth. Humans are the enemies of

00:08:40.700 nature. And as if we were the only bad species on the planet, that was just a bit too much like

00:08:48.420 original sin for me. I'm not a fire and brimstone guy, not even particularly of a particular

00:08:55.620 religious bent, more of a scientist. And I had to leave. And I was sorry that it had ended up like

00:09:05.040 that. But I'm really glad I did now because over the years, it's basically turned into a racket

00:09:10.600 peddling junk science and doing basically nothing other than trying to scare people into thinking the

00:09:16.940 world is coming to an end. And the whole ocean is full of plastic and it's killing everything. 0.81

00:09:21.520 And just a lot of lies.

00:09:24.540 It's interesting because we wanted to talk to you about the plastic and the global warming and all

00:09:28.600 of that stuff. And I know you will have a lot to say on it. But one of the questions you just brought

00:09:32.620 up yourself is this idea that humans are a sort of plague on the planet. Isn't that, I mean, isn't that

00:09:40.420 true, Patrick? Like we're consuming all the resources, we're polluting everything.

00:09:44.940 People would say the world is overpopulated. We're having to modify crops just to be able to feed the

00:09:52.140 population. We're messing around with all sorts of things. You know, we're probably going to end up having

00:09:57.920 to go to Mars to try and, you know, you get the picture I'm trying to paint here, right? Isn't all of that

00:10:03.640 true?

00:10:05.820 No, that would be a simple answer. No, it's not true. We are perfectly good species. And most of us

00:10:14.180 actually try to be good people and good species. There's always a few bad ones in, I guess, whatever

00:10:22.740 species. There's probably bad mice and bad birds and, you know, that don't like the other birds or

00:10:30.000 whatever. But we are a perfectly fine species. We do a lot, especially since the era of mechanization

00:10:41.060 ended up causing pollution because we were burning fuels without any control. We have done a lot to

00:10:50.180 mitigate that. And I mean, if you were where I am today on the north end of Vancouver Island, you

00:10:56.500 would not think there's too many people. And one of the reasons people think there's too many people

00:11:01.860 is because most of them are crowded into dense urban centers, which occupy about two percent of

00:11:09.300 the land on this earth. And the land is only 25 percent of the surface of the earth. So it's way

00:11:15.980 less than one percent of the planet that is covered in concrete full of people. And those people in that

00:11:24.360 concrete don't have a very good balanced understanding of what the whole earth actually

00:11:31.780 looks like. If they would go, they should fly more over top of the countryside where they live. Even

00:11:39.160 Europe, which is one of the densest populations, if you fly over it, you see nothing but trees. You know,

00:11:46.420 you see the odd city here and there when you land and when you take off. But Europe is 43 percent

00:11:53.780 forested. The EU, the entire EU has 43 percent forest cover. 250 years ago, it was less than 10 percent

00:12:04.000 because wood was being used as the energy source for everything and for building, of course, as it still

00:12:12.840 is today. But in those days, the forests were disappearing in Europe and that caused humans

00:12:19.980 to invent the science of silviculture, often referred to as forestry. They like to call it

00:12:26.760 deforestation. But if you plant trees after you cut the ones that are growing there in the first place,

00:12:32.920 it is called reforestation, not deforestation. And Europe has become very good at reforestation. In fact,

00:12:41.200 getting right into it, the meat and potatoes of it, China and India are doing more to help green the

00:12:49.560 earth than any other countries because they are so populated, because there are so many people and

00:12:56.600 they are emitting so much CO2, about as much between the two of them as the whole rest of the world

00:13:02.700 combined. They are fertilizing the earth with carbon dioxide, which is causing the trees and food

00:13:10.600 crops to grow 30 to 40 percent faster than they were just 50 years ago. And because they have so many

00:13:18.920 people, they need a lot of food and they need a lot of wood. So they are planting vast areas of forest

00:13:24.940 in once denuded areas before they started thinking about what they should really be doing, which is

00:13:31.000 planting more trees. And China and India, between the two of them, are responsible more for the 0.88

00:13:38.320 greening of the earth than any other countries and are producing more biomass, more living material

00:13:44.900 in the form of photosynthetic plants like trees and food and all the wild plants too, and are actually

00:13:53.960 doing a great service to the planet. And that is the irony and why I am a member of the CO2 coalition,

00:14:03.440 because they've got it completely backwards. Carbon dioxide is not some kind of toxic poison brought

00:14:10.440 by Martians to kill everybody. Carbon dioxide is the food of life. It is what plants eat. And we have 0.84

00:14:18.880 to start thinking like a plant, because we're not a plant, we're an animal that eats plants. And if it

00:14:26.900 wasn't for the plants, we wouldn't be here. Animals could never have existed if it weren't for the fact that

00:14:33.040 plants came first. They came first and made the oxygen, because they consumed carbon dioxide,

00:14:41.040 kept the carbon for themselves to build wood and fibers and fruits and vegetables. And then they gave

00:14:49.920 off the oxygen into the atmosphere, which made it possible for animals to evolve in the first place.

00:14:57.020 So we owe our entire existence to plants and should therefore worship them regularly and make sure we

00:15:04.800 understand just exactly what the formula is on this planet, instead of thinking that by burning fossil

00:15:12.000 fuels, which are in fact made from plants, do people understand this? Come on, people, plants made the

00:15:19.780 fossil fuels. Fossil fuels. Fossil fuels were made by solar energy in the forests and in the grasslands of

00:15:27.740 this earth. And they got buried. Those forests got buried and turned into hydrocarbons. They started out

00:15:35.280 as carbohydrates. All they did was lose their oxygen and became hydrocarbons like coal and oil and gas.

00:15:43.620 And we are now releasing that solar energy that they captured. So hydrocarbons, fossil fuels are the

00:15:53.880 greatest storage battery of solar energy on this earth. And we should use them judiciously, which is

00:16:02.940 why I favor nuclear energy, because it could actually supplant a great deal of fossil fuels in an effective

00:16:10.280 way. Unlike wind and solar, which don't work three quarters of the time, they could actually work all

00:16:17.120 the time, as they do. There's 440 nuclear plants operating in around the world today. Nearly 100 of

00:16:24.000 them are in the United States. And no citizen of the US has ever been harmed by a nuclear plant. And I don't

00:16:31.120 believe any citizen of the UK or of the EU has ever been. Well, Chernobyl did affect the EU, of course.

00:16:38.540 And it was the only nuclear accident in the history of nuclear energy that killed people. And it was about 86

00:16:45.600 people, according to the World Health Organization. Greenpeace says it was 300,000 who died in Chernobyl, but they

00:16:53.240 don't have gravestones or names. So I suspect something is amiss there in their calculation.

00:16:59.680 Sir Patrick, before we touch on nuclear power, there is a narrative that is being spread at the

00:17:08.280 moment by people at Extinction Rebellion, you know, Greta Thunberg, and so on and so forth, that

00:17:13.480 our planet is in grave danger. We have something like 50, you know, harvests left. If we don't do

00:17:19.160 something now, we're facing a climate catastrophe, are the words that they use. Is this accurate?

00:17:26.260 And if it's not, what is the reality of the situation that we face? Because global warming

00:17:32.140 is a thing, isn't it? Yes, and we're in a climate emergency right now. Can't you see outside the

00:17:38.860 climate emergency which is unfolding about you? It's complete hogwash. There is no climate emergency,

00:17:45.300 obviously. This is a prediction that they are making for the future, very near in the future,

00:17:50.860 apparently. But it isn't here yet, because even the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

00:17:57.860 Change of the United Nations, which is controlled by China, apparently, even the IPCC cannot hide the 1.00

00:18:06.420 fact that there is no increase in any extreme weather event occurring since weather events began to be

00:18:15.040 recorded, which is quite a while ago. Nothing is unusual about what is happening in the weather

00:18:21.760 today in this world. Nothing. So this cannot possibly be called a climate emergency if everything is

00:18:30.320 more or less normal. Patrick, can I just stop you there? You know, we're talking about rising sea

00:18:36.200 levels, you know, the ice is melting in the Arctic, all of these... Don't forget the polar bears.

00:18:42.440 Yeah, and let's talk about the polar bears as well, you know. Surely, isn't that...

00:18:47.080 Let's talk about the polar bears. That's a good idea. The polar bear owes its very existence to

00:18:56.540 climate change. There would not be any polar bears if it wasn't for climate change. The climate change

00:19:04.320 I'm referring to is not the weather. It is the reduction in global temperature that has occurred

00:19:12.800 over the last 50 million years. We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period on this

00:19:21.460 earth. The graphs are there to see. The data is there to see. It's from marine sediment analysis

00:19:27.340 showing that the eocene thermal maximum, it's even got a name, peaked 50 million years ago. And since

00:19:36.480 then, the earth has cooled to where we are today. How many people actually know that we are in the

00:19:45.820 Pleistocene ice age today? This is the Pleistocene ice age. We are in an interglacial period,

00:19:53.960 one of about 40 to 45. We don't know exactly because it goes back 2.6 million years, which is

00:20:02.560 when the people who are in charge of figuring out when to name an age and then the next age and the

00:20:08.940 next one after that. They say we are in the Pleistocene ice age today and that this is the

00:20:15.640 Holocene interglacial period, which is a slight warming from when ice covers a very large part of

00:20:23.920 the entire northern hemisphere, like all of Canada, for example, right down into the northern United

00:20:30.300 States. 20,000 years ago, that's the picture of the earth. An ice sheet miles thick covering the

00:20:39.660 whole of Canada and down into the U.S. That ice sheet melted over the last 20, well, for 10,000 years

00:20:48.520 after that. And for the last 10,000 years, we have been in what's called an interglacial period,

00:20:54.900 which is still colder. Note there are large sheets of ice on both poles. For the 250 million years

00:21:03.640 before that, there was no ice on the North Pole. None. Because it was warmer for 250 million years

00:21:14.300 before that. So those are the kind of time periods that people have to consider when talking about the

00:21:21.060 climate of the earth and its conducive to life or not. It was very conducive to life when the whole earth

00:21:27.760 was warmer than it is today because life then existed where there is ice today. But let's get back to the

00:21:34.540 polar bears depending on climate change. Patrick, I'm sorry to interrupt again, but before we get back to the

00:21:39.620 polar bears, which I'm really keen to do. I really appreciate you setting this in the historical

00:21:45.360 context, which I think is essential if you're going to discuss this. But there is a flaw in what

00:21:50.440 you're saying, isn't there? Which is the argument about the changing climate is that, yes, the earth

00:21:56.400 had its cooling and warming periods for millions and millions of years before. But what has happened in

00:22:02.520 the last 200 years with the Industrial Revolution is human beings have started to affect the climate in

00:22:08.920 ways that are not natural for our planet. And if we mess with it, there's a runaway phenomenon where

00:22:15.400 you simply don't ever get to go back to the normal way of the planet being. Isn't that true?

00:22:22.540 No. You simply can never go back. A runaway effect. Why hasn't that happened before? And people say,

00:22:31.540 well, humans weren't here when it was warmer. Yes, but our ancestors were. Every single living

00:22:38.920 thing on this planet today, every insect, every bird, every human represents a continuous,

00:22:47.320 successful reproduction since the beginning of life. We are the toughest, baddest ass species that ever 0.84

00:22:56.460 existed because we have lasted longer than any other species. All the species that are on earth today

00:23:02.900 have come through the gamut of cold and heat and whatever nature threw at us. We are still here.

00:23:12.100 And it isn't as if we just popped up out of the ground. We came from reproduction over millennia.

00:23:20.740 Any time two people get together and don't have children, that line ends. That's the pruning of

00:23:31.100 the evolutionary bush. And it's been going on since the beginning of life. So no, what we have done is

00:23:39.820 caused slightly more than one degree Celsius increase in global temperature. If you believe the people who

00:23:47.500 are trying to tell us we're all going to die if we don't stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere,

00:23:52.520 they are manipulating these numbers all the time. The sea level rise 2000 years ago, the sea level in

00:24:02.000 Britain was much higher than it is today. There's remains of Roman docks in the south of England that are 0.93

00:24:10.500 way inland. This is true. I've been to some. I've been to some, Patrick. It's interesting. I've been

00:24:16.700 to, I think it's Pevensey Castle here in the south of England, which used to be a fortress that would

00:24:24.220 guard the sea. It's now about five or 10 miles inland. Yes. Many of the southern towns in Britain

00:24:32.240 were ports at that time, 2000 years ago. So it's gone up and down and up and down for the last 7,000

00:24:40.080 years. The sea did rise 400 feet, 120 meters as the ice sheet melted from 20,000 to 10,000 years ago.

00:24:52.140 That was sea level rise, 400 feet. But what I say today, when the sea is rising less than an inch per

00:25:00.180 year, way less than an inch per year on average, is you have two choices if the sea rises to where you

00:25:08.760 don't want it to be. Either move to higher ground, that would be a fairly logical choice to make,

00:25:17.080 so that you were not inundated by the sea, or hire the Dutch. They have been very successfully 0.96

00:25:24.840 protecting 25% of Holland is below sea level.

00:25:30.460 And you could do that with Manhattan, for example, because there's a lot of people and infrastructure

00:25:37.340 there. It'd be worth building dikes around Manhattan. We can build things so fast these

00:25:42.940 days. We can make whole new cities. Look what the Chinese have done in just the last 30 or 40 years. 1.00

00:25:49.220 I mean, if you set your mind to it these days with the technology we have, it's no problem.

00:25:55.740 So let's forget about that one for a bit. Can I go back to polar bears?

00:26:01.060 Yeah. Yes, you can. I like them as well.

00:26:06.000 They actually highlight a lot of important principles. As I said, if it weren't for climate

00:26:12.640 change, there'd be no polar bears. I'm going to try to get that through Extinction Rebellion's

00:26:19.000 thick head. So before there were polar bears, when the earth was warmer, there were only brown bears,

00:26:27.620 the Eurasian brown bear, as it is called. I'm sure you know what I mean. Over here, we call them

00:26:32.840 grizzly bears, but they are the same species because the grizzly bear came to the new world at the same

00:26:39.020 time people did, 15,000 years ago or so. When the sea was 400 feet lower, Bering's land bridge

00:26:47.580 occurred between Russia and Alaska. So along came the humans, the brown bear, which we call grizzly

00:26:56.060 bear, the moose, which in Swedish is elke. So they sort of call it an elk, but we have another kind

00:27:03.780 of elk over here that was here already. And the caribou, which you call reindeer, they came then

00:27:09.600 to, and so did the timber wolf. So those five species of mammals weren't even in the new world

00:27:16.180 until 15,000 years ago. So then the world started to cool. And the Eurasian brown bear

00:27:24.480 hived off as the Arctic began to freeze and ice sheets form, and seals under the ice could be hunted

00:27:34.260 by a bear. The Eurasian brown bear split into two populations. One population went to the Arctic

00:27:44.920 to hunt seals under the ice. At that time, they were still brown, and they were still Eurasian brown

00:27:50.620 bears. But they gradually evolved into a white bear for camouflage and developed a diet that was much

00:27:57.840 more carnivorous because there aren't many plants in the Arctic like there are where the brown bear lives.

00:28:04.260 So the polar bear is actually the offshoot genetically of the Eurasian brown bear. And today,

00:28:13.740 because they're not separated by much time, only a few hundred thousand years, because of that,

00:28:21.220 they can still breed successfully between the two. They seldom find each other because one's in the

00:28:27.420 Arctic and ones on the land down south. But if they are put together, they can produce viable offspring,

00:28:36.280 which is actually the definition of a species. But we see the polar bear as being so distinct

00:28:41.840 from the brown bear that we give it a separate species name. There you go. If it wasn't for the descent

00:28:50.140 into the Pleistocene ice age that began three or four million years ago and was finally said to be

00:28:58.040 this is now an ice age 2.6 million years ago, that caused the Eurasian brown bear to evolve into a polar

00:29:06.020 bear. And that's why they wouldn't exist if it weren't for climate change. Now, as to their population

00:29:12.160 and the threat of extinction and all of that, here's the true story. In the early 70s, wildlife

00:29:20.820 biologists went to the leaders of the polar countries, which is Russia, Canada, the United

00:29:27.640 States, Norway and Denmark, of all places, because it owns Greenland, which actually has quite a lot of

00:29:34.340 polar bears on it. And told them that the hunting of polar bears had increased to such a level that

00:29:42.320 is a threat to the population. They had been reduced to somewhere between six and 10,000 individuals

00:29:48.640 at that time. So all the polar countries came together and signed an international treaty in 1973

00:29:57.900 to end the unrestricted hunting of polar bears. How many members of the public are aware of that?

00:30:06.240 None of them are told this. The media never talks about the international treaty to end the unrestricted

00:30:13.860 hunting of polar bears because by the early 70s, it'd become real easy to take a plane to the Arctic,

00:30:20.880 hire an Inuit guide, and get yourself two or three polar bear rugs for in front of your fireplace.

00:30:25.540 And lots of people had enough money to do that. And it was a thing to do. So the polar bears were

00:30:32.040 diminishing. Since that treaty was signed, the polar bear population has grown to somewhere between 30

00:30:38.540 and 50,000. It's not easy to count them all because they're distributed all around the North Pole on the

00:30:45.180 ice pack. And that's one of the reasons they can make up this fake story. That's why my book is called

00:30:50.920 Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom because the polar bears might as well be invisible

00:30:56.660 to nearly everybody on Earth. Same with coral reefs. So they're not invisible in the sense that if you

00:31:04.240 could get there and see them and count them and look at them all, you could verify them. You could see

00:31:10.080 them. But most people can't see the Great Barrier Reef or the polar bears. And those have become the two

00:31:16.360 iconic symbols of the death of the planet, when in fact, they are both healthier than ever.

00:31:24.100 Sir Patrick, you know, that is something as well that I've been told that, you know, that the Great

00:31:28.360 Barrier Reef is dead, where once it was, you know, pink coral, now it's bleached white, etc, etc.

00:31:34.300 Is that true? No, it's completely recovered from the bleaching of 2016, which itself was completely

00:31:44.300 exaggerated. And when coral bleaches, it is not dead. They don't tell you that. You look at the

00:31:52.340 headlines from that time. It said 93% of the Great Barrier Reef is dying. They didn't say it was dead.

00:32:02.100 They said it was dying. And the newspapers translated that as dead. They said that it was about to die.

00:32:09.540 They said it was terminal. Forbes even said that it was in its final terminal stage, as if there are

00:32:16.580 previous terminal stages to the final one. It was just a bunch of hype. And the fact of the matter is,

00:32:24.140 Peter Ridd, Dr. Peter Ridd, who was fired from James Cook University for daring to counter the

00:32:30.560 propaganda from his own fellow scientists in Australia, who are exaggerating the threat to

00:32:37.000 the reef in order to get hundreds of millions of dollars in research money. Now, how on earth can

00:32:46.000 hundreds of millions of dollars save the coral reef? What are they going to do? They're going to go out

00:32:51.980 there and look at it and take photographs of it and dive on it. How does that fix the reef, if indeed

00:33:01.360 it was in trouble? They are not coral reef doctors. They are charlatans sucking money out of the

00:33:09.940 taxpayers on the pretense that the coral reef is dying. The main threat to coral reefs is cyclones,

00:33:17.240 which we call hurricanes. That is what causes real damage to coral reefs, because they're right out

00:33:24.240 there in the middle of the ocean with no protection whatsoever, except for their own selves. And very

00:33:30.600 often there's large damage caused. Now, bleaching is a really, I mean, it's a complicated phenomenon.

00:33:37.980 The coral is a symbiotic union of an animal and a plant. And do you want me to go on from there and

00:33:49.120 describe the whole life history of corals? Probably not. But when they bleach, when they bleach, they are

00:33:55.800 ejecting the plant. The coral animal, which is a relative of jellyfish, is transparent. As you know,

00:34:04.340 a lot of jellyfish are basically transparent. You can see through them. That's the true of the coral

00:34:11.040 reef polyp, as it's called. And when they bleach, they are ejecting the plankton, which are the plants

00:34:19.460 in the coral. And again, read two pages of my book and you will understand this. But that's what happens

00:34:29.400 is it's just a stage in the life cycle of the coral to eject these plankton and then eventually take up

00:34:38.160 new ones. They do it when the ocean gets hot quickly and they do it when the ocean gets cold

00:34:43.500 quickly. So it's not just the heating. But the truth is the Great Barrier Reef is not in the hottest

00:34:50.540 waters in the world for coral reefs. The most biodiverse coral reefs are in the Coral Triangle in

00:34:56.780 Indonesia, which my wife and I have dived on two occasions on 10 to 14 day trips. So we know the

00:35:04.940 coral reef very well. The Coral Triangle reefs very well. They are the most biodiverse in the world and

00:35:10.880 they are in the warmest oceans in the world. When the world cooled into the Pleistocene Ice Age,

00:35:17.940 the range of corals was drastically restricted from what it had been during a warmer earth and is now

00:35:26.760 kind of a sanctuary in the Indonesian ocean, which is an archipelago with a shallow sea

00:35:32.780 and no cold water ever comes there. So corals do better there than they do anywhere else in the

00:35:39.500 world. There are 600 species of corals there, two thirds of all coral species and more reef fish

00:35:45.200 species there than anywhere else in the world. This is also thoroughly documented in my book,

00:35:49.920 which, by the way, is titled Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, available on

00:35:54.540 Amazon.

00:35:57.940 Patrick, let me take a step back here. And look, you've got to understand we're asking you these

00:36:03.400 questions because that is what a lot of people think and that's what a lot of people are being

00:36:08.280 told. So the ignorance that we show probably from your perspective is because we have faith that other

00:36:14.360 people out there are equally as ignorant as us. So in that, very much in that spirit, let me ask you a 0.87

00:36:20.200 broader question, which is based on what you've said so far and your book, the change in global

00:36:27.820 temperature is not significant. Polar bell is thriving. You know, all of the other stuff I listed before

00:36:34.900 not true. You also mentioned plastic. I don't want to go to 10 rounds with you on it. I mean,

00:36:39.760 people say the Great Pacific Vortex is the biggest man-made object ever, which is just a bunch of

00:36:45.640 plastic rubbish floating in the Pacific, etc. No, it's not. There actually is no such thing as the

00:36:52.420 Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is a fake thing. And again, it's because no one can see it. You can't

00:36:58.460 stand on the beach in California and see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch because they say it's in the

00:37:06.420 middle of the Pacific Ocean, far from land, right? Look at my book. There's a photograph in it, which

00:37:12.840 proves that there is no Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is totally fake. They show a picture on the

00:37:20.280 internet with underneath it, it says part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And it's this huge patch

00:37:25.680 of debris with a diver coming up, holding some stuff. But in the background, there are mountains.

00:37:32.040 And I looked at that and I thought, now just a minute, there are no mountains in the middle of

00:37:37.580 the Pacific Ocean. So where was this picture taken? Ah, the tsunami in Japan caused by the earthquake

00:37:45.500 that caused the Fukushima nuclear crisis. That's where that picture was taken. It is not the Pacific

00:37:52.580 Garbage Patch. It is whole towns that were washed into the sea when 20,000 people died from that tsunami.

00:38:00.380 So they show that. That's the only real picture they show. Otherwise, if you go to the internet,

00:38:07.600 after Googling Great Pacific Garbage Patch, you find photoshopped mock-ups where people have painted

00:38:14.860 a blob on the Pacific Ocean and put an arrow to it saying Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

00:38:20.680 It's totally fake. There is no such thing.

00:38:23.940 Okay. Well, you're making my point for me, which is all of these things that I've given to you,

00:38:28.740 you've dismissed, which is fair enough. So this is really perfect.

00:38:33.360 No, I didn't dismiss them. I proved they didn't exist.

00:38:36.140 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not disagreeing with you, just to be clear. I'm trying to set up the real

00:38:40.660 question, which is, if all of what you're saying is true, why are we being told, or everything we're

00:38:48.160 being told, why does every major European government and American government and every other government

00:38:55.140 seemingly in the world, why are they all considering a Green New Deal? Why are we being told that we need

00:39:01.420 to desperately, urgently invest in renewable energy before we all die? Why is this all going on,

00:39:07.700 in your opinion, if none of what I've put to you is correct?

00:39:10.620 Because the key to controlling the populace is fear and guilt, the combination of which

00:39:18.040 is very effective. Like, you're driving down the street in your SUV and you think you're killing

00:39:24.400 your grandchildren. That's what you've been told. And that makes you feel guilty. So you send a big

00:39:30.840 check to Greenpeace, thinking they might do something to stop this from happening, which is 0.93

00:39:36.080 garbage to start with, because they're just hobnobbing with the rest of the

00:39:40.620 crowd at Davos in the World Economic Forum and supporting global government, which I think 0.98

00:39:46.680 amounts to bureaucrats in Beijing, unelected bureaucrats in Beijing. And so the whole thing

00:39:54.900 is based on fear. Now, let's go back in history, not so far as I did previously, not millions of years,

00:40:01.040 but just thousands of years. Since people have been standing on street corners with signs saying,

00:40:07.560 the end is near, the end is near, and predicting apocalypse, end times, cataclysm, and all the rest.

00:40:19.680 How many of those predictions have come true that the earth is coming to an end? I'd say they're

00:40:25.800 batting zero on that one, seeing as though if the earth had come to an end, we wouldn't be talking

00:40:31.100 with each other right now. So the earth has never come to an end, despite hundreds of predictions

00:40:37.780 through the ages that it was very soon coming to an end. And anyways, what does the end of the world

00:40:45.580 look like? Does it implode, explode? Do the seas catch fire and then burn the whole land off and

00:40:51.880 everything is dead? I'm not sure what the end of the world might look like. But I'm quite sure it has

00:40:59.680 never happened and therefore is unlikely to happen anytime soon, especially due to carbon dioxide

00:41:07.840 emissions from burning fossil fuels that were made by solar energy millions of years ago that we are

00:41:14.900 now taking advantage of because we're smart. Imagine rabbits finding coal. What would they do with it?

00:41:25.120 They would not have a clue what to do with it. And we actually are a pretty special species,

00:41:33.280 actually. Look at what we've done. You have art on the wall behind you there. How many other species

00:41:39.700 produce art so prolifically as the human species does? Or all the other things we do? And the idea that

00:41:49.400 we are evil is at the root of all this, that the enterprise of the human species predicts the end of

00:42:00.720 the world, that it's just going to happen automatically because of how awful we are, is a

00:42:07.420 complete and utter lie. There is no possibility that the world will come to an end anytime soon

00:42:15.880 from anything we are doing. As a matter of fact, what we are doing, the main effect of our use of

00:42:22.180 fossil fuels, other than providing 82 or 3 or 4, whatever it is, percent of all the energy we use to

00:42:31.440 stay alive each day and to get from one place to another each day, to, in other words, carry out our

00:42:38.160 existence every day. The other most important thing that CO2 is doing, that fossil fuels are doing,

00:42:47.160 is greening the earth. All you have to do is go to NASA greening the earth on the internet and you

00:42:53.260 will see the satellite photos. This was actually pioneered by the Commonwealth Science and Industry

00:43:00.500 Research Organization, CSIRO in Australia, which is their peak science body. And they figured this out

00:43:09.740 in the mid-2000s, or I think it was 2014, actually, when they published their map, showing up to 30%

00:43:18.480 increase in vegetation growth, especially in the driest parts of the world. Because CO2, increased CO2,

00:43:27.720 not only results in faster plant growth, because that's the food for plants, CO2 also makes plants

00:43:36.700 more water efficient. In other words, more drought resistant. Because when there's more CO2, it's easier

00:43:45.220 for the plants to take it in, so they don't make as many holes under their leaves, which is where they

00:43:50.800 take it in. And that means less water escapes from them, so they can survive on a smaller amount of

00:43:57.560 water than they could when CO2 was lower. So, CO2 is performing miracles with the life on earth.

00:44:08.540 And making our, you know, why are there record food crops every year? The main reason is increased CO2.

00:44:16.140 That is the primary reason. And people are not being told that. They're being told a pack of lies

00:44:22.300 about CO2, like as if it's bad. When in fact, like, nobody can question that it is the main food for

00:44:29.960 life. It is the main food for plants, and it is the main food for animals, because animals eat plants.

00:44:37.120 That is their food. And plants are made from carbon, from CO2. So therefore, so are we.

00:44:44.140 Patrick, I take your point. So then, why is it that over the last couple of years, you know,

00:44:50.980 we've, you know, we've been fed this narrative, we've had Greta Thunberg on the TV, all over the

00:44:57.640 news and media, saying, you know, that the planet is ending. Is it really to instill people with fear?

00:45:04.800 Because what you're saying is very Orwellian, if I'm being honest.

00:45:08.200 If there is evil in this world, it's this movement to try to convince people that they

00:45:17.040 should commit mass suicide by ending the use of fossil fuels. There's people living

00:45:22.880 on the 30th floor of a condominium in 500 cities of over a million people.

00:45:33.160 They sleep at night while the trucks bring the food in from the countryside. Big trucks

00:45:41.680 that are not going to be running on batteries anytime soon.

00:45:47.320 The food that those trucks are carrying was produced with the help of very large tractors

00:45:54.740 and combines and other mechanization that make it possible for less than 5% of the population

00:46:02.320 to grow all the food for the rest of the people who are living in the cities, where there isn't

00:46:08.540 any room to grow the food. Not on a balcony on the 30th floor of a condominium, if you're

00:46:15.460 lucky enough to have a balcony. So they don't see the trucks coming in to resupply the stores

00:46:24.280 every night with food. They don't even have a clue where their food is coming from.

00:46:29.300 They don't understand a thing about it. This is the downside of mechanization. Mechanization has

00:46:37.380 been a wonderful thing to take the burden of labor, manual labor, off a huge percentage of the

00:46:45.880 population. At one time, it took 80% of the people to grow the food and the other 20% lived with the

00:46:54.000 other lords and ladies in the castle with the king. But the 80% of them were out slaving every day,

00:47:00.680 living in hovels, so that kids by six and eight had to become labor and didn't get educated because

00:47:08.280 they were necessary to do part of the food production. By hand. Everything by hand.

00:47:16.120 Today, 80% of the people plus live in cities, and it takes only a much smaller proportion of the people

00:47:26.240 to provide everything the people in the cities need to survive. The energy, the food, and the materials,

00:47:36.940 like concrete and steel, for example, and wood to build their homes. People in the cities think the

00:47:46.020 people in the country who are digging and plowing and cutting and drilling and all the excavating

00:47:54.620 and building huge mines. They are the enemies of the earth. They are the ones who are destroying the

00:48:00.640 planet. They forget that the only reason those people are doing that is so that they can remain

00:48:07.040 alive in their hives in the city. That's the only reason those people are doing that. Well,

00:48:14.200 they take a little bit for themselves along the way, but not as much as most of the wealth is in

00:48:20.780 the cities. Most of the people in the cities have more fancy cars and travel more and all the rest.

00:48:27.260 They got more money. So, Patrick, someone who's not familiar with your work, who hasn't heard you say

00:48:32.160 these things before, might be going, what kind of environmentalist is this guy? He doesn't sound

00:48:37.080 green at all to me. What are the things that people who do care about the environment, ecology,

00:48:47.100 biodiversity, et cetera, if those things are important, what should we actually be doing?

00:48:52.140 Should we be recycling plastic and tins and whatever? Should we be avoiding taking unnecessary

00:48:59.000 trips? Should we be cutting down our energy consumption? What else should we be doing? First of

00:49:04.480 we'll get to the nuclear power and other stuff in a second, but as individuals, what should people be

00:49:09.760 doing from your point of view? You mentioned unnecessary trips. No trip is necessary with

00:49:19.420 the technology we have today. So what you're basically saying is people can't go on holidays

00:49:25.540 because they are really unnecessary. But I would argue that's not the case, that holidays are a break

00:49:35.120 from whatever you're doing in your normal life. And the definition of necessary comes into question

00:49:43.140 there. It's not a hard and fast word. What we should be doing is making sure the water and the air

00:49:51.240 and the earth are clean and not polluted, but they've, they have twisted the meaning of so many words

00:49:59.520 that they call a carbon dioxide pollution. You know, I used to laugh at people who said their plants liked

00:50:05.560 it when they talked to them as if like plants have ears or something and could listen to music or

00:50:13.900 whatever. But I don't laugh anymore because I hadn't realized at the time that when you talk to your

00:50:21.960 plants, especially if you're standing close to them or sitting close to them, which you normally would

00:50:26.400 be if you were talking to them, you are breathing out 40,000 parts per million carbon dioxide, which is

00:50:34.220 100 times the level it is in the natural air. Therefore, you are basically breathing super saturated

00:50:41.420 fertilizer on the plant. And that's why it grows better when you talk to it. It's a perfectly simple

00:50:48.080 matter. And so they have now in the United States, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency

00:50:54.460 ruled under Obama that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, an air pollutant, when in fact it is the main food for

00:51:03.960 all life and has no toxic properties whatsoever. So it's not toxic. It is the main food for life and it is

00:51:14.180 being called pollution. The same thing is true with plastic. They tell me that plastic is leaching toxins

00:51:23.260 into the sea, that when fish ingest plastic and when birds ingest plastic, it's leaching toxins into their

00:51:33.060 body. Is that why we wrap most of our food in plastic? Because it's toxic? The disconnect here is

00:51:42.360 unfathomably insane. The reason we use plastic to contain our food is because it's non-toxic, because it is

00:51:54.280 sterile. And the reason adult albatross feed bits of plastic to their chicks, they're not actually

00:52:04.760 feeding it to them. They are causing them to ingest it because they're not eating the plastic. They can't

00:52:12.100 digest the plastic. The bits of plastic that the adult albatross give to their chicks and indeed continue,

00:52:21.180 the adults continue to ingest plastic all their lives along with other hard bits that they can find

00:52:29.220 in the ocean. There's no pebbles in the sea. They don't float very well. So whereas land birds use

00:52:36.380 pebbles as a digestive aid in their gizzard, which is a second stomach that all birds have, birds don't have

00:52:45.660 teeth. Therefore, they can't chew their food and have to swallow it whole. Sometimes they swallow a whole

00:52:51.300 squid, for example. In order to digest that whole squid, they send it to their gizzard, where it's a

00:53:01.760 muscular organ, where they also put hard objects of a suitable size and shape so that the birds can use

00:53:11.920 them to help grind the food. It's used in industry all the time for grinding things by putting hard

00:53:18.660 objects in the grinder to help grind it. Birds figured that out millions of years ago. Sir David

00:53:25.700 Attenborough, your lovely Sir David Attenborough, lies and says the birds are mistaking plastic for food

00:53:36.100 and feeding it to their chicks. No, they're not. They are not mistaking it for anything.

00:53:44.840 They are using it as a substitute for bits of pumice, hard nuts, pieces of wood, and the squid beaks

00:53:54.040 remain in the gizzard when the bird digests the flesh of the squid, because the squid beaks are a hard

00:54:02.040 object. So they keep them there. And those objects all wear out over time and have to be replaced.

00:54:08.000 That's why they have to continue eating, ingesting these digestive aids all their life. One would think

00:54:15.680 that Sir David Attenborough, having written The Secret Life of Birds, a large book, and having done a

00:54:23.640 10-part BBC series on birds that he might know they have a gizzard. He never mentions the gizzard.

00:54:34.520 He never tells the truth about the hard plastic bits that are being used as digestive aids in the

00:54:43.340 chick's gizzard and in their own gizzard. He pretends that they are mistaking it for food and holds up a

00:54:49.860 clear plastic bag on television saying that they're ingesting this thinking it's food. They never show a

00:54:58.960 clear plastic bag being fed to an albatross chick because that's not going to happen. Then you go on

00:55:05.100 the internet and if you google plastic in baby albatross chicks, you will find baby albatross chicks that are

00:55:14.820 mostly desiccated and half rotten. They've had their side cut open and they've been stuffed with plastic

00:55:23.780 objects. They are staged artifacts. They do this in order to make people think that birds are stupid

00:55:33.800 when in fact birds are not stupid. They are very intelligent and they don't feed their chicks things 1.00

00:55:41.260 that they mistake for food. They know what food is just like we do. And we don't eat plastic bags or

00:55:50.280 bits of hard plastic because we don't have a gizzard like birds do. And there's also the great

00:55:56.520 walrus suicide pact

00:55:59.260 where the walruses are filmed by Sir David Attenborough

00:56:05.260 leaping from a cliff to their death. He says it's because there isn't enough ice in the Arctic.

00:56:13.960 That's why they commit suicide because they're too crowded on the land. And actually they don't belong on

00:56:20.280 the land. They belong on the ice. Well, there must be some reason that this area of land on the northern

00:56:26.760 Russian coast is called a walrus sanctuary, like it's designated as a walrus sanctuary. So walrus must

00:56:34.800 go on it occasionally. As a matter of fact, that's where they go when the ice recedes in the summer north

00:56:41.300 from the northern Russian coast. It happens every year. So there is no ice to get on during the summer.

00:56:49.400 Turns out the reason the walruses leapt to their death was because a pack of 20 to 30 polar bears

00:56:57.680 was coming up from behind them. And they were at the top of a cliff. They just happened to have gone up,

00:57:03.420 walked up, waddled up to where they were at the top of a cliff. And they were trapped because this group

00:57:09.340 of polar bears came. But Sir David Attenborough didn't show that. He said that the walrus's home

00:57:16.540 is on the ice. No, the walrus's home is in the ocean and on the land and on the ice when they want

00:57:25.120 to get out and rest. But unlike the polar bear, whose home is on the ice in the winter, hunting seals,

00:57:32.940 walruses do not hunt seals through the ice. They are bottom feeders, sort of like Sir David Attenborough

00:57:41.120 and his film crew of our planet. Walruses use their tusks to harvest clams from the seabed and other

00:57:51.280 creatures that live there. They cannot dive more than 300 feet deep. So they have to stay near the

00:57:58.480 shore. They are actually a shore animal. They're a seaside animal. They don't go out into the deep sea

00:58:06.900 ever because there's nothing there for them. Even seals and sea lions can go into deep water to fish.

00:58:14.500 But walruses don't fish. They dig clams. And they have to stay near the beach. They are a beach

00:58:22.020 beachside species. And he just completely ignores that.

00:58:26.820 Gotcha. Let me drag you back to, so we got to keep the rivers and the air clean. 0.99

00:58:31.240 What else should individual people be doing to be environmentally friendly?

00:58:38.000 Protect endangered species. Protect endangered species. That's a very important thing to do.

00:58:43.840 You know, it wasn't until about 100 years ago that the average person even cared about endangered

00:58:49.400 species. Only a few naturalists and biologists even knew about what it was. And when the passenger

00:58:57.260 pigeon went extinct, which is one of only two species that have gone extinct in North America

00:59:04.320 since European colonization, people woke up to this because the media made a deal about it.

00:59:10.940 Like passenger pigeons were a mainstay in markets all across the eastern United States. In New York,

00:59:17.920 they were hanging in groups of 20 outside the shops. And then there weren't any anymore. And there had

00:59:24.600 been millions of them. So this dramatic extinction that occurred over a period of not that many years

00:59:32.320 with, and they were easy to kill. They flew at low elevation in large flocks. And that's what really

00:59:39.320 triggered the concern for endangered species in this world. And so it's only been a short time since

00:59:45.720 anybody even cared about that. I mean, before that, everybody just thought, well, if a species goes

00:59:51.480 extinct, it goes extinct. Species have been going extinct forever. Way more species have gone extinct

00:59:57.800 than exist in the world today, like thousands of times more species. Some of the great extinction

01:00:04.500 events, which were the last one we are quite certain was caused by an asteroid piercing the Earth's crust

01:00:10.000 and throwing billions of tons of debris into the stratosphere where it blocked out the sun for many

01:00:14.860 years, and basically ended the food chain that it killed all the plants. And therefore, there was

01:00:21.000 nothing for the animals to eat. Interestingly, one of the reasons birds survived through that

01:00:28.380 extinction event, and none of the dinosaurs that walked on the Earth survived, but the ones that flew

01:00:37.400 did, because they could fly hundreds of miles to eat the carrion from the ones that died. So they survived

01:00:45.420 through that because of flight. And of course, today we realize how important flight is to animals when you've got so

01:00:52.800 many different bird species that have survived through all these ages. That's just a little aside. But there's been five

01:01:03.800 great extinctions of life. One thing that I will ask you about, and I think it's a final thing, is the Amazon

01:01:15.100 and deforestation. Surely that is a huge problem.

01:01:20.480 No, it's not. 90% of the Amazon is intact. Again, it's a situation where not even many Brazilians ever go to the

01:01:28.400 Amazon. There's no reason to go there. It is basically a very hot steaming jungle. It's been described as a

01:01:36.380 human desert because there's so few people there. 10% of the Amazon has been developed into cattle

01:01:44.300 ranching and other forms of farming. It is not a sea of factories spewing smoke. It is a huge wilderness

01:01:55.080 area. I have flown across it. It takes five hours to do so. I have been at the mouth of the Amazon. I've

01:02:02.380 been at Jari partway up the Amazon. I've been at Manaus where the Rio Negro comes into the Amazon.

01:02:08.520 So I've seen a huge part of it. It is still there. It is not deforested. And the fires they show you that

01:02:18.720 take up the entire frame, of course, nothing but flames, right? It doesn't take a very big fire

01:02:24.860 to take up the whole lens of a TV camera. Most of those fires are re-clearing land that is being used

01:02:33.960 for cattle because the vegetation grows so fast there that when they built a road to Manaus,

01:02:41.340 it quickly disappeared as plants came up through the pavement and destroyed the road. It is an amazing

01:02:51.500 living ecosystem. And they've rekindled the Amazon is dying meme as a result of the election of a

01:03:03.920 president who is not a communist. And therefore, they're just going after him saying that he's

01:03:12.540 destroying the Amazon like they did 20 years ago. And as I say, I've been there. I've been all over

01:03:18.980 Brazil, right from the south to the northeast to the west. Brazil is an amazing country. It is nearly as

01:03:25.780 large as the lower 48 United States. And the Amazon is a huge piece of it, which is largely intact.

01:03:36.400 Look at a map that shows the reservations that have been made for the indigenous people of the Amazon

01:03:43.760 and the national parks in the Amazon. And if you own a piece of land in the Amazon, you are only allowed

01:03:51.060 to develop 20 percent of it. And actually, Brazil, even in the south, where the main agriculture is,

01:03:59.560 has some of the best land use practices in the world. They require that 20 percent of all agricultural

01:04:07.360 land, private land, be kept in nature and that all streamside areas be protected and left in natural

01:04:16.240 vegetation. Take a look in England. They farm right up to the bank of the river. Maybe a willow tree

01:04:23.120 finds a footing there that they can't, you know, that they leave alone. But Brazil actually has really

01:04:30.140 good land use planning. You've been very critical of the United Kingdom in this. You've slated David

01:04:36.500 Attenborough, our farming practices and all the rest of it. As well you deserve. But I'm sure you'll be

01:04:43.060 happy to find out birds have a second stomach because you'd love one. Yeah. I'm just speaking

01:04:48.440 to the home audience, you know. Yeah. But it's great. Listen, let me ask you. We've got a final

01:04:53.960 question to come, but very, very quickly because we're running over in a couple of minutes. Talk to

01:04:59.760 us about nuclear energy, because just for context, you're talking to somebody. I'm from Russia.

01:05:05.100 Originally, my wife actually was evacuated from Kiev in Ukraine during the Chernobyl episode,

01:05:12.780 the disaster that happened there. I've never understood why that one incident, which is,

01:05:19.080 by the way, caused by human deliberate incompetence and stupidity and the sort of planned economy of the 0.99

01:05:28.640 Soviet Union and which then generated human error. Why that one incident has been used to essentially, 0.99

01:05:35.120 you know, cause such resistance to the idea of nuclear power. But tell us very quickly your view

01:05:43.280 of it and whether we should be using nuclear energy more or less than we are in the moment.

01:05:47.440 Well, we are using nuclear energy a lot at the moment. There are 440 nuclear plants operating in the

01:05:54.920 world. Europe actually has most of the countries that have more than a third of their electricity

01:06:03.720 being produced by nuclear energy. But the big movement in nuclear today is in China, India and

01:06:12.240 Russia, where they are actively building new plants right now as we speak and plan many, many more

01:06:19.100 because they are actually thinking of the future. Nuclear is the energy of the future because fossil fuels

01:06:26.800 are limited. And one of the most important reasons to support nuclear energy is to reduce the rate at

01:06:34.200 which we are burning the precious fossil fuels. And nuclear can do that more than any other technology

01:06:40.620 we have today. Hydroelectric is wonderful where it is applicable, but it requires rainfall and

01:06:48.700 topography to be correct in order for, you know, you're not going to have hydroelectricity in Saudi

01:06:55.300 Arabia anytime soon. So nuclear is applicable anywhere in the world. You can, you can build it anywhere 0.89

01:07:03.240 you want to have energy. Now Chernobyl was an exceptional situation. The Chernobyl class of reactors built by

01:07:13.440 the Soviets behind the Iron Curtain without any input from Western science and Western nuclear

01:07:19.500 understanding. Those reactors, there were more than 20 of them spread out over the former Soviet Union in

01:07:26.880 all the satellite countries as well, including Slovakia, for example. Those reactors were basically the

01:07:35.700 same design as they were using to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. And they were a flawed design

01:07:44.680 in that they had a positive void coefficient, which would take too long to explain, as opposed to a

01:07:52.640 negative void coefficient. What that meant was they were actually capable of a runaway nuclear reaction

01:07:58.940 operation if things weren't done properly. And most people don't realize that the Chernobyl accident did not come

01:08:06.960 during normal operating procedures, like making electricity. It came when a group of, when a group of scientists came

01:08:15.240 from nuclear headquarters, probably in Moscow, to do an experiment. And there was a lack of proper communication

01:08:22.920 between the operators and these high-level guys who came in to do this experiment. Also, they told the

01:08:32.140 operator to shut down the safety system so that the safety systems would not interfere with their experiment.

01:08:38.400 And it blew up. Three Mile Island and Fukushima were not nuclear explosions. They were meltdown of the core

01:08:47.120 due to lack of cooling water after the reactor was shut down. So Chernobyl was an exceptional situation.

01:08:55.880 It killed people, especially the people fighting the fire, which went on for 10 days. They had a 2,000 ton

01:09:03.120 graphite moderator, which is pure carbon, which was very, very difficult to put out. And indeed, it did kill

01:09:13.020 over 80 people, including the children who died of thyroid cancer, which was a small number, but they

01:09:20.280 were diagnosed too late to save them. A lot of people did get thyroid problems, but they were diagnosed

01:09:28.720 early enough that it could be cured. The death rate was not a nice thing, but those are the only people

01:09:36.400 that have ever died from civilian nuclear reactors in the world.

01:09:40.880 That being the case, and this is the last question, yeah, that being the case, why do we seem to

01:09:46.320 be so worried about nuclear energy? Why do we seem to recoil in horror when it's suggested

01:09:51.700 as an alternative?

01:09:53.720 Because it's as fake as the fear of carbon dioxide. It's that fake.

01:09:58.740 There is no reason to be afraid of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy, if you look at casualties versus

01:10:06.820 energy produced, nuclear is the safest of all the electricity producing technologies. And it also

01:10:13.940 takes up less room. Like, look how much room wind and solar takes up. It takes up vast swaths. And if

01:10:20.940 they make it 10 times as much as it is now, it'll take up a lot of agricultural land where we grow our

01:10:27.520 food. They need flat land for these things. So that is what should be stopped.

01:10:35.260 Patrick, I agree with you. That's the one issue on which I will say that this is one thing I do know

01:10:40.620 a little bit about having grown up in the Soviet Union. My father was someone who was familiar with

01:10:46.100 these things. So that's the one thing I can definitely say that I know about that we can agree on.

01:10:52.160 But listen, we're running out of time. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you and having

01:10:56.380 a completely different perspective to the one that we are being given elsewhere. We've got one more

01:11:03.400 question for you. Which is always, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should

01:11:07.680 be?

01:11:10.980 Oh, yes. The one thing we're not talking about that we really should be.

01:11:14.660 Um, I think the fact that aquaculture, which is the growing of fresh and marine water fish

01:11:25.980 in a farming context, as opposed to catching wild fish, that aquaculture is the way we will save the

01:11:34.980 wild fish from being overexploited. And aquaculture is being attacked on every front by the greens,

01:11:42.140 as if it's poisoning the sea or something, when in fact, it takes the pressure off the wild fish.

01:11:49.100 Wild fish have been overfished now for at least 30 years. They should let the wild fish recover.

01:11:56.780 In many cases, they should reduce the rate of catch of wild fish in the ocean.

01:12:02.360 And they should increase the amount of fish being produced by aquaculture. It produces beautiful

01:12:09.400 product. Almost all the shrimp you buy these days is produced in farms. Much of the salmon now,

01:12:16.280 of course, Norway having led that effort, and now British Columbia and Chile and New Zealand have

01:12:23.140 followed in their footsteps and are producing beautiful product with aquaculture. And tilapia is

01:12:30.360 another one that is becoming very successful because it's easy to grow and it's inexpensive.

01:12:37.000 So fish has the best proteins and oils of any protein food, any meat that we can eat. So we should

01:12:45.620 be eating more fish, but we can't eat more fish based on the wild fish because they have already

01:12:50.760 been thoroughly overexploited. And I see Britain and France arguing over who's going to get the fish.

01:12:58.040 fish. And it should be more like, let's not catch quite so many of them next year and let's share them

01:13:06.140 equitably somehow. But however you do it, let's make sure we don't catch too many fish because there's the sea

01:13:13.500 is only capable of producing so much. And these are wild animals. We stopped basing our food on land, our meat on

01:13:21.660 land on wild animals 10,000 years ago practically, because we farm animals on the land. And yet the

01:13:28.440 green movement seems to be adamantly opposed to farming fish in the sea, in the lakes and in rivers.

01:13:35.940 And that is a completely bass-ackwards position. They should be supporting aquaculture to take the

01:13:44.220 pressure off the wild fish stocks. Gotcha. Patrick, thank you so much for coming on. Remind everybody

01:13:50.420 where they can find your work online if they want to follow up this interview and read more and find

01:13:55.240 out more before we let you go. Please just Google me, Patrick Moore, and you'll find all kinds of

01:14:03.640 videos, etc. But what I'd really like you to do is to read my new book, Fake Invisible Catastrophes

01:14:09.920 and Threats of Doom. It's the result of more than 50 years of learning on my part. I've been a

01:14:16.260 lifelong learner all my life, of course. And please do read my book. It will change the way you see the

01:14:24.300 world and in a positive way. We should not be believing in the doomsday narrative. We should

01:14:32.360 be believing in the promise of this earth and of life upon it. Thank you. And we didn't get a lot of

01:14:38.720 jokes out of you. I thought you guys were comedians. Well, now we're getting scolded as well. I tried

01:14:44.720 to do a joke at the end there by saying, how dare you? But the internet got in the way. Yeah, how dare

01:14:50.200 you? Yeah. Patrick, listen, it's been a pleasure. We're going to do a couple of quick questions for

01:14:54.820 our supporters as a separate thing very quickly, and then we'll let you go. Thank you so much for

01:14:59.940 watching. Thank you guys for watching at home. We will see you very soon with another brilliant

01:15:04.620 interview like this one or a Raw show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care. See

01:15:10.620 you soon, guys.

TRIGGERnometry - July 12, 2021

Are We Being Told the Truth About Climate Change？ Patrick Moore

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript