TRIGGERnometry - Net Zero Must Go - Matt Ridley

00:00:00.000 I think we've got a crisis of confidence in scientific truth, and I think it's largely

00:00:07.440 self-inflicted. I've never thought that carbon dioxide has no effect at all. I've never thought

00:00:13.840 that we're not in a period of warming, but I've been blacklisted by the BBC. We're not in a period

00:00:19.640 of unprecedented warmth. We're not in a period of unprecedentedly fast warmth. We're not in a

00:00:25.040 period of increasing extreme weather. I think what the UK has done is unbelievably foolish, 0.99

00:00:30.280 and we should tear up net zero. Lord, Matt Ridley, welcome back to the show. 0.88

00:00:36.660 Thanks very much for having me on. It's great to have you on. We want to talk about science,

00:00:40.820 and particularly one of the big things you were at the forefront of, of course, was the COVID lab

00:00:47.360 leak thing. We also want to talk about the climate conversation. Those are two, I think, major issues

00:00:52.900 where there are a lot of concerns from very sensible and reasonable people like you, not lunatics on

00:00:57.560 the internet, about the way that science is effectively being corrupted. And we want to

00:01:01.780 talk about that through the lens of those two issues in particular, and we'll talk about your book and

00:01:05.000 other things as well. So where are we with the COVID lab leak? It is sort of anecdotally pretty clear

00:01:11.680 that it came from a lab in China. Is that basically true? Yes, for most of us. So the CIA thinks that,

00:01:18.740 the FBI thinks that, Robert Redfield, the former head of the CDC in America, thinks that,

00:01:23.640 most of the world thinks that, ordinary people think that, the evidence is overwhelmingly strong,

00:01:29.780 that it's not a coincidence that it broke out in the only city with a huge research programme on

00:01:34.620 COVID-like viruses. But the exception is the scientific establishment, which has not budged an inch.

00:01:41.620 So the journal Science, the journal Nature, they keep publishing things saying it's not a lab leak.

00:01:46.040 The Royal Society, they refuse to have a debate on the topic, the National Academy in America,

00:01:51.780 likewise. I and a couple of colleagues who are both academics, keep submitting a systematically

00:02:00.200 argued review paper, or versions of it, with all the arguments for a lab leak, spelled out with

00:02:07.760 references in the most objective and careful terms that we can, to journal after journal,

00:02:13.900 about six journals so far. They reject it within weeks. And the reason they gave to start with was,

00:02:20.820 this is a conspiracy theory, it's nutty, it's wrong, you can't believe a word of it. The reason

00:02:25.220 they now give is, everyone knows this stuff, so we don't need to publish it. Now, you can't both,

00:02:30.580 both of those can't be true. And the obvious question that a lot of people will ask is,

00:02:35.640 why is that happening?

00:02:36.400 Well, within science, there's a huge number of scientists who recognise that the evidence points

00:02:43.720 strongly to a lab leak. And they say things to us like, keep going, you're on the right track,

00:02:48.000 but I don't put my head above the parapet, because I'm worried about my funding, I'm worried about my

00:02:51.660 reputation with my university, that kind of thing. But there's a group of senior scientists,

00:02:59.260 scientists and editors of journals and things, who decided early on, that if they gave an inch on

00:03:05.960 this topic, and conceded that it might have come from an accident in a laboratory, the damage to the

00:03:12.760 reputation of the whole of science would be so great, that it would threaten their funding in

00:03:17.400 lots of different fields. I think there are 180 degrees wrong on that. I think if they'd come out

00:03:22.060 quite early and said, this is a serious hypothesis, we need to take it seriously and look at it and 0.98

00:03:25.740 discuss it, then the damage would be confined to one corner of very idiotic virology, which was

00:03:32.220 doing extraordinarily risky experiments that should never have been done, let alone at that biosafety 0.95

00:03:36.620 level in that lab. And, you know, this was a very, you know, this was 1% of 1% of 1% of science,

00:03:42.900 you know, this wasn't, you know, the rest of science is fine in terms of safety. It's just,

00:03:48.720 you could have confined the damage to one corner of the discipline, and then you'd have got full marks

00:03:55.200 for investigating yourselves, looking into it. As it is, they're saying, how dare you review

00:04:02.060 biosafety and laboratories? It's up to us to decide whether something's safe. Well, I'm a libertarian,

00:04:09.720 but even I don't go that far, if you know what I mean. It's remarkable what we're hearing from these

00:04:15.740 people. So I think they made a mistake early on at a time when it was all going to blow over in a few

00:04:20.640 weeks. It's just going to be a little local outbreak in China, and nobody didn't know about

00:04:25.000 it. They knew among themselves that it was very likely to be a lab leak, but they kept that quiet.

00:04:29.420 They published a paper saying the opposite, which became very influential, and then they found

00:04:33.600 themselves out on a limb and they couldn't get back. And so they're now, they're doubling down

00:04:37.880 on a lie that they know they told effectively, or a mistake they made, let's say. This would be

00:04:42.140 charitable. Yes, but of course, things are changing in America because this week,

00:04:46.500 Jay Bhattacharya, my good friend, has been confirmed as the head of the National Institutes

00:04:52.900 of Health, responsible for the whole funding apparatus for all biomedical research. And the

00:05:00.360 head of the CIA, the new head of the CIA, yes, is John Ratcliffe, who led an inquiry into this very

00:05:07.600 topic for the Heritage Foundation and came to the conclusion it's probably a lab leak. So suddenly in

00:05:11.620 Washington, you've got senior people saying the opposite of what they were saying a year ago.

00:05:15.940 Now, that means we're going to get more information coming out. We're getting bits of it already from

00:05:20.320 within the US. We may get some decent intelligence from whistleblows in China or something. We may get

00:05:27.600 close to being able to say, case closed, this is definitely what happened. But five years have gone

00:05:33.580 by. And there's been a lot of track covering. And the hope of those who don't want to admit it was a

00:05:42.480 lab leak is that this gradually gets memory hold and never gets resolved. And, you know, it just fades

00:05:50.400 into the background. And how much of the reason for these, you know, call it a cover up, call it

00:05:56.860 unwillingness to adjust course or whatever, is to do with the fact that the lab in China was being funded

00:06:04.640 by quite a lot of scientists and the sort of scientific organisation in America. And so the people who are

00:06:12.760 in charge of funding that are the very same people who are then saying it didn't come from that lab.

00:06:18.460 Exactly. Well, I mean, Dr. Fauci, as I understand it, was heavily involved in all of this.

00:06:22.300 Anthony Fauci was responsible both for promoting this kind of research, for bringing to an end a

00:06:28.900 moratorium on this kind of research in the US, for allowing some of the funds to go through the

00:06:35.040 EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profitable body in New York City, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

00:06:42.840 So, yes, you know, his fingerprints were all over it. So when Jeremy Farrer of the Wellcome Trust and

00:06:49.160 a number of other people came to him very early in the pandemic and said, we need to have a

00:06:52.960 conversation about whether this thing started in the lab. His initial reaction was, let's have the

00:06:58.040 debate and talk about it. And we know that at that meeting, they discussed, you know, whether to

00:07:02.920 discuss it. And within a day or two, Fauci is basically giving instructions to shut it down,

00:07:08.240 to make sure this never gets mentioned. And he's at the podium in the White House talking about this.

00:07:13.060 And he never admits that he's just had a meeting with a dozen other scientists at which they very

00:07:19.100 seriously discussed the possibility that it did start in the lab. He says it's conspiracy theory,

00:07:24.080 it's debunked, all this kind of thing. And they savage anyone in the press who comes out and says

00:07:28.580 that. So, yeah, you have to ask yourself, did they worry about the fact that they might have been

00:07:36.600 partly responsible? And then you find some of the emails that have come out through congressional

00:07:41.020 investigation. And you find that Fauci is sending emails to colleagues saying, we need to have a

00:07:46.620 serious conversation about the grants we gave to this lab. Now, why is he having that conversation?

00:07:52.620 He's concerned. So, yes, I'm afraid there is an enormous amount of motivated reasoning going on

00:08:01.180 here. You know, if you worry that you might be partly responsible for the death of many millions of

00:08:07.180 people, then of course you're going to, your brain is going to tell you that it's very unlikely that

00:08:12.780 that's the way it happened. There is a term for what you're describing, Matt, a cover-up.

00:08:19.360 Well, frankly, I personally think this makes Watergate look like a picnic. Because at Watergate,

00:08:26.280 yeah, there was a break-in, there was a bit of burglary, there was some financial corruption

00:08:31.820 involved a president, yes, but it didn't involve the death of somewhere between 7 and 28 million

00:08:39.740 people. It didn't involve the turning of the world upside down. The worst industrial accident

00:08:47.180 in the world is probably Bhopal, where 25,000 people died. This was probably an industrial accident,

00:08:55.100 in a sense. The scientific laboratory accident is much the same thing. We're talking about a

00:09:01.420 thousand times as many people dying. It's a very important issue. And that there was a cover-up

00:09:08.580 is not in doubt. Because we've seen the emails, we've seen the slack conversations between the

00:09:13.880 people who were writing the paper, so-called proximal origin paper, which came out pretty well

00:09:19.060 five years ago this week, which said there is no possibility it came out of a lab. And they were

00:09:25.160 saying to each other in private, in their emails, I still think it's frigging likely that it came out of

00:09:30.440 a lab. I hover one way or another, one of them said. And they went on saying that even after

00:09:35.760 they published the paper. So their current excuse, which is, oh, we changed our mind in the light of

00:09:39.780 new information, doesn't add up. Because even after they published the paper, they went on in

00:09:43.980 private saying, I still think it's a possibility. So I'm afraid that's the very definition of a cover-up.

00:09:49.000 You are covering up information that you have available and suspicions that you have about what

00:09:53.860 happened. Now, we, when I say me and a number of other scientists, well, scientists and journalists,

00:10:00.320 I'm not a scientist, but I'm a commentator on science, we are pushing the journal Nature Medicine

00:10:06.060 to retract that paper. Because it was clearly not just factually wrong, there was no, the arguments it

00:10:14.280 gives for why it couldn't have gone out of a lab don't stack up. But it was written by people who

00:10:20.340 didn't believe it. Now, in my view, writing a scientific paper that says the opposite of what

00:10:24.580 you actually think in private is the very definition of scientific misconduct.

00:10:30.720 And Matt, this has damaged, and obviously millions of people have lost their lives, as you said,

00:10:36.960 but it has also damaged people's faith in science. The amount of people now who were told

00:10:42.800 follow the science and now are rabidly anti-vax, rabidly anti-institution, saying that they can't

00:10:50.980 trust scientists anymore, they can't trust doctors. This has done a tremendous amount of damage to the

00:10:56.720 scientific institutions themselves, hasn't it? Absolutely. And this is a point I struggle to get

00:11:02.180 across to my scientific friends. They think that it's the fault of RFK and anti-vaxxers that people

00:11:11.840 have turned against vaccines. And I'm saying, look in the mirror. Who was it who built up,

00:11:17.240 who gave RFK the viability to make his arguments? How did his numbers shoot up? Because you made

00:11:25.180 claims for the vaccines that were way overblown about whether they prevented transmission,

00:11:29.940 about whether they were safe for children, et cetera, et cetera, which have damaged vaccines.

00:11:35.380 I'm pro-vax. You know, I think vaccines are a good thing. But the damage that's been done

00:11:40.980 to the reputation of that technology and, as you say, of science in general. So just to take

00:11:45.760 another very simple example. Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization was still

00:11:53.060 saying in capital letters, this virus is not airborne. Quite why they were so obsessed with

00:12:02.300 saying this, I don't know. And from that flowed all the stuff about if you stand six feet apart

00:12:06.980 and if you wash your hands all the time, you know, it'll be fine. Well, that was nonsense.

00:12:10.960 It's airborne. It doesn't matter where you stand. I'm breathing at you now. You know,

00:12:14.840 if I had COVID, you'd get it. I don't, by the way. At least I think I don't.

00:12:20.540 And so, you know, giving out genuine misinformation and then not saying, sorry, we were wrong leads

00:12:32.360 people to say, well, I wonder what else you're wrong about. And I'm someone who's covered science

00:12:39.020 all my life. I've championed science. I'm passionate about science. I love science. But I find myself

00:12:44.960 now taking any scientific announcement on any topic with more suspicion than I used to five

00:12:53.140 years ago. It's had that much effect on me. Now, imagine if the effect it's had on other people

00:12:59.240 who are not such fanatically pro-science people. So I think we've got a crisis of confidence in

00:13:07.440 scientific truth. And I think it's largely self-inflicted. To paraphrase a Republican

00:13:13.860 strategist in America who was saying something, I think just this week, there isn't a mirror big

00:13:18.660 enough for the scientists to see the damage they've done to scientific reputation.

00:13:25.960 And the worrying thing is, Matt, is that we are going to have another pandemic. These things

00:13:29.460 happen every 100 years or maybe less than that. So if we do have another pandemic and we have

00:13:36.740 scientists coming out, my concern is, and I'm sure yours is as well, how many people are

00:13:41.480 actually going to believe them this time around?

00:13:43.840 I hadn't thought of that, but it's a very good point. And, you know, I personally think

00:13:48.720 that proving this was a lab leak will be quite reassuring in one way, and that is it will be

00:13:54.720 the exception that proves the rule. It will be the case where because it was already trained

00:14:00.300 on human beings in the lab, it was infectious from the start and therefore nothing we could do

00:14:04.520 to stop it. Lockdowns didn't work, etc., etc. Whereas if it jumps out of nature, it stutters

00:14:12.160 like bird flu is doing at the moment. You get a few infections and then it dies out. It's quite

00:14:16.680 easy to contain. It's not very contagious. You can institute controls that will stop it.

00:14:23.280 And therefore, there is every reason to think we can stop natural pandemics, but we can't stop

00:14:28.000 artificial ones. Now, that's a very important lesson to learn if we want to learn it. But what's

00:14:33.000 happening in virology labs at the moment? There are more opening than ever before. There's no increase

00:14:41.660 in the biosafety regulations in any country on this. They're accelerating. The Wuhan Institute of

00:14:51.320 Virology Lab that is at the centre of this, run by a professor called Dr. Shi Zhengli,

00:14:56.980 announced a new experiment on a MERS-like virus the other day. Well, that's comforting.

00:15:03.640 Now, you know, maybe they sat down and said, let's do it in a more safe way. But actually,

00:15:09.700 in the paper they published in Nature the other day about this, they said we used biosafety level

00:15:17.260 2+. Well, we've never heard of 2+. We know 2 is not good enough for these kinds of viruses.

00:15:22.320 We know 3 is probably OK, but we don't like the sound of 2+. So what are these Western journals

00:15:29.060 doing publishing this stuff without saying, hang on, are you sure it was safe to do this

00:15:34.160 experiment? You know, there's an enabling factor in the West here that needs to be looked at.

00:15:41.980 And I just want to examine China's part on it, because how much responsibility does China have

00:15:48.320 to take for being opaque about the virus, not disclosing what happened, as to us to really

00:15:56.000 understand what was going on? What I guess what I'm really trying to say is, Matt, can we absolutely

00:16:00.840 say for certain that it came from a lab without Chinese cooperation?

00:16:07.480 Sorry, without Chinese cooperation?

00:16:09.280 Without Chinese cooperation? 0.90

00:16:10.720 Can we prove that without the Chinese cooperating with the investigation? Yes, I see what you mean. 0.55

00:16:14.720 I thought we meant without, they didn't cooperate in making the virus, which I wouldn't agree with.

00:16:23.620 Probably not. We probably won't get to 100% without some kind of whistleblower or other

00:16:33.720 opening up of the records in the laboratory. But in terms of beyond reasonable doubt, I think

00:16:41.720 we're pretty well there, frankly. I think the evidence when you look at it is so extraordinarily

00:16:46.480 strong. I mean, the coincidence of this thing happening without leaving a trace in any wild

00:16:51.760 animals, in the very city that is doing an extraordinary range of experiments that includes

00:16:58.540 a plan to do the very experiment that would have put a fear in cleavage site for the first 0.96

00:17:02.800 time in a virus. You know, I won't go into the details, but you know what I mean.

00:17:05.900 Now, what happened in Sverdlovsk in 1979 is relevant here, if you don't mind me going into

00:17:13.340 that for a second. And that is that there was an outbreak of 65 people died. The Americans

00:17:23.600 said, we think you've just had a leak from your biowarfare anthrax plant in the city. The Russians 0.98

00:17:32.220 said, no, they've died of food poisoning. Come and look. And an international team went

00:17:38.820 in and looked and said, yeah, the Russians are probably right. And it all died down. 0.99

00:17:44.020 And then the Soviet Union collapsed about 12 years after the event. A scientist came to the 0.78

00:17:50.560 West and said, you were absolutely right. It was an anthrax lab. We left a filter off one

00:17:58.360 day and we sent a plume of anthrax over a suburb. If it had gone the other way, it would have killed

00:18:02.460 hundreds of thousands. In fact, it only killed 65 people. So it took a long time, but the truth

00:18:09.100 eventually emerged. Now, it's going to be, I still maintain, it's going to be quite hard

00:18:16.140 for the Chinese authorities to keep the lid on what happened in those months, in the autumn of 2019,

00:18:22.800 in that lab in Wuhan, where they had some kind of drill. They had some kind of emergency that caused

00:18:29.160 them to close down their, take their database offline, where they called for new ventilation

00:18:34.840 equipment for the lab, where they suddenly banned the sale of experimental laboratory animals in

00:18:40.440 markets as food. You know, there's a whole string of events that happened that autumn that we would

00:18:47.240 like to know more about. There are people who know exactly what happened. And are they still alive?

00:18:54.080 Well, one of them isn't. Um, the guy who was developing a vaccine from very, very early in

00:18:59.720 the pandemic, so early that we think it probably, he probably started developing the vaccine before we

00:19:03.820 knew about the outbreak. Um, cause otherwise it's just impossible to see how he worked that fast.

00:19:08.600 He fell off a building, the roof of a building and died. And these new labs coming back a little bit

00:19:16.020 that you're talking about, cause this is the thing that concerns me. We all make mistakes.

00:19:20.980 We all do stupid things. Governments do stupid things. Scientists do stupid things. We all make 1.00

00:19:25.660 mistakes. The mark of someone who is dangerous is someone who refuses to learn from their mistakes.

00:19:31.820 And in this instance, are you saying gain of function research is ongoing?

00:19:35.440 Well, gain of function can be quite a broad term. It can mean, uh, um, enabling a plant to fertilize,

00:19:45.060 to, uh, photosynthesize more efficiently. Let me rephrase. So are we still doing things that could lead

00:19:51.040 to another pandemic? Gain of function research of control. Goff rock is the sort of narrower category

00:19:56.820 that we're talking about. Sorry to be pedantic. No, no, please be pedantic.

00:20:00.260 Yeah. Isn't it pronounced pedantic?

00:20:02.980 Um, uh, is continuing, I think in the West with more caution. I think I'm sure lessons are being

00:20:19.000 learned even while they may not be being acknowledged, but we have no such confidence about, uh, Chinese

00:20:25.500 laboratories. Uh, we certainly have no such confidence about laboratories in places like

00:20:31.160 Iran and North Korea where they would actually quite like to start another pandemic, if you see 1.00

00:20:35.800 what I mean. Uh, and in general, as I say, calls for stiffer regulation of, uh, virology experiments

00:20:47.880 that cause increases in lethality or infectivity of viruses are being resisted by the scientific

00:20:56.540 community. So there's a famous meeting called Aziloma, which happened in 1975, soon after the

00:21:01.440 invention of genetic engineering in California. And at Aziloma, they agreed on a set of self-policing

00:21:07.440 principles that the biotechnology industry and research would do. Uh, and one of those was not

00:21:12.420 to work on highly pathogenic, um, individual, uh, creatures. Well, somewhere along the line,

00:21:17.500 they gave up on that. Um, Aziloma too happened a few weeks ago, uh, the 50th anniversary of that

00:21:26.120 meeting. Yeah, it was 1975. So yeah, the 50th anniversary. Um, nobody who has been arguing for a lab

00:21:35.640 leak in this case was invited to that meeting. The people who went were all the people who were saying

00:21:40.700 this was definitely not a lab leak. So there's a real danger of science turning in on itself and

00:21:46.580 talking to itself and thinking it doesn't need to listen to the concerns of the public, um, or of

00:21:51.620 informed critics. And I, uh, I don't think that's healthy. There's something powerful about hearing the

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00:23:45.360 Are we missing something in this analysis, Matt? Is there a holy grail at the end of this type of

00:23:51.580 research that the trade-offs of killing a few million people are just so worth it?

00:23:56.920 Well, that, of course, is the phrase that, in fact, you used in a paper, you know, that the

00:24:01.620 risks are worth the benefits.

00:24:03.360 Right. So there must be some massive benefits on this.

00:24:05.200 A long time ago. We can't see it. I mean, the benefits, in theory, are being able to predict

00:24:11.460 and prevent the next pandemic. Well, that went well, didn't it?

00:24:16.780 But even at the time this stream of research was kicked off 15 years ago, there were other

00:24:25.360 virologists saying, look, going out and finding viruses in bats in the real world and bringing

00:24:34.440 them into a laboratory and souping them up to see how dangerous they are. You're very unlikely

00:24:39.720 to find the one that actually is going to cause the next pandemic anyway. And if you do, you

00:24:44.220 might make it more dangerous. It's not really a very good use of money, this. Why not just beef

00:24:49.220 up surveillance and testing and tracing so that when there's a local outbreak, we're

00:24:56.360 quicker onto it? Why try and predict it? Why not just be better at stopping it when it first

00:25:02.120 starts? And that has always seemed to me a very good argument, because if this kind of

00:25:08.140 research can lead to 20 million deaths, then it's got to have an enormous upside for it to

00:25:13.980 be worth it. And the upside they talk about is pretty small.

00:25:17.300 Well, in that case, I am in a position where I don't understand. I always think, why are

00:25:23.640 people doing certain things? And people generally respond to some kind of incentive structure

00:25:28.360 within the culture and mentality they operate in. So if what you're saying is this type of

00:25:34.760 research is ongoing in one form or another, why are those people doing it?

00:25:40.360 To get papers in nature, to get promotion, to get scientific fame and renown. That's the big

00:25:49.540 motivation for most scientists in most fields.

00:25:52.700 Most humans in most fields.

00:25:53.920 Most humans in most fields.

00:25:55.420 Yes, exactly.

00:25:56.520 So that's...

00:25:57.320 You don't need to get complicated about this, if you know what I mean.

00:26:00.640 That tells me it's incentive structure within science is all wrong then.

00:26:03.960 Yes.

00:26:05.800 In that area.

00:26:06.780 Well, and in quite a lot of areas. Because I think if you examine what gets you fame,

00:26:17.880 renown and promotion in science, it's publishing a lot, it's doing something that nobody's done

00:26:22.700 before, etc. It's not necessarily solving a problem that humanity wants you to solve.

00:26:28.720 Now, I mean, they'd like to do that as well. And I don't... I'm not here to say that all

00:26:34.000 scientists are evil. You know, I don't think that... Evil is the wrong word here. But I think there

00:26:39.700 are misaligned incentives that have become very out of control. And for me, the big problem is the

00:26:46.780 monolithic nature of the funding and publishing system. The fact that basically all the money flows

00:26:53.580 through one government agency, so in this country, UKRI, in America, NIH, or whatever. And you say,

00:27:00.200 well, there's the Wellcome Trust. Wellcome Trust just falls in line with UKRI. You know, there's no...

00:27:04.820 There's no attempt to be the red team to their B team and to fund different things.

00:27:11.980 And then when it comes to publishing, you know, you don't find science says, well, I'm not going to publish

00:27:17.040 that. Nature says I will, except in a sort of competitive sense, we'd like to do it first. You know,

00:27:21.420 they all have exactly the same criteria. So it's become very monopolistic, science. And for me,

00:27:26.920 monopoly is the big theme of what's wrong with this world, what's wrong with government, what's wrong

00:27:30.800 with crony capitalism, etc. You know, wherever you get monopoly, you've got a problem.

00:27:37.320 It's a fantastic point, because I have a lot of friends who work in science. And what they say is,

00:27:43.340 if you want to get funding, which is actually the most important thing for a scientist,

00:27:47.880 is to get funding. And people would be very shocked to hear that, and so was I, but apparently

00:27:52.300 it's true. If you want to get funding, you know the avenues that you need to go down. You know the

00:27:58.000 research that is looked upon favourably. So you're not going to do something which is deemed to be,

00:28:04.780 you know, slightly conspiratorial or, you know, slightly dodgy for whatever reason. You are going

00:28:11.240 to stick to the current paths. And that's a tragedy for science and human innovation, isn't it?

00:28:17.300 Well, to take another example from a different field, Alzheimer's research decided some years ago

00:28:26.780 that the hypothesis they liked best was the amyloid plaque hypothesis, that if we could find a way for

00:28:34.900 these features not to form inside brain cells, then we would be curing Alzheimer's.

00:28:42.420 And at various points along the way, scientists have said, hang on a minute.

00:28:48.660 I'm not sure you're not just treating the symptoms rather than the causes here.

00:28:53.940 We don't seem to be getting anywhere with this hypothesis. And they have been excluded. There's

00:28:59.540 been a really shocking degree of, we refuse to publish you if you don't subscribe to the amyloid 1.00

00:29:05.620 black hypothesis. You're a nutcase, you're a conspiratorial, blah, blah, blah. And there are 0.99

00:29:10.260 other hypotheses out there and they get ostracised. An even more striking example, which admittedly from

00:29:17.060 longer ago in the 1980s, is the stomach ulcer story, I don't know.

00:29:22.420 The guy who proved the bite swallowing the thing and giving himself a stomach ulcer.

00:29:26.420 So Glaxo and others were making an absolute fortune out of these antacid drugs that fought

00:29:32.580 the symptoms of stomach ulcers, but never cured them. And this guy comes along and says, look,

00:29:37.540 I think they're caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter. And they wouldn't publish him

00:29:41.860 and they wouldn't fund him and they wouldn't give him grants. Barry Marshall was his name in Western

00:29:46.900 Australia. And eventually, in order to prove his point, he swallowed a glass of Helicobacter and got

00:29:52.340 the most ferocious stomach ulcers. And he then swallowed an antibiotic and cured himself.

00:29:57.860 And at that point, the world had to sit up and take notice. And he eventually got the Nobel Prize.

00:30:02.260 But the degree to which he was pushing uphill for most of his career is quite shocking.

00:30:08.260 So in order to disprove what was a commonly thought hypothesis, he had to give himself literal

00:30:16.260 stomach ulcers. That's demented.

00:30:22.740 There's a great tradition of self-infection. I think Robert Ross, the guy who made the link

00:30:30.260 between malaria and mosquitoes, he deliberately infected himself too. They're quite mad, 0.96

00:30:35.940 some of these doctors. Brave is the word I should use.

00:30:39.460 Yes. So moving that along to a subject which is even more controversial than COVID, which is

00:30:46.340 climate change or the climate crisis. I mean, that's going to be even worse, isn't it?

00:30:51.140 Well, I've covered that topic for 45 years now. I wrote about it when I was science editor of The

00:30:57.380 Economist in the mid to late 80s. And I have watched a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that carbon

00:31:07.220 dioxide might cause runaway warming, be tested and discussed and debated. And for 10 or 20 years,

00:31:15.060 you could argue both sides of it and then gradually get closed down to the point where if you say

00:31:21.860 something like, yeah, I think carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but I don't think there are positive

00:31:27.620 feedback effects. And I think it's a diminishing effect. So I don't think we're going to get runaway

00:31:32.980 warming or dangerous warming. And I don't see any evidence that it's causing more extreme weather,

00:31:38.660 which is basically what the facts show after 40 years. If you say that, you are a denier.

00:31:46.500 Now, what does that word even mean in this context? It's an extraordinary thing to level at someone.

00:31:53.860 And now, you're not just a denier if you say, I think climate change is not as bad as you think.

00:32:01.540 You're a denier if you don't use the word crisis. You know, you and I have always been in meetings,

00:32:08.820 I'm sure, where people say the climate crisis is very important. If you stick your hand and say,

00:32:12.260 look, can we talk about climate change, but not the climate crisis? Because I feel that's emotive

00:32:15.860 language. It's like you farted. And as I say, you know, I've never thought that carbon dioxide has

00:32:29.940 no effect at all. I've never thought that we're not in a period of warming. But I've been blacklisted

00:32:37.380 by the BBC, because I once said some of these things on the Today programme, etc. And the idea

00:32:45.540 that, you know, and someone with my view in a university would never get funding, would never get

00:32:53.140 published, and would be quite quickly cancelled. Now, I don't think that's healthy. I mean,

00:32:59.860 I'd love to hear. There are other people out there who say there's no carbon dioxide warming.

00:33:05.300 It's all caused by the sun. I think they're wrong too, by the way. But I don't see why they couldn't

00:33:11.060 occasionally be allowed one job in a university or one paper in a in a journal, which we can then

00:33:16.660 criticise, if you see what I mean. And is it your assertion, therefore, that the consensus that we're

00:33:22.900 often told about that exists within science, you know, 90x, and it changes every day, whatever that

00:33:27.940 percentage is. But basically, the way it lands with a member of the ordinary general public like me

00:33:33.940 or Francis is, basically, all the same scientists agree. And there's this guy who thinks, you know,

00:33:40.100 that the sun revolves around the earth, and he's a bit weird. And that's why no one listens to him.

00:33:45.620 Yeah. Well, are you saying that's manufactured by the fact that, basically, you can't say a

00:33:51.940 different opinion, and therefore, therefore, 93% of scientists agree?

00:33:55.060 Yes, it's partly that, that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But also, the very study that got to

00:34:01.140 97% of scientists think climate change is happening said they think it's happening. Well, I'm in the 97%.

00:34:08.420 They didn't say they thought it was a crisis. You cannot find any study that says 97% of scientists

00:34:14.020 think it's a crisis. Literally. I mean, you could probably get to 50 or 40 or 60.

00:34:18.580 So what's the, in your assessment, what is the reality of climate change and the human impact on

00:34:27.700 that process, and therefore, the measures that we ought to be looking at and taking to mitigate

00:34:33.460 that problem? Well, that's a very big topic. But to be blunt, I think we are in a period of warming.

00:34:40.100 I think we're going to have to adapt to that anyway, because there's every chance that we're not going

00:34:44.660 to be able to stop it continuing. Can I just stop you there, Matt? You said we're in a period of

00:34:49.700 warming. What does that mean? What does that actually mean in terms of data, et cetera?

00:34:54.020 Because there'll be people going, I don't know what that means. I mean, me, by the way.

00:34:56.980 Exactly. Well, the average temperature of the planet does seem to be going steadily upwards.

00:35:02.420 Since when? Since the mid-80s.

00:35:06.020 It went down in the 70s. I remember all the fears about the ice age coming.

00:35:09.460 Yes, in the 70s. So we were told the planet is about to freeze in the 70s.

00:35:13.780 Yeah. And that wasn't a fringe view, by the way. It was, you know, covers of Time and Newsweek

00:35:18.500 and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. People have forgotten that.

00:35:20.660 Yeah. And it was going to be six degrees of cooling and, you know,

00:35:23.060 it was going to be amazing changes. And that didn't happen. It bottomed out and started warming gently.

00:35:29.860 And since then, it's warmed at, you know, about a quarter of a degree per decade,

00:35:37.460 on average across the last 30, 40 years. And it's maybe, they say it's 1.5 degrees above

00:35:45.540 pre-industrial levels now, but pre-industrial levels did this, you know. So which bit do you want to

00:35:50.820 prove? I mean, we know that in the medieval period, it was warmer than today because you find

00:35:54.740 whole forests that are emerging from melting glaciers now. Well, there were forests in 1500 where there's

00:36:01.060 no glass, there would have been no glacier there now. So the glaciers come and then gone away again.

00:36:05.380 So we're not in a period of unprecedented warmth. We're not in a period of

00:36:09.620 unprecedentedly fast warmth. We're not in a period of increasing extreme weather.

00:36:14.100 Floods, droughts, storms, there's no increase in either frequency or severity.

00:36:23.940 Floods, you need to take into account the fact that we're building on floodplains and making it

00:36:28.020 harder for rivers to lose their energy and things, you know. So there are, of course,

00:36:32.260 there's man-made factors, but that's not the same as saying that it's the climate that's making

00:36:36.580 them worse. So for me, climate change is real, it's happening, it's producing an effect,

00:36:44.500 some of which is deleterious and we need to work out what to do about it.

00:36:49.780 But at the same time, the carbon dioxide we're putting in the air is having a very measurable

00:36:54.500 effect that's beneficial. And we refuse to take that into account. And that is global greening.

00:37:00.660 You know, there is more green vegetation on the planet now compared with the 1980s,

00:37:06.500 equivalent to a continent the size of North America that's been added of green vegetation.

00:37:13.220 That's an enormous impact. It's approximately 16 or 17 percent more green vegetation on the planet

00:37:21.620 now than there was in the 80s. And there's lots of ways of proving that. It's satellites,

00:37:26.740 it's the variation seasonally, but on the ground too. You take photographs in deserts, you can see

00:37:32.660 how much greener they are than they were then. And that's because carbon dioxide is plant food.

00:37:37.620 And when there's more in the air, the plants grow better, particularly in arid areas.

00:37:41.620 Now, that's had an effect on crop yields. It's not the only effect on crop yields, but it's 15 percent

00:37:47.140 is quite a good improvement. And if you add the dollar value of that up, it's very hard to make

00:37:56.420 it smaller than the dollar value of the increase in warmth that has done damage. Because even the warmth,

00:38:04.420 that means that fewer people are dying in winter. Most of the warmth is concentrated in winter at

00:38:09.540 night in the north, not in summer and daytime and in tropical areas. So for me, the cost benefit

00:38:16.260 analysis is not clear. And yet there are so many vested interests now in continuing to talk about it as

00:38:23.220 a crisis and fund it as a crisis that I'll not get a hearing for what I just said.

00:38:30.100 Well, you're getting it here. And I find it very interesting because it sounds to me a little bit,

00:38:34.820 and, you know, as part of the media ecosystem now, I kind of start to see human behavior over

00:38:41.940 time. And I begin to see patterns. And I think one of the patterns is, particularly among the

00:38:47.140 commentariat, the people who may be not informed, is to kind of go, well, you know, the line is moving

00:38:52.820 in this direction. And if we continue moving in this direction for the next 50 years, things are going

00:38:57.700 to get really bad. And then the line starts moving in another direction. And we're like,

00:39:01.940 well, if it moves in this direction, 50 years. And we forget that, like, the line moves up and down.

00:39:08.020 And that's where I think the real concern about climate change is, which is the runaway effect.

00:39:12.820 Yes. Which is, if this carries on for a long time at this rate, we really do have a problem. And I don't

00:39:19.540 think you would deny that. Absolutely.

00:39:21.140 Absolutely. So what is the reality of the runaway thing? Because that's really the big piece of it.

00:39:26.420 Yes, you're quite right. The tipping point where it's a little bit of warmth creates a lot more

00:39:32.260 warmth. That would be the worry. You start to collapse the ice sheets, that makes everything

00:39:36.340 darker and therefore warmer, because ice is white and water is dark. You know, things like that.

00:39:43.220 Maybe when you make it warmer, you get less clouds, and therefore you get more sunlight coming in.

00:39:47.460 Most of the evidence on that is that the positive feedbacks are pretty small and diminishing. We

00:39:55.220 know, for example, that for every extra bit of carbon dioxide you put in the air, you get a

00:40:00.900 diminishing effect. The first bit has a big effect, the second bit has a smaller effect, and so on.

00:40:06.900 So there are negative feedback effects and positive feedback effects.

00:40:10.820 Most of the attempts to find tipping points, you know, the collapse of the Atlantic circulation,

00:40:18.260 collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, etc., and the acceleration of sea level rise, that's another

00:40:24.660 possible threat. After 40, 50 years, we can be much more relaxed about them than we were.

00:40:30.740 And, you know, it was reasonable to worry about them in the 80s, as I did. And I wrote some

00:40:35.060 alarmist articles in the 80s, saying this thing might go haywire after a certain point.

00:40:40.500 I now think that's pretty unlikely. But if we had a technology that said we can stop emitting

00:40:49.060 carbon dioxide tomorrow and it won't cost you a penny, fine, no problem. You then have to say,

00:40:55.940 well, how difficult is it to stop emitting carbon dioxide? And we've tried for 30, 40 years now to do

00:41:04.340 that. And what today, 82% of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. The year 2000, 83%, roughly.

00:41:17.860 We've hardly changed. It's gone up a bit and then down a bit, you know, may have got to 84 at one point,

00:41:23.540 down to 81 at one point. But, you know, we can't find a replacement for fossil fuels that is both

00:41:30.820 reliable and cheap. And, you know, just think about heating your home or driving your car or whatever.

00:41:39.460 You know, it ain't that easy. And if you're living in Burkina Faso and you're burning brushwood,

00:41:47.540 which you've collected from the surrounding forest or scrub to keep yourself to cook food at night,

00:41:55.460 and the World Bank says you can't have money for a bottled gas program in that country because

00:42:06.020 it's a fossil fuel, then I think you should be pretty cross about that. Because your burning fire

00:42:12.260 is killing your kids. Indoor air pollution kills 4 million people a year. It produces more carbon

00:42:19.940 dioxide than burning gas. It steals the wood from beetles and other creatures who want to eat it.

00:42:25.700 Whereas gas doesn't do any of those things. And yet, so that's the reality of our obsession with

00:42:31.780 with trying to stop using fossil fuels is that we are doing genuine harm today. And you have to put

00:42:37.540 that in the balance against the potential future harms of runaway warming. And what are the policies?

00:42:43.620 Sorry, Francis, go for it on this. What are the policy implications of what you're saying, Matt?

00:42:47.940 If you were the chief scientific advisor or chief advisor to blah, blah, blah, would you go full

00:42:54.500 Trump drill, baby drill, no net zero, scrap all of that stuff? Should we be trying to reduce carbon

00:43:01.220 emissions at all? I think it's relatively simple. The advice I'd give was don't put it,

00:43:07.060 don't set a deadline. I mean, 2050, net zero, UK, only country doing it. We only produce 0.87% of

00:43:14.020 the world's emissions anyway. It won't make a damn bit of difference whether we hit that or not.

00:43:19.140 And the technology to do that, as I say, is not here. And it might come along in 2051. And then

00:43:24.900 you'd look a fool, wouldn't you? You'd spend a fortune trying to get rid of emissions and you 1.00

00:43:28.100 could have done it for free. So I think that's a crazy way of going about it. I think what the UK

00:43:33.300 has done is unbelievably foolish. And we should tear up net zero, get rid of the Climate Change 0.88

00:43:37.700 Committee, and instead fund research into energy technologies that might be able to solve the

00:43:49.380 problem in the future. Because if you could get fusion going economically five years earlier than

00:43:58.340 it would otherwise by a bit more funding, or if you could get small nuclear reactors cheaper five years

00:44:05.060 sooner, that would make far more difference than heat pumps and electric vehicles and all these kind

00:44:11.780 of things. So, you know, for me, it's about researching the problem to find solutions rather

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00:45:54.500 One of the things when we talk about climate change is that people tend to fold it into pollution

00:46:00.500 and damage to the wildlife and the environment, which I know you're very passionate about. I am,

00:46:05.940 so is Constantine. How do we disentangle these things? Because it's very important,

00:46:12.660 because I think we can all agree that we need to do more to preserve our wildlife and our ecology,

00:46:19.060 not only for ourselves, for our children and our grandchildren. So how do we

00:46:23.300 essentially disentangle us and make sense of this?

00:46:26.340 Well, I was in a meeting the other day where a presentation was made in which

00:46:31.540 the importance of preventing nature decline and nature depletion was talked about,

00:46:36.500 comma, as a result of the climate crisis. And I stuck up my hand and said, look,

00:46:44.420 wherever I go in the world, and I'm a keen bird watcher and love nature,

00:46:50.980 the threat to wildlife that I see is nearly always not climate. It's nearly always invasive

00:46:57.540 species or habitat destruction. So I was recently in India and I said, what's your biggest problem in

00:47:02.420 this lovely habitat in the edge of the Tar Desert? And they said, well, we've got this new invasive

00:47:06.980 tree that's coming in. Well, a couple of years ago, I was in Africa. I said, what's your biggest

00:47:10.500 problem? Oh, there's an invasive ant, which is displacing the... And then when I think about my own

00:47:15.700 farm in Northumberland, the water vole has gone extinct because of invasive mink. The

00:47:20.340 red squirrel is going extinct because of invasive grey squirrels, etc. So,

00:47:23.700 and if you look at extinctions of birds and mammals, invasive alien species that compete with

00:47:33.380 them, particularly on islands, are the biggest threat. Now, that topic gets neglected. But you're

00:47:39.060 right. People think of it as part of the same... They say, oh, I didn't mean just the climate crisis.

00:47:43.780 I meant man's impact generally. So they're sort of... They're already there, if you know what I

00:47:49.460 mean. They're just using that as a shorthand for human impacts, which is fine. But I do think it

00:47:57.780 distorts our priorities. Because if you... Climate change can be a very convenient excuse for

00:48:04.740 politicians. Yes, we can't do anything about nature decline because it's climate change. Yes,

00:48:09.300 we can't stop fires destroying Malibu because it's climate change. Politicians love talking about

00:48:15.780 climate change because then they don't have to take any responsibility for not doing preventive

00:48:20.900 burns in California, not designing better flood mitigation schemes in Britain or whatever it might

00:48:28.260 be. Not doing anything about the grey squirrel. And it becomes this... It becomes like a doomsday cult

00:48:34.500 where you can't do anything or you can't say anything against it because

00:48:39.300 there is going to be this day where the fires are going to engulf us all. Well, I think

00:48:43.700 there is a sort of love of doom in the human spirit. And if you want to get attention on the

00:48:54.020 media, which you guys do, then it really pays to do the, you know, sackcloth and ashes,

00:49:01.860 profit on a hill thing about how we're all doomed, we're doomed. You know, people have said to me,

00:49:09.220 you keep writing these books saying that people are wrong to be so pessimistic about things.

00:49:14.180 You realize you could make more money if you said the opposite.

00:49:19.460 Does that, I guess, explain the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg?

00:49:24.580 Well, she's moved on, mate. We're getting left behind. So she was the head of the climate thing.

00:49:31.220 Yeah. Now she's got a whole different issue.

00:49:33.140 She's on Palestine. She's on Palestine, mate. So your references are behind the times.

00:49:38.420 But I mean, I'm sorry, that was peak strangeness. I was going to say a ruder word, but...

00:49:46.180 It was weird. Let's just call it what it was. It was deeply weird.

00:49:49.220 That photograph of Leila Moran and Michael Gove and Ed Miliband standing, looking at a 14 or 15

00:49:58.100 year old girl, as if she was Joan of Arc, hanging on their every word when she came to parliament here.

00:50:04.420 You know, I mean, I'm sorry, she knew relatively little about the topic.

00:50:10.500 I love how diplomatic matters. A 14 year old knew relatively little about one of the most

00:50:18.820 complicated scientific subjects in human history. Yeah. She didn't quite understand the climate models

00:50:24.980 at 14. It, of course, showed that, you know, there is an element of religious dogma into this topic.

00:50:36.900 And it's got all the features of a religious cult. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't any science

00:50:43.060 there either. Of course there is. But, but, you know, if you're banning Nigel Lawson from the BBC,

00:50:52.500 which happened to him before he died, but you're allowing Greta Thunberg, something's wrong with your

00:50:59.300 priorities about truth. Yes, indeed. We had Nigel on the show during the pandemic,

00:51:04.660 right before his death, actually. A very interesting conversation. Oh, we didn't talk

00:51:08.260 about climate. Well, Matt, one of the things you talk about in your latest book, which is there,

00:51:14.500 is, you know, one of the things that we wanted to explore is the kind of maverick,

00:51:19.620 the maverick theory of science, like the great man theory of science, if you like, which is,

00:51:25.940 you know, the idea that quite a lot of progress, it does get made, you call them brave,

00:51:30.500 stroke, mad people. Is that an exaggeration? Is that a story we like to tell our kids so they

00:51:37.780 think anything is possible, but actually most science is sort of a bunch of people working

00:51:42.340 together on a thing and eventually coming to a conclusion? Or is quite a lot of it genuinely,

00:51:47.300 you know, the crazy guy coming up with a theory, everyone thinks he's an idiot for 20 years, 1.00

00:51:51.220 and then we go, oh, actually, he gave himself an ulcer. He's right. Where's the, where's the balance 1.00

00:51:56.740 between those two? It's a very good question, and one that I wrestle with, and I don't fully know

00:52:00.980 the answer to. On the one, on the one, yes, of course, an awful lot of science is incremental

00:52:08.020 improvements to knowledge by perfectly sensible, normal people working in the orthodox mainstream.

00:52:13.620 You know, one can't deny that. And, and I'm not a huge fan of the great man theory of history. I do

00:52:18.900 think there's an inevitability about certain things happening in history. But you cannot deny

00:52:26.900 that an awful lot of scientific theories start out as heresies and are advanced by mavericks.

00:52:34.900 And those mavericks have a tough time being heard. But you also can't deny that that doesn't mean

00:52:41.140 that every maverick is a genius. You know, not everyone is Galileo, not everyone is Charles Darwin.

00:52:47.460 But it, I mean, in the book I've written, Birds, Sex and Beauty, it's, it's about the, the debate on

00:52:52.660 sexual selection, which is a, an idea that Darwin had, that the choice of your mate can drive evolution

00:53:03.060 in interesting ways that survival of the fittest can't. Seduction of the hottest versus survival of

00:53:08.740 the fittest is the way I put it. And it's a much more creative and different force. And it often

00:53:13.140 doesn't help you survive, but it does help you get a mate and therefore have attractive grandchildren,

00:53:17.460 which can attract others, et cetera, et cetera. So it can, it can result in peacock's tails and

00:53:21.940 flamboyant plumage and all that. Now, Darwin had that idea quite early. He pushed it quite hard.

00:53:27.780 All his friends said he was wrong. Wallace completely disagreed with him. Alfred Russell

00:53:33.220 Wallace is his rival co-discoverer of natural selection. Even his chums like Thomas Henry Huxley

00:53:39.700 and Herbert Spencer thought he was talking through his hat. But we now know he was basically right,

00:53:45.300 that make choices an important force in evolution and not to be underestimated.

00:53:50.180 And so I just, I was very curious about the idea that we think of Darwin as triumphantly successful,

00:53:55.780 but actually one of his favorite ideas that he's devoted a lot of energy to, he lost the argument

00:54:00.180 in his lifetime. And partly because in Victorian England, if you say female lust may be behind 0.96

00:54:09.060 male coloration. It doesn't work for crusty old Victorians who are sitting around discussing these 0.97

00:54:17.620 things. They don't understand about female lust, if you should. I mean, they certainly don't want to 0.98

00:54:22.100 talk about it. So there's a cultural background there that's quite interesting. But partly this was an

00:54:29.380 excuse to go birdwatching for a year and write a book about it. Partly I'm fascinated by the colors and

00:54:34.500 flamboyant plumage of birds. Francis, you're a bird watcher, you know what I mean.

00:54:43.220 And it's genuinely difficult to explain why should birds be so conspicuous? Why do they

00:54:48.020 dance so much? Why do they sing so much? And maybe it has a story to tell about human beings too,

00:54:55.940 because we are selective about our mates both ways. Males are very selective in which females they

00:55:01.540 mate with and vice versa. And a chap called Jeffrey Miller has written a book called The Mating Mind

00:55:06.660 20 years ago. Former guest on the show.

00:55:08.740 You've had Jeffrey on the show? Yes, we have.

00:55:10.740 Big fans of his. Yeah, he's a great guy. And it's a really good book. And in it, he argues that

00:55:19.140 we think the human brain exploded in size over the last couple of million years

00:55:24.100 because of natural selection. It helped us survive on the savannah. Well, why? I mean,

00:55:30.980 A, why did it do that? And B, why didn't baboons or gazelles need bigger brains too? They were also on 0.96

00:55:37.460 the savannah. So maybe it wasn't about surviving in practical terms. Maybe it was about social

00:55:43.700 survival. Maybe it was about working out what's going on in other people's heads was an important

00:55:48.980 part of our life. And so there was a sort of social arms race between us to have big brains

00:55:52.740 to figure out what each other was thinking. That's a perfectly good hypothesis. People discussed that

00:55:58.100 ad nauseam. Jeffrey says, well, maybe actually it was about seducing each other. Maybe once we got

00:56:02.980 into the habit of saying the guy who sings well or makes good jokes is the one I want to mate with,

00:56:09.780 that could drive an explosion of the human brain that could suddenly take off in the way that it

00:56:14.100 did take off. It's such an interesting idea, I think. But nobody takes it very seriously. And nobody

00:56:21.940 has thought through the implications of it in terms of how we rethink social sciences, economics,

00:56:27.860 sociology, all these things, if it is what we devote a lot of our mental energy to.

00:56:34.660 Um, uh, you know, but having a good sense of humor is an incredibly important part of seduction as

00:56:41.860 you're comedians, aren't you? So I shouldn't really tell you that, but

00:56:44.340 Well, he's single mate, so it hasn't worked for him. By the way, I was just thinking, Francis,

00:56:50.740 that book title in your accent takes on a whole different meaning, doesn't it?

00:56:55.460 Birds, sex and beauty. Birds, sex and beauty. Yeah, exactly. Why is that a different take?

00:57:00.340 Well, birds is, I mean, is it cockney to you to talk about women as well?

00:57:04.820 Women, yes. Birds, sex and beauty. Yeah. So if you read, if you've written that book,

00:57:10.500 it would take on a whole different meaning. Yeah, more like a natureist approach. If I was,

00:57:15.060 you know, I'm a Northumbrian, if I spoke in Jordan, board, sex and beauty, like.

00:57:19.300 Yeah. But, but it's an interesting point you make. And it's, there's, there was a term for it,

00:57:26.260 uh, on the internet many, many years ago, which is called peacocking.

00:57:30.180 Really? Yes, yes. And the term peacocking in the kind of dating slash manosphere culture of the time

00:57:36.260 was you displaying your peacock feathers in whatever, in like making jokes or

00:57:41.540 displaying a particular talent that women would then become interested in. Right.

00:57:45.700 So it's interesting that you, you say that when it comes to birds. Right.

00:57:49.300 Because it makes complete sense. Right.

00:57:50.580 And by the way, it's quite an important point that I make in the book,

00:57:53.860 because we've done experiments to show that in some birds, it goes both ways. You know,

00:57:56.820 that males have to be brightly coloured to attract females, and females have to be

00:58:00.260 brightly coloured to attract males. So, so this isn't necessarily about saying it was the male brain

00:58:06.260 that did all this. It could have been just as much the other way. I think it's quite important

00:58:10.180 to say that. Well, bird feminists will be very happy you've made that point. 1.00

00:58:13.300 The avian feminist movement will send you a letter of thanks for that meaningful contribution.

00:58:22.180 Quick question, though. So if, why is it that in some species, it's a female that's colourful?

00:58:28.260 Why is it in some species, it's the male that's colourful? Or is it arbitrary?

00:58:32.100 No. Well, the answer to that was brilliantly spotted, and we should have spotted it years

00:58:36.500 earlier by a guy called Robert Trivers at Harvard in the 1970s.

00:58:39.460 He said, whichever species invests most time and energy in bringing up the offspring

00:58:48.500 ends up being dully coloured and competed for by the other one that gets brightly coloured,

00:58:53.700 because he's got the spare time, as it were, to show off. And so the exceptions prove the rule again,

00:58:59.540 which is that there's a bird I used to study, and I mentioned it in the book, called the phalarope,

00:59:05.940 in which it's the females that are brightly coloured and do a lot of the displaying, 0.99

00:59:10.100 and they do a lot of the harassing of the males. And the males sit on the eggs. And it's because the 0.72

00:59:16.260 males sit on the eggs that they're the scarce resource that the other sex is going to fight for. 1.00

00:59:20.420 Do you see what I mean? Grabbing a mate who's going to look after your eggs for you for two weeks 1.00

00:59:26.580 is so valuable that it makes sense for you to invest time and energy in being seductive. 0.95

00:59:32.580 Because there was something that I used to think when I used to see these brightly coloured

00:59:36.660 tropical birds in Venezuela, where I was like, I understand there's a beauty aspect to it,

00:59:41.940 and then you're demonstrating to your potential mate how healthy you are, how strong you are.

00:59:48.260 But doesn't that then make you more vulnerable to predators?

00:59:51.700 Absolutely. And this was one of the points that got Darwin interested in this, because he's saying,

00:59:59.940 how does this help survival? I mean, it's supposed to be survival of the fittest. And the answer is,

01:00:04.500 yeah, no. If you can win the jackpot in the next generation by fathering beautiful sons,

01:00:12.580 who all get lots of mates, then it doesn't matter if your life is short because you get hit by a hawk,

01:00:21.460 as long as you've managed to mate first. Do you see what I mean? So it's a price you pay

01:00:30.020 for winning the seduction lottery is you lose the survival lottery. And obviously there's a balance.

01:00:36.740 But it makes perfect sense within the selfish gene explanation of these things, doesn't it? Because

01:00:41.780 it's not about the unit, Matt Ridley or Constantin kissing, it's about me passing on my genes. So if I

01:00:47.780 can live to 50 and have 10 kids, that's a hell of a lot better than living to 100 and having none,

01:00:52.820 right? Exactly that. You put it beautifully.

01:00:55.220 Yeah.

01:00:55.620 Yes, I don't think I would.

01:00:56.500 Matt, you should come on many, many more times.

01:00:58.500 You put it beautifully. See, this is why Matt is a regular guest on the show. He's just,

01:01:05.460 he's so spot on about everything, isn't he? Yeah.

01:01:08.020 He just knows how to just, you know, say it exactly how it is.

01:01:11.220 And he does it at the end of the interview. So we remember it. So then we invite him back for next

01:01:14.820 time.

01:01:15.380 Matt, always a pleasure to have you on. We're going to take some questions from

01:01:18.660 our audience in a second on our sub stack. Before we do, we always end with the same question,

01:01:23.140 as you well know, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:01:26.340 Is it Anthony Fauci getting that pardon? Pre-pardon? Wasn't it a pre-pardon? It was a preemptive

01:01:33.700 pardon.

01:01:34.100 Yeah, it went back to 2014. There's something on the tip of my tongue and the back of my mind. I think

01:01:48.180 we're not talking about that asteroid that's aiming at us in 2032 or something.

01:01:54.740 What? There's an asteroid.

01:01:57.460 It's only 0.1% chance it's going to hit us or 0.1%, I can't remember, but you know.

01:02:02.820 So why are you scaring the public, man?

01:02:07.460 At one point, at some point.

01:02:10.420 We're all going to die.

01:02:11.300 Well, we're going to have to work out how to deflect one. It's not an Earth killer,

01:02:18.660 but it could be a city killer, this one. Now, I gather they've downgraded its chances. It was 2%,

01:02:24.340 it's now 1% or something, you know, so we probably don't need to worry about that.

01:02:27.220 But do we know where it's going to hit?

01:02:29.540 No, no. I mean, it's a long way off yet. I mean, you know, you know, whatever.

01:02:34.420 The planet spins.

01:02:35.300 No, sorry.

01:02:35.860 That was a very non-scientific way of using it.

01:02:40.660 That was the plane of the ecliptic.

01:02:42.980 Yeah.

01:02:44.820 No, sorry. It's a better one, actually. I don't know if you can edit that out.

01:02:48.500 But we can, but why would be?

01:02:50.740 Yeah, exactly. There's a guy called Avi Loeb, who's the professor of astrophysics at Harvard University,

01:02:59.220 and he is convinced that an object came in from another solar system, vertically sort of through

01:03:13.620 the plane of our solar system and passed between us and the sun in 2017. It was called something

01:03:19.380 like Umumia. It's got a Hawaiian name. And this is true. I mean, that's a fact that it did that.

01:03:26.820 But he's convinced it might have been an artificial object, not a natural object.

01:03:32.580 Because it was flashing on and off. It was bright, then dark, bright, then dark, bright, then dark.

01:03:37.700 Probably that means it was long and thin. And so it was spinning. And when it was pointing towards us,

01:03:41.060 it was dark. And when it was sideways on, it was brighter. It then did an acceleration that is

01:03:47.060 quite hard to explain. Not impossible to explain, but quite hard to explain.

01:03:50.980 Now, most of the astrophysics community says Avi's talking through his hat,

01:03:54.580 and he doesn't know what he's talking about. And it's far more likely to be natural.

01:03:59.380 Well, why? He's saying we don't know the Bayesian prior logic here, whether it's more likely to be

01:04:05.940 natural or artificial. If it's come from another solar system, an interstellar trajectory,

01:04:14.020 the chance, you know, it's possible that it was sent to our solar system.

01:04:22.820 And it's possible it had a solar wind collector to speed it up. So as it gets past the sun,

01:04:27.540 it does speed up. You know, you can imagine a technology that would do that. A solar sail,

01:04:31.940 I think is the word. And he wrote a wonderful book about this. And all his colleagues think

01:04:37.780 he's a complete nutcase. And I like nutcases. 0.99

01:04:41.220 Mm. Clearly. Well, thanks for being here with two other nutcases. We'll take a look at it. But, 0.93

01:04:46.900 uh, I mean, they part, they went, this object went past us, but didn't make any contact and

01:04:51.700 probably took a look at what's happening on earth and went off and just carried on.

01:04:57.380 Well, Matt, it's great to have you on the show. Head on over to Substack where we ask

01:05:01.060 Matt Ridley your questions.

01:05:02.180 How much of this politicization of the sciences can be attributed to people

01:05:07.860 being just being unwilling to accept that life isn't fair?

01:05:12.180 Uticasht. 0.79

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TRIGGERnometry - June 15, 2025

Net Zero Must Go - Matt Ridley

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