In this episode of Trigonometry, we're joined by environmentalist and author Ian McKellen to talk about climate change and why he thinks it's the biggest cult in scientific history. We also hear from author and environmentalist, Dr. Kelly, who tells us about her journey to becoming a scientist and why she thinks climate change is the biggest scam in history.
00:03:23.000I did psychology because that's where all the girls were.
00:03:26.000I did botany because I was interested in the relationship between plants and soils and how we do, in geology, look at vegetation and work out what the rock types are and what's going on.
00:03:39.000I did political science, which was a comparison of the British, American and Australian systems.
00:13:11.000So it's absolutely crippling Western countries who are going down this path because you cannot run an industrial economy on sea breezes and sunbeams.
00:15:06.000I think that's just a matter of fact for anyone who's looked at it with an open mind and with anything like a rational approach.
00:15:13.000But on the science aspect, this is where I really wanted to explore the things that you're saying, because I think this is incredibly valuable.
00:15:19.000Why do you think the scientific community, or at least this is what we've been told, the scientific community has arrived at a point where the vast, we keep being told, the vast majority of scientists agree that human activity is causing climate change.
00:15:35.000And it will cause it to get to a point where it's a runaway climate change, which means we basically can't go back and the planet just overheats, quote unquote.
00:15:43.000How do we get to that being the consensus view?
00:15:48.000Well, you never have consensus in science.
00:15:50.000Once you've got consensus, it isn't science.
00:15:52.000The second thing is we've had times in the past when the carbon dioxide countered the atmosphere was at least 10% and perhaps 20% compared with 0.04%.
00:16:17.000We geologists see this and we understand it.
00:16:20.000I just want to flesh that out, just sorry to interrupt.
00:16:23.000So what you're saying is there have been times in the history of this planet when there's been hundreds of times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today.
00:16:32.000That at those points, it was incredibly cold.
00:16:35.000You know how at the beginning of every year, people say this is a year things change.
00:16:40.000Then by February, everything looks the same.
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00:28:24.000So I think it's an irrational way of thinking.
00:28:28.000Well, let's come back to the science a little bit.
00:28:30.000Can you give us, I think one of the interesting things whenever we talk to someone like you, is you operate on a timescale that the overwhelming majority of people have no way of even conceptualizing in their head, which is millions of years, hundreds of millions of years.
00:28:47.000Do you think that's part of the reason we're here in the sense that I often think like if people saw the entire history of global temperatures and saw where we are on it, they would ask a lot more questions than anyone's been asking.
00:29:01.000But if you only look at the last 50 years, then a story can be told that's much more persuasive about how it's all doom and gloom.
00:29:14.000So they can't ask the right questions.
00:29:16.000And that's why we geologists are never regarded seriously when it comes to climate change, because the same processes that operated 100 years ago or a billion years ago, they're still here.
00:29:27.000You have to change the laws of physics and chemistry.
00:29:31.000If you're going to say, well, the geology is wrong, it doesn't work.
00:29:34.000So when we look in the past, we look at the six great ice ages.
00:29:38.000We look at the five great extinctions of complex life.
00:29:41.000But we also integrate that with history.
00:29:44.000We integrate it with what has been lived.
00:29:47.000So I used the example before when someone might say, oh, you know, it's the hottest time we've had ever.
00:29:54.000You say, well, no, we've cooled down since the time of Jesus.
00:30:22.000But when you look at the temperature over time, and you don't need to go back very far, the temperature doesn't change very much at all in our lifetime compared with the past.
00:30:34.000It was a period after the last glaciation, which ended 14,400 years ago, where the ice sheets broke up and dropped huge amounts of ice into the Atlantic Ocean.
00:33:46.000We have a circumpolar current, and it freezes.
00:33:49.000Once we break up Antarctica, currents will be able to move, and we will go back to the normal situation
00:33:55.000that planet Earth has been in, where it's been warmer and it's been wetter, and sea level's been about 200 metres higher.
00:34:01.000We've got extremely good evidence of that time and time again over the past.
00:34:06.000So these 400 million-year cycles, it's not quite 400 million years.
00:34:11.000It varies a little bit, but these are tectonic cycles.
00:34:14.000We've got galactic cycles, where every 143 million years we've got a bad address in the galaxy, and we get cold.
00:34:22.000We've got orbital cycles, these Milankovic cycles, which get spoken about a lot.
00:34:28.000And their cycle is on about 100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 20,000 years.
00:34:33.000And that changes the distance we are from the sun.
00:34:36.000And then we've got solar cycles, and we've got some long ones, around 10,000 years, and we've just come out of a grand solar maximum.
00:34:44.000We've got cycles about 217 years, sorry, 1500 years, and the 22-year cycle, which has been known for hundreds of years.
00:34:55.000We've got lunar tidal cycles, where we push warm water up into the Arctic.
00:35:00.000That's from the moon, and that's over 18.6 years.
00:35:04.000And so that combined with the ocean cycles, which are every 600 years, sorry, every 60 years, you can then plot the exploration of the Northwest Passage.
00:35:21.000So we've got these oceanic cycles, and just recently there's been a cycle which, I want to see more evidence, but there's a suggestion there might be a Martian cycle every 2.4 million years.
00:35:33.000So we've got solar cycles, orbital cycles, galactic cycles, tectonic cycles, and all of that is being reduced to saying traces of a trace gas in the atmosphere drive a major planetary system.
00:35:48.000Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.
00:35:50.000How much of this is about hubris, Ian?
00:35:53.000Because the way I see it is 1,000 years ago, 14,000 years ago, it gets colder.
00:36:01.000We look around, we go, it's getting colder.
00:36:16.000We're so competent at solving problems that we almost, I think, are pre-wired to think that every problem that exists, A, has been caused by us, and B, must be solved as opposed to adjusted to.
00:36:30.000How much of it is simply about the fact that human beings, in line with increasing technological advancement, have become very, very arrogant about that?
00:36:41.000Well, if we had another inevitable glaciation, we could solve it technologically, already in parts of the world with triple glazing.
00:36:50.000We could solve it, as long as we've got energy that can keep us warm, and as long as we've got international trade to bring food from warmer climates.
00:37:01.000In the peak of the Little Ice Age, we had the maunder minimum, and that very cold period was obviously due to sinful humans, and it was deemed that the witches were making the harvests fail.
00:37:17.000And so witches were rounded up, and witches were drowned.
00:37:21.000And after they stopped drowning the witches, we came out of the maunder minimum, and it warmed up.
00:38:00.000And it's also, the thing that I resent is I don't mind having conversations about climate science, climate change, but talking to different people have got different views.
00:40:52.000That's an absolutely, totally different story to what we're told, simply because it doesn't follow the popular paradigm.
00:40:59.000And what's really interesting now, actually, is that you're seeing a number of big name people who pushed this narrative, who are now starting to roll back on it.
00:42:31.000Well, here's where I'll permit myself to disagree with you, though, Ian, because I think what Francis's point is when Tony Blair and Bill Gates and others wrote back on their previous advocacy for dealing with climate change through net zero.
00:42:45.000That's not a scientist changing his mind, having looked at different data.
00:42:53.000I also think partly it's a political and cultural view because you are a seeing results in the real world, which is increased populism because energy being expensive ruins economies.
00:43:06.000And when economies are ruined, people get upset.
00:43:33.000I think there's been a very significant change there.
00:43:36.000And that's that's very much political.
00:43:38.000But it's also driven by the cost of energy and the cost of energy now is crippling.
00:43:42.000In this country, people have to make a decision whether they have a hot bath, whether they have a hot meal or whether they put on the heating.
00:43:48.000Now, for a first world country, that's just impossible.
00:43:57.000And this is why someone who might be pushing a different agenda gets attracted.
00:44:03.000And the thing that I find particularly worrying is what you're talking about is how there is an institutional capture in these scientific institutes.
00:44:12.000And you're thinking to yourself, well, that is really dangerous, because if we can't trust what's coming out of the scientific institutions, then that ultimately is not just going to undermine people's faith in climate science.
00:44:25.000They're going to go, well, if I can't trust this, how can I trust this?
00:44:33.000So why wouldn't they be lying about that?
00:44:35.000I think it was because it was politicised and the politicians jumped on the bandwagon and the so-called climate scientists could see that there was a pot of money here to keep their institute going, to have research grants, to run and go to conferences.
00:44:53.000And so once science is politicised, that's the end result.
00:45:17.000Politising various aspects of science, which may or may not be important for, say, defence or medicine, terribly dangerous.
00:45:27.000And we're talking about the politicisation of science.
00:45:29.000And look, I never thought of science as being something that was inherently political until relatively recently, until what we're talking about now, the climate science.
00:45:39.000Has it always been political or is that something new that's come in?
00:46:14.000And it's also as well, you have to be fair to scientists and go, look, if their research isn't going to get published or if it's going to negatively affect their career, then why would they publish research?
00:46:27.000People only respond to incentives, scientists, however smart or brilliant they might be, are still human beings.
00:46:37.000And so many universities now have climate institutes because that's where the money is.
00:46:43.000So many people are getting whacking big research grants because governments don't want to be accused of ignoring climate.
00:46:51.000Well, that being the case, I think it'd be interesting to talk about you mentioned that we are likely to revert to the mean, which is warmer, wetter, as I think you said.
00:47:01.000And you said a third thing as well, warmer, wetter and something else.
00:47:05.000Warmer, wetter and higher sea levels, which I would argue, based on my very rudimentary understanding of just human society as it is today, given the number of people living on the planet, those things will be disruptive.
00:47:19.000And if they are inevitable, all that money that we've been spending trying to stop the inevitable change in climate and sea levels ought to be being spent on making adjustments to the way we live and creating all sorts of, you know, the sorts of things they do in Holland to manage sea levels, to protect towns and cities.
00:47:39.000Isn't one of the things that's really the tragedy here is there's been a huge misallocation of resources that has impoverished Western countries at the same time as leaving them vulnerable to the very thing that they are trying to prevent but can't?
00:48:34.000A little bit further south, go to Lydia.
00:48:36.000That's where gold coins were first made and first minted.
00:48:39.000I've been to Lydia down the main street in a yacht.
00:48:42.000So the land level is going up and down all the time and we humans have adjusted to that.
00:48:46.000Well, I took my mum the other day to Pevensey Castle, which is just down the road from London on the south coast.
00:48:54.000And you go to one of the towers and they say this is where they would defend themselves from the sea.
00:49:00.000You can't see the sea because it's now seven miles inland.
00:49:03.000I can't remember how many miles, but you can't even remotely even imagine the sea being there because it's so far away.
00:49:09.000So this process is natural. But what I'm asking you, Ian, is I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from, oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realising we can't stop climate change because we're not causing it.
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00:53:52.000I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from, oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realising we can't stop climate change because we're not causing it.
00:54:05.000So what is it that we need to do to ensure humans are thriving on the planet?
00:54:14.000We do know that when it's colder, you have more wars, you have more disease, and you have more people die.
00:54:21.000We have people have a decreased longevity in cold periods of time.
00:54:26.000So we've always known this, and when we look at deaths, there's been a survey done, a medical survey of 34 million deaths related to climate.
00:54:36.000And more than 90% of people, if they have a climate-related death, is due to the cold, not the warm.
00:54:42.000So we are already adapting, and that's the one thing we humans can do.
00:54:46.000We can adapt and adapt very, very quickly.
00:54:49.000A rising sea level, it's not overnight.
00:54:53.000The one geological process that would be difficult to adapt to very quickly would be an asteroid impact.
00:55:00.000And the chances of that decrease all the time as the solar system settles down even more.
00:55:21.000We'll do it again and probably be much better because we're a technological species now.
00:55:26.000One of the things that I found concerning about the whole climate change debate is we know that humans have a very real impact on the world.
00:55:34.000And they have a very detrimental impact when we think about ecology, when we think about sea life, when we think about animal life.
00:55:40.000But we don't tend to talk about that anymore, Ian, because the moment we talk about humans' impact on the world, we talk about climate change.
00:55:49.000When actually there's so many more important or just as important things that we need to talk about and address like pollution, microplastics, et cetera.
00:55:59.000Well, we've got the eight major rivers that are putting plastics into the ocean.
00:56:03.000We've got the oceans with a large amount of microplastics.
00:56:06.000We have changed climate at, say, Mount Kilimanjaro by forest clearing.
00:56:10.000We've had less precipitation on Mount Kilimanjaro.
00:56:32.000And what I find difficult to understand is that to solve the world's climate crisis, whatever that is, is we are knocking down forests to put in wind turbines.
00:56:43.000These wind turbine blades have poisonous chemicals in them, they've got asbestos in them, and we are cutting swathes of forest, killing off wildlife, doing the same with offshore wind turbines to save the planet.
00:57:00.000You know, we had to destroy the village to save it.
00:57:03.000Yeah, it just doesn't make sense because when I hear scientists talking about this, we should be talking about other things like species extinction.
00:57:11.000And also, as well, you go, the whole thing doesn't make sense because we're so interested in essentially deindustrialising.
00:57:18.000Yeah, it seems every week, I think it's every week, China opens two new coal power stations.