TRIGGERnometry - The Climate Crisis is a Scam - Professor Ian Plimer

00:00:01.000 You said that climate science is the biggest cult in scientific history.

00:00:06.000 Why do you say that?

00:00:07.000 Because it's costing the planet trillions.

00:00:10.000 There's a very large body of people out there who actually are using science to promote scams.

00:00:16.000 It's absolutely crippling Western countries who are going down this path

00:00:20.000 because you cannot run an industrial economy on sea breezes and sunbeams.

00:00:26.000 What you're saying is there have been times in the history of this planet

00:00:29.000 when there's been hundreds of times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today?

00:00:34.000 Yes. We've had times in the past when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was at least 10%

00:00:39.000 and perhaps 20% compared with 0.04%.

00:00:43.000 And what did we have then? We had the biggest ice ages this planet's ever enjoyed.

00:00:47.000 On the one hand, you say it's not commensurate with the science.

00:00:51.000 On the other hand, you're the only scientist who's been saying this for a long time.

00:00:55.000 How do you explain that?

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00:02:18.000 Ian, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:02:19.000 Thank you.

00:02:20.000 Great to have you on.

00:02:21.000 Tell us a little bit about you before we get into the conversation itself.

00:02:25.000 I was born and bred in Sydney.

00:02:27.000 I had a passionate interest in rocks as a child.

00:02:30.000 I used to take them into the Australian Museum and the curator was very kind with me.

00:02:37.000 He spent a lot of time with these dreadful rocks, explaining what they meant.

00:02:41.000 20 years later, I was publishing with him.

00:02:43.000 So that really made his life, but he made my life also.

00:02:47.000 And I followed my passion at school and at university.

00:02:51.000 I had to repeat a year at school because I was far too young.

00:02:54.000 These were the post-war days where kids just poured into school.

00:02:58.000 And because I could read and write, I got put into a higher class.

00:03:01.000 And because I still could read and write better than anyone else, up into a higher class.

00:03:04.000 So I finished school at 15.

00:03:06.000 And that was far too young to go to university.

00:03:08.000 So I repeated a year.

00:03:10.000 I went to university and followed my passion.

00:03:13.000 And when I finished my undergraduate degree, I took an extra year to study things that I really liked.

00:03:20.000 I studied counterpoint in music.

00:03:23.000 I did psychology because that's where all the girls were. 1.00

00:03:26.000 I 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.

00:03:39.000 I did political science, which was a comparison of the British, American and Australian systems.

00:03:45.000 And they were all very interesting.

00:03:46.000 And I did English literature.

00:03:48.000 So I felt then that my degree was complete.

00:03:51.000 And then I went and worked underground at Broken Hill, which is a mining town that's been operating since 1883.

00:03:58.000 And that was fascinating.

00:04:00.000 And I did an honours degree working on the rocks underground.

00:04:04.000 And then I went off and did a PhD again working underground.

00:04:07.000 This was in far north Queensland.

00:04:09.000 At the same time, I was part-time tutoring in university, that's right.

00:04:16.000 And then I moved back to Broken Hill.

00:04:19.000 And that was probably the most productive period of my scientific life.

00:04:23.000 I was publishing a lot of work.

00:04:25.000 I was working in the field.

00:04:26.000 I was working underground.

00:04:28.000 And then I went to the head office of the company in Melbourne.

00:04:35.000 And I left them on a day which I can never forget.

00:04:40.000 We were passengers in their corporate jet.

00:04:43.000 It ran out of fuel.

00:04:44.000 It crashed.

00:04:45.000 And not many people live from crashing in a forest.

00:04:50.000 And I'd had an offer from the university because I had a lot of experience in the mining.

00:04:55.000 I'd had a lot of publications out there.

00:04:58.000 And I thought I'd better take that off.

00:05:00.000 I have three young kids.

00:05:01.000 I don't particularly want to be travelling the world, flying in private planes and crashing

00:05:06.000 in forests.

00:05:07.000 And that really changed my life.

00:05:09.000 And that's when I started to combine what I knew from underground safety with general safety.

00:05:16.000 And working in a university, there's really very little understanding of safety, very little

00:05:21.000 understanding of responsibility and consequences for your action.

00:05:25.000 And I very quickly became a chair at the University of Newcastle.

00:05:29.000 That's Newcastle in Australia, not in the UK.

00:05:32.000 And then after Newcastle, I was the Lehrstuhl von Lagerstettenkunde, the professor of mineral

00:05:37.000 deposits at Munich.

00:05:39.000 I thought that was Australian for a second.

00:05:42.000 Well, we have a German population.

00:05:45.000 In fact, the broken hill oil body was found by a German. 1.00

00:05:48.000 That's a very different story.

00:05:50.000 And then I came back to Australia to be the professor and head of earth sciences at the

00:05:56.000 University of Melbourne.

00:05:58.000 And in my department, I had geology, geophysics and meteorology.

00:06:02.000 These same meteorologists who I saved from extinction when the university wanted to close

00:06:07.000 them down are now climate scientists.

00:06:09.000 And they are some of my biggest critics, which is quite amusing.

00:06:13.000 And then after the University of Melbourne, I was given the opportunity to build a new

00:06:19.000 department of mining engineering at the University of Adelaide.

00:06:22.000 I went from a tenured chair to an untenured chair.

00:06:25.000 It was just a challenge.

00:06:26.000 And I had the minerals industry supporting me, the South Australian government supporting

00:06:30.000 me, the university.

00:06:31.000 And so I went there.

00:06:32.000 It was a challenge.

00:06:33.000 It was really quite an easy job because all I had to do was to raise a lot of money every

00:06:37.000 year.

00:06:38.000 And with all my contacts in the minerals industry, that was easy.

00:06:41.000 And then when I finished up at the University of Adelaide, I went back into the minerals 0.99

00:06:47.000 industry.

00:06:48.000 I now work as a director of Australia's biggest private company.

00:06:52.000 That's Hancock Prospecting.

00:06:53.000 They have operations all the way around the world.

00:06:56.000 I'm a very big iron oil producer, producer of gas.

00:07:00.000 And during my university time, I got interested in creationism.

00:07:07.000 And these were people who claim that the planet formed 6,000 years ago, that there was a global

00:07:13.000 flood 4,000 years ago, and that all sedimentary rocks formed in this flood.

00:07:17.000 And this was a scientific nonsense.

00:07:19.000 Yet they were claiming it was science.

00:07:21.000 And this was in the 90s.

00:07:23.000 And this was my training for various other things in life.

00:07:27.000 And so I wrote quite a few articles.

00:07:30.000 I had various debates with creationists.

00:07:32.000 I put out a book called Telling Lies for God, which was gentle and non-provocative, as

00:07:37.000 the title suggests.

00:07:39.000 And I realised that there's a very large body of people out there who actually are using

00:07:45.000 science to promote scams.

00:07:47.000 And the creationists were one of these.

00:07:49.000 Yes, they were deeply religious, but they were very misguided.

00:07:52.000 And then I saw exactly the same thing arise in the late 90s with climate change.

00:07:58.000 I could see exactly the same hallmarks.

00:08:00.000 This was a religion.

00:08:02.000 It had all the hallmarks of the religion with sin and with redemption, with paying penance. 0.98

00:08:08.000 And basically, you have to give up something in your life.

00:08:13.000 We won't as the leaders of the religion, but you have to.

00:08:17.000 And I started to look at the science.

00:08:19.000 And the science is absolutely, totally in commensurate with my science, and that is geology.

00:08:24.000 I'd published, by then, hundreds of scientific papers.

00:08:27.000 By then, I'd had a few books out.

00:08:29.000 I'd edited an encyclopedia of geology.

00:08:33.000 I'm a polymath with a specialist in one area, but I could see very quickly this wasn't science.

00:08:40.000 This was absolute nonsense.

00:08:43.000 Because if you were to promote an idea in science, it has to be commensurate with all the other

00:08:49.000 validated work in science.

00:08:51.000 And this wasn't commensurate with what we know in geology and what we've known for hundreds of years.

00:08:56.000 We've known about sea level changes for a long time.

00:08:59.000 Charles Darwin wrote a book about coral reefs and sea level changes.

00:09:03.000 That was in 1842.

00:09:05.000 So what we've been told about sea level change was just nonsense.

00:09:09.000 We also had seen cycles of climate in the past where we've had very, very warm periods.

00:09:14.000 We've had very cold periods.

00:09:16.000 We've had six major ice ages.

00:09:18.000 We're currently in one of those ice ages.

00:09:20.000 It started 34 million years ago.

00:09:22.000 And during that time, carbon dioxide has changed enormously.

00:09:26.000 It was unrelated to temperature.

00:09:28.000 It never has been in the past, so I can't see why it has to be in the present.

00:09:32.000 And we see in the rocks that when you can back-calculate how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere,

00:09:38.000 we've had for the last 500 million years a decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

00:09:43.000 It's dangerously low.

00:09:44.000 If we halved it, we'd have no vegetation.

00:09:47.000 So I could see that all of these ideas coming out on climate change were total nonsense.

00:09:52.000 And I could see there was a big business evolving behind it, as I saw with the creationists.

00:09:57.000 So I thought, well, it's about time I compared them.

00:10:00.000 I did quite a bit of writing on this.

00:10:02.000 I've written, I think, probably half a dozen books on it now.

00:10:05.000 I got on a lecture tour, gave many lectures, many podcasts, broadcasts.

00:10:12.000 I have a weekly segment on Sky TV.

00:10:15.000 Sky TV in Australia is very different from Sky in the UK, which is a bit to the left.

00:10:20.000 So I got very active in this, and I was really the only voice in science that was talking like this.

00:10:27.000 A few other geologists were doing it, but not as active.

00:10:31.000 And because the climate story we've been told is incommensurate with validated science elsewhere, then it's not science.

00:10:39.000 To a normal person listening, there may seem like there's a contradiction there.

00:10:43.000 On the one hand, you say it's not commensurate with the science.

00:10:47.000 On the other hand, you're the only scientist who's been saying this for a long time.

00:10:50.000 How do you explain that?

00:10:51.000 Well, right across the board in geology, people object to this new religion of climate science.

00:10:59.000 You can count on a sawmillers hand the number of geologists who would agree with popular paradigm.

00:11:06.000 Simply because we look at the past, we see sea levels go up and down all the time.

00:11:10.000 We see massive ice ages.

00:11:12.000 We see very rapid temperature changes.

00:11:14.000 It's all written in the rock.

00:11:16.000 We happen to be a minor science, and many scientists, once they retire from universities and institutions,

00:11:24.000 will then stand up and say, well, look, I don't think we're right.

00:11:28.000 I don't think this is right.

00:11:30.000 So geology is a very different science in that we use a lot of observation,

00:11:34.000 and we link it with experiments in physics and experiments in chemistry,

00:11:37.000 and very few people know geology. 0.51

00:11:39.000 So right across the board in geology, you'll find people just say, oh, that's just rubbish.

00:11:44.000 So you mean in other fields people are not saying this stuff?

00:11:48.000 People in astronomy are criticizing climate science.

00:11:52.000 People in some areas of solar physics are criticizing climate science.

00:11:58.000 It's not universal.

00:12:00.000 And the one thing you see when you look at the IPCC reports is there's no geology.

00:12:04.000 There's no paleontology.

00:12:06.000 And they're the clues to what sea water temperature might have been.

00:12:09.000 They're the clues to what sea levels are doing.

00:12:11.000 It's not there.

00:12:13.000 And Ian, you said that climate science is the biggest cult in scientific history.

00:12:19.000 And when I heard that, I was like, wow, that's a pretty bold statement.

00:12:23.000 Why do you say that?

00:12:24.000 Why do you stand behind that particular statement?

00:12:26.000 Because it's costing the planet trillions as a result of the climate science hysteria to completely change energy systems,

00:12:36.000 which are constantly being revised and constantly made more efficient.

00:12:40.000 And we've abandoned efficient, cheap, reliable energy.

00:12:44.000 And putting in unreliable energy, we're completely recapitalizing grids.

00:12:49.000 We're completely recapitalizing generation of electricity.

00:12:52.000 There isn't enough electricity.

00:12:54.000 We have to have backup, which is enormously expensive, which lasts for a very short period of time.

00:12:58.000 The costs are absolutely horrendous.

00:13:00.000 Now, scientists will publish work.

00:13:02.000 But if there's an economic consequence from that work, there'd be no responsibility.

00:13:07.000 They will get on and publish the next paper.

00:13:09.000 And then they publish the next paper.

00:13:11.000 So it's absolutely crippling Western countries who are going down this path because you cannot run an industrial economy on sea breezes and sunbeams.

00:13:22.000 There's just not enough grunt.

00:13:23.000 So what we're effectively talking about is net zero.

00:13:26.000 And what do you think about the UK's approach to net zero?

00:13:30.000 Well, I think you should tell your prime minister that you breathe in 0.04% carbon dioxide.

00:13:39.000 And because he's metabolizing food, he breathes out 4% carbon dioxide.

00:13:44.000 So if he wants to go to net zero, drop dead.

00:13:47.000 That's the solution. 1.00

00:13:49.000 It's totally ridiculous.

00:13:51.000 Our bodies are carbon based. 0.66

00:13:52.000 Carbon dioxide is a major planetary gas.

00:13:55.000 It's been around for billions of years.

00:13:58.000 The first atmosphere had methane and hydrogen and helium and some carbon dioxide in it.

00:14:05.000 The second atmosphere, which was dominant for a very long period of time, was rich in carbon dioxide.

00:14:10.000 And it had hundreds of times more carbon dioxide than now.

00:14:13.000 And what do we see?

00:14:14.000 A thriving of life.

00:14:15.000 And the third atmosphere is an oxygen-bearing atmosphere which we currently live in.

00:14:19.000 So we've had an evolution of the atmosphere.

00:14:21.000 We've demonized something which you can't see.

00:14:24.000 You can't taste it.

00:14:25.000 You can't smell it.

00:14:27.000 And so you can demonize it.

00:14:28.000 The same as you can demonize viruses or bacteria or radiation.

00:14:32.000 It's a wonderful, wonderful thing to scare people with.

00:14:36.000 We don't get told that carbon dioxide is plant food.

00:14:40.000 And without carbon dioxide, you have no life on Earth.

00:14:42.000 And what's the rationale for doing this?

00:14:45.000 Because, look, on the net zero side of it, there are some people who still haven't caught up.

00:14:51.000 But I regard what you're saying about net zero as completely uncontroversial.

00:14:55.000 I think it's exceedingly clear at this point that net zero is economic suicide.

00:15:00.000 And I think that's what we're seeing in our country, in other countries.

00:15:03.000 And I don't think that's controversial.

00:15:05.000 I don't think that's questionable.

00:15:06.000 I 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.

00:15:13.000 But 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.

00:15:19.000 Why 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.

00:15:35.000 And 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.

00:15:43.000 How do we get to that being the consensus view?

00:15:46.000 And is it the consensus view?

00:15:48.000 Well, you never have consensus in science.

00:15:50.000 Once you've got consensus, it isn't science.

00:15:52.000 The 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%.

00:16:02.000 And what did we have then?

00:16:03.000 We had the biggest ice ages this planet's ever enjoyed.

00:16:06.000 And this is when we had kilometres of ice at the equator at sea level.

00:16:10.000 And the evidence for this is incontrovertible.

00:16:13.000 It's worldwide.

00:16:14.000 And this is written in the rocks.

00:16:17.000 We geologists see this and we understand it.

00:16:20.000 I just want to flesh that out, just sorry to interrupt.

00:16:23.000 So 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.

00:16:31.000 Yes.

00:16:32.000 That at those points, it was incredibly cold.

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00:19:55.000 Yes.

00:19:56.000 On average.

00:19:57.000 Yes.

00:19:58.000 And then it warmed up quickly in the interglacials and then it cooled down again.

00:20:01.000 That's not driven by carbon dioxide.

00:20:03.000 That's driven by something else like that great ball of heat in the sky we call the sun.

00:20:07.000 It's driven by the Earth's orbit.

00:20:09.000 It's driven by many, many other factors.

00:20:11.000 It's driven by where the continents might be.

00:20:13.000 So we've had very high carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before.

00:20:17.000 And what has happened is we've sequestered that into carbonate rocks.

00:20:21.000 And this has been happening for a long period of time.

00:20:24.000 Now, with those older glaciations, the carbonate rock was dolomite,

00:20:27.000 which has got 48% of the gas carbon dioxide in it.

00:20:31.000 That's by weight.

00:20:32.000 And so we've pulled that carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

00:20:36.000 And in younger times, in the last 20% of time,

00:20:40.000 we've pulled carbon dioxide out of the limestone.

00:20:43.000 We've pulled it into carbon-rich sediments, black shales, into coals,

00:20:49.000 into the shells, which are now fossils, into carbon-rich rocks.

00:20:55.000 So that's been sequestered out of the atmosphere.

00:20:58.000 And that process has been going on for at least a billion years.

00:21:01.000 But we certainly have got very good evidence that about 500 million years ago,

00:21:06.000 when we had an explosion of life, we had 0.7% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

00:21:10.000 It's gone down to 0.04%.

00:21:13.000 Where's it gone?

00:21:14.000 It's gone into the rocks, into sediments.

00:21:17.000 Now, during that 500 million years, we've had a couple, three major ice ages,

00:21:24.000 yet carbon dioxide has been going down over time.

00:21:27.000 So there's no relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide.

00:21:30.000 So why do so many people in the scientific world, in government, in politics,

00:21:37.000 why do so many people believe that there is this strong connection?

00:21:40.000 Well, you've used the word believe, and that's a word of religion and politics.

00:21:43.000 It's not a word of science.

00:21:45.000 And they believe it because that's the way of putting bread on the table.

00:21:50.000 Now, I've had these people in various departments that I've run,

00:21:54.000 and these people are mainly mathematical modellers.

00:21:58.000 They're eminently unemployable.

00:22:00.000 They are able to get grants from governments by scaring people witless,

00:22:04.000 and the government throws them a few shackles to keep them alive.

00:22:08.000 And they base their life on a model, looking at what might happen in the future,

00:22:14.000 and if something goes wrong, they'll redo the model.

00:22:17.000 Now, we've had 40 years of models now,

00:22:19.000 and of the 102 major models we have, not one of them has told us what we've measured

00:22:25.000 over the last 40 years.

00:22:27.000 So they don't work because they make one assumption, which is invalid,

00:22:32.000 and that is that carbon dioxide drives temperature.

00:22:35.000 Now, there's not one scientific paper out there, and this is a big call,

00:22:39.000 but you can check it out.

00:22:40.000 There's not one scientific paper there that demonstrates that human emissions

00:22:45.000 drive global warming.

00:22:47.000 If there were, you'd never hear the end of it.

00:22:50.000 Now, this is a question I always ask people who call themselves climate scientists,

00:22:54.000 and I question that.

00:22:57.000 I say, show me.

00:22:58.000 Show me the evidence, because that's what you do in science.

00:23:00.000 Show me the evidence.

00:23:01.000 Show me that the human emissions drive global warming,

00:23:04.000 and if you can show me, then you've got to show me that the other emissions,

00:23:08.000 which are natural, which are 97% of the emissions,

00:23:11.000 don't drive global warming.

00:23:12.000 It's never been done.

00:23:14.000 So the whole thing is a fallacy right from the start,

00:23:17.000 and it's keeping a lot of people employed in universities and in institutions

00:23:21.000 and in government.

00:23:22.000 It's driven by bureaucrats who are green. 1.00

00:23:25.000 We've had a 40-year dumbing down or 50-year dumbing down of our education system,

00:23:29.000 and these people now give us the benefit of their knowledge as bureaucrats

00:23:33.000 and as politicians.

00:23:35.000 Don't you find it remarkable that so many people have bought into this,

00:23:40.000 including very, very intelligent people?

00:23:43.000 We interviewed Boris Johnson.

00:23:44.000 Boris Johnson really believes in what you've been saying

00:23:48.000 and how this global warming has been influenced and driven by man-made courses.

00:23:55.000 You've used that word believe again, and belief is a religious phenomenon,

00:24:00.000 and I think this is a new religion.

00:24:02.000 We have, in the West, almost completely abandoned Christianity, 0.94

00:24:06.000 but we have to have faith in something, and this is the new religion.

00:24:10.000 And so an intelligent person like Boris Johnson might understand the classics,

00:24:14.000 but he needs to go back a few more thousand years.

00:24:17.000 Wow.

00:24:18.000 If he did read the classics, he would know that in the time of Jesus,

00:24:22.000 it was warmer than now.

00:24:24.000 Then in the Viking times, it was cooler than now.

00:24:27.000 Then in the medieval times, it was warmer than now.

00:24:30.000 And then in the Middle Ages, we had the Little Ice Age.

00:24:35.000 It was considerably colder than now, and we've warmed up since the Little Ice Age.

00:24:39.000 Well, what a surprise.

00:24:41.000 So I think this is the new religion, and this has turned out to be blind, unreasoning faith. 0.99

00:24:48.000 Because there was at one point, I think it was in the 1970s,

00:24:51.000 where the great, how shall we say, you know, the great worry was it was global cooling.

00:24:59.000 Yes, of course.

00:25:01.000 Science operates on frightening people if you want a research grant.

00:25:05.000 So I once served on the Australian Research Council.

00:25:08.000 I also served on the German Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.

00:25:12.000 But in Australia, we were instructed by the minister to give money,

00:25:17.000 grant monies to people who were fighting the war on cancer.

00:25:22.000 And if you could demonstrate that there was a relationship between ingrown toenails

00:25:27.000 and cancer, you would get funded.

00:25:30.000 Now, you will get funded if you can put climate change into your research grant application.

00:25:36.000 So it is the new religion. 0.98

00:25:38.000 It's been embraced with fervor.

00:25:40.000 And it's going to cost us very, very dearly.

00:25:43.000 And the thing that I always found weird, because look, I'm not a scientist.

00:25:47.000 I follow this stuff, but nowhere in the detail that obviously you do as a scientist or other people.

00:25:52.000 But one of the things that I found strange was embracing of Greta Thunberg.

00:25:57.000 And she was seen as the front person for this particular movement.

00:26:01.000 And at the time, she was 15 years old.

00:26:04.000 And at that time, I was a school teacher.

00:26:06.000 And I was thinking to myself, why are we letting a school kid be the forefront of a global movement?

00:26:13.000 It's weird.

00:26:15.000 Well, she wasn't a school kid. 0.93

00:26:16.000 She didn't go to school.

00:26:18.000 And this again, we see in religion, in Christianity, young women often appear as something on the horizon.

00:26:32.000 We don't question it.

00:26:33.000 We just admire it and view it from distance.

00:26:35.000 She couldn't answer a single question you put to her. 1.00

00:26:38.000 She's absolutely pig ignorant because she didn't go to school. 1.00

00:26:42.000 And our education system now has dumbed down people where they've lost the ability to think critically. 1.00

00:26:48.000 We don't ask questions.

00:26:50.000 And if you ask questions, you get banned.

00:26:52.000 You get thrown out.

00:26:53.000 So I think this is a perfect scam to run with an ill-educated society that's given up the basis of Western civilization.

00:27:03.000 And that's Christianity. 0.79

00:27:04.000 And it's also believing as well that it's very anti-human.

00:27:09.000 That's the thing.

00:27:10.000 The other thing about it.

00:27:11.000 I remember talking to a neighbor of mine and he's an old boy and he's got a few kids.

00:27:16.000 Careful.

00:27:17.000 He wasn't in his prime like you are.

00:27:20.000 And he was talking about one of his sons and he said that he didn't want to have children.

00:27:26.000 I was like, OK, is it a lifestyle choice?

00:27:28.000 And he just went, no, no.

00:27:30.000 He's really worried about the climate.

00:27:33.000 And so they don't want to bring children into a world where they feel that the world is going to end.

00:27:39.000 And I just thought that's unbelievably tragic.

00:27:43.000 Well, think of previous generations.

00:27:45.000 If you were in 1916 living in this country, you would ask the same question.

00:27:50.000 Should I have children?

00:27:52.000 If you were 1942 in this country, you would ask the same question.

00:27:56.000 I can remember as a young man we were worried about having children because of the impending nuclear holocaust that we were going to have.

00:28:05.000 So I think every generation goes through this and every generation survives it.

00:28:09.000 And I think people are a little bit too sensitive and they're not really thinking.

00:28:15.000 Other generations have had this in the past.

00:28:18.000 Can you think of being in Ireland in 1844 with the potato famine?

00:28:22.000 People had children.

00:28:24.000 So I think it's an irrational way of thinking.

00:28:28.000 Well, let's come back to the science a little bit.

00:28:30.000 Can 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.

00:28:47.000 Do 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.

00:29:01.000 But 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.

00:29:08.000 Well, I think that's exactly right.

00:29:09.000 People don't understand the past.

00:29:11.000 They don't want to know about the past.

00:29:13.000 They don't learn about the past.

00:29:14.000 So they can't ask the right questions.

00:29:16.000 And 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.

00:29:27.000 You have to change the laws of physics and chemistry.

00:29:31.000 If you're going to say, well, the geology is wrong, it doesn't work.

00:29:34.000 So when we look in the past, we look at the six great ice ages.

00:29:38.000 We look at the five great extinctions of complex life.

00:29:41.000 But we also integrate that with history.

00:29:44.000 We integrate it with what has been lived.

00:29:47.000 So I used the example before when someone might say, oh, you know, it's the hottest time we've had ever.

00:29:54.000 You say, well, no, we've cooled down since the time of Jesus.

00:29:59.000 It was much hotter then.

00:30:00.000 It was much hotter in the medieval times.

00:30:03.000 It was much hotter in the 1930s.

00:30:05.000 So how far do you want to go back?

00:30:07.000 You don't have to go back very far to show that we're not living in unusual times.

00:30:11.000 We are actually living in an ice age because we've got polar ice.

00:30:15.000 Ice is a rare rock.

00:30:17.000 For less than 20% of time, we've had ice on Earth.

00:30:20.000 So we're living in an unusual time.

00:30:22.000 But 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.

00:30:34.000 It 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.

00:30:46.000 We suddenly became cool.

00:30:48.000 It was a period called the Younger Dryas.

00:30:50.000 And we had temperature drops that were very, very large, like 10 and 15 degrees Celsius drops.

00:30:56.000 And it took about 10 years to have a 15 degrees Celsius rise after the Younger Dryas.

00:31:02.000 Now, that's global warming.

00:31:04.000 What happened in the Younger Dryas?

00:31:06.000 We actually huddled into villages.

00:31:08.000 We fortified those villages.

00:31:09.000 We invented animal husbandry.

00:31:11.000 We invented for survival.

00:31:12.000 We invented agriculture, where we collected grass seeds and actually grew them.

00:31:17.000 We've got extremely good evidence of that.

00:31:20.000 So in these times of hardship, we humans thrived.

00:31:23.000 And once it became warm, and history shows us this, then we get the populations expanding.

00:31:29.000 We have less war.

00:31:30.000 The economy thrives.

00:31:32.000 For example, in the medieval warming, Europe had two harvests a year.

00:31:36.000 That gave an enormous amount of wealth.

00:31:39.000 That wealth was spent on the universities, the cathedrals, the monasteries.

00:31:43.000 We see evidence.

00:31:44.000 You've only got to travel through Europe and see this.

00:31:47.000 So over time, we can see that temperature has changed a lot.

00:31:51.000 Now, we also have cycles of climate.

00:31:54.000 The geological cycles are over 400 million years, and that's when we pull apart or stitch

00:31:59.000 back together the continents.

00:32:01.000 And it's the position of the continents that really does drive your climate.

00:32:05.000 Really?

00:32:06.000 Can you explain the mechanics of that?

00:32:07.000 Well, it's plate tectonics.

00:32:09.000 It's pulling apart, and you have fractures going deep into the earth.

00:32:12.000 These fractures leak out molten rock, which has to cool down, and they leak out carbon dioxide.

00:32:18.000 We've got that process happening right now in the mid-ocean ridges.

00:32:21.000 We have about 70,000 kilometres of mid-ocean ridges.

00:32:24.000 We're leaking out carbon dioxide out of the basalts there.

00:32:28.000 We have about 3.4 million old volcanoes on the ocean floor that we've been able to measure.

00:32:35.000 And we know that there's a volcanologist will give us a very strong correlation between a swarm of earthquakes,

00:32:42.000 which means molten rock is rising, and degassing and putting carbon dioxide into seawater.

00:32:47.000 It doesn't bubble up because it dissolves.

00:32:50.000 When that carbon dioxide is a basalt lava or volcano erupts on the seafloor, then you have to cool it down.

00:32:57.000 You cool it down with seawater.

00:32:59.000 And one cubic kilometre of molten basalt is at 1,200 degrees Celsius.

00:33:04.000 If you cool that, that's enough energy for 30 hurricanes.

00:33:08.000 So there's this thought in the volcanological area that maybe El Niños are related to the movement of molten rock beneath the oceans,

00:33:18.000 and that that's got to be cooled down, and that gives you warm water above.

00:33:22.000 So we've got this 400 million-year cycle.

00:33:25.000 It's currently in process, and we can see it happening right now in Antarctica.

00:33:29.000 The ice sheets in West Antarctica have 150 geothermal areas and volcanoes underneath the ice.

00:33:35.000 That's because we're pulling apart Antarctica.

00:33:38.000 Once we've pulled it apart, we'll completely change the ocean currents.

00:33:42.000 Antarctica is currently isolated.

00:33:44.000 Warm tropical water can't get to it.

00:33:46.000 We have a circumpolar current, and it freezes.

00:33:49.000 Once we break up Antarctica, currents will be able to move, and we will go back to the normal situation

00:33:55.000 that planet Earth has been in, where it's been warmer and it's been wetter, and sea level's been about 200 metres higher.

00:34:01.000 We've got extremely good evidence of that time and time again over the past.

00:34:06.000 So these 400 million-year cycles, it's not quite 400 million years.

00:34:11.000 It varies a little bit, but these are tectonic cycles.

00:34:14.000 We've got galactic cycles, where every 143 million years we've got a bad address in the galaxy, and we get cold.

00:34:22.000 We've got orbital cycles, these Milankovic cycles, which get spoken about a lot.

00:34:28.000 And their cycle is on about 100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 20,000 years.

00:34:33.000 And that changes the distance we are from the sun.

00:34:36.000 And 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.

00:34:44.000 We've got cycles about 217 years, sorry, 1500 years, and the 22-year cycle, which has been known for hundreds of years.

00:34:55.000 We've got lunar tidal cycles, where we push warm water up into the Arctic.

00:35:00.000 That's from the moon, and that's over 18.6 years.

00:35:04.000 And 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.

00:35:15.000 And it's every 60 years.

00:35:17.000 You can see that it's warmer, and people can get through.

00:35:19.000 They got through in wooden boats.

00:35:21.000 So 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.

00:35:33.000 So 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.

00:35:48.000 Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

00:35:50.000 How much of this is about hubris, Ian?

00:35:53.000 Because the way I see it is 1,000 years ago, 14,000 years ago, it gets colder.

00:36:01.000 We look around, we go, it's getting colder.

00:36:03.000 We need to adjust.

00:36:04.000 We need to huddle in the villages.

00:36:05.000 We need to do this.

00:36:06.000 We need to do that.

00:36:07.000 Because we know we can't change what's happening.

00:36:11.000 But now we've become so technologically sophisticated.

00:36:15.000 We're so advanced.

00:36:16.000 We'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.

00:36:30.000 How much of it is simply about the fact that human beings, in line with increasing technological advancement, have become very, very arrogant about that?

00:36:39.000 Oh, I think you're absolutely right.

00:36:41.000 Well, if we had another inevitable glaciation, we could solve it technologically, already in parts of the world with triple glazing.

00:36:50.000 We 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.

00:36:59.000 But we saw that in the past.

00:37:01.000 In 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.

00:37:17.000 And so witches were rounded up, and witches were drowned.

00:37:21.000 And after they stopped drowning the witches, we came out of the maunder minimum, and it warmed up. 0.86

00:37:26.000 Problem solved.

00:37:27.000 Problem solved.

00:37:28.000 Evidence was.

00:37:29.000 It was witches doing it. 1.00

00:37:31.000 So we've been doing this for a long while, and we seem to think we're top of the pile.

00:37:37.000 We're not.

00:37:38.000 Ninety percent of our cells, by number, are bacteria.

00:37:43.000 Fifteen percent of our weight is bacteria.

00:37:45.000 If you want to die, a good bacterial infection will do it.

00:37:48.000 The dominant life form on Earth are not whales, they're not trees, they're bacteria.

00:37:52.000 And most of them are beneath your feet for the top four kilometres in the crust.

00:37:56.000 So we tend to think we're pretty important.

00:37:59.000 We're not.

00:38:00.000 And 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.

00:38:11.000 Fine.

00:38:12.000 What I hate is this culture of fear that I now see in the media, where if it's a bit cold, they say extreme weather.

00:38:20.000 You're like, mate, it's a bit of sleep.

00:38:21.000 What's going on?

00:38:22.000 Or what you get on the other side of it is this phrase that always is used now since records began.

00:38:29.000 This is the hottest weather since records began.

00:38:31.000 And just going by what you say, you go, well, the records haven't been around that long, have they?

00:38:37.000 Well, two things.

00:38:38.000 The records haven't been around that long.

00:38:40.000 And the temperature record is a contaminated record.

00:38:43.000 These have a cluster of measurements in the UK, Europe and the US.

00:38:48.000 These were, many of them were in rural areas, which are now in cities and suburbs.

00:38:55.000 And so you have the urban heat island effect.

00:38:57.000 And these figures are changed.

00:38:59.000 So the primary data has changed.

00:39:01.000 And often you see that in a rural area, when it's been changed, it gives a warming trend.

00:39:06.000 So I think the data is contaminated.

00:39:08.000 And a number of people have commented on that, including people at climate institutes like your Phil Jones.

00:39:13.000 You've got to be very careful of the records.

00:39:15.000 There are other records you can get from tree rings, from ice cores, and they tell us a different story.

00:39:21.000 A geological record tells an even more exciting story.

00:39:25.000 So for ice cores, the original ice cores that were drilled used volcanic eruptions and dated the ash and the acid in those cores.

00:39:35.000 And then you could work out the rate of ice deposition.

00:39:38.000 And then with that, as snow falls and is compressed into ice, it traps little bits of air.

00:39:44.000 And you can extract that air and measure the amount of carbon dioxide in it.

00:39:48.000 You can also, from chemical fingerprints in the ice, you can work out at what temperature it formed.

00:39:53.000 So then you get a correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature and time.

00:39:59.000 And that showed a perfect relationship.

00:40:01.000 You can see these Milankovic cycles.

00:40:03.000 You can see the three cycles.

00:40:05.000 And you can see that carbon dioxide followed exactly the temperature.

00:40:10.000 But with more detailed sampling, a totally different story came out.

00:40:14.000 And the story was that you will get a period of natural warming and some 600 to 1600 years later, you get an increase in carbon dioxide.

00:40:25.000 Now, we've known that from chemistry for 200 years.

00:40:28.000 You know, if you want to sit down with a carbonated drink, like a champagne or a beer or a soft drink, commit a sin.

00:40:36.000 Don't drink it.

00:40:37.000 Just watch it.

00:40:38.000 And as it warms up, it keeps bubbling out carbon dioxide.

00:40:40.000 That's what happens to the oceans. 1.00

00:40:42.000 So you warm the atmosphere and later the oceans will release carbon dioxide.

00:40:48.000 So we know that from chemistry.

00:40:49.000 We know it from looking at our soft drinks.

00:40:50.000 We know it from the ice cores.

00:40:52.000 That's an absolutely, totally different story to what we're told, simply because it doesn't follow the popular paradigm.

00:40:59.000 And 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.

00:41:10.000 Case in point, Bill Gates.

00:41:12.000 Well, science works like that.

00:41:15.000 I mentioned Broken Hill earlier.

00:41:18.000 I had published probably 60 or 80 papers on Broken Hill.

00:41:22.000 There was a new mineral found some 15 years ago by some scientists at Broken Hill.

00:41:27.000 I named it after me because of my work on Broken Hill.

00:41:30.000 And I am the authority on Broken Hill.

00:41:32.000 And I published a sequence of papers.

00:41:34.000 And then when I went back and looked at the data and looked at new data, I thought, wait a minute, I don't think I'm right here.

00:41:40.000 And so I went back and spent years to go back and look at this data and get new data.

00:41:48.000 And I published a paper criticising all of my earlier work saying I was wrong.

00:41:52.000 That this is a better interpretation.

00:41:54.000 Now, that's the way science works.

00:41:56.000 You might come to a conclusion, but it's only tentative.

00:41:59.000 And with more data, more thinking, more calculation, you'll come to a different answer.

00:42:03.000 Now, Bill Gates is clearly thinking economically that this is nonsense with the amount of energy that he needs for AI.

00:42:11.000 But many scientists are doing this in their life.

00:42:14.000 When they get a little bit on in life, they will change their views on many things.

00:42:19.000 It's based on thinking and it's based on new data or it might be based on the fact that they're no longer employed by an institute.

00:42:26.000 And many people have left these climate institutes.

00:42:29.000 You will hear their real view.

00:42:31.000 Well, 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.

00:42:45.000 That's not a scientist changing his mind, having looked at different data.

00:42:50.000 No, that's an economic view.

00:42:51.000 It's partly an economic view.

00:42:53.000 I 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.

00:43:06.000 And when economies are ruined, people get upset.

00:43:08.000 And that has political ramifications.

00:43:10.000 But I think it's also about the conversation around net zero has shifted dramatically in the Western world in the last two or three years.

00:43:19.000 And a lot of people are now coming out and being critical of it for political reasons.

00:43:25.000 They essentially sense which way the wind is blowing.

00:43:28.000 I think there's a lot of that going on as well.

00:43:30.000 I do, too, especially in Germany.

00:43:33.000 I think there's been a very significant change there.

00:43:36.000 And that's that's very much political.

00:43:38.000 But it's also driven by the cost of energy and the cost of energy now is crippling.

00:43:42.000 In 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.

00:43:48.000 Now, for a first world country, that's just impossible. 0.96

00:43:52.000 That shouldn't happen.

00:43:53.000 And people are starting to wake up.

00:43:55.000 These people also vote.

00:43:57.000 And this is why someone who might be pushing a different agenda gets attracted.

00:44:03.000 And the thing that I find particularly worrying is what you're talking about is how there is an institutional capture in these scientific institutes.

00:44:12.000 And 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.

00:44:25.000 They're going to go, well, if I can't trust this, how can I trust this?

00:44:28.000 How can I trust that?

00:44:29.000 How can I trust medicine, vaccines, whatever else it is?

00:44:32.000 Because they're lying about this.

00:44:33.000 So why wouldn't they be lying about that?

00:44:35.000 I 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.

00:44:53.000 And so once science is politicised, that's the end result.

00:44:57.000 It's very dangerous.

00:44:59.000 Other sciences are not as politicised, and certainly in my science it is not politicised at all.

00:45:04.000 And I think that's the end result.

00:45:06.000 Once you politicise it, once politicians are talking about climate change, you've only got to ask them a simple question.

00:45:12.000 You know they don't know what they're talking about.

00:45:14.000 So politicising science is dangerous.

00:45:17.000 Politising various aspects of science, which may or may not be important for, say, defence or medicine, terribly dangerous.

00:45:27.000 And we're talking about the politicisation of science.

00:45:29.000 And 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.

00:45:39.000 Has it always been political or is that something new that's come in?

00:45:43.000 No, it's quite new.

00:45:45.000 And I've been working as a scientist since 1968.

00:45:50.000 I think it's come in from the 90s.

00:45:55.000 And there's a pot of money out there.

00:45:57.000 And scientists have got the same weaknesses as everyone else.

00:46:01.000 If there's a pot of money, they'll try to grab it.

00:46:03.000 And virtually every university has a climate institute.

00:46:07.000 And I think they don't ask the simple question, well, whatever we do can't change the global climate.

00:46:13.000 Why are we doing it?

00:46:14.000 And 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?

00:46:27.000 People only respond to incentives, scientists, however smart or brilliant they might be, are still human beings.

00:46:33.000 That's exactly right.

00:46:34.000 So it's all about the money.

00:46:37.000 And so many universities now have climate institutes because that's where the money is.

00:46:43.000 So many people are getting whacking big research grants because governments don't want to be accused of ignoring climate.

00:46:51.000 Well, 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.

00:47:01.000 And you said a third thing as well, warmer, wetter and something else.

00:47:04.000 Higher sea levels.

00:47:05.000 Warmer, 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.

00:47:19.000 And 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.

00:47:39.000 Isn'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?

00:47:54.000 Yes, very much so.

00:47:56.000 Natural processes are fairly slow.

00:47:58.000 In the case of Holland, they've been doing it for a thousand years.

00:48:01.000 That is because of the land sinking.

00:48:03.000 Southeastern England is sinking.

00:48:05.000 Scotland is rising, both politically and physically.

00:48:09.000 This is a normal process.

00:48:11.000 In Scandinavia, it was once covered by five kilometres of ice.

00:48:14.000 That pushed down the rock.

00:48:16.000 That ice is gone.

00:48:17.000 Scandinavia is rising.

00:48:19.000 We've got old survey records going back centuries.

00:48:22.000 We've got old beaches in Norway that are 340 metres above sea level.

00:48:27.000 So we know the land goes up and down.

00:48:29.000 Go to the biblical town of Ephesus.

00:48:31.000 That was a port.

00:48:33.000 It's inland and above sea level.

00:48:34.000 A little bit further south, go to Lydia.

00:48:36.000 That's where gold coins were first made and first minted.

00:48:39.000 I've been to Lydia down the main street in a yacht.

00:48:42.000 So the land level is going up and down all the time and we humans have adjusted to that.

00:48:46.000 Well, I took my mum the other day to Pevensey Castle, which is just down the road from London on the south coast.

00:48:54.000 And you go to one of the towers and they say this is where they would defend themselves from the sea.

00:49:00.000 You can't see the sea because it's now seven miles inland.

00:49:03.000 I can't remember how many miles, but you can't even remotely even imagine the sea being there because it's so far away.

00:49:09.000 So 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.

00:49:24.000 So what is it that we need to do to ensure humans are thriving on the planet?

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00:53:52.000 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.

00:54:05.000 So what is it that we need to do to ensure humans are thriving on the planet?

00:54:10.000 Adapt.

00:54:11.000 Adapt.

00:54:12.000 We've always done it.

00:54:13.000 And there's never been a problem.

00:54:14.000 We do know that when it's colder, you have more wars, you have more disease, and you have more people die.

00:54:21.000 We have people have a decreased longevity in cold periods of time.

00:54:26.000 So 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.

00:54:36.000 And more than 90% of people, if they have a climate-related death, is due to the cold, not the warm.

00:54:42.000 So we are already adapting, and that's the one thing we humans can do.

00:54:46.000 We can adapt and adapt very, very quickly.

00:54:49.000 A rising sea level, it's not overnight.

00:54:53.000 The one geological process that would be difficult to adapt to very quickly would be an asteroid impact.

00:55:00.000 And the chances of that decrease all the time as the solar system settles down even more.

00:55:08.000 But we can adapt.

00:55:09.000 These things don't happen overnight.

00:55:11.000 They take time.

00:55:12.000 Climate change doesn't occur between Thursday and Saturday.

00:55:16.000 It takes a very long period of time.

00:55:18.000 And humans have adapted before.

00:55:21.000 We'll do it again and probably be much better because we're a technological species now.

00:55:26.000 One 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.

00:55:34.000 And they have a very detrimental impact when we think about ecology, when we think about sea life, when we think about animal life.

00:55:40.000 But 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.

00:55:49.000 When 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.

00:55:59.000 Well, we've got the eight major rivers that are putting plastics into the ocean.

00:56:03.000 We've got the oceans with a large amount of microplastics. 0.80

00:56:06.000 We have changed climate at, say, Mount Kilimanjaro by forest clearing.

00:56:10.000 We've had less precipitation on Mount Kilimanjaro.

00:56:13.000 That's fairly well established.

00:56:15.000 But we are probably in the Western world polluting less than we did 200 years ago.

00:56:22.000 And that's because we're wealthy.

00:56:24.000 But you go to parts of the third world, it's just disgusting how dirty it is and how dangerous it is. 1.00

00:56:30.000 They are the real problems.

00:56:32.000 And 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.

00:56:43.000 These 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.

00:56:58.000 It's a bit like in Vietnam.

00:57:00.000 You know, we had to destroy the village to save it.

00:57:03.000 Yeah, it just doesn't make sense because when I hear scientists talking about this, we should be talking about other things like species extinction.

00:57:11.000 And also, as well, you go, the whole thing doesn't make sense because we're so interested in essentially deindustrialising.

00:57:18.000 Yeah, it seems every week, I think it's every week, China opens two new coal power stations.

00:57:23.000 Yes.

00:57:24.000 You go, none of this actually seems to make any type of logical sense.

00:57:28.000 No, well, it doesn't.

00:57:29.000 But these are the cold hard facts, and China's using Australian coal in these power stations.

00:57:35.000 Yet, in my country, we've got thousands of use of coal there.

00:57:39.000 We're trying to ban the use of coal to generate electricity for ourselves, which is cheap and reliable.

00:57:45.000 Yet, we're very happy to sell it to China and buy back their value-added products.

00:57:51.000 So, we are killing off very large areas of prime agricultural land, putting in solar panels.

00:57:57.000 And these are contaminating the ground.

00:57:59.000 These are destroying good farmland.

00:58:01.000 And again, we buy these from China that have been made with our coal, and we buy them at an elevated price.

00:58:08.000 So, I think the world's going through one of its periods of going mad.

00:58:12.000 But I think, and we've touched on it before, we are starting to see common sense start to come to the fore.

00:58:19.000 Is that true in the scientific community, or is it still very much captured, do you think?

00:58:24.000 The money hasn't dried up in the scientific community.

00:58:27.000 If a government decided that we would like to spend a lot of money on research on the next inevitable glaciation,

00:58:36.000 and cycles of climate, and what can we expect, you'd immediately find a stampede in the other direction

00:58:43.000 for people to get funded for their research, looking at a potential glaciation.

00:58:48.000 So, I don't think science is changing yet, because the money's still there.

00:58:52.000 But I think the community's changing, because it's burning their pocket.

00:58:55.000 I'm sure you've had this question before, but very much in that spirit,

00:58:59.000 you're obviously someone who's worked in the mining industry.

00:59:01.000 Some people will say your beliefs are driven by, you said yourself, follow the money.

00:59:06.000 This is a convenient belief for you to have, given that this is the industry you've worked in all your life.

00:59:11.000 What do you say to that?

00:59:13.000 Well, there are a number of CEOs of major mining companies who are very green,

00:59:18.000 very green, and who are going down the path of having electric vehicles,

00:59:25.000 having greenwashed operations.

00:59:28.000 In my case, my views arose well before I was in the mining industry,

00:59:33.000 and they will change depending upon the data.

00:59:36.000 The mining industry, especially the petroleum industry, understands climate change very well,

00:59:41.000 because they constructed, probably 50 years ago, a sequence of sea level curves based on climate,

00:59:48.000 based on sediments, and this is a guide as to where to find oil, where to find coal, where to find gas.

00:59:55.000 So we practically apply everything I've been saying about sea levels and about carbon dioxide to look for oil.

01:00:04.000 I'm not a petroleum geologist, but to look for oil and gas.

01:00:07.000 So I'm fortunate in the position I have now where I have more freedom than I ever had when I was in the academic world.

01:00:17.000 Far more freedom. I can basically say what I think.

01:00:20.000 Yeah, and it's interesting. I remember, I've always had questions about this,

01:00:25.000 because there were just things about the whole climate narrative never made entire sense to me.

01:00:31.000 So I remember, it would have been probably 25, 30 years ago, my grandfather was a scientist,

01:00:36.000 and he had many friends who were scientists.

01:00:38.000 I remember talking to somebody, one of his friends, and I asked him,

01:00:42.000 well, what about this climate thing? You know, is it really the consensus?

01:00:47.000 And he said, there are a lot of scientists who think this is happening for this reason.

01:00:52.000 But he said, the people that are dissenters make me question,

01:00:57.000 because they are usually the most brilliant and talented ones,

01:01:02.000 but they have to take a risk to speak out.

01:01:05.000 And it does sound to me, based on what you're saying and other people we've spoken to,

01:01:10.000 that the things that you're saying are just quite hard to say in the social context.

01:01:16.000 And if people have watched this interview or listened to this interview and gone,

01:01:19.000 well, you know, this is a bit out there, climate denier or all this other stuff.

01:01:24.000 I just go back to the point Francis made earlier.

01:01:27.000 Well, you know, scientists or some scientists have been running around for years now saying,

01:01:32.000 if you say that your name is Stacy, you become a woman, right?

01:01:36.000 That's been the thing that we've all been told to believe.

01:01:38.000 And there's lots of other examples I could give.

01:01:41.000 So this idea of groups of people, you know, our friend Douglas Murray,

01:01:45.000 the madness of crowds, groups of people going crazy.

01:01:48.000 I mean, it's a pretty common thing, actually.

01:01:50.000 I think it is.

01:01:51.000 I think it is.

01:01:52.000 Well, my first book on climate change, Heaven and Earth,

01:01:55.000 came out while I was a chair at the University of Adelaide.

01:01:58.000 It created a storm because no one had dared to do that.

01:02:02.000 And I integrated history, archaeology and geology.

01:02:05.000 I looked at previous agriculture that might have been done in the north of England.

01:02:09.000 I looked at Stone Age societies and how they adapted to climate.

01:02:16.000 I tried to cover the whole spectrum.

01:02:19.000 I had about three and a half thousand scientific references in that book.

01:02:23.000 I published that while I was in the university and it wasn't liked.

01:02:29.000 So I guess it's if you're crazy or if you're skeptical about everything,

01:02:34.000 which you should be as a scientist.

01:02:35.000 You should be skeptical about everything.

01:02:37.000 Then I'm being quite consistent.

01:02:39.000 But I also had in the same building where I was in Adelaide, a climate institute.

01:02:45.000 And they were very generously funded compared with my department,

01:02:51.000 where people actually went and became a productive member of society.

01:02:55.000 All of their graduates ended up working in another climate institute.

01:02:59.000 I don't see that as being productive for society.

01:03:02.000 And Ian, when we talk about climate, we also talk about green technologies.

01:03:07.000 And the people will say, you know, these are, you know, they're doing very well.

01:03:11.000 You know, they're going to be able to replace certain technologies that we have.

01:03:14.000 Where do you stand on green technologies?

01:03:16.000 Are there some that are actually good and you think will make a positive impact?

01:03:21.000 Are there some that are just not there?

01:03:23.000 And are there others that you go, look, this is a busted flush.

01:03:26.000 We need to stop funding this.

01:03:28.000 Well, I think with all new technologies,

01:03:31.000 you've got to actually fund it to a point where you can say,

01:03:34.000 I don't think this is going to work.

01:03:36.000 And I think it's been wonderful to stimulate green technologies.

01:03:42.000 I'm yet to see any green technology that makes processes more efficient

01:03:47.000 and more cost effective.

01:03:49.000 But that doesn't mean you stop trying them.

01:03:51.000 And I think this green transition is going down the inevitable path

01:03:56.000 where Western countries will have more nuclear power.

01:03:59.000 That's the transition.

01:04:01.000 It's not a transition away from coal,

01:04:04.000 because the annual consumption of coal keeps increasing.

01:04:07.000 And it has been doing that for about 120 years.

01:04:12.000 So what it's pushing us towards is looking at nuclear fusion even more,

01:04:18.000 looking at other nuclear processes.

01:04:20.000 There are some nuclear processes floating around

01:04:22.000 where the cooling systems are very different.

01:04:26.000 Using, say, liquid sodium are very different from water-cooled systems.

01:04:30.000 I think it's edging towards a technology boom where we will be changing the use of energy,

01:04:37.000 because every time you turn on a switch, you're using energy.

01:04:42.000 The amount of energy we humans are using individually is increasing enormously.

01:04:47.000 It has to be cheap.

01:04:49.000 Unless it's cheap, you cannot run an industrial society.

01:04:52.000 To de-industrialise a society with expensive energy is not very sensible.

01:04:57.000 So I think to have a green revolution is wonderful,

01:05:00.000 because ultimately the market says, no, this is a busted flush.

01:05:03.000 It's not going to work.

01:05:04.000 And why is it that we don't talk about nuclear energy more?

01:05:08.000 Why is it that when I read in the newspapers

01:05:10.000 we're talking about nuclear power plants being actually shut down?

01:05:14.000 Is it because we see a Fukuyama

01:05:18.000 and we get worried about a disaster like that?

01:05:21.000 Fukushima.

01:05:22.000 Fukushima, sorry.

01:05:23.000 Fukuyama has made a lot of mistakes.

01:05:25.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:26.000 But having a nuclear meltdown isn't one of them.

01:05:28.000 Well, you could say the end of history was a nuclear meltdown.

01:05:31.000 But yeah, I agree.

01:05:32.000 So Fukushima, or is it just a hangover from, you know, the Cold War,

01:05:36.000 where our entire generation thought we were going to die in a nuclear war?

01:05:40.000 Well, I think it's very complicated.

01:05:42.000 It's easy to frighten people with nuclear because you can't see it.

01:05:46.000 You can't taste it.

01:05:47.000 You can't smell it.

01:05:48.000 And if you've got a reactor near your house, you think, oh, it's going to blow up.

01:05:53.000 Well, some reactors, it's impossible for them to blow up.

01:05:57.000 The second thing is I think there's been an enormous amount of disinformation

01:06:01.000 as part of Cold War tactics.

01:06:03.000 And that continues.

01:06:05.000 The third thing is that nuclear power countries like France went to nuclear power

01:06:13.000 because there was a crisis, and that was the oil crisis,

01:06:15.000 and now they are flush with cheap energy, which is nuclear.

01:06:20.000 So I think it's very easy to scare people with nuclear.

01:06:23.000 I think there's been quite a process that has been going on since Cold War times

01:06:30.000 using Cold War tactics.

01:06:33.000 It's clearly not the only thing we should be having for energy.

01:06:38.000 We should have an energy mix for all the right reasons.

01:06:42.000 And I think nuclear obviously will come when there's an energy crisis.

01:06:46.000 That's how France got into being a nuclear country.

01:06:49.000 And there's tiny countries like Slovenia, 3 million people.

01:06:53.000 It's nuclear power.

01:06:55.000 So why can't big countries do the same?

01:06:57.000 Yeah, it's been great having you on.

01:06:59.000 Let's go over to Substack where our audience will get to ask you their questions.

01:07:03.000 But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society

01:07:06.000 that we really should be?

01:07:08.000 I think we're not talking enough about the unstitching of Western society,

01:07:15.000 the attacks on our culture, and the breakdown of society and processes

01:07:22.000 that took thousands of years to build.

01:07:25.000 And that is underpinned by, in many ways, Christianity.

01:07:30.000 It's underpinned by some of the things we've been talking about, the scientific method.

01:07:34.000 And I just don't think we're talking about how to think, how to think critically,

01:07:39.000 how to use our history to enrich the future.

01:07:43.000 Well, we do that on the show as much as we possibly can.

01:07:46.000 Thanks for coming on and talking to us.

01:07:48.000 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where you get to ask Ian your questions.

01:07:53.000 What role do you see advanced technologies like AI-driven modelling playing in reshaping the climate debate,

01:08:01.000 especially when geological data spans millions of years?

01:08:04.000 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything.

01:08:32.000 Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick.

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TRIGGERnometry - March 08, 2026

The Climate Crisis is a Scam - Professor Ian Plimer

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