#191: Fight Back and Win (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 191st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode we discuss climate science, models, and assumptions. How do urban heat, and assumptions of low vs high solar variability, affect climate models? Should apparent consensus among climate scientists give one pause? Are non-scientist humans capable of thinking for themselves? We discuss the difference betw...
folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number one. - 191.
Indeed.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying.
We're feeling pretty prime today.
I was going to gloss over that question because I hadn't thought carefully about it, but it's at least an odd number, so yes.
Indeed.
Gloss.
Gloss.
As in glossophagene bats.
Whoa.
As in the root meaning tongue.
Gloss over it, yeah.
I'm not sure what this has to do with glossophagian bats, but I'm thrilled that it does, because glossophagian bats are really spectacular creatures.
These are nectarivorous bats.
You should be careful to pronounce that nectarivorous, because if you say nectarivorous, it means they eat nectis, which they do not.
No, they eat these famously low-nutrient nectis, and hard to digest.
Hard to digest, I think, is the primary issue.
I would imagine they're high in nutrients, especially if they haven't been washed in a while.
Let's put it this way.
Given the strength to weight ratio of silk in high quality neckties.
High quality neckties.
Wow.
Sure.
I mean, if you're going to wear a necktie, you know, go big or go home.
I'm not talking about wearing, I'm talking about eating.
Fair point, but nonetheless, we are down.
It seems to me there must be a higher abundance of cheap synthetic neckties in the world than in fancy silk neckties.
I'm actually not sure that that's true, because it's the kind of thing that if you're going to wear one, you're going to wear one.
And if you're going to wear a cheapo, you're probably not going to wear anything unless you work in the mailroom and it's a clip-on.
But I don't know how common clip-ons even are these days, but the point is... I don't know, I'm way out of it.
You were talking about men's fashion, and you seem certain.
Like, I'm out.
I don't know.
The strength to weight ratio of silk is so high that I would imagine the energy in the bonds contained therein is something to behold.
So...
Well, I imagine the nectivorous, as opposed to the nectarivorous, bats that eat nectis have the digestive enzymes, perhaps even the salivary enzymes, necessary to deal with those bonds that you have extrapolated from the strength-to-weight ratio of silk.
Given that those bats are entirely hypothetical, I see no reason they wouldn't have those enzymes.
Absolutely.
Excellent.
All right, now that we have alienated virtually everyone, we can get on with the podcast.
Yes, we can.
It's livestream 191.
It's Prime.
It's pretty cool.
Join us on Rumble, please, and subscribe to our channel here.
Join the watch party that's happening right now on Locals for members.
Locals-only live conversation.
We got lots of stuff going on at Locals.
We encourage you strongly to join us.
By subscribing for free on Rumble, and you can join us for free on Locals as well, but we really appreciate people joining as members.
And you get AMAs with Brett, early release of guest episodes of Dark Horse, you get our private monthly Q&A, soon ask us at the Discord server, lots and lots of good stuff there.
Today we're going to talk about climate and Mother Nature and libraries in Canada and other things.
Mostly a lot A lot on climate, though.
We're going to start talking about climate.
Climate, but the tendrils, it turns out, go everywhere.
Yes, of course they do.
Of course they do.
So we will not be doing a Q&A today, and next week we're coming to you a little bit late.
We'll be back, I think, 3.30 Pacific next week.
And we're going to move the rest of all the things we want to talk to you about until the end, except for our sponsors, which, as always, we have chosen carefully.
We really do truly vouch for, so if you are interested in supporting the podcast another way and are interested in Armwrap, Helio Valley, or UnCruise, please listen to our ads and use the What are they called?
Promo codes?
Like what?
Promo codes that our sponsors offer us.
Okay, so our first sponsor this week is Armra.
It's brand new to us in one way, but completely ancient in another.
It's Arbra.
Armra is colostrum.
Colostrum is the first food that every mammal eats, produced in the first two or three days of an infant's life, and is nutritionally different from the milk that comes in afterwards.
Mammals have existed for 300 million years, give or take a few tens of millions of years, and the first food that every mammal has eaten is colostrum.
Colostrum serves many vital functions, including that of protecting and strengthening the mucosal barriers of infants before their own barriers mature.
Modern living breaks down your mucosal and immune barriers, as we all know.
And Armra is the superfood that builds it back.
Armra colostrum protects and strengthens your body's barriers, creating a seal that guards against inflammation and everyday toxins, pollutants, and threats.
Armra uses their cold chain biopotent technology to concentrate colostrum's 400-plus living nutrients into their most pure and bioavailable form.
According to a review published in the journal Clinical Nutrition Open Science in 2022, bovine colostrum has been used to treat cancer, AIDS, polio, heart disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.
It is a general anti-inflammatory, and its use in adults is known to increase lean muscle mass, improve athletic performance and recovery time, support healthy digestion, and reduce allergy symptoms.
Armour starts with sustainably sourced colostrum from grass-fed cows from their co-op of dairy farms in the U.S., and they source only the surplus colostrum after calves are fully fed.
Unlike most colostrums, which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, Armour uses their cold-chain biopotent technology, an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing casein and fat, to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability of any colostrum available on the market.
The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free.
I went into the research literature a little bit to figure out what we think we know, what Western science thinks it knows about colostrum.
And sure enough, as is included in that 2022 paper I just referenced, there is much that is already understood about colostrum's benefits and a lot more promising.
And I will say that when I have started Eating this, and it does show for me many of the positive effects that we are hearing about in this research.
Benefits of Armra's colostrum also include clearing of blemishes, shinier, thicker hair, stabilization of blood sugar levels, and acceleration of fat burning.
And colostrum has been shown to significantly improve fitness endurance and significantly decrease recovery time after intense exercise.
So Armra, that's A-R-A, nope, that's Armrah, A-R-M-R-A, has a special offer for the Dark Horse audience.
Receive 15% off your first order.
Go to tryarmrah.com slash darkhorse or enter darkhorse to get 15% off your first order.
That's T-R-Y-A-R-M-R-A dot com slash darkhorse.
It's so strange being a mammal.
It is a very bizarre thing being a mammal, indeed.
But when nature reveals to you things that those who produce it are intending as food, consider that as food.
Yes, I would also say, as you know, sometimes before I go on stage at a public event, I have a little ritual I do where I say to myself, don't fuck this up!
And if I'm going on stage with someone and they ask me what they should be thinking, I tell them, don't fuck it up.
Which probably doesn't help them.
No, no.
It's exactly the thing that you need to hear.
But I imagine hearing it from yourself is rather different from hearing it from someone else.
Oh, yeah.
Alarming.
But it just, it puts you in the right frame of mind.
But anyway, the point is, it's also good life advice, you know.
Medicine, time and time again.
Technology.
Take something that works great, and then thinking it's going to improve it, it fucks it up.
So, returning to a natural approach is a key takeaway from that.
Yeah.
Armour is great stuff.
Our second sponsor this week is Paleo Valley.
Paleo Valley makes a huge range of products, from supplements like fish roe and organ complex, grass-fed bone broth, protein, and superfood bars.
Everything we've tried from them has been terrific, including their golden milk made with loads of turmeric, but today we're going to talk once again about their beef sticks.
The beef in these delicious snacks comes from small, American-owned farms that practice rotational grazing.
Paleo Valley's beef sticks are 100% grass-fed and finished, entirely organic, and naturally fermented.
100% grass-fed beef is more nutritious than grain-fed beef in many ways, including that it contains more calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc, phosphorus, beta-carotene, and iron, and it's also utterly delicious.
If you're thinking that Paleo Valley's beef sticks are like Slim Jim's, you're wrong.
For one thing, unlike Slim Jim's, Paleo Valley beef sticks contain no mechanically separated chicken parts.
For another, Paleo Valley's beef sticks are actually good for you.
See earlier point about not including mechanically separated chicken parts.
Ingredients hiding in most beefsteaks and jerky include MSG, hormones, hydrogenated oils, and brominated vegetable oil, which, if you're wondering what that is, it was first patented as a flame retardant, and now it's in a lot of food.
Not if you buy Paleo Valley, though.
Furthermore, unlike other meat snacks, Paleo Valley uses natural fermentation to preserve its beefsteaks.
This gives the beefsteaks a long shelf life without the use of harmful acids and chemicals, and with the added benefit of contributing to a healthy gut.
Paleo Valley beefsteaks are also keto-friendly and make a great protein-rich snack to grab when you're on the go, like running out the door for a meeting or going on a bike ride.
Paleo Valley does not cut corners.
They source only the highest quality ingredients and are passionate not only about human health, but environmental restoration and animal welfare as well.
And they're a family-owned company.
Try Paleo Valley's beef sticks today.
You'll be so glad that you did.
I think they're completely delicious.
I love these things.
Head over to PaleoValley.com.
That's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y dot com slash Dark Horse for 15% off your first order.
I think you may have innovated a slogan for them.
What's that?
Try Paleo Valley's Beef Sticks and not those other guys' Beef Slicks.
Alright, I think you innovated that, not me, but good.
Alright, our final sponsor this week is Un-Cruise Small Ship Adventures.
UnCruise explores by sea and by land.
They have boats that hold orders of magnitude fewer people than most cruise boats, and you won't miss them.
Their passengers are awesome, but there are fewer of them.
They take them to some of the world's most magnificent places, Panama and Costa Rica, Galapagos, the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, Alaska, even our own backyard, the San Juan Islands.
When UnCruise first approached us, we were skeptical.
Our standards for travel are especially high, and we have years of experience leading trips to the scablands of eastern Washington and the Columbia River Gorge, as well as the Andean Paramo, Galapagos, and the Amazon.
We know that most trips do not meet expectations.
UnCruise, by contrast, exceeds expectations.
The small boats of UnCruise allow passengers to get real deep experience.
Their largest boat can accommodate a mere 86 guests.
The boats of UnCruise take small groups of people to places that larger boats can't go.
And the excursions are designed to bring people into deep nature without destroying it.
When we spoke with the CEO, Dan Blanchard, we discovered a shared ethos.
The value of wild, roadless nature for exploration and observation.
We took an uncruised week-long trip through the inland waters of southeast Alaska in early May and were blown away by what we saw and what we were able to do.
We saw sea otters with their pups, mountain goats, eagles in their nests, brown and black bears, puffins, orcas, humpbacks, arctic terns, too many species to list really, and mile after mile of the most breathtaking scenery.
Each day we got off the boat to hike or kayak and the crew and naturalist guides were, to a person, kind, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic.
The food was surprisingly good as well, and food preferences and sensitivities were handled perfectly.
And every sailing with UnCruise is all-inclusive.
Transportation, drinks, farm-to-table cuisine, daily excursions, everything is included.
UnCruise understands that the boat is just a tool.
Their small ship cruises take guests through communities and locales on the ground so that they can have actual experiences.
And UnCruise is giving Dark Horse listeners a fantastic deal.
$500 off their current cruises, an offer that you can combine with other savings.
So start planning your next trip with UnCruise today and take advantage of this great offer.
Go now to uncruise.com slash pages slash darkhorse.
Remember to save $500 on your trip and go now to uncruise.com slash pages slash darkhorse.
So, today we're going to start by talking a bit about climate.
Excellent.
A fraught topic, no matter which direction you approach it from.
Always fraught at this point.
And maybe we should just – I'm not sure actually the right approach here, because we have talked a bit, many times, about what we understand to be true and what we understand to be uncertain.
About climate change and and the models that are used to generate what we are told by many are our consensus right in the scientific community.
And in part, what is absolutely true is that models requiring that assumptions be made about what you weight and what you don't weight and what you think is important and which data sets you use and such.
inherently will spit out conclusions that are consistent with the assumptions that you fed into the models.
This is just a fact of using models.
And so it is Alarming, frankly, that we can be assured that there is nearly complete consensus across all scientists of the conclusions of the climate change models, given that it is models that we're talking about.
Like, anytime, and you know, if you didn't know this already about science, COVID should have revealed this.
Anytime you are told, you know, follow the science, do the thing that all the scientists know is right, there is a really good chance that there is some obfuscation going on.
But that's not how science works, right?
You have something to add here?
Well, I'm debating whether or not to add it here, but I don't want to derail you, so why don't you continue and I will introduce this piece shortly.
There are a couple new papers out, both from a group called CERES, C-E-R-E-S, a research group based in the East Coast of the United States, which I'll talk about a little bit as well after we talk about the science.
And in fact, the group itself put out this blog post on their site, which you can just show briefly here, Zach.
New studies suggest global warming could be mostly an urban problem.
The new study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal Climate by 37 researchers from 18 countries suggests that current estimates of global warmer are contaminated by urban warming biases.
The study also suggests the solar activity estimates considered in the most recent reports by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that's the IPCC, Likely underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming since the 19th century.
Okay, so that's the that's the proceed.
That's that's the very short version of what these researchers claim to have found.
And there are again two papers.
One of them is still in pre-print and one of them in the journal Climate has been published.
And I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the journal, the paper that's been published in the journal Climate.
Let's just go to, this is a PDF of the paper.
Again, you can show my screen here.
The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming from 1850 to 2018 in Terms of Human and Natural Factors.
Challenges of Inadequate Data.
It's one of these papers with a ton of authors, the first three in the author list being the prime drivers behind the Ceres Institute, and then there's a whole bunch of other researchers from across institutions around the world, including some independent researchers.
So from the abstract of this paper we have, a statistical analysis was applied to northern hemisphere land surface temperatures from 1850 to 2018 To try to identify the main drivers of the observed warming since the mid-19th century.
I'm going to keep on stepping out for editorializing.
No one is suggesting that we haven't been warming since we started taking data in the mid-19th century.
Two different temperature estimates were considered, a rural-urban blend that matches almost exactly with most current estimates, and a rural-only estimate.
The rural-urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 degrees Celsius per century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 degrees Celsius per century.
This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases.
Okay, let's just stick to that one for the moment, if you would give me my screen back.
So and that's sort of half of what this paper is doing.
It's well recognized that cities are hotter than surrounding areas.
We know some of the reasons for this.
Maybe we actually have a really good fix on all of the reasons, but, you know, higher density, lots of black surfaces that reflect, you know, albedo is not our friend in cities, things like this, right?
So wait, they absorb energy from the sun because they're black.
If you think about... Cities.
Yeah.
If you think about an air conditioner, an air conditioner cools a room but it creates more heat.
The net output is heat.
That heat ends up in the city.
Cities Yes, buildings in cities are cooler, maybe cooler than the surrounding countryside, but the air outside in cities will therefore be hotter.
Therefore be hotter, and obviously they're not measuring the temperature inside of apartments, they're measuring it outside.
If you think about the canyonizing effect of buildings, they will prevent that heat from dissipating at any normal rate.
Boundary layers being what they are.
Boundary layers being what they are.
So these are rezone, you know, and think about every car going down the highway is putting out hot gases.
Even a car that isn't putting out hot gas, I said every car, it's not quite every car because we've got electric cars in which the heat that is produced by the generating of the energy, if it's let's say coal power that's producing electricity is elsewhere, but nonetheless the car is moving air molecules.
It's literally warming the air as it moves The tires are creating heat.
So all of these things are generating heat, and it will be concentrated where human activity is concentrated, and we call that thing a city.
And this is not controversial for anyone.
It is completely well understood and demonstrably true that cities are hotter than surrounding areas.
Urban areas are hotter than rural areas.
We know this.
But urban heat, the fact of urban areas being hotter than rural areas, has been dismissed by mainstream climate scientists as trivial and contributing to our understanding of a warming climate.
On what basis it's been dismissed, I don't even know, right?
Because what this research, and presumably someone does, but What this research that we're talking about now that was just published in the journal Climate, I think it was at the very end of August of 2023.
These researchers look at temperature estimates only from rural areas rather than from the urban-rural mix that pretty much all of the other models are looking at.
They find that 40% of the warming since 1850 is attributable to urban heat.
Now, that's A, not all of it, and B, that's not nothing, because we still have a problem where cities are hot, and they're getting hotter.
This still is a significant fraction of warming to be explained, and cities being hot is a problem for a number of reasons.
But it does suggest that rural areas are not warming at the rate that we have been told the entire globe is warming, because what you have is a lot of data being taken from urban areas.
So I want to interject something here.
Go for it.
It is true that cities are warming and that that's a real phenomenon.
It is false to the extent that any pattern of climate change is deduced based on city warming.
That is false.
It is a little bit like conditions in an apartment.
If you took data from inside the oven, You might get an alarmist picture of the conditions inside the apartment.
It is not that the oven isn't real.
It's not that it's not generating heat.
In the case of an oven on an interior wall in an apartment, it's not even that all that heat doesn't ultimately end up in the apartment.
It does, but dissipated over a very large volume.
It's not a critical matter.
And so the ultimate underlying question here is, how critical is what we face?
And to the extent that it is critical, what is its source?
Yeah, so here's a bit from pages 9 and 10 of the paper with regard to this particular set of results that they've got.
In this study, we proceed with the two temperature series described above, that is the urban and rural, like all of the temperatures since 1850 through 2018.
And just the rural areas, which is a tiny fraction.
It's only 14% of all of the temperature stations.
So we got all of it versus 14%, but the 14% are those which are in rural areas.
I'll show you the visual comparison after I read through this.
A visual comparison of the two series shows that while there are clear similarities between the rural and urban and rural only estimates, there are also several key differences, and they identify three.
One, the rural only estimate is noticeably noisier.
i.e. the magnitudes of the fluctuations from year to year are larger.
This is largely a consequence of the reduced number of stations.
However, it is noteworthy that the timing of the multi-decadal warming and cooling periods for both series are qualitatively smaller.
So with regard to this first point about greater noisiness in the data, this will always be true when you have a data set that's smaller.
The larger your data set, the lower the impact of noise, of outliers, of fluctuations that will happen in terms of your ability to actually read and interpret the data set.
So this is the reason that the The pseudoscientific religion that embraces randomized controlled trials as the only source of reliable information, this is the point that they are actually not wrong about that.
Large data sets drive out noise so you can see subtle patterns.
So anyway, that is why we collect arguments.
The more subtle the actual pattern.
The more likely a small data set is to obscure that subtle pattern by virtue of the fact that there will be noise that will overwhelm subtlety.
And just for the sake of completeness, when we used to teach signal to noise ratios as professors, it is important to understand that noise is not an actual phenomenon.
Noise is the sum total of the effects of all of the things that you're not trying to study.
So it shows up as some random influence, or maybe a systematic influence, Right.
Sometimes there will be error in data and data collection, right?
But climate and weather are understood to be different things linked for sure, related for sure, but at different timescales.
What you are trying to figure out is, is there a longitudinal pattern?
Longitudinal just referring to long there is the time dimension, right?
What you're trying to figure out is, is there a pattern over 150-200 years?
The fact that in 1910 such and such had a really hot summer and a really cold winter is not relevant.
The people living then will have felt like, oh my god, this feels like the end of everything.
But it doesn't necessarily play into the longitudinal data.
So let me give a different example that will illustrate the noise point.
Let's suppose that you were trying to study the change in symptoms associated with a virus across time, and so you were looking at datasets.
But you had a population that wasn't totally genetically homogeneous.
You had people from one origin living in one part of your sample area and people of another extraction living somewhere else.
The genetic differences between those people is something that you didn't measure and maybe didn't even think about.
But to the extent that it can affect how a virus impacts people, for example, you know, COVID had a bias with respect to blood type.
To the extent that blood types are not perfectly evenly distributed across the population, If you sampled in such a way that you happen to capture more people with O-positive blood in one part of your sample, it would show up as noise relative to the actual pattern you were trying to study, which is how virulent is this particular variant of the virus.
But one experiment's noise is—one scientist's noise is another scientist's hypothesis.
Yeah.
And so you can look at datasets that appear to be very noisy with regard to something and say, you know, well, you know, let's dig there.
Let's figure out what there is to be explained there, potentially.
And actually, what you're pointing to is the perfect example of this, because in effect, if you're asking the question, you know, what is the temperature doing over time?
And you are not thinking about what is the population doing over time.
Oh, it's concentrating heat in these little places where we also tend to measure temperature.
And the point is, it's noise until you decide to study that impact.
And then you discover, oh, actually one of the factors that was influencing what we thought was going on with climate is actually urbanization.
Right.
Okay, so again, here we are in the middle of this paper.
They are talking about three bindings that they get when they compare the urban and rural data set from 1850 to 2018 to the rural only.
We talked about noise.
Number two is the long-term linear warming trend of the rural and urban series is 62% higher than that for the rural only series.
And we've already gone over the numbers.
This paper published in 2021 by the same authors of this paper, many of the same authors, argue that much of this extra warming in the rural and urban series is due to a combination of urbanization bias and urban blending arising from the homogenization process.
So we've already sort of covered much of that.
And then three, while the rural and urban series implies an almost continuous long-term warming, the rural-only series suggests a much more non-linear behavior.
That is, the rural-only series suggests that temperatures have alternated between multi-decadal periods of cooling and periods of warming since at least the mid-19th century.
If I can have my screen back just for a minute to find the relevant Thing here, yeah, here it is.
I might, is this going to all fit?
Yeah, that shows.
Okay, so this is, I think, figure 3a from this same paper, soon at all, 2023, published in Climate this last month.
This is their, this is the visual accompanying what we were just talking about, the comparison of rural and urban with rural-only estimates.
Where the rural and urban, which is what you will tend to hear about in most climate change models, and what we are told there is nearly complete consensus about from climate scientists, is in red, the non-dashed line in red, for those of you with color inferiority.
And the data that these authors are using, which again is a tiny subset of the data that are used, Um, generally, but what they have selected out is, uh, the urban, um, the, the urban places.
So the rural only data, uh, with a blue dashed line shows, uh, again, it's, it's noisier.
Your peaks and your troughs are higher.
Um, that's, that's the noise, but also not with regard to noise, but with regard to The non-linearity, the less linear nature of the change, the red line is more or less going up over time.
The blue dashed line, using data only from the rural temperature stations, it does a lot more going up and down.
That said, beginning in about 1970, we see what looks to me, and I'm not doing the math on this, they do some of it later in the paper, but I don't remember whether they say, 1970 looks like an inflection point with regard to either model, right?
So, urbanization bias in the standard ways that we are informed about climate change Yes.
Does that mean that there is nothing to be found in an assessment that the globe is warming?
No.
But is there a number, is there bias in what we are being told?
And is there a pattern that is being obscured by using data from places that really it shouldn't be used?
And here's one more reason that we probably should be, that we absolutely, I'm just gonna say absolutely, should be suspect about using these urban weather stations, these urban temperature stations.
is that we've got data here from 1850.
Now, not all of these weather stations have been in use since 1850, of course, but many of them were and have been in continuous use since then.
How many of those that are urban now were urban in 1850?
Right?
So, what you're going to find is a warming trend regardless, because they went from rural to urban, and we know that cities are hotter.
And so, even within a temperature station, if you have urbanization around that temperature station, you will get a warming trend no matter what is happening more globally.
Yeah.
All right, now how to put some of these things together.
One, as I mentioned to you when you first pointed this paper out to me, this result did not come as a total shock because I had had a conversation with Creon Levitt, former NASA scientist, on this very topic based on different data.
And this is not a public conversation?
It was not a public conversation.
He does have a... he's written up what he was looking at, and I will put a link in the description, or I will give it to you, and you'll put a link in the description since you compile those things.
But anyway, he wrote up his analysis, and what he looked at On the basis that the data sets that are traditionally used for calculating warming are understood widely by people who are skeptical to have a lot of monkey business in them.
That there's a lot of adjustment in things that is not necessarily justified by rigorous scientific logic.
And so he looked for a data set The modelers will say, we always manipulate things.
Manipulate would be a wrong word, but you're saying actually it's widely understood that this level of tinkering is not justified by their explanations for why they're doing it.
Right, so let's give an example of why tinkering might actually be justified.
Let's suppose that you were collecting temperature data from a bunch of sensors that you had distributed around some landscape.
Let's suppose it had nothing to do with global warming.
You were just measuring temperature because you were interested in some ecological phenomenon.
Phonology.
Phonology.
Yeah.
Which, you know, is related to climate, of course.
But, you know, when do plants in a particular...
When do deciduous huckleberries flower every year in, you know, in the Pacific Northwest?
Right.
So maybe you would be looking at microclimates.
You would have distributed a bunch of sensors and then you would take their data and you would correlate that data with measurements that you took some other way about what was flowering.
Okay.
So suppose on some day, you know, you get an average temperature of Fahrenheit.
Let's say it's 75 degrees.
But one sensor reads zero.
Okay?
That sensor is broken.
If you include the zero, your data set is worse than if you exclude it.
You have a totally legitimate reason to throw it out.
You know it wasn't zero.
Yeah.
So that would be an obvious case.
Now you could also do other things.
What if it says 58?
Right, so you could throw out the outliers that are far enough out that they're suspect, and you know, based on what it was you were studying, you would have to be careful not to throw out data that's actually informative, but I know you were going somewhere specific, but this is always the problem with throwing out outliers.
That you say, well, okay, zero, that's broken.
200 degrees Fahrenheit, that's broken.
Those are broken.
But within, say, three standard deviations of the norm, That's broken?
Maybe?
Maybe.
But if you start whittling away the outliers until what you get is an answer that looks right to you, what looks right to you starts to become a much more narrow field, and you yourself as a scientist become catalyzed, and then your data become catalyzed, and then you can only see one thing, and you're no longer operating as a scientist.
Yeah, in fact, we've mentioned this before, but there's a marvelous exploration of this and related topics by Feynman called Cargocult Science.
And he talks about the fact that very important scientific discoveries have been delayed by the fact that people were throwing out the evidence that they were true because it violated their assumptions about what was possible.
So, I can't remember if it's Maxwell's equation.
I don't remember what the exact example was, but anyway, it's well worth looking at this because the point is, on the one hand, in order to do good science, sometimes you've got to throw stuff out.
On the other hand, you can certainly talk yourself into validating a false belief.
So, this has to be done by people who are scientifically rigorous and know when to be surprised and know when to just throw something out because it couldn't possibly be right.
So anyway, those are important influences.
Now what Creon did, and again we will put the link to this in the description here, but what Creon did was he looked at a different data set that was largely ignored and therefore hadn't been tinkered with.
And the data set has to do with the measurements of temperature and other parameters At airports, where these things are rigorously monitored because they are relevant to aviation.
In an extreme case, you can think about the likelihood that there is ice on the wing of an airplane.
It's a life-and-death thing, and so there's a whole system for monitoring these parameters so pilots know exactly what's going on.
And what Creon found Very much consistent with this paper, but maybe even more extreme, is that... With this paper that I'm talking about, soon at all 2023.
Was that in places he compared, for example, after talking to me or thinking about our podcast, he looked at Portland and found warming, and then he looked at, is it Camp Pendleton?
But a An airport that had no development around it and he found that the warming that he indeed saw in the Portland measurements evaporated when, or probably evaporated, of course there's noise in both data sets, but appears to have evaporated when he looked at a what should have been a climatologically similar location that had not experienced a development over the same period of time.
So anyway, this is exactly how you would go back and correct an error that had come from the fact that your measurements were biased towards urban, and therefore of course ended up showing you warming.
Yeah, and we all should want to have our scientists behaving this way, and we all should want to know We all should want to know what is actually true.
We all should.
Okay, so that's one of the big pieces of this paper, is about the urbanization bias in the data sets, and therefore the models that use those data sets that include temperature station data from both urban and rural areas since 1850.
Uh, the other one, uh, is, um, well, uh, here.
So this is, uh, from, again, the beginning of the paper.
Uh, the authors of, the main authors of this paper from a paper in 2021 anticipated two major problems with the IPCC's, um, uh, What does AR stand for?
Sorry, I've forgotten.
I have to go back.
It's basically the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report.
Okay, good.
So they had done Assessment Report 5, and they were about to do Assessment Report 6, and these guys wrote a paper in 2021 that came just late enough for the IPCC to not include their recommendations in their next report in AR 6.
They anticipated two major problems, Connolly et al.
did, if AR6 repeated AR5's approach, which of course it did.
Those two major problems that they predicted were, one, this is what we just talked about, urban areas represent a small fraction of the global land area, yet the land component of the IPCC's global temperature estimates include many urbanized weather stations.
As a result, there was concern that they might be contaminated by urbanization bias, i.e.
warming biases from the growth of urban heat islands, Around weather stations.
So we've already gone through that one.
That's just a recap.
Two.
Matz et al.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
The total solar irradiance TSI data set recommended by the CMI P6 organizers for estimating past solar activity is a low solar variability estimate, just like the four data sets considered by these other modeling groups for ERA-5, and implies a much smaller role for the sun than using a high solar variability data set.
Let's Explain for a moment before we read a little bit more on this paper.
What are the potential contributors to climate, and specifically to global warming?
There are many, but broadly speaking we have anthropogenic, we have human, we have sun, and we have volcanoes.
We have volcanism, solar, and anthropogenic, and they do talk about some of the contributors of volcanism in this paper, but largely we're going to talk here about human versus sun, because those are the two biggest ones that are being talked about.
So you said human, volcanic, and sun, and so I know you're not excluding it, because I know it's definitely on your mind, so it must be buried in one of those.
But it seems to me that there's a fourth category.
I think there are many categories, but what are you... I'm on tenor hooks here, what?
The orbital dynamics.
Okay, sure.
The point here is not that there's a lot of other things.
We're not talking about volcanism either.
But yeah, so the Milankovitch cycles, maybe even that's included in solar.
They must be including it in the Sun.
Right.
So the problem is that sun is two things then.
What's the sun putting out?
And then the sun is also, what are we receiving?
Which is heavily contingent.
So volcanism is the simplest of those three, right?
What are the ways that humans could be affecting climate?
Wow, it's not just one thing.
It's not just three things.
It's not just eight things, right?
You know, maybe rather than sun, it should be called astronomical influences, and I don't know what all is included.
You know, these are these, you know, data sets and models that are so multivariate that, you know, basically not a climate scientist, I don't know what all is included.
But If you assume, if you say, okay let's put aside, let's just imagine for the moment in a simple universe which is not the one that we live in, the only possible effects on climate are humans and sun.
If you say, well the sun doesn't change that much, therefore, and that would be a low solar variability model, the sun doesn't change very much in terms of how it affects the earth, You will inherently then increase the relative impact of humans on any change that you see.
If you've only got those two things and you say, low solar variability, sun doesn't – yeah, the sun has an impact for sure, but it's pretty much consistent over time, you have guaranteed the outcome that the role of anthropogenic activities has a higher influence.
If I can say that another way.
Yeah.
Allocating total change to an artificially smaller number of causes, you will end up taking causes you didn't account for and putting it into those other modes where it doesn't belong.
If the sun varies and you assume it doesn't, then you are going to end up including the variability that comes from the sun under some other causal mode that it is not attributable to.
Exactly.
So these authors have used what they're calling a high solar variability data set.
They're not the only ones to do it.
They didn't invent it.
These data sets exist out there and they're available to everyone.
But they started not with the assumption that the sun varies a lot, but with the assumption that If we changed our assumptions going in about the degree to which the Sun does vary, then we will end up attributing less of the change that we have seen to human activity.
And that's a pretty basic assumption, and it's borne out, basically.
So I will say, I now know why orbital dynamics don't show up, and I don't think they're buried in what the Sun is putting out in their model.
It's because on this time scale they're irrelevant.
Yeah, that's right.
The change is too slow.
Okay, so a little more from this actual paper.
So again, we've got the IPCC, which comes out, I don't know what the periodicity of their annual reports or their attribution, what do they, what was the ACE assessment reports?
Thank you.
I don't think so.
They can't because they're only on six.
So the IPCC, between putting out its Assessment Report No.
5 and Assessment Report No.
6, this Connolly et al.
2021 paper was published, and they said, here are some things you need to be concerned about, urbanization bias and your low solar variability models.
data sets.
And the IPCC said, ah, you came too late.
And, you know, maybe they did.
Apparently 10 and a half weeks too late.
We can't include that in how it is that we're going to go about doing this.
But since then, since the error six, since the assessment report number six from the IPCC has come out, there are a number, as they say here, a number of recent global temperature attribution studies have explicitly considered different aspects of a number of recent global temperature attribution studies have explicitly considered different aspects of that were mentioned in this 2021 Six are mentioned here.
Three of these studies agreed with Connolly et al.
2021 that A, much of the long-term warming since the late 19th century could be explained in terms of changing solar activity.
And B, the IPCC had substantially underestimated the solar contribution.
Two of the studies disagreed with Connolly et al.
2021 and concluded that the solar contribution was very small.
The remaining study reached an intermediate conclusion, finding that TSI, that's the models that are being used, or the solar, excuse me, finding that TSI was the dominant climate driver up to 1960, but that afterwards CO2 appeared to dominate.
That looks like science to me, right?
We've got six published pieces of research since Collier et al.
2021 published and said, here are two major ways that the existing models are not being rigorous about figuring out, about teasing apart the various effects that might exist.
Six studies, three of which say, yeah, you may be right there.
Not certain, but you may be right.
Two of which say, yeah, we don't think so.
We still think that the sun plays a minor role.
And one that is intermediate, and it's not actually intermediate, it's basically got an inflection point.
point.
Before 1960, they say sun, and after 1960, they say actually carbon is their finding.
That is what science, especially in a complex system, will tend to look like.
We haven't figured this out yet, and when you tweak parameters in your model, you can get wildly different results, and that tells you for sure that the models are a big part of what is driving the, frankly, ideology of climate change, rather than the science.
You know, it's interesting.
The complex systems problem here intrudes in multiple directions, and whether it is emphasized or de-emphasized is a political question.
It shouldn't be.
But what's happening here is you have a series of layered complex systems.
The Sun does not appear to be a complex system to those of us who look at it from the Earth, but it is one.
And the likelihood that what it puts out is constant is, well, it's just simply false.
You can tell that it's simply false because, for example, you know, coronal mass ejections contain a lot of energy and they are flung off the sun.
There's a pattern in terms of how frequently they're flung off.
They are haphazardly flung off in terms of direction.
But the idea, you know, if this was a perfectly uniform illuminator of the Earth, you wouldn't have those kinds of effects and they're clearly there.
So the sunspot cycle-- Coronal mass ejections put the lie to low solar variability.
Right.
The variability is there and we can see it on many different timescales.
We see a sunspot cycle, you know, a sort of decade-like cycle.
We see low periods of activity, you know, within a year, high periods of activity.
These things all suggest a highly dynamic complex system that we do not understand.
Yeah.
It is not a complex adaptive system, right?
Complex adaptive system is different.
That's like biology, but it's a complex system like hurricane.
Well, things on the Earth are responding complexly and adaptively to warming that is happening.
Absolutely.
Phenology and range distribution, organisms moving north towards the poles where they couldn't survive before, things like this.
Right.
So yes, our reaction is there's a whole lot of biology and therefore complex adaptive systems interfacing it, but the Sun doesn't know anything about them.
It's just flinging out energy as it does based on the fusion that's taking place internally.
But if you think about whether complex systems are going to be emphasized, When we're being panicked about anthropogenic climate change, then of course the fact that we have this massively complex system that we are disrupting and therefore putting ourselves in danger is the star of the show, right?
Whereas the complex system inside the Sun, that means maybe we actually can't be entirely certain about what we think we're detecting, because even if we detect a warming down here on Earth, the question is, is that An anomaly of the data because it was collected in heat islands?
Is that an anomaly of the Sun that we don't yet understand, you know, in terms of how much energy it was putting out?
What can we infer from, you know, past solar environments based on indirect evidence in ice cores or whatever?
So, I guess what you would like, scientifically speaking, is a consistent response to complexity.
Complexity ought to give you pause about what you think you understand, and that both puts us in danger with respect to disrupting complex systems of life here on Earth, but it also puts us in danger scientifically of getting stuff wrong because we were still at the beginning of understanding all of the inputs to it.
Right.
So our certainty should go down because we're looking at complex systems and that increases danger but it also decreases insight.
Yes.
All true.
All true.
Okay.
Maybe, though, these people are cranks.
Maybe the people who did the research have an ax to grind, an ideological ax to grind, just like many have argued those on the side of modifying all human behavior immediately and permanently due to rampant, out-of-control anthropogenic climate change appear to have an ideological ax to grind.
Let's see.
So this is CERES.
You can show my screen here.
The Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences is a multidisciplinary and independent research group.
Lots more good things to say.
Here are three of the primary drivers at CERES.
They're actually the three top authors on the paper.
Their mission statement.
In recent years, the scientific community appears to have prioritized defining a scientific consensus on any scientific topic, especially politically charged topics.
We believe this obsession with forming a consensus contradicts the ethos of true scientific inquiry and open-ended scientific research.
Sounds like loons to me.
Instead, our approach to scientific research is driven by a deep curiosity to continually expand and revisit our understanding of important scientific docs.
I think they're not following the science.
I think that's their problem.
So just one more thing from their site.
Following is not their strong suit.
Yeah, they're not followers.
That's their problem.
That's probably why.
Well, support us, it says.
How we are funded.
Just a little bit more about them.
In our view, scientific research works best when it is independent.
What?
From industry, government, religion, politics, or ideology.
For this reason, a strict requirement for all our patrons and funders is they do not attempt to influence either the conclusions or research directions of our group.
Instead, we strive to ensure our research is driven by objective, evidence-based analysis, like that.
Rather different from what many funders attempt and succeed at doing with regard to driving scientific both results, but more cryptically and maybe more importantly the questions that are asked in the first place.
So if certain kinds of questions are never asked, they don't have to get into the mud and actually change the results that are found, because they can just keep the questions from being asked in the first place.
And that is part of why independent research groups like this one are so important.
So I'm going to take a little license and step out of this immediate topic for a moment because something emerged.
Let's do it.
I mean, there's lots more to say, but can you show the Offit video here?
What's an OFIT?
Why don't you say more?
Paul OFIT is a scientist and vaccine evangelist who we have taken to task for his presentation most recently of the spike protein as the reason for the adverse events that we see coming.
out of the mRNA shots, and I accused him of knowing that that was unlikely to be true, and that in fact he seemed to be trying to rescue the mRNA platform from the fatal flaw at its heart.
This doesn't sound like a climate question, but what he said...
Sounds like a science question.
I believe Paul Offit is beginning to feel the heat, and that us having leveled at him the accusation that surely he knows better is now creating in him an incentive to...
He's now rationalizing in public what he's been doing, and his rationalization is fascinating.
So let's show the clip Our training as scientists is the opposite of the training for being a science communicator.
I mean, to be a good scientist, you never go beyond the data in front of you.
Never.
That's the worst mistake you could make.
You feel you have to reduce uncertainty by having caveat after caveat after caveat.
That does not work well on television or the radio.
I mean, you have to I mean, you can't really say MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism.
You can only say that with all the studies that have been done, it's extremely unlikely.
You can't prove, never.
You can't reject the null hypothesis, and you always know that in the back of your head.
You know you can't say that, but you say it anyway, because it's true.
MMR doesn't cause autism.
I mean, these aren't mathematical theorems.
You don't have proofs.
Alright, so what he says there is that effectively when speaking to the public you can't really be speaking in a scientifically accurate way because what scientists do is they never get ahead of the data.
He's wrong about that.
He is saying something that sounds right.
You don't want scientists getting ahead of the data.
But there is absolutely an important scientific way in which we scientists discuss what might be true without misleading anybody about what we know.
Right?
And in fact, this is true both inside of science, when we talk to other scientists who are expert in the same field, As it is true when we talk to the public.
It sounds different, but inside of science there's an entire language for referring, for example, to evidence that you know exists that has not yet been published, right?
You say personal communication.
You say, I was speaking to this person and they conveyed that in their lab they've seen this thing.
Well, it's also, I mean, it's just, it's inference.
And inference is a huge part of what we do as scientists and as humans, but specifically inference.
And, you know, he is speaking as a, like a platonic ideal of an empiricist, which does not exist and also requires that inference happened in order to collect whatever data it is that he's now talking about.
But the other side of what he said, which reveals how wrong he is, also is This sounds like what we used to hear behind closed doors among our faculty colleagues.
The belief, actually, and anyone who's ever been a student has sometimes intuited that this is actually what their teachers think of them.
So many faculty actually think their students are dumb and can't think and just need to be, you know, just are looking for grades and, you know, a job afterwards and, you know, and don't, don't care and couldn't be bothered and actually can't, can't do.
And this attitude, this arrogance, this hubris is found for sure among scientists as well as other faculty.
And it's not just about students.
It's about the entire public.
The public can't do the math.
They can't think through it.
They don't know what science is.
They just have to be told a result.
They just have to be told what it is and what to do and be allowed to move on with their day.
And it's not untrue.
That all of us are overwhelmed by the complexity of the world, right?
That we have way too many choices that we have to make all the time, and in some places we'd like to be like, who can I just trust on this?
Okay, you!
Can I just do what you said to do and set and forget and be done?
And that's of course how a lot of people ended up where they were on COVID, right?
But it's Reprehensible, and it is successfully dumbing down people when they aren't actually that dumb.
Yeah.
All of us are curious.
All of us have the capacity, pretty much.
Most, the vast majority of us have the capacity to assess nuance.
And it is that, you know, the science communicators are the ones who are just supposed to be telling you an answer.
No, they're not.
That's what we've been led to believe.
That's what we get.
You know, I am science, says Bauchi.
Follow the science.
No, You can see exactly how this results in a disaster of the sort that we have around all things COVID, and of the sort that we have around anthropogenic climate change.
Because if you follow off its argument to its logical conclusion, then when something important is at stake, we have something called science communicators.
And these science communicators are people who are trained to do science and know that they cannot do it in front of the public, And what they must do is present an artificially clean picture of complex systems.
Now, even if a bunch of dumbfucks actually believed that, once they establish that system where you get to lie to the public because at the end of the day we need the public to reduce its carbon footprint, what happens is somebody figures out how you capture that voice of the things that decent people are not allowed to contradict in public, And it commandeers it for its own purposes that have nothing to do with the public.
And then imagine the following thing.
Imagine that people like you and I decide that we want to talk about the science just as we would have in a classroom where we let people see the full messiness of the process, the full noisiness of the data sets, and all of the influences that we don't yet understand.
Then what happens is they have to control the literature Because it's not.
There is no firewall between the public hearing their science communicators tell them an artificially clean story, and then what the scientists say to each other, because people are listening in to what the scientists say.
So now you can't speak the truth at a conference.
You can't speak the truth inside your department.
The point is there just becomes this orthodoxy that is an article of faith, purely, and it just self-reinforces and casts out anybody who looks at it and says, actually, you've missed something.
And, you know, we were we were rogue as professors as well, right?
Science is taught with textbooks, right?
Because there's just too much of it to do it any other way.
You can't have people wallowing in all the uncertainty and all of the wrong turns we've made and the things that we've thought that we now know weren't true.
No.
The way you do it is you have the students buy a $300 textbook that has the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in it.
Because now On September 13th?
Something like that.
September 13th, 2023, we have finally arrived at complete and unfailing human knowledge.
We were wrong until right now, and we will never be more right than we are right now.
This is the logic.
And I mean, what amazing hubris, right?
And you will hear these like practical sounding explanations.
Oh, it's too much.
You don't have time.
You can't teach them like that.
Well, so we are not just assuming that the public is filled with idiots who don't want to think for themselves, but so too are students who are in college literally to become scientists.
So, of course most of the scientists also don't know how to think, because they have been fed these textbook versions of science since they were students, which apparently, you know, back in, you know, whenever they were students, it was 1957, we know everything and nothing shall change, but everything until right now was wrong, or a lot was wrong.
And, you know, in 1987 and in 2017, like all of these moments when any student or member of the public arrives to think about, well, I wonder what's true.
Ah, you're lucky you're right.
you arrive today, because until today we had so much wrong, but now we got this.
We nailed it.
We have it.
What insanity.
Yeah.
Well, not only insanity, but it is setting us up for a disaster.
Let's say that the consensus on global climate change, anthropogenic climate change, was about right.
There would be nothing more reassuring than watching people who were allowed to question it find themselves having to return to that conclusion because that's actually where their skepticism It's true and that's why it stands up to scrutiny.
Whereas the idea that as you depart from the orthodoxy you're committing some sort of moral offense.
Well, of course there's every possibility that we are missing important things, and the license to lie that comes from you cannot... I mean, just notice these two things juxtaposed.
He talks about the problem of it.
He talks about the problem of being on On CNN or MSNBC, there's just, you can't, and he specifically uses the example of autism and vaccines, he says, you know, science does not allow you to say with perfect certainty that they don't cause it, but we say it anyway because, and his basic point is because we want people to get that message, And therefore we can't be honest with them about the ambiguity.
But it creates a, you know, so, okay, CNN and MSNBC are the excuse.
And I will agree, I've not been on either of those things, but I've been on Fox.
That three-minute spot is very difficult because there's not a lot of room to get nuance in there.
But what do they do where there is room to get nuance in?
These same people don't say, well, I said it overly precisely on CNN because there wasn't a lot of time, but then I got on a three-hour podcast and I did it properly the scientific way.
That's not what he says, right?
They go after those of us who have tried to explore these things on podcasts at length with full nuance, and they treat that as some sort of an offense too.
Yeah.
No, and I would actually say it's not, you don't get precision with your three minutes.
You get broad generalizations that actually lack precision and often, therefore, move into inaccuracy.
Well, yeah.
I mean, of course, I would say what you get is precision over something that is inaccurate.
Yes.
Now, you get details that are wrong.
Yeah, if you do it off its way.
You get precision, not accuracy.
Yes, you get precision and not accuracy.
And, you know, there is an art.
He's First of all, he is sliding into his rationalization this data-driven view of the world.
The fact is... It's entirely empirical, like I said.
Right, it is entirely empirical, which means you're not even doing science, dude.
Science is hypothetico-deductive, which means hypothesis is ahead of the data.
Right?
Like literally.
That's what it is.
It's the scientists speculating about what might be true and then pursuing data to see whether it is.
Yeah, but we already know.
So let's just do some science to demonstrate that what we already know is true.
Right.
Let's do it that way.
The paternalism of this is insane, right?
The science communicator is going to take what He or she ostensibly learns from the actual science taking place somewhere where people are allowed to do nuance.
They're going to artificially purify it for your own good so that you know that at the end of the day you should get their vaccine or you should reduce your carbon footprint or whatever it is.
But the problem is Those of us who have been back where the scientists are discussing this know how garbagey this process is.
I mean, witness the thing that we explored some weeks back with the cheap trick used to create the impression of efficacy.
It's pure statistical artifact and not spotted by peer review.
Go ahead.
This is another zig back to climate stuff-ish.
Often when climate comes up, no, often when the environment comes up, People assume that you're talking about climate.
Yep.
And we have made a point for long, long before actually we had any sort of public stage at all, of separating out these two things.
Climate science, inherently model-based, inherently injected with the assumptions of the people doing the work, obviously informed by something that is not entirely scientific, because how else could there be such broad consensus when you're talking about models that couldn't possibly have this level of consensus if you were actually free to choose the assumptions?
That you would like to choose.
To wit, we see those six papers that we talked about where three said, yeah, actually, maybe there's some more solar contribution.
Two of which said, no, we think it's mostly anthropogenic.
One of which says, actually, there's kind of an inflection point around what was it, 1960?
It's, you know, solar variability up until then, and then it starts to be carbon dioxide.
Like, that's what scientific results look like.
But when we And I don't, you know, the labels are getting really old, but if I were asked, you know, are you an environmentalist?
Yeah.
And I have been asked, like, what thing do you care about more than anything else in the world?
And it is the environment.
We are making extraordinarily permanent changes to things that people who haven't spent time in wild nature, and especially people who haven't spent time in wild nature who are either studying it or who are de facto studying it because they have to understand it in order to do what they're trying to do there, which might be something like hunting or fishing, honestly.
might conflate environment with climate but it is simply true that we are destroying ecosystems that we can't get back.
That we are toxifying our land and our water such that the insects are dying and once the insects are dying the songbirds are dying because they don't have anything to eat and once the songbirds are dying the predators that eat the songbirds are dying which is the wild dogs and the wild cats and the raptors And we've got, you know, not just deforestation, but de-everything.
All of these ecosystems are being destroyed for our hunger for development.
And that is, all of those things are true quite aside from what may or may not be true about the human role in climate change.
I know it's exactly what you're saying, but the very fact that we are being lied to, even if anthropogenic climate change is approximately correct, our model that we are being presented, even if that's true, the fact that we are constantly being lied to about it is causing people to tune out the entire set of questions, because Yes, climate change is synonymous to most people with environmental concern.
And so for those of us who are skeptical of all of this climate modeling, because it can't, it's models, right?
We know how bad those models are, how likely they are to reinforce the pre-existing biases of the people who are doing the modeling.
And we know how toxic these environments are.
So it is certain that those biases are artificially creating a consensus that then will be borne out by models that mean nothing.
That's simply true.
And then we are told that the models are dead certain and that we're in an absolute emergency and we need to turn the economy of planet Earth upside down.
And we need to, you know, constrain you to a 15-minute city and maybe you're going to have to eat bugs and all that stuff, right?
When people are being lied to that way, they become unreachable about the stuff that we are clearly doing that we can't undo, that is going to hurt your children and your grandchildren.
They are going to have a lesser Earth because the climate fanatics are making people deaf to things that they would otherwise care deeply about.
And it's tragic.
It's... It is.
Yeah.
And it's unnecessary.
And, you know, Well, you don't get to lie about the science, right?
Oh, no, but they do all the time!
All the time.
But the excuse, right, that we have to present, you know, it is exactly what you're describing, we have to present an artificially certain picture to the public in order for them to give a damn, which is not true.
You know, people can absolutely hear things like, The cost-benefit analysis surrounding this treatment is worthwhile for you, but then they get to ask questions like, okay, if it's worthwhile for a 75-year-old person with comorbidities, is it also worthwhile For a six-year-old who does not, is not threatened by the disease in question.
And so that's why, that's really why they want to make this pure is because... No questions for you.
If you're human, you need this.
You need this, right.
And that is so obviously gameable and capturable by perverse economic interests that become indifferent to those they're killing because it is profitable to be indifferent.
And that's where we are.
So, you know, maybe, you know, maybe CNN and MSNBC just simply need to come to an end because their model of discussion is harmful to people.
And maybe the point is, as with the discovery that the public was ready to deal with much more complex narratives than their, you know, three-camera sitcoms were providing, but it needed a different business model.
You know, the long form podcasting or whatever comes after long form podcasting that lets things be explored with their full messiness.
Maybe that's the way to interface with the public, you know.
But either way, you don't get to lie about this stuff.
It's too important.
Yeah, it is.
You wanted to talk about that ad campaign from Apple.
Yeah.
So I want to.
Decently related.
It is quite related.
So there's this like five-minute video that just came out from Apple last couple of days.
Last couple of days, in which... Starring a black woman as Mother Nature.
Yeah, it's a skit that they have put on.
Super high production values, of course, and it is causing a tremendous amount of eye-rolling.
Oh, conservatives just hate it, right?
Yeah, and I must say, personally, I was... I don't know what to think of it.
Are we going to show a tiny bit of it?
Yeah, let's show a little piece of it.
It's really worth watching the whole thing, but I'm going to show a little bit of it.
Electricity.
Electricity status.
We're operating on 100% clean electricity.
What runs on 100% clean electricity?
Every Apple office, store, and data center runs on clean electricity thanks to you and your powerful wind and sun.
And Apple offices are already carbon neutral.
Yeah.
This building is carbon neutral?
Oh yeah, we do it with a mix of clean energy and eliminating greenhouse emissions.
It's kind of like a URTR.
Are you seriously explaining carbon neutrality to Mother Nature?
Right, no, I'm sorry.
You want to tell me how photosynthesis works too?
Don't.
Also, over 300 suppliers have committed to using 100% clean, renewable electricity.
What's next?
So, um...
I find this to be, and I don't know about that particular clip, but the whole thing, a very mixed bag, actually.
It's just, it's mixed.
Well, let's put it this way.
I am troubled by the fact that the reaction to it is Cynical, which I think is probably justified at one level, but the problem is I don't even think we get to check anymore because... Right.
This is... To your corners.
Yeah, to your corners.
And the problem is, A, because this is about anthropogenic climate change and Apple using this narrative to toot its own horn about its accomplishments, The point is everybody who is skeptical of the story about anthropogenic climate change and the fact that we need to turn the economies of, you know, all the nations of the world upside down in order to address this problem has the same reaction to it.
And I share some of that reaction.
Right.
On the other hand... Carbon offset credits.
Right.
I don't know whether Apple is completely hypocritical here or they're actually reporting On some positive stuff.
What I know is that I'm incapable, I don't sit in a position where I can evaluate how well Apple is doing on this front.
Because what this is, is PR.
But I do know, you know, let's take an adjacent example.
There's a question about Tesla and how sustainable its model for cars is based on the fact that cars, that electric cars have batteries that require elements that cause, you know, warfare in remote parts of the world and, you know, unsustainable living conditions, exploitation of child labor for the mining of materials and things.
And Tesla's actually done a pretty good job of changing their battery chemistry around a long-term, more sustainable model of mining.
So with regard to this video, though, you know, carbon offset credits is eminently gameable.
You know, ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
But they say in this, protecting soil, plants and trees.
Well, OK, trees are plants, but that's what they say.
Protecting soil, plants and trees.
And there's this little back and forth between Mother Nature and one of the Apple employees.
We've planted forests.
Where?
Paraguay, Brazil.
Are you trying to save the tropical savanna?
She says yes.
Savannah and Forrest aren't the same thing.
This, to me, this like jumped out at me.
It's like, this is a super high production value five minute video from Apple in which they just forgot that Savannah isn't the same as Forrest's?
Like, what is that?
That seems like a stupid error to have made.
But they also say, okay, we've restored mangroves in Colombia.
We've restored grasslands in Kenya.
Like, that has value to the extent that things can be restored.
You can't go into a place that's been denuded of all natural life for a hundred years and say, we planted some stuff.
It's back.
We got forest again.
Like, no, you don't have forest.
You might have a few trees, but that's not a forest.
Yeah, I agree with you.
You can't plant a forest, especially a tropical one.
We don't understand nearly enough.
You can restore habitat and then hopefully you get to a place where nature takes over and, you know, I mean, what we've seen in the eastern U.S.
is that forests that were denuded are now again forest, but they're not the same forest.
But I mean, this is forestry management language, not ecology language.
We've planted forests.
Nope.
Right.
No, you did not.
You've planted something that looks superficially like a forest.
Maybe.
I don't take the same exception.
I don't read the same way the idea of... I don't see the conflation between... I mean, she says, we planted forests.
Where?
Peregrine Brazil.
So you're trying to save tropical savanna?
Like, what?
I think it was, are you trying to save tropical savanna?
So that could be a new topic.
But anyway... It's not.
I mean, let me go back and listen to it.
Yeah.
It's both tiny, and I'm going to come off as pedantic.
You know what?
Forest is not forest.
The Ecuadorian Amazon is not the same as a piece of boreal forest in Alaska, say.
It's just not.
They have completely different characteristics, but also value to the earth and the organisms in it.
And the fact is that there's lots of places on the earth where you could plant trees, but you shouldn't, because that's not what is going on there.
And so we have these incredibly simple rubrics, like, oh, we're going to plant trees!
Plant trees are the thing!
Some places.
But A, you can plant trees, but you can't plant forests.
That's different levels of complexity.
And also, there are places where you wouldn't plant trees, and frankly, if you're planting trees in the savanna, what are you doing?
And, you know, so how much do they know about what they're actually doing?
And there's another thing in here of...
They take on this guy for wearing a leather jacket.
They're trying to reduce leather to nothing?
So there's like confusion mixed in with actually restoring mangroves in Colombia.
That does seem like a doable thing.
Like we've been places where mangroves are being restored.
And it protects the land behind them as well.
It effectively acts as a breakwater, and it collects nutrients, and then you get more land growing, and you get more protection, and it's protection for the fish that live in those spaces.
It's a habitat for the fish while they're maturing.
You know, it's extraordinary, and it's not particularly useful for humans.
But mangroves are a remarkably diverse and highly variable between places set of ecosystems that if part of what is happening here is a move to actually think carefully about where there are places that we could reverse some of the move to denude the land, good!
We need that.
We need that.
The leather thing is particularly odd because there's a whole level of analysis that's implied there that I doubt was done, which is, you know, leather is a product of animals, obviously.
Animals can be quite destructive depending upon where you're raising them.
On the other hand, if you're raising them for meat, wasting the leather doesn't make any sense.
In fact, it's probably environmentally good that you're not using some other material.
Which means that if this is thought through, they're trying to reduce the number of animals raised for meat to zero.
Or they're not, or they're just posturing.
And so, anyway, the reason I wanted to raise this is because, on the one hand, you can hear our cynicism.
Our cynicism is through the roof because we're sick of being lied to.
And it is causing us to have a reaction to the idea... And this is, we actually know about this stuff.
Right.
Like, we actually know about these sorts of ecosystems that they clearly don't, right?
Well, you know when you watch a car commercial and the car goes whizzing around the curves in the highway in a way that would probably or, you know, across the lake bed in a way that would violate your warranty if you bought the car and did it?
Oh, okay.
Not that it breaks physical principles.
The PR department is not in contact with the engineers and the warranty department.
Right?
They're separate endeavors.
And so I don't know what the hell is going on in Apple.
I do think Apple is in an interesting position because it is not what we would call an efficient market.
There's so much power involved in the brand of Apple, in part because people deal with it as a religion.
Mm-hmm.
And in part because Apple has done such a good job of making a refined product that it isn't, it's not easy to get up, to get fed up with Apple and just buy somebody else's version because you're, you know, okay, now you're in the Android world and you've got that set of problems.
So the point is that this is a company... I mean, we're practically advertising for them right here.
But let's think about in an efficient market where you have lots of competitors producing something similar, and then some competitor decides, you know what?
We'd like to produce it sustainably.
Well, what just happened?
Oh, you just went out of business because by producing it sustainably, you drove up the price.
You didn't deliver anything extra to your customers.
So those people who ignore the fact that you're producing it sustainably And you know, buy something else, do damage, but they personally come out ahead.
So it's all very well and good for Apple to do this because they've got as close to a legal monopoly as is possible.
Yes, but first of all, all of us who are paying attention to the ESG rubric know it is a disaster because it is so heavily politicized and it is being used as a bludgeon to elevate companies that partner with certain political ideologies, etc.
This should not be going on.
That does not mean that we should, as a species, be shaming companies that try to figure out how to do things in ways that either pollute less, that get more for the same amount of materials, or are more efficient.
Those are things that we should find laudable.
And to the extent that they are also good business, and this is a point that Bobby Kennedy makes beautifully, that pollution is economic inefficiency.
You're losing something into the environment.
And so anyway, we are now, the public is now at cross purposes with itself because we are so used to being lied to and we are so cynical because we are being lied to that we react to the very idea of doing business in a less destructive way as inherently false the public is now at cross purposes with itself because we are so used to being And they're probably stealing from us as they're doing this in some way that we can't even see.
And that is a mistake.
The savings will be passed on to us.
Right.
So we... I literally don't know how to think about this ad.
I find the ad a bit cringy, but I also know that, you know... But maybe they're earnest.
I don't know.
Right, but that's like... I go back and forth too.
It's like, oh, it's cringy.
And like, are you just being hypocritical?
Or are some of you earnest, and you really are trying to do good, and some of what they describe doing seems like it would do good, and some of it is just silly, or worse?
Right.
But what you don't want to do is get into a situation where somebody who does the right thing gets a wave of cynicism that punishes them for trying to do the right thing.
And I'm not saying that this is or isn't Apple trying to do the right thing.
I'm not saying, frankly, That what they're portraying as their actual environmental posture is an accurate representation of anything.
I find it unlikely and especially in light of the fact of Apple's history of doing things like Creating phony demand for its phones by programming them to fail artificially quickly.
In other words, the battery failure was partially induced in order to get people to buy more phones.
That's fun.
Right.
But actually, I wanted to raise a parallel example that I think is very interesting that people will probably not have thought of.
Some years ago, Volkswagen got into tremendous trouble for gaming the emission standards.
They effectively programmed vehicles to trick the test apparatus so that they appeared to be less polluting than they were.
That's like 10-ish years ago.
Yeah.
We're not talking about World War II era.
No, it was a big deal.
Now, I had an interaction.
We got a Toyota truck that replaced the Toyota truck that we'd had for many, many years.
And a totally different phenomenon surrounds it.
So all the car manufacturers are subject to the same CAFE standards that are ostensibly supposed to decrease emissions, etc.
But what I discovered about this truck was that it had been artificially hobbled by its manufacturer so that it was not responsive to you putting your foot on the gas pedal.
It has a lag built into that responsiveness.
Now, the reason that this is interesting is that the way this is done is so easy to defeat that of course there is a simple product that anybody who gives a damn about this can purchase that simply removes this lag, right?
It is as if the manufacturer wanted it to be discovered by the aftermarket that there was a way for Toyota to pass its tests without cheating.
So with the lag, there's better gas mileage.
Yes.
That's oversimplified from an engineering perspective.
It doesn't matter.
Averaging of data, not a lag.
The fact is, these two things amount to the same effect, right?
You have, in one case, a manufacturer doing something criminal, gaming a standard so that their vehicles are not as efficient as they appear to be.
And in the other case, you have a manufacturer within the law allowing the aftermarket to solve a problem that causes the same net impact.
Now, It's a very, you know... Static rules get gamed.
Static rules get gamed.
And then there's a question about, well, what should we really want?
How important is it?
The CO2 that is being put out of these vehicles, how important is it?
And of course, we can't even have that.
I would like to know!
Right.
It is important that we know.
There are a lot of us who are actually very interested.
Well, let's put it this way, though.
There's no way the Imagine two worlds.
One world, we discover that human released CO2 is not a major factor in climate, that other factors dominate.
Well, that is a world in which a lot of activity is, economic activity, is unleashed because its impact is not important.
The other world is the world we live in, where we're told... With regard to the particular metric that we were talking about.
Well, that's the interesting thing about CO2, is that it only matters if it is trapping heat from the sun at a rate that affects the climate here on Earth.
It's not toxic.
Right, but all that other economic activity is going to have other effects, and we're not looking at those other effects because that's not what we're focused on right now.
And again, you know, my noise is your hypothesis.
Right, but trade-offs being trade-offs.
What you want to do is prioritize the things that have the biggest negative impact, and you want to put your effort, your control efforts, on those things.
And just as with the case of the leather jacket, right?
Either it is actually a ecologically positive thing to use leather, because the meat is being used anyway, and throwing away the leather and then making a vinyl You know, replacement for it is extra activity that doesn't need to have pollutants put into the world.
I will say that this is one of my always questions is, awesome, yes, let's get rid of plastics.
What are we replacing it with?
Right.
What, like, we also can't do leather?
Can we not do trees either?
Or is it all glass?
Where's the glass coming from?
Like, what are we allowed to use?
Steel and glass?
Right.
Is that what we're left with?
What you want is a dispassionate net analysis about how much harm actually comes from this thing.
Double paned windows definitely increase the efficiency of your home by allowing you to maintain a temperature without losing so much heat or losing so much cool to the outside environment.
These sealed units go bad.
And never do you see a calculation in which the energy to produce a replacement sealed unit and to deal with the now useless trash, never do we see that in that analysis.
And dangerous, because it's sharp, right?
Like, it's not... The point is, hey, This, I agree, a sealed window unit has a benefit.
We can all see it.
It has a cost we don't talk about.
And until we talk about both things, we don't know whether or not... What is it?
RO value?
Is that the number?
Something like that?
R value.
Just R value?
Yeah.
Yeah.
You see the analysis with regard to only the R value and not with regard to the, you know, the entire industry and like, okay, on this window, If I put a double-paned window in, and I expect to want to look out that window and have my home heated on the inside and not on the outside for 40 years, What can I expect?
How many times will I have to replace one or both panes?
Because often you can't just do one.
You have to buy it as a unit.
So how many times am I going to have to not just take this out and send it to the landfill, but pay for the labor and the cost of making the new one and all of this?
As opposed to you have a pane of glass, you know, other than the, you know, kid in the baseball under the window, like, you know, sure, windows break, but it's just going to be there.
Forever!
Well, and no doubt there is a sweet spot.
Yes.
Right?
You can have those two pains and you can get 60% of the insulation value that you would get from a sealed pain without them being sealed, which means that you don't have the problem of the seal blowing and then causing your window to get cloudy.
If they're not sealed though, you're gonna get condensation and such.
Well, but the question is how many of these things could be mediated in a way that you can correct it?
Yeah, I don't think that's a solution here, because you know they're blown.
I mean, it was.
People used to do storm windows, and storm windows... Well, storm windows, though... I mean, in fact, the house we lived in in Michigan had storm windows, right?
And, you know, we'd put them on, take off the screens, and put on the storm windows in the winter.
And, you know, single-pane glass in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was not an effective way to heat a house that was built in, what was it, like 1947?
That little house we lived in?
But every year, you know, we clean the glass on both sides and, you know, we're talking about six months and then it comes off again.
But I'm not arguing for that, okay?
Storm windows suck.
But technologically speaking, you don't have to make, you know, think about it this way.
If you've got a sealed unit and it goes bad, you're throwing away two panes of glass and you are you know i don't know how much energy goes into creating it's not air in between those two panes of glass of glass so you know there's a there's an industrial process that goes to creating the impressively high r value yeah and all i'm saying is what is actually if you if you were actually concerned about energy usage mm-hmm There's some net analysis here.
And then there's some question about, well, how much would you, you know, relax your desire for more energetic efficiency to reduce a bit of pollution that matters a great deal?
We don't do these analyses because we're playing some... And hassle for the homeowner that then could allow them to be more productive economically, or otherwise productive in the world, that then returns value that is not being measured in your current equation.
Right.
And we are not doing any of these net analyses because all of these things have become symbolic.
We feel like our homes are vastly more efficient because of the standards that we are applying.
But really, you want the net standard.
And what we've got are these overly focused standards that do maybe maximize one thing.
But if you don't know what the cost in energy of the system of windows you have chosen is, then you don't really know anything.
And has anyone in our history of living in various places and various structures and had to replace a lot of windows ever been able to begin to answer the question of actual net No.
I remember a few conversations that you broached with people who were, you know, good people, smart people, who were like, I wouldn't even, all I can tell you is the R-value.
Right.
Like I just, I wouldn't even begin to know how to do the analysis.
And there's no percentage in it, because the fact is, it's actually, you know, so many industries have done this, where they've got Something that masquerades as a solution to one problem, but it's really the solution to the problem of an economically depressed sector.
So in bicycles, for example, a well-built steel bicycle does anything that an aluminum or titanium or carbon bicycle can do.
It's slightly heavier, not enough to matter, it's well done.
And it'll last you your whole life.
So the bike industry has a problem, which is that a lot of people buy one bike and- If you get in an accident, you can fix it.
Right.
On the other hand, if we can sell you a fancy plastic bicycle and call it carbon fiber so you don't realize it's plastic, and then you have to replace it periodically because we've now sold you a bicycle that's made of- Because you're riding a plastic bike.
Yeah, it's chemically an organic thing, which is not a long-term solution.
Rather low tensile strength.
Right?
I mean, that's the issue with carbon fiber, or at least in one direction.
Let's put it this way.
Under the right conditions, the expected conditions, it's a great material.
And, you know, I think for camera tripods, it's the right material.
For a bicycle, when your safety is depending on the thing not suddenly braking on you while you're riding at high speed, it's a terrible material.
Also, forces come at you in rather unexpected ways when you're bicycling.
Well, let's put it this way.
As long as everything is as the manufacturer anticipated, no problem.
But that doesn't mean that somebody didn't hit your bike with a shopping cart while you were in a store and you didn't know it and so it developed a small crack.
Got a stress fracture.
Right, exactly.
So anyway, point being, carbon fiber bicycles solved a serious problem.
But it was a problem, an economic problem, for bicycle manufacturers.
It was not a problem for the consumer.
And this idea that, you know, hey, selling people replacement sealed window units is good business if you're selling windows.
Because it causes people to replace windows that otherwise wouldn't have needed it.
So you may not be all that interested in figuring out whether or not the energy lost in making new window units is more than the energy saved by the unit overs.
You win when you buy new windows.
Right.
So people, they don't think about it.
It's not a common question.
Right.
All right.
I have one more thing.
Do you have more?
I mean, I want to talk about libraries.
All right.
So let's do one more thing on climate and then we can move to libraries.
I wanted to argue that we should actually address climate change, whether or not it's anthropogenic, And that there is one, although I am absolutely dead set against geoengineering, because I think it is just the most insane example of people overestimating what they understand about a complex system, and it invites so many disasters.
You know, for example... Will it blow up the moon, though?
I'm not willing to blow up the Moon.
I like the Moon for lots of reasons, some of them aesthetic, and I can't defend it at all, but I just think it's cool.
Okay, we'll take that off the list for now.
All right, the Moon stays.
Okay.
But, you know, let's take an obvious example or two.
You know, geoengineering could involve putting particles in the atmosphere to block... Oh my god, these people!
Right, exactly, right?
How could that possibly go right?
What we need is less sunlight on the earth.
That's going to make everything better.
Less sunlight on the earth, which will affect, let's see, everything.
And, you know, affect human health directly, etc, etc.
Okay, that's a dumb idea.
I mean, it's like, dumb.
It's as dumb as blowing up the moon.
Dumb to the 10th power, right?
Equally dumb.
Hey, let's fertilize the oceans with, you know, limiting reagents such that they pick up carbon by Creating algae.
There's all sorts of ideas.
I don't even know what that meant.
I didn't track that.
Well, fertilizing the oceans.
Is it copper?
There's plans to... When you say fertilize the ocean, I don't know what fertilize the ocean means.
So you just said copper.
adding some limiting element to the oceans that some things that live in the oceans are constrained by because it is limiting for them that once they have more of say it's copper if it's molybdenum right then they will start proliferating and by proliferating they will make more carbon because we live on earth and we have carbon-based life They will capture carbon that is otherwise... They will, I don't, I'm sorry, I said make more carbon.
They will use more carbon and then what?
They will sequester it and as long as it's... There's like short-lived, what are they, like planktonic somethings, like what happens then?
Get an equilibrium.
I mean look, It's not that they're first order wrong, that you could change things in some direction that would have a net impact.
What they're wrong about is that you don't know all of the things you're going to affect, and so all your second, third, and fourth order effects are going to be devastating.
But anyway... Ocean biomass is the solution to the I mean, look, first of all, you've got a religion based on the idea that it is this non-toxic, transparent molecule in the atmosphere that is overwhelmingly going to mess up our climate.
And that's why you need to sell your leather jacket.
Sell your leather jacket and eat bugs.
But, okay, so here's going to be my argument for what we actually should do.
Okay, I'm dubious about anthropogenic climate change and how serious it is.
I'm not saying it's not serious.
As I've mentioned many times before, the Arrhenius equation is not new, and it does suggest that changing the carbon concentration of the atmosphere will trap more heat, and the question is really not whether that is happening, but whether it's happening enough to matter.
That's one thing.
Second thing, this is not a minor issue if we are affecting it enough to matter because there is a parameter that we, as far as I know, can be certain of that makes this very high stakes, which is the trapped methane in the Arctic.
So what you do not want to do is tread into novel territory where The Arctic starts to unfreeze at a new level, because if that happens, the release of methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas, will cause an increase in warming, which will cause a decrease in Arctic ice, which causes a darkening of the planet, which captures more of the sun's light.
So you mentioned albedo before.
I will try to do this efficiently, but Thing to know, what we know, quite apart from global climate change, any of that discussion, from a Serbian climatologist named Milankovic, this was his insight, was that there are... This is from like early mid-20th century.
Yeah, there are three ways in which the orbit of the Earth is not perfectly regular.
There are three cycles, and these cycles, each of them has a tiny effect on the amount of the Sun's energy that lands here and sticks, right?
One of them has to do with the degree of the Earth's tilt, which changes slightly, We're at 23.5 now, but we go between 22.5 and 24.5-ish.
We're right about in the middle right now.
There is a precession of the North Pole, that is to say where the North Pole points in the universe, precesses.
This will be known to people as the difference between the Magnetic North and the Cardinal North, the Compass North, I think.
Really.
You would detect it in whether the North Star was North.
So the magnetic North is a feature of idiosyncrasies in the composition of the Earth.
But okay, so the precession, where the North Pole points, the precession... Where the actual North Pole points, okay.
Yes, if you spin a top, you will watch the stalk of the top go like this.
That's precession.
So there's a cycle that is the precession of the Earth's axis, rotational axis.
There is a degree of the tilt.
Is it tilted more or less?
And then there's an obliquity of the orbit.
How circular versus oblong is the orbit?
And these three things are unconnected to each other, and they have very different cycles.
I think one is 100,000 years, one is something like 41,000 years, and one is closer to 20,000 years.
And so the problem is, That these things sometimes line up so that it slightly reduces the amount of the Sun's energy that lands on the Earth and sticks, and sometimes increases it when they are in phase versus out of phase.
And this is what drives ice ages.
But here's the key thing.
It's also going to...where the land masses are on the Earth will affect to what degree the precession and the obliquity of the orbit, but especially to what degree the tilt of the Earth quickly affects temperatures on the Earth on land and in water.
Right, yeah.
Because a greater tilt of the Earth is going to make seasonality even greater at the poles.
Yep.
So the key thing, though, is that all of these cycles, even put together, have a very small impact on how much heat ends up on the Earth.
What they do, though, is they trigger an amplifier.
And the amplifier is what Heather referred to earlier.
It's albedo.
And albedo has to do with when energy from the Sun hits the Earth, it either bounces back into space or it is absorbed and heats the place.
And the key thing is that when water is frozen, Arctic ice cap for example, it's white.
That's very reflective.
It bounces a lot of energy back into space.
When there's more ice, it bounces energy back into space.
When there's less ice-- And therefore, ice begets ice.
Right.
The more ice, the cooler things get.
And so the Milankovitch cycles independently aren't enough to make a huge difference.
But what they do is they change how much ice persists over the northern summer.
And the more ice that persists over the northern summer, the more energy from the Sun is bounced back into space just by being reflected, the cooler things become.
So it's a positive feedback in either direction.
Now, the reason that this matters is that if we are affecting the climate and we reach a place where we start releasing the frozen methane in the Arctic at a novel level, and I'm not saying that we are or are not going to do that, but I'm saying I don't think anybody knows enough to know for sure.
If we do that, then this becomes a process that we can no longer control, because the dominant effect of large amounts of methane being released from the Arctic would take climate into a whole new phase.
So our intuitions, based on the amount of warming that may or may not have happened while we have been alive, is not a good model for what might happen if we get there.
And so my point is, I don't know if we're headed there, but I don't want to find out.
Right?
I don't want us to get to a novel place where we are suddenly releasing large amounts of methane, then the Arctic ice does recede.
Not saying it's happening, but if it did, that would be very, very bad.
So, What I'm going to suggest is that there is one and only one type of geoengineering that makes sense with respect to dealing with that possibility.
Wow.
Okay.
I have no idea what's coming.
Yeah, you have no idea what's coming.
But interestingly, it fits perfectly with our Hanukkah tradition, which we discuss in our book.
Okay.
Our book, which I neglected to bring here.
Here, you can hold on to this.
Libra, who represents our book.
He's mostly a gatherer, not so much a hunter, but in any case.
Yeah, he doesn't gather.
He just, he just, he doesn't save anything.
Right.
Yeah.
In our book, we argue that human activity should, in the long run, be both sustainable and reversible.
And the idea is that sustainability isn't really enough because Time and time again, what we have discovered is that we have unleashed processes technologically that when they were small, we didn't know were a problem.
And at the point that they become a problem, we literally don't have the ability to reverse course.
That puts us in great danger.
So, what I would suggest is that the way to create a fail-safe for climate has to do with artificial albedo.
Now, this is going to have implications that would have to be looked at carefully.
I'm not the first person to suggest this, by the way.
So things like, things that I have seen are like making blacktop white.
Right.
And painting roofs that are dark white.
Well, let's put it this way.
Those things... Especially in cities, especially to deal with the urbanization effect.
You could make a strong argument for white roofs.
Now, white roofs, if you did it with paint, that paint is likely to be white by virtue of titanium, which is not cheap.
So I'm not arguing that, hey, here's a freebie.
You can whiten stuff up, right?
You're talking about processes that all have implications.
Paint is not an environmentally free product.
So one does have to look at the cost.
And it may be that cities should have white roofs because that would counteract in part their tendency to concentrate heat.
It's also possible that the whitening that would be necessary to counteract warming Should be distributed in some useful way to minimize the harm that it undoubtedly will cause because it is an interference in a system and so it will have impacts on things and it could be, you know, the fact is it will matter somewhat.
But what you're looking at is a net reflectivity.
And so by changing the net reflectivity down here on Earth, you could modulate.
If we did find ourselves headed towards some threshold that threatened to release methane clathrates at a novel level from the Arctic, that you could actually change that.
But the important thing about this versus all of the other proposals I've heard of for geoengineering is that it's reversible.
If it turns out that it was a very bad idea, you can undo it because it's down here on Earth and it's not, you know, an infinite number of particles that you released and you can't get back.
The point is, if painting stuff white wasn't a good idea, you can change it back to whatever, you know, make it white on one side and flip it over, right?
Flip over your roof.
Maybe not your roof, but yeah.
No, you're not saying it's simple, but you're saying it's doable.
I'm not saying it's simple, and I'm not saying that it is environmentally, well... It's not neutral.
It's not without major costs.
It will have major costs.
It's not inherently neutral.
What I would like to know is that it is worth those costs.
We are, you know, let's face it, we are stewards of the Earth at this point because our effect is so profound on it that we will change it, whether we do that intentionally in ways that are desirable or at least tolerable, or whether we do it in ways that are haphazard and very destructive.
But nonetheless, so what I'm getting at is you're hearing somebody who is skeptical of those models, right?
I don't know that we are in a climate emergency.
But the possibility that we are in a climate emergency is real.
I didn't get that from the modelers.
That's a question of the Arrhenius equation and the tendency of carbon, which we are increasing the amount of in the atmosphere, to trap heat.
There do, as far as I know, there are real methane clathrates trapped in large quantities in the Arctic.
So all of these things are subject to albedo.
We know that from the lesson of Milankovitch cycles and the amplifier that is in Arctic ice.
So what that means is we could build our own amplifier that is subject to our understanding of whether or not something important is happening, and we could modulate climate.
And the punchline of this is that then we get to, and I hope we would do it much more responsibly than we're doing it, But then we get to keep living, right?
We don't have to be limited to 15-minute cities.
We're not going to have to eat bugs.
We can actually control the impact of our own effect on climate if, in fact, it is important that we do so.
Excellent.
That's my pick.
Let's do it.
I don't think we can do it.
I think it's going to require more people and, frankly, a lot of paint.
Which paint company has the most awful slogan in the entire world?
Sherwin-Williams.
Sherwin-Williams.
Cover the Earth.
Cover the Earth.
Well, here you go.
This is their moment.
I guess.
Unfortunately, they have really high quality paint, but who let them put that all over their trucks?
And my God.
Yes.
And they literally have like a paint can covering the earth.
It's not an appealing idea.
No.
And yet here you are proposing very much the same thing!
I don't want to just pour it on the earth.
You didn't say it even had to be paint.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be paint.
But, well, the problem is you do need an awful lot of whatever it is.
And the nice thing about paint is that it is already formulated to have minimal thickness for maximum reflectance.
I mean, that's kind of what paint is.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's already a product that does this job.
No, but what if you, like, designed blacktop with rocks that were lighter?
Like, you don't have to use, you don't have to cover things with a white substance to make things lighter.
Yeah, no, I actually, as an engineering question, like, what could you make blacktop out of?
Or roofs, or all of the things that we have.
That was more reflective as opposed to absorbent.
Ultimately, I think you're going to end up with something that we will end up calling paint.
And the reason is because if you imagine how much white rock you have to mine in order to do this with rock rather than paint, it's way worse.
Because what the paint does is it takes microscopic rock and just lets you see the face of all of it.
I mean the the blacktop question also is those roads are going to get dark from the tires and the exhaust and the vehicles very quickly so they're you know they're not going to stay light for very long and they're going to look terrible also.
Yeah and it may it may be bad for people to drive looking at white roads that are you know Blaring huge numbers of photons?
I don't know, but we should separate the question.
There's some best way to take control of albedo without destroying the planet over it, such that if this is the issue that some people fear, we have a mechanism for modulating it.
Good.
All right.
We've been at it for a while, but I want to say just a little bit about what's going on in Canada.
Whoa.
Yeah, it's Canada again.
I mean, we thought we have it stupid down here in the United States.
Man, Trudeau is leading the charge, continues to lead the charge up in Canada.
Actually, I don't know that this is Trudeau.
I think this may be a provincial government.
Canada taking stupid to new latitudes.
Oh man, yeah.
Okay, so here we go.
This is the CBC, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation.
You can show my screen.
Empty shelves with absolutely no books.
Students, parents question school board's library weeding process.
Books published in 2008 or earlier removed from school library amid confusion around new equity-based process.
Whoa.
Yeah.
Equity-based.
Here we go.
Okay, so it's a good article.
I will, of course, link it here, but let's just go down to, um, books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data, are not being checked out by students, are removed, said the board in its statement.
This is going to seem like the weakest objection possible, but the idea that because students aren't checking out books, we should get rid of them is more of the same insane, like, student-driven, child-driven, like, trust-the-naive-who-don't-yet-know-what-they're-doing to decide what it is that they should be exposed to.
That's not what libraries are, guys.
Oh, I have a whole other objection to it.
I agree that that's absurd.
I mean, there's a billion objections.
We're getting to them.
No, no, but to that particular provision.
The idea, okay, every time somebody checks a book out of a library, there's some impact, right?
It's tiny or it's cosmic.
The idea that the books that are having the important impacts are the ones that are being checked out by everybody, rather than the book that somebody finds that has just the thing necessary to put the two things together that nobody realized went together, that unleashes the...
No, but esoteric is useless, Brett.
Rare is useless.
How can we get everyone in lockstep if we're not all reading the same stuff?
It is a weird... I don't even know that they thought in these terms, but it is one of these consensus drivers.
Only the books that everybody's reading...
It's even worse than that.
Here we go.
The board shall evaluate books, media, and all other resources currently in use for teaching and learning English, history, and social sciences for the purpose of utilizing resources that are inclusive and culturally responsive, relevant, and reflective of students and the board's broader school communities, reads the directive.
How weeding works.
And yes, it says weeding, not reading.
How weeding works.
PDSB's Equitable Curation Cycle is described generally in the board document as a three-step process that holds PEEL staff accountable for being critically conscious of how systems operate so that we can dismantle inequities and foster practices that are culturally responsive and relevant.
First, teacher-librarians were instructed to focus on reviewing books that were published 15 or more years ago, so in 2008 or earlier.
Then, librarians were to go through each of these books and consider the widely used MUSTY acronym adapted from Canadian school libraries.
The letters stand for the criteria librarians are supposed to consider, and they include Misleading.
Information may be factually inaccurate or obsolete.
Unpleasant.
Refers to the physical condition of the book.
May require replacement.
Fine.
If it's got mold, get a new one in.
Good.
Superseded.
Book Been overt... Okay, there's a word missing there, or the librarians don't know how to write or something.
Superseded.
Book been overtaken by a new edition or a more current resource.
Book been overtaken.
Whatever.
We know what it means.
Yeah.
Trivial.
Of no discernible literary or scientific merit.
Poorly written or presented.
Irrelevant.
Doesn't meet the needs and interests of the library's community.
And elsewhere, the book and the material in it may be better obtained from other sources.
That's certainly after they remove it from the library.
The deadline to complete this step was the end of June, according to the document.
Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by, quote, resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness, and inclusivity, end quote.
And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.
So this article begins with a story of a 10th grader at a school whose library has been so affected, who reports that having left school at the end of the spring, she enjoyed her library a lot.
She says she spends all of her lunches in her library, and the shelves were full, and that now they're about 50% empty. 50%.
And it includes Harry Potter, apparently the Very Hungry Caterpillar has been taken out of some libraries because it's older than 2008.
Well, it's also transphobic.
Yes.
And how many caterpillars go to school after all?
Right.
It does not reflect the broader needs of the community of school-going children unless there are some who declare themselves caterpillars or butterflies, which some of them may do.
Help me out here.
I have already, in listening to you describe the interstices of this horror, forgotten how empty shelves help.
Let's see if we can generate how they must help.
They help because those who would be offended by the things that were on full shelves no longer are at risk of being offended.
Both because, again, we have obtained full and complete knowledge here in 2023.
And while certainly we weren't there in 2008, we can assume that in the last 15 years we have been approaching this pinnacle of omniscience that we have now obtained.
And before 15 years ago we were so, we were living in such dark ages, we were so Ist, in every regard, that it is best not to expose our fragile and now-obtained-to-the-highest-plane egos and psyches with such works as were written before the ancient era, which shall henceforth be referred to as all that which happened before 2008.
That was good.
Thank you.
I don't think that's what this is about.
Oh, you don't?
No, I don't.
Here's what I think this is about.
Is it just Fahrenheit 451 in new form?
Sort of.
It comes down to trade-offs.
Oh.
You will not be surprised to discover.
Could I interrupt?
Please.
I forgot to read the very next paragraph.
When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are causing harm, either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because they are inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant, or accurate.
For these reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated as, quote, they are not suitable for any learners.
So this is book burning.
Health hazard?
Well, no, it's so moldy.
One of these musty ones, unpleasant, refers to the actual physical condition of the book.
So, wait a second.
I leave open the possibility that in our very broken world, that people's very broken immune systems may be having a very broken reaction to the molding books, but is there any... No, there are books that are so far gone that you really don't want anyone reading them, inhaling them, yes.
Grotesque.
Is there any demonstrated instance of a measurable health impact of musty books?
There's a lot of people with mold toxicity right now.
Yes, yes.
Why do they have that mold toxicity?
That's fine, but that's a different question.
So, you know, it's not worth arguing that there are no books that actually shouldn't be destroyed because they actually do pose a health hazard.
I am certain that there are, but it is not the majority.
It's not 50% of the books in, you know, individual libraries in Canada.
They're talking about the misinformation in the books.
That's the health hazard.
Yes, that is, yes.
I still want to know that anybody has demonstrated a health hazard from books.
I leave open the possible.
Right.
So you were saying about trade-offs.
Yeah.
Here's what it is.
There is a harm to the empty shelves.
Do you have the picture of those empty shelves?
Let me see.
There's one.
There was an emptier one.
OK, so that's one.
This is a grade 10 student, Reina Takata, took this photo of the bookshelves in her Mississauga High School libraries on her first day back to school this fall.
And then there was another one.
It's a random.
Yeah, that one's more or less empty.
I think they have to do more work emptying them, for my point to be accurate, but they'll get there.
Here it is.
Which side are you on?
The empty shelves are a psychological health hazard to people who grew up in the former Soviet Union.
They will be traumatized by the experience of seeing empty shelves.
But students who live in the West will now be prepared for the empty shelves they're soon going to face by going into the library.
It's in training.
Yeah.
Oh, we're helping you prepare for your future that we are bringing.
You will eat bugs, have nothing to read, and be happy.
Sorry.
That's terrible.
No, I'm telling them like it is.
Honestly, if I have to choose between not having anything to read and eating bugs, I'll eat the bugs.
You'll eat the bugs.
Yeah.
You do.
There are a lot of bugs.
I know, and I've had bugs.
I've tried bugs on three different occasions.
I've never enjoyed it.
I don't want to eat bugs.
And no, you're like, we're not making that choice.
This is like when I said last week, I think it was, if I had to choose between cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for my children, I would actually go with the cross-sex hormones.
Both are awful.
Both outcomes are awful.
But with regard to bugs and reading, you might just have an individual preference for actually, which thing am I absolutely unwilling to give up?
Do I know that my quality of life would be so unutterably changed that it would be very hard to proceed?
And tell me I can't read ever again?
Well, you're in luck, because it's the same morons— I'm in luck because I've got shelves and shelves and shelves of actual real books.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you're also in luck because it's the same morons pushing all of this stuff, and so we just simply have no choice but to fight back and win.
Yes.
Yes, we do.
Okay, let's do that.
Fight back and win.
Fight back and win.
Yep.
Alright, that's an excellent plan.
Okay, let's fight back and win.
So, we're going to be back next week.
We're not going to do a Q&A today.
We will be back next week, four hours later at 3.30 Pacific, and we will therefore also not be doing a Q&A next week because we'll be getting started late.
Please come join us on Locals.
There's lots going on right now.
The chat party is happening right now.
Watch party.
The guest episodes are released early there.
We've got our monthly private Q&A there.
You've done a couple of impromptu AMAs there.
We're going to be doing more and more stuff.
Which were great.
I mean, the questions were great.
Hopefully the answers were good.
Excellent.
Yeah, so please, please join us there and please subscribe to the Rumble channel.
In Natural Selections this week, I was talking a bit about Narcan and the fact that it is now available over-the-counter.
This is, of course, an opioid overdose nasal spray that the FDA has decided to make available over-the-counter.
You make it sound like it's for the purpose of creating an overdose.
But no, that's a whole different drug.
That's not what they say it's for, but it does seem to make the whole opioid crisis... Anyway.
It's a classic pharma win-win.
Yeah, they win, they win, and they win again.
Yeah, they win from causing the problem, and then they win from addressing the problem.
Yeah, and as I say in this piece actually, I mean I also, I write about a number of things this week at National Selections, but at the bottom of the Oregon Health Authority blog post on this, I mean WAPO and New York Times and everyone's writing about Narcan being available over the counter now, but the Oregon Health Authority post has at the bottom of this post, which includes quotations from this doctor who is like, in a perfect world, everyone would carry Narcan.
That's your perfect world.
Amazing.
Wow.
Am I glad you're not my doctor.
But at the bottom of this post, they've got further recommended reading.
And one of the three posts that are recommended reading is an article from 2021 explaining why you really should never, ever, ever take Ivermectin unless you have a prescription because that could be dangerous.
As recommended further reading on a post for, like, fentanyl addicts who are getting Narcan for neither, which do they have prescriptions for?
I am quite sure.
And also, fentanyl and Narcan, not all that safe or effective.
Narcan apparently is effective, but not as safe as the doctor interviewed says it is.
And Ivermectin is both.
Okay, I digress.
Go check out Natural Selections if you want to hear more about that.
We have cool merchandise and we're gonna have more.
We're gonna create some new stuff soon at the store, but we got a lot of great stuff now.
DarkHorseStore.org, print shop out of Louisville, Kentucky, makes all of our stuff.
They're great.
And yeah, once again, check out our sponsors this week, which were Armra, Paleo Valley, and UnCruise.
All fantastic.
And anything else to say before we sign off?
I think we're there.
I think we're there.
All right, until we see you next time, then, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
