All Episodes
Previous Next
May 30, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:19:21
Delingpod 23: James and Ronan
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Cole.
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Danny Cole.
Unless another time subscribe with me.
I love Danny Cole.
This is the second part of the interview with Ronan Connolly.
And this is the one where he asks me some questions because he's researching a book.
And so, Ronan, we're going to go straight in there.
Ask me your questions.
Okay, so, well, the first thing is...
Do you see any differences between the left-wing and the right-wing on climate change and how it's perceived?
Yeah.
It's not just an opinion thing.
This is a fact that in recent surveys, it's been shown that conservatives are generally much more sceptical about climate change than the liberal left.
Yeah.
And I think...
This used not to be the case either.
I think there was much less of a divide in the 1970s.
But this supports my contention, and I know you're going to ask me about this later on, that this is essentially a political issue, not a scientific one.
Okay, okay.
And on this, do you...
What...
Okay.
I hear from people on the left wing.
By the way, I'm on the left.
Can I just say, doesn't it show how tolerant I am?
Here am I welcoming you to my home.
An evil left winger.
Giving you tea.
Giving you actual proper tea made with leaves because I know you're Irish and I like good tea.
Yes, yes.
It's a lovely tea, by the way.
You've done a good job.
Thank you.
Yeah, so one of the things that I find is that on each side seems to think that the other side is evil.
Yeah, bad faith, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
But can you tell me about, say, I know you're just speaking on behalf of yourself, but broadly speaking, on the right wing...
What is environmentalism?
Are you an environmentalist?
Yes, definitely.
I would say I'm probably, this is going to really piss them off, but I think it's actually true.
I think I'm probably more of an environmentalist than a lot of the people who attack me as being a kind of big oil funded, fossil fuel advancing, evil person.
Okay.
I love nature.
I grew up in a family where we really enjoyed going outdoors, doing stuff, travelling around the world.
My father was a herpetologist and a guppy breeder.
So we had a fish house where he used to...
The great thing about...
This is a digression, but...
One of the great things about breeding guppies is that you can isolate mutant strains and very quickly create these new strains of guppies.
And my father himself created new strains of guppies.
Interested in genetics in a kind of experimental family way.
Interested in, I love being outdoors.
I love wild swimming.
I love walking.
I love identifying trees and so on.
So I am an environmentalist.
I am very sceptical of the modern environmental movement, which, as I've said before, I think is political rather than concerned with conserving nature, conserving the environment.
I believe in empiricism.
So I believe that you should address your environmental concerns to areas where it really matters, where there really are problems.
For example, the depletion of the water table.
Yeah.
Farmers drilling boreholes and draining the water table.
That seems to me a problem.
I hate using the word sustainably, but I do believe that farmers should farm sustainably according to the environment in which they operate.
Yes.
So, for example, I know that Israeli farmers are very good at this, for example.
Using kind of micro amounts of water, which are directed to the root of the plant, rather than kind of spreading it over the whole area.
Yes.
That sort of thing.
I worry about fish stocks.
Yes.
I worry about, for example, and this is a classic example of where I think the left's gone wrong.
Yeah.
I worry about virgin rainforest.
Yes.
Being chopped down to make palm oil plantations.
Yes.
To grow biofuels.
What is that about?
And I also object to wind turbines, which slice and dice avian fauna, birds and bats.
If you care about the environment, why are you putting up these bat-chomping, bird-slicing, eco-baric affixes?
So, yeah, okay.
So, what you're describing is, within the literature, there is the scientific literature looking at environmentalism and environmental policies.
There is a growing recognition that we should distinguish between what's called local pollution and global pollution.
So, local pollution and local environmental issues is pretty much everything that you've described.
Yeah.
And then global pollution seems to be these more abstract concepts such as tackling climate change.
This is broadly what I've been finding, that the more right-wing people pay more focus on what would be the local pollution issues.
Yeah, I bet you haven't come across any right-wing person who doesn't give a stuff about nature, have you?
Not yet, no.
No, but I'm keeping...
You know, I still hope to find one of these...
Unicorns.
You know, Dr.
Evil-style characters that is eating cold for breakfast or something like that.
But no, not yet.
Well, okay, so...
Shifting to these global pollution issues and climate change in particular, which is the main one, what do you think the right-wing views are on the proposed climate, let's say carbon mitigation or climate mitigation policies?
Yeah.
I think the right-wing position, insofar as I'm sort of representative of it, is more complex than is generally acknowledged by our critics, which is to say, number one, we are sceptical about anthropogenic global warming theory.
Right.
We believe very much that the case is not proven.
Right.
Yeah.
Secondly, we question whether the, well, more than question, I think, whether the methods being used currently to address a problem which we consider moot are not doing more harm than good, which I believe they are.
Yeah.
You've then got the geopolitical issues of countries like China and India which are going full out for industrial production and really don't give a toss.
They may pay lip service when they come to international meetings because obviously it's very much in the Chinese interest if the West hamstrings itself, hamstrings its economies to the benefit of China's.
So, and finally, I'm not even sure that it is possible for, given the drastic changes that have taken place in climate naturally in the four and a half billion years that the world has existed, I would question whether bombing your industrial economy to the dark ages is going to make actually any difference anyway.
Okay, okay.
So, let's see.
Moving on.
Okay.
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about media.
So, in terms of right-wing and left-wing, do you think that the, let's say, we'll call it the mainstream media is a term I hear a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MSM for short.
Sure.
The legacy media.
Okay, so do you believe that the mainstream media gives a fair hearing to right-wing perspectives?
Ronan, you've just pinpointed the issue which got me into this in the first place, which is to say, I'm a journalist and I'm in...
It's a trade, and you look around for good stories, and you try and report them honestly and well.
And here is a story that is being reported neither honestly nor well.
It's very rare for journalists to come upon such low-hanging fruit.
It's almost a dream scenario, where there's a story where the facts are totally on your side, And yet hardly anyone's covering it or printing it.
Right.
And you'd think, well, why isn't everyone else jumping on this story?
Because it's a really good one.
Yeah.
And I think I've rarely felt so ashamed of the Fourth Estate as I have on this issue.
They've just failed.
This is climate change.
Climate change.
Environmental correspondents haven't done their job.
They haven't asked the right questions.
They've been...
They just transcribe press releases from Greenpeace and the WWF, it seems to me.
So, no, the mainstream media hasn't done its job.
And even, you know, I know you're going to ask me about Climategate later on.
Climategate would almost not have been reported in the Telegraph at all.
The Telegraph being a conservative newspaper or a former conservative newspaper.
Had it not had a brief period where it ran these blogs, where they had a variety of voices, including some right-wing ones, and where I sort of helped break this story.
But the Telegraph main print newspaper was very reluctant to...
It should have been on the front page, and it should have been...
Pages 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, for weeks, because it's such a good story.
It wasn't.
It was virtually ignored.
Yes, yes.
Well, I want to talk about that later on.
But, yeah, here's the thing.
Are you familiar with...
So, John Stuart Mills, he wrote On Liberty, was the book in the mid-19th century that he wrote.
Yeah.
And he was looking at different debates that were there.
I think it was specifically he was looking at religion where atheists and religious people were not allowed to.
We're at loggerheads with each other.
And so he was arguing that regardless of the thing, he said, if you only know your side of the argument, then you don't even know that.
And then the next part that he added on, which I think is important as well, is...
If you want to understand the other side of the argument, then it's not sufficient to find out from somebody who agrees with you, someone on your side.
You need to find out of somebody that genuinely believes it on the other side.
He argued that even if ultimately you end up...
Being happy with your original position, you will have a lot more stronger through having engaged in respectful dialogue with the opposing side.
So this is why me, as a left-wing environmentalist, I'm trying to get different perspectives on both sides.
So, what are your...
What do you think of this approach?
And what do you think of it, first of all?
Yeah, well, because I'm a journalist, and...
Because it's so much fun.
Yeah.
Exposing the stupidity of the other side's arguments.
That I do spend quite a lot of time reading, I suppose, the more extreme representatives of the climate alarmist community.
Who's that funny chap who used to write for The Guardian?
I don't know whether he still does.
I think...
I've forgotten their names.
George Mambier?
No, no, no.
George.
Obviously, I love reading George's pieces.
I mean, he's kind of moved on from climate change.
He's now on Rewilding.
That's his particular baby.
But not Lewandowski, who's a really crazy guy who writes for me.
Oh, Dan and Noticelli.
Yeah, Dan and Noticelli.
Yeah.
So, yes, I'm fairly familiar with what the other side says because I kind of have to be in order to ridicule them effectively.
And you almost don't need to editorialize.
You just say, well, this is what they're saying.
Yeah.
I don't think that there has been any dramatic evidence in the last 10 years that really supports anthropogenic global warming theory, which is to say I don't think there's any evidence that has emerged that recent climate change is...
A, primarily anthropogenic, B, unprecedented, or C, catastrophic.
On the contrary, it seems to me that the longer we go on, the more it seems that there is a massive divergence between what the computer models are predicting and what observed climate is actually doing.
Well, maybe we can touch on this at another thing, because this is like, what I'm finding is that, actually, look, I'll just say a little bit about this from my research.
It seems that on climate change, while it might be a surprise to a lot of people on one side, the Climate change, almost, it works out that about 85 to 90% of the general public agree that climate changes.
Yeah.
And that it is probably a little bit warmer now than the end of the 19th century.
Yeah.
And there is a small percentage of the public that disagree with that.
That seems to be more right wing, almost very little of it as on the left wing.
And so this is where the term climate change denial seems to be.
If like if I'm to give it a it seems to be there seems to be a genuine percentage.
And this is described as being a right wing phenomenon.
Now, I like I when I look in detail at the questions that are being asked, they're often quite poorly framed.
Not necessarily the ones that I would do.
So if you say asked, is it warmer now?
Or is there global warming now?
And then you have a question like the hiatus.
And technically...
Depending on how you do your analysis, you could say that there hasn't been since the end of the 20th century.
So people that are familiar with this...
It's interesting, when you were asking me to fill out the questionnaire at the beginning about what I thought about climate change, I really had to think about it because I think like a lot of people have looked into it, I accept that...
Since we emerged from the Little Ice Age in about 1880, the temperature has increased by less than one degree Celsius.
And there have been ups and downs.
I mean, it was probably the greatest heat waves in America, certainly in the 20th century, were in the 1940s, I think.
Yeah, it depends on how you do your analysis.
The Dust Bowl era was a period then, yeah.
So, yeah, I think it all depends on how you ask the question.
Do I believe in climate change?
Well, most assuredly I do.
But it's a bit like conflating Europe with the European Union.
A lot of people...
And it's another way where the lexicon has been corrupted slightly for political reasons, I think, where people often...
Deliberately allied Europe, the collection of wonderful countries with their own separate countries.
With Europe, the political entity is the European Union.
And I think it's the same with climate change.
When somebody says you're a climate change denier, do they mean, are you actually denying that climate change is, which I think really passing few people do, or are you denying that man-made climate change is a serious problem, which I think is something different?
I'll tell you a little bit more about it.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is the IPCC reports.
This is what a lot of people refer to when they're talking about their general scientific opinion on climate change.
They often cite...
refer to this yeah and uh so they they use the terminology detection and attribution of climate change so they say that there are two separate problems to be addressed so the first is detection is there evidence of climate that the climate is changing and then the second one is uh how much of this is human caused versus natural yeah yeah
And what I'm finding from my research, and this is why I'm looking at this book, trying to understand why the left and right have different opinions on climate change, is that, yes, there's a slight...
There is, you could say, a left-right divide on the detection part, because...
Of the small minority of the public that disagree on that, they're mostly right wing.
But the more interesting for me, and it has more policy implications, is the attribution.
So how much is human cost and how much is natural?
And what the data seems to be showing is that the further to the left you are, the more likely you are to believe that most of the recent climate change is human cost, specifically related to our carbon dioxide emissions.
Yeah.
And the more to the right you are, the more likely you are to believe that it's mostly natural or entirely natural.
Maybe solar variability changes in ocean circulations or various things like this.
And interestingly...
Among the general public, the most common answer to this question, this is...
I'm talking statistics here from...
I've looked at data from the US, UK, France, Germany, Norway, Australia.
I have a lot of different survey results that I'm looking at and they all are showing the same thing.
The most common answer by number is...
How much is human caused?
Is it human caused or natural?
And the most common answer is probably a bit of both, which makes sense.
And then, but as you, the general public, broadly speaking, is about one third...
One-third left-wing, one-third right-wing, and the rest is somewhere in the middle.
I couldn't be bothered.
They're all the same, the left and right.
I just want to stick to my own stuff.
So they're kind of either centrist or apolitical, to use a term.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, there seems to be this interesting correlations between the question on how much climate change is human-caused versus natural.
It seems to be closely correlated with where you fall on the left-right centre.
And this is the general public.
So these are people that have very strong opinions on this.
And they, in some cases, they've looked it up quite a bit.
Yet they're finding that, you know, they're not using, you know, scientific training.
Because, like, this is a shock for scientists.
For you as a scientist, yeah.
Yes, most, you know, and most of my fellow scientists, when they start, they think, oh, here's a paper I've done.
Here's this graph so they can do that.
You show it to people and they're like, Okay, whatever.
Do you know what?
I'd rather think that way about the scientists.
I love you, some of you.
But at the same time, I think, you think it's your baby.
And it's really not.
You're actually quite marginal to this, really, when it comes down to it.
Because it is ultimately about politics.
This is about policy.
Yeah.
But what should nominally be a scientific issue, the attribution of recent climate change to various factors, that should be an issue that's scientific.
It can be addressed by science.
And what...
There is interesting work from Professor Dan Kahan in Yale University.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.
But what he's been finding is that when you actually...
You know, he's looking at the US specifically, which is particularly partisan.
I think partly because they have a two-party system.
You have the Democrats are more left-wing and the Republicans are more right-wing.
Yeah.
And they seem to be very polarised on this and on climate change in particular is one of these party issues.
It seems that to me as an outsider, the impression that I get is...
When you decide you're a Republican or you decide you're a Democrat, I think they will send out in the Post a checklist of, here's what you believe on abortion, gun control, nationalisation, you know, and climate change.
And so you end up saying, this is it.
So what Dan was finding was that...
He noticed this left-right divide, but he was wondering why...
This is me paraphrasing his scientific papers and what he's found.
But broadly, it seems that the prevailing theory before he started looking at this was there was an information deficit model.
Is the technical term that's been used.
So this is bearing in mind that most academia is left-wing.
So the people who were looking at this problem, they were looking at from the perspective of not trying to recognize that there might be biases on both sides, but trying to figure out what the biases are on the other side.
Yeah, or fucking what, Ronan?
I mean, this is...
They knew what their conclusions were going to be before they began their research, which is that right-wing people are stupid.
They're anti-science.
Every left-wing person knows this, of course.
And of course, this is reinforced by a left-wing academic culture, where they hardly ever meet any right-wing people.
And any right-wing people who do get into...
Look at Willie Soon.
Look at what happened to him.
The way he's been isolated, marginalised, because his research doesn't fit the left-wing narrative.
No, no, this is it.
I've written a couple of papers with him.
I'm collaborating with him on a few things.
I'll tell you, he's not...
Well, I won't say on it, but he'd be a bit more apolitical rather than anything.
But no, personally, he's kind of falling into the whatever camp.
far left at all, for sure.
But I don't think he's...
He's more interested in the science.
But yes, he ends up because his results fit with the right-wing narrative and are alien to the left-wing narrative, he ends up getting more interest on the right-wing and less on the left-wing.
He should be looking at what the science says.
Well, here's what Dan Cahan was finding is that he looked So the prevailing theory had been that, yes, what is missing from the right-wing perspective is that they don't have the same amount of information as those on the left-wing.
And so Dan said, well, this is...
I can test this.
So he came up with a series of MCQ short questions to try and identify how much people knew about climate change.
And then he was able to analyze, you know, their political views, where they left or right.
And then also, is global warming mostly human caused or mostly natural?
Which was the same question that had been asked.
And what he found was, if you're on the left wing, This is in the US, so if you're a Democrat or left-leaning, then the more you know about climate science, the more convinced you are that global warming is mostly human cost, which fitted in with the information deficit model.
It said, oh, the more people read up on it, the more convinced they are because they see where the science is going.
except that if you were on the right wing, if you were a Republican or you're conservative or right-leaning, then the better you scored on the test, the more you know about climate change, the more convinced you were that it was mostly natural.
And so you actually become more partisan the more that you read up on it.
So to me, what that's saying...
Now, he's talking of the general public.
We're not talking of the scientific community.
And this is something that is a tricky bit because there's very little data on how the scientific community diverges on whether they follow the same thing.
But it's a very clear...
Trajectory between the two things.
The graphs show very clear.
You get almost 90% of the top-scoring left-wing people are saying that our recent global warming is mostly human-caused.
And almost 90% of those top scorers with the same level of knowledge.
I just want to stress this.
Scored the exact same on the test.
They are equally informed on climate change.
And 90% of the conservatives believe that global warming is mostly natural.
So, to me, that is indicating that the science...
Let's just stick forward to be less controversial and just look at the...
99% of the population that are not scientifically trained.
We're talking of the vast majority of the public.
And so, for convenience, let's ignore whether this applies to the scientific community.
But, you know, we just talk of the general public.
They will then...
That's saying that from reading up on climate change, if you are left wing or right wing, you will be able to find enough compelling scientific evidence.
To become more convinced on whatever the party line happens to be on this, consciously or unconsciously.
So this seems to indicate, well, first of all, that the actual evidence is not as compelling one way or the other, certainly for the general public.
It's that there is arguments on both sides that you can get to support your case.
So confirmation bias seems to be playing a role.
And people are able to discard the one that's our...
That agrees, which seems to be what's happening.
People are able to, if an article that they find, or an analysis they find, or somebody talking about it, agrees with what they taught all along, then they just say, I knew it.
And we don't seem to give as much scrutiny to it.
But then if it disagrees with us, we go and we try and pick holes.
We try and find, is there any way...
This can't be right.
What's wrong with it?
What's wrong with the people that did this analysis?
Maybe there's some vested interest.
Maybe they're ideological and you find some reason to discard the inconvenient truths that you're finding, to use a term that Al Gore made quite popular, you know, to...
So this seems to apply on both sides.
And for me, that's kind of what I'm trying to address with this book that I'm researching.
Why has this become a left-right issue, which should be a scientific topic, and can we do anything about it?
So let me get back to my questions, because I think we've switched roles.
Yeah, you question me, go on.
Yeah, yeah.
So, okay, getting back to John Stuart Mill's thing.
So if you only know your side of the argument, and that you need to seek out other people from the opposing side, do you...
Do you actually find...
On the, say, with left-wing perspectives, do you try to take that?
Or do you see any point with people that disagree with you politically?
How do I answer this one?
I come from the position...
That if you are going to divert scarce resources, particularly taxpayers' money, to endeavors which are going to have a dramatic effect on people's lives, which are going to hamper economic growth, which are going to distort industry away from free markets and entrepreneurialism towards crony crack capitalism, to awarding...
Rewarding bad actors, essentially.
This is classic rent-seeking.
This is the opposite of the kind of thing that Adam Smith was advocating in The Wealth of Nations.
You better be damn sure that there is good reason for doing this.
So I think the onus is on the other side to demonstrate their case much more convincingly than they have.
So I don't think it really matters what I think about the science of what I would consider the scientists on the left.
All I care about is that they can demonstrate their argument convincingly enough to justify...
We need a cost-benefit analysis, basically, of climate policy.
And we have not had this for a very long time.
Yeah.
It's interesting that you say that.
That, like, actually there's a professor in Harvard, I think it's Castle Stein...
And he is arguing that there should be a cost-benefit analysis on all of these, all policy issues.
But strangely, he is saying...
There shouldn't be one.
No, he's saying so that we can get more...
But he's assuming that climate change is one of the...
Climate action is one of the things that...
Well, I... He doesn't seem to want to do cost-benefit analysis on climate change.
Yeah, funny that, isn't it?
Also, the other thing that distorts the issue is that the left has created this voodoo economics, where it's invented these externalities, which are sort of not measurable, they're just kind of estimated, which muddies the waters considerably.
And you see this particularly, for example, in all this...
Every other day in the Guardian you read about how the cost of solar energy and wind energy has come down so much it can compete on equal terms with fossil fuels.
But they only reach this calculation by ignoring certain factors like, for example, the cost of keeping conventional power stations on spinning reserve, on standby.
The cost of the rare earth minerals used to create and so on and so forth.
So I wouldn't even trust them to get the economics right anyway if they were to do a cost-benefit analysis.
The whole business is corrupt.
It's fascinating talking to you as a man of the left and you think that this is a kind of a neutral issue that if only we can discuss it more we can find the truth.
I think the truth is all on the right-wing side of the argument.
Well, of course you would.
Yeah, yeah.
Because you're on the right wing.
If you disagreed, then presumably you'd be on the left wing.
You'd probably be writing for The Guardian.
I'd shoot myself.
Okay, so look, no, what I'm finding is there does seem to be, like, I want to just...
On, like, Kasselstein's stuff, he's actually done a lot of very interesting analysis.
Yeah, he's one of the Obama administration's thinkers.
Yes.
You know, he's not exactly a neutral party.
He's gone.
He's bent.
Well, that's what...
Intellectually bent.
That would be what you would think, because you're, you know, you're completely opposed to that.
But, no, I'm, like, I'm kind of...
For me, I can see that there seems to be a bit of a blind spot that I'm kind of intrigued by.
And that's part of what I'm finding is that like...
Okay, let me put it to you this way.
Are you left or right-handed?
Right-handed.
Okay.
Do you use your left hand?
Yeah, I do.
There was a period, I'm not sure if I still do it now, where I used my mouse with my left hand in order to stop the kind of imbalance which has given me back trouble.
Okay, okay.
I didn't know that.
But the point is, we can have our own leanings on, say, on politics.
You know, just to use the left and the right as the analogy.
Like, the problem comes when we only rely on one side because...
It's very difficult to find what the left is and the right is.
I know this is one of the issues that I try to describe, to grapple in the book.
Yeah.
A lot of people have different definitions.
One thing that I find is common is the people that are on the right wing know that they're on the right wing and people that are on the left wing know that they're on the left wing.
But when they try to describe it, it gets difficult.
But there are a lot of issues.
There's always somewhere in between.
And what I'm finding is that on a lot of the...
We should be trying to...
This was why I think John Stuart Mills was right, was correct when he said you need to seek both sides.
Even if your side happens to be right at the end, to be the one that you believe was correct, you don't really understand what your side is unless you see the opposing thing.
So it's only by...
Having a dialogue between different opposing views that you can actually identify something that's more meaningful and practical.
Let me go on to here on to conspiracy theories.
This is an issue.
I am...
I'm finding that both on the left and the right, and both on the global warming is mostly man-made versus global warming is mostly natural, you often find invoked explanations as to why the other side thinks what it is.
And there seems to be Broadly, four main conspiracy theories that are invoked.
And so I just, I have this on a diagram, but like, I have here four quadrants.
So on the top, well, top left, for want of a word.
In red, I see.
Yes.
Is mostly human caused, and it's a vested interests term.
And so this is the big oil conspiracy theory that says...
That the fossil fuel industry is paying for the climate denial to suppress the renewables industry.
So there was a guy, Ross Gelbspan, I think he still writes for the Boston Globe, but he wrote on this in the late 90s.
And also Kurt Davies for Greenpeace, they set up this thing called Exxon Secrets.
Yeah, and Exxon knew the whole thing.
Yes, that's from Greenpeace as well.
And so then we have, but I also find a similar one that's on the right for the mostly natural that's also vested interest, which is, I've seen different terms for one of the terms that's popular is the green blob.
And this is our, there's also the climate industrial complex is another term that's been used.
And so it's saying that there's a conglomerate of the renewables industry, That is lobbying for favourable subsidies and mandates and regulations, scientists looking for grants and the media looking for scare stories and that these are all working together to keep this in the public domain.
Then there's another one, which seems to be another two.
So those are specific vested interests that are supposedly conspiring together.
And then we have ideological.
And so we have, again, on the mostly human cause, the most popular, it seems to be, the merchants of doubt theory.
Now, this was Professor Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway So they published a book in 2010.
I find it quite a fascinating narrative, personally, but it seems to be quite popular.
It's that there's, it seems to be four prominent conservative films.
Physicists in the US. Three of them who passed away in the 90s and early 2000s.
So this is Frederick Seitz, Bill Nuremberg and Robert Jastrow and now Fred Singer who is in his 90s at the moment.
But they apparently...
Opposed climate action for ideological reasons, and because they were so influential, they are responsible for most of the climate denial.
And then opposing it, there is one, and you've coined an interesting term.
So this is...
For the bottom right corner, for ideological, for mostly natural.
So the term is watermelons.
So tell me a bit about...
I like the name.
What does it mean?
Watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside.
I mean, the term was floating around the ether.
I just popularised it, I suppose, or lifted it as a book title.
Yeah.
It's essentially almost what we've been talking about this whole conversation, which is that I think that the...
And there's evidence to support this as well, that...
The whole climate change scare is essentially a political phenomenon, not a scientific one.
I'd rather call it a sort of politico-religious phenomenon because I think it's not just about the left-wing assault on Western industrial civilization, although I think that's very much part of it.
I think it's also...
If you remove...
Traditional religion from people's lives, the decline of Christianity in the West.
People nevertheless still have that yearning for the numinous, for extracting some deeper meaning beyond their ordinary working lives.
And somehow the green religion has taken over from the old Christian faith.
Okay.
And you see lots of examples of this.
for example buying indulgences like they used to do in the medieval church you can now buy carbon credits to make up for your flight and the daily ritual of recycling which has been which I think is largely largely It's not that I don't think that recycling has a place.
I think it does.
But I think that the fact that we're all forced to separate all our rubbish individually and waste...
I don't know how gazillions of man hours doing this when it could be done by a machine.
Right.
I think is another example of...
We want that hair shirt thing.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, yeah, obviously, I would not consider those, the ones on the green side of the argument.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
So, the most, climate change is mostly natural.
Yes.
Yes.
The explanations for why the other side.
You've done them in red and green.
I see red and green, of course.
I suppose it should be blue, shouldn't it, really, from my side of the argument.
But anyway...
Yes.
Unless you're in the US. I don't call them conspiracy theorists.
And actually, the vested interest one, I particularly think is silly.
The idea that big oil is funding climate denial when anyone, anyone who's spent even five minutes being a climate sceptic knows that big oil is absolutely fucking useless at supporting the cause, supporting the kind of people who are its natural allies.
Yeah.
We believe in fossil fuels as the cheap, abundant form of energy that is most effective.
And do we get any support from big oil?
No.
Shell did not support the James Dellingpole's sceptical blog on The Telegraph.
It supported the environmental pages on The Guardian.
Big oil is always trying to get into bed with the greenies.
It's called greenwashing.
It's also ideological.
You look at Van Buren, the guy who's either CEO of Shell or BP. I think it's Shell.
Yeah.
He buys into the idea that there are these things called stranded assets, that somehow oil is a busted flush and that renewables are going to take over.
So even big oil has bought into this nonsense.
Okay.
Well, okay.
So let's look at the specifics of the term conspiracy theory.
Yeah.
It's become a very loaded term.
And...
The problem occurs is, okay, so clearly people conspire.
You do get people that are conspiring to try and...
On any issue, there are going to be people with agendas.
And so what I find is that conspiracy theorists, the term seems to be applied to people that are saying...
That these people that have agendas, it seems to me that they are successful and that they are conspiring with each other and that there is a, typically that it's secret.
And so, this is the...
Do you think that that applies to...
No, I reject your use of the term conspiracy theories.
And when I was writing Watermelons, I very deliberately avoided it because I don't think there is a conspiracy as such.
I think it's a concatenation of mutual interests.
Right.
So, for example...
If you are a second-rate businessman, a second-rate entrepreneur, you're not going to enter a field which exposes you to the risk of the markets, of trying to genuinely find out what it is the consumer wants and providing it to the consumer at lower prices than anybody else and better quality.
That is how markets should work.
Giving people what they want at the best possible price, best possible quality.
The second-rate kind of entrepreneur will go into a field where the market is rigged and will not try and compete on the open market, but will try and gain favours from government and try and arrange for legislation to support...
Why are so many dodgy businessmen and entrepreneurs going into renewables, for example?
It's because the state in many countries has rigged the system whereby you can make possibly 9% a year, which you could never make on the stock markets.
This is corrupt.
It's wrong.
Where was I? Yeah.
That's just one example anyway.
Okay, so you don't actually think there's a conspiracy?
Sorry, let me go on that.
I don't remember where I was going now.
I talked about second-rate businessmen, second-rate scientists, and Dick Lindzen is very good on this.
His view is that...
That climate change, climate science, insofar as there is such a thing as climate science, because obviously it's a mixture of, you know, ranging from geology to paleoclimatology to physics to computer modeling, whatever.
But this field attracted a lot of people, a lot of second-raters, who have not got very good minds, but went where the money is, you know.
Scientists, like anybody else, they need to feed their families.
I'm not saying that most of the scientists involved in the climate change, in the climate industrial complex, because I do...
I think it's quite a useful term, that.
I don't believe that most of them are motivated by bad faith.
I don't think they are lying, especially.
I think they are going where the money is.
Follow the money.
They've got to go where the grant funding is.
And the whole field has been distorted.
The example I use is...
Is grey squirrels.
Suppose you want to research the feeding habits of grey squirrels.
And you've studied biology at university.
You want to be out field research.
Are you going to get funding for the feeding habits of grey squirrels?
No one's going to give a toss.
But if you can write about how climate change has affected the feeding habits of grey squirrels, Suddenly there is grant money available.
So the whole science, whole area of science has been skewed dramatically towards this outcome, which is that climate change is a serious issue which needs addressing.
And every time the question is, does this need more funding?
Well, of course it does, because that's always going to be their answer, because hey, that's where their bread and butter is.
Right.
So I guess you don't see a boardroom of people just all conspiring together?
It's interesting you say that.
There is...
Copious documentary evidence of the La Jolla Conference.
You know about the La Jolla Conference in Southern California?
Well, tell me a bit about it.
Where Naomi Oreskes, one of the people that you quote on your Merchants of Dat, where, oh, the guy from Oxford University...
Is this Miles Allen?
Miles Allen, who's become Mr.
kind of CO2 is a problem, Mr.
Carbon Mitigation...
And a host of people, either on the climate change gravy chain or on the left or both, sat down and said, how are we going to advance our cause?
How are we going to win the argument compellingly?
And they decided to start this campaign.
You see in this meeting the germs of the Exxon New campaign.
The idea that big oil secretly knows and knew all along about just how dangerous climate change was.
And they lied to us.
They hid the evidence, but they knew.
Exxon knew.
Well, they didn't bloody know.
They had some researchers saying, well, you know, this might be an issue.
Actually, Exxon did the responsible thing.
I mean...
If climate change, man-made climate change, is a serious problem, if fossil fuels really are sending the planet to hell in a handcuff, then as an all-industry person, you better make damn sure that your scientific researchers are finding this out so that you can get out of the market or take mitigation measures or whatever because your industry is toast.
Exxon never knew that because there was...
The evidence doesn't exist to show that.
Okay, let me go back on to, so I think we'll try and speed through some of these, if I can succeed.
I know.
Okay.
Oh yeah, we were talking about the media earlier on, and I was asking how much does the mainstream media give right-wing perspectives a fair hearing, and I think you said no.
Absolutely zippled.
Okay, what do you think?
Does Breitbart play any role as a countermeasure?
Breitbart is...
Let me tell you right now.
I could write whatever the fuck I wanted to about the environmental climate change for Breitbart.
There is not a house line that's forced on me.
But obviously, the reason they recruited me, I imagine, is that they were aware of my views.
They knew about Climategate and my coverage of that.
Yeah.
But because they're a right-wing site, and because of the way things are in journalism, because Breitbart gets so much stick for being Breitbart, they are acutely conscious, more acutely conscious than The Guardian is, I'd say, of the need to get their facts right.
Okay.
So the kind of onus is on me not to write stuff that is horseshit.
And so I write stuff that I believe to be true about climate change based on my reading on...
So if Patrick Moore goes to testify before Congress and points out, for example, that there is no evidence of an imminent sixth great extinction, that, look...
Here are the facts about when the last species to...
That mainly 95% of the species extinctions in the last five years have been on islands.
What has caused them?
It's things like shipwrecks bringing along rats.
It's like humans predating on them, whatever.
That there is not this kind of climate change induced problem.
So I report on stuff like that.
Breitbart, to its enormous credit, is getting the word out.
Yeah, okay.
So you think that there is a role for...
Yeah, and do you see...
Because the journalism industry is facing...
It's been recognised since the 90s that newspapers are finding it harder and harder to...
They used to be the go-to place for information.
No one believes the mainstream.
A dwindling handful of readers, probably older readers.
A friend of mine was speaking to a group of postgrads, I think, at Oxford University.
And before he gave his talk, I think this was in one of the scientific fields, I forget which.
And before he began his talk, he asked them how many had bought a newspaper in the previous week.
Do you know how many?
You tell me.
One.
Okay.
So the younger generation aren't interested in newspapers because they can get their stuff free online.
Yeah.
Elsewhere.
And people curate their own news now.
They decide which authorities they trust.
Okay.
And which they don't.
Which of course has led to an increased polarization.
Right.
Which some people lament.
Yeah.
I would say actually it's a necessary rebalancing because I think the media, the mainstream media in the last few years has generally swung towards either the squishy left or the hard left.
Okay.
The Telegraph, for example.
sound on Brexit, unsound on stuff like identity politics.
And it's bought into a lot of the liberal left narrative.
Certainly not very good on climate change, except in the Sunday Telegraph when Booker was writing for it.
But yeah, so there are very few newspapers that are actually doing their job.
Do you think that the...
Well, actually, I'll just go into the next question.
Have you seen The Guardian's new editorial policy on the language to be used on reporting climate change?
Yes.
What do you think?
I absolutely love it.
I think it is hilarious.
I think it makes our case for us so well.
And it makes my case particularly that this is about...
It has increasingly become a propaganda war, not a war about scientific fact.
The idea that they've changed...
I can't remember the exact terms they use, but maybe you've got it there.
Yeah, yeah.
Fantastic.
Let's see if I can find...
Let us share with the...
I see what I can find.
I think they've changed climate change to global climate change, catastrophe, disaster, death, and all the baby polar bears are going to die.
Let me see, let me see.
Shuffle, shuffle, rattle, rattle.
Yes, there you can go.
Yes, exactly.
So here is an example.
So the Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world.
By the way, because I'm left-wing, I actually, like, The Guardian is, I agree with a lot of, I like their, a lot of their coverage.
But the climate change is one of the issues.
Do you feel a bit embarrassed about this as a scientist?
Yeah, well, it's another example of where what I'm finding is, and this is why I'm trying to write the book, is that what should be a scientific issue is becoming a left-right issue.
So I have problems about when I read something on a right-wing article, say on Breitbart, and you can see it's all framed in a, to me, it's framed in more of a right-wing perspective.
And then The Guardian, I look at everything, and I see it's framed in a left-wing perspective.
And so there's becoming a, you know, it's, to me, it's building into making this a party political issue.
So, but I'll just say, yeah, so they're saying instead of climate change, the preferred terms are, you have a choice, climate emergency, climate crisis, or climate breakdown, and instead of global warming, you should refer to global heating, although the original terms are not banned.
Right.
Okay, so...
Global heating, that seems to be a poor choice.
I don't see why heating is that much...
Well, I suppose warm is less hot than heat.
Well, warm could be pleasant, I guess.
I suppose it could...
Benign, balmy, yes, whereas heat...
Yeah.
Maybe they should call it global burning, though.
Yeah.
Or global frying, that would be better, wouldn't it?
Or global immolation.
Well, maybe you can write in a few suggestions to the Guardian.
Do you know what, Roland?
I should.
I should actually say, look, look, guys, guys, I know what I'm talking about.
So, okay, what do you think of this from a journalistic perspective?
Because you're a journalist looking on the other side.
What do you think of that?
And then maybe also from a financial perspective.
Yeah.
Well, as a journalist, I think it's silly because I'm not sure that they should have done this in secret because it would have been noticed anyway, I suppose, after a time.
But I think they really shouldn't have done it at all.
I just think it's...
Look, The Guardian used to be...
The respected newspaper of the left, didn't it?
It used to be the broadsheet version of the left-wing point of views, which one could respect, and it had this heritage from the Manchester Guardian.
I think it's long since to be a respectable newspaper, and it has become an unashamed activist rag, really.
It's just like a glorified left-wing website, blog, which happens to have a print edition.
So they would argue that Breitbart is the same on the right.
Ah, but the difference is that Breitbart acknowledges its bias.
Breitbart does not even pretend to be anything other than a right-wing newspaper.
The Guardian, I think, still trades on its reputation as a kind of an authoritative and responsible voice of the left.
So if you were to go, if say, well, maybe your listeners would have a different, you know, thing, but if you were to, John Stuart Mills, we were talking about earlier, if you want to hear the others, if you should try and seek out the other side, what would you say for somebody that's on the right wing?
Where would they seek it out?
Do you think The Guardian is a place to go?
Well yeah, The Guardian is a fairly accurate representation of where the kind of loony climate establishment is.
Yeah, well, okay, so...
So, yeah, it just tweaks the terminology a bit.
Okay.
Do you think that there is more merit in...
Are you, in a sense, though, strawmanning the opposing thing by taking someone that's on the almost exact opposite from you and rather than looking for someone maybe that's in the middle or some...
Who are these people in the middle?
I suppose you're one, but you see, the thing is, Ronan, that I would quote your work very freely as evidence from my side.
That's the thing.
The fact that you're on the left is not a problem to me.
I'm ultimately more interested in the quality of your science and your arguments.
That's what really matters to me.
So if somebody from the left comes up with something that is persuasive, I'm going whoop-de-doo.
Thank you.
Okay, right.
I think I'd like to...
Yeah, so the final...
Yeah, heading back to...
So you were one of the first journalists to cover Climategate.
Yes.
This story, this was related to the...
Email leak.
Yeah, in University of East Anglia.
And so the CRU, the Climate Research Unit, is one of the main things.
A lot of the people there were heavily involved in the...
I'm glad you said that because I was going to say if you weren't that it wasn't just a kind of random leak of emails from a scientific it was the belly of the beast the climatic research unit founded by Sir Hubert Lamb who's one of the preeminent climate scientists Is one of the world's main gatekeepers of the temperature data sets which are used to justify, well, first IPCC reports and then government policy.
And what you had in the climate gate emails was scientists, the scientists who write the reports on which government policy is based, Quietly admitting that they really aren't as sure about climate change as they sometimes say in public.
There was evidence of dissenting voices being horribly bullied and ostracised from scientific publications, thereby enhancing their false argument that there is unanimity in climate science and that people who disagree are kind of Flat earth loons, eccentrics.
But of course, if they're not getting published, how do we know what the other side thinks?
So, well, okay, on the technical point of view, looking at things, first of all, the term climate gate, you seem to have been one of the people that actually got that term used as the main, where does that term come from?
From a commenter called Bulldust.
When the story started breaking in the blogosphere, obviously what you try and do is try and get as much information as you can as quickly as you can.
And there's a great wisdom of crowdsourcing.
You're an independent scientist.
There's an amazing amount of scientific expertise out there.
These people sitting at home who previously, their opinions wouldn't have been available.
But thanks to the internet, they lurk in the comments below and they come up with some quite erudite points or some witty points or some good names, as in the case of Bulldust.
Maybe he was below Joe Nova, I think?
Okay.
But anyway, so the term, that seems to have been the one that stuck.
I think you used it in your reporting.
Yeah, Mark Stein tried calling it Warmergate, which I think was wittier, but he was too late.
By then the name had stuck.
For me, what's interesting about Climategate, from the perspective of what I'm researching this book, is it seems to be almost like those inkblot tests that psychologists would use.
I'm finding that...
Anybody that's looked at ClimateGate, they seem to find different things in it.
And that again, it seems to be this confirmation bias thing that they could use it.
Coincidentally, the things that people find always seem to be On whatever their perspective was originally.
And so, in light of this, you, I take your...
So, from what you've described, you would be putting coming in that it shows that it was a lack of scientific rigor.
But then we have here on the...
There were several inquiries into Climategate that arose from them, but they basically concluded nothing to see, move along, please.
And that's really surprising, isn't it?
That the scientific establishment, which has a vested interest in promoting itself as a source of unimpeachable authority, which is getting billions, probably, in grant funding...
That has much to lose if the scientists have exposed the charlatans.
Isn't it really surprising that their argument, their defence, was nothing to see here?
Well, I do find...
I've talked to quite a number of scientists, a lot of them off the record, that did find what the ClimateGate showed to a lot of people.
It said...
Wait, maybe this wasn't as solid, as settled, to use a term, as we had thought it was, that there seems to be a bit of politicisation going on.
But I've also talked to other scientists who take the opposite thing and they look...
And for them, Climategate actually, all it revealed from their perspective was that there are scientists involved that are kind of...
Trying to over-egg the pudding, maybe, and also trying to downplay uncertainties, but that broadly, there's nothing...
There's no smoking gun.
Yes, and that it broadly, all it just said is it showed some people were not behaving as well as they could, but that they actually...
But you see, that's fine.
If that's the truth, then that's damning enough for me.
You see, you forget about the...
Do you know what?
I'm quite sympathetic to that argument.
I don't think that there was...
Michael Mann and a few others emerges, exceedingly dodgy characters.
What you have to remember about Climategate...
It's not, does it prove that the whole of climate science is a busted flush?
Which it doesn't.
It came out at a time when, in the years after the Rio Earth Summit, there was a sort of escalating credulity about climate science among politicians especially, but also among the general public.
That basically, these scientists were treated like priests.
They were like priests in ancient times.
They were treated reverently.
Whatever they said was taken on trust.
What ClimateGate did was show that these...
No, I think not just to me, everybody.
It showed for the first time, perhaps ever...
that these people had feet of clay yeah that's what it did it doesn't really matter beyond that i wouldn't make extravagant claims for it except i would say that you would be very very silly if you imagine that the the the the the so-called inquiries the impartial inquiries which exonerated these scientists
one of them was run by a guy called ron oxborough lord oxborough who's who's very much part of the climate industrial complex and he very much connected with the kind of the whole renewables renewables scam somebody described it as like putting dracula in charge of the of the You were never going to get an objective opinion from him.
These were whitewashes.
They were the establishment whitewashing the establishment.
Nothing more than that.
And I'm not going to be very hard on you generally because I think I agree with a lot of what you say.
And I would also, by the way, I'd like to stress that I kind of agree with your line about Climategate.
I mean, you'd think that I having such great associations with it, I'd be keen to big it up as this tremendous scoop.
No, it was just the scientists being exposed as being dodgier than their public image.
That's all it did.
But no, they were not exonerated by those inquiries.
Only a fool would think that.
Okay, I've only two more questions then.
So there seems to be an intriguing paradox on the side calling for major urgent climate action and So, from that side, which seems to be mostly left-wing, you can see it particularly with the Deep Green movement as well and the Extinction Rebellion and all of this thing are saying...
They say the message that we hear is the science behind climate action, urgent climate action, is clear and obvious and you don't need to be a scientist to see that.
But if you're not a scientist and you disagree, then we shouldn't listen to you because you're not a scientist.
Yes.
They've so arranged the debate that they can't lose.
I suppose that's good activism and good propaganda.
It's not very good economics because of the damage that's going to be done.
It's not very good democracy, is it really?
It's like a handful of hardcore leftists.
That's what they are.
I call it environmental terrorism.
I mean, I don't think terrorism is just about killing people.
I think you can use a form of economic terrorism by occupying a bridge, for example, in London and forcing everyone who goes past it to sort of weave your way through jugglers and yoghurt weavers and policemen performing skateboard tricks.
Okay.
I don't think that shutting down London for a week and causing tremendous economic damage is a just or fair contribution to the argument.
Okay, so I probably shouldn't have said the thing on the extension rebellion and all of that because what I'm finding is that seems to be not from people that I've been talking to in London.
They're not this week.
They're not really...
There's some support for the idea, but a lot of the general public were kind of saying, that seemed to have been going a bit too far.
But we still, even with the general, most people's position, when they believe it, is that the science is clear.
Well, the science is clear on what?
Well, we need to be doing something.
Because something is better than nothing.
We must do something.
Here's something.
Let's do it.
That seems to be where we are.
Okay.
Why does something need to be done?
Sometimes not doing anything is better than doing something.
Because you've got the...
A hundred, say, a hundred notional pounds spent today addressing climate change is considerably more expensive than a hundred pounds spent in 50 years, when a hundred pounds is a much smaller fraction of the global economy.
We're always talking about future generations and how we're hurting future generations.
The future generations can look after themselves very, very well because they're going to be much, much, much wealthier than we are.
So you're going with this discount rate concept.
That's just one.
I don't think that's my dominant argument.
It's just one among many.
Okay, my final thing here.
Maybe you can help me or not.
There's another similar paradox.
Is it the paradox of diamonds?
No, no.
Okay, so apparently the science is settled on climate change.
Right, yeah.
Also, apparently, it was already settled in the 19th century.
Yeah.
And then the IPCC was set up in the late 1980s.
When it was being set up, apparently the science was settled.
But the IPCC report was set up to check it, nonetheless.
And with each successive report that we've been finding, it's become more settled there.
Yeah.
You know, and yet strangely, the IPCC hasn't been disbanded.
We're being told that the future reports are needed to make the science even more settler.
So my question, you studied English language and literature in Oxford.
Which is why, by the way, I think I'm actually better qualified to deal with this issue than any scientist.
Right.
Because ultimately, it's about language.
Right.
It's about...
And in order to slay this beast, you have to be good at critical thinking about all else.
Okay.
So, well, my question.
How exactly is the verb to settle declined by...
Like, what would you use for if something is settled and then it becomes more settler?
Well, do you know what?
I'm getting bombarded with different thoughts now.
Before I forget, on the way here in the car, I said to you that one of the most fascinating things about this whole debate is that as the evidence for man-made global warming theory has grown weaker, or at least has failed to be confirmed the longer time has gone on, So the rhetoric used by the climate alarmists has got more dramatic.
And you used a...
You reminded me of a fascinating legal phrase.
Can you just tell me?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
No, it's a term you hear in legal circles.
Yeah, if in a legal case, if the facts are on your side, you should pound the facts.
If the law is on your side, you should pound the law.
If neither is on your side, you should pound the table.
There is so much table pounding going on right now.
And of course, yeah, the Guardian couldn't have made my case better for me with this escalation of the language.
It's like a question I often ask.
If the case for man-made climate change were as rock-solid as Extinction Rebellion would tell us, why are the climate alarmists not able to say, well look, here are the facts, here's our case, and everyone would believe it?
It seems to me that they can't make a case because they haven't really got a very good case.
They haven't yet presented the compelling evidence that they insist they have.
And that's a real problem.
Okay.
Well, yeah.
Well, so that's my questions.
I just, you know, just to stress that, like, I'm trying to do this.
I know you've presented things from the right-wing perspective and the climate skeptics perspective are, you know, sometimes it's called the climate deniers because you deny the existence of climate or something.
Yeah, whatever.
I'm also interviewing people on both sides, and so this is kind of the idea.
I think it's great you're doing this, and you're one of the very few people who can move with both camps, and also you've got a certain degree of scientific integrity in that you're an independent scientist.
I've read some of the stuff you've, or some of the papers that you've co-written, and they're very compelling.
Okay.
So I'm glad you're doing this, so well done.
Okay, thank you.
▲
Export Selection