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Dec. 12, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
37:24
Delingpod 49: Will Happer
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Welcome to the Delling Pod.
And I know I always say this, but I really am excited about this particular episode.
I have managed to track down...
I had to come to Madrid to do it.
I have managed to track down Dr.
Will Happer, who is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest physicists, and he is also a climate sceptic, which means I love him very much, and I'm really excited to finally...
So good to meet you.
Thank you.
Tell me a bit about your scientific career so we can establish you as a great thinker of our times.
I mean, you worked on American weapons programs, which you probably can't talk very much about.
Some, yes.
And I've worked a lot on, in particular, high-energy lasers and how they propagate in the atmosphere.
And so I know a lot about the interaction of radiation and...
When you say a high energy laser, do you mean like lasers that can shoot down spacecraft and things?
Yes, yes, exactly.
Are they used in the military at all these days?
No.
They were just a kind of thing you worked on?
I've worked on them.
There have been developments.
Experimental lasers, that would be a real threat.
They've never been fielded, at least by the United States.
But who knows, they might be someday.
What could you imagine them being used for?
I'm thinking Star Wars, things like that.
Because there's going to come a time, isn't there, where the war for territory is going to move to space.
China, maybe.
Would that be a...
Yes, another place where they conceivably could be used would be, you take a country like Israel, which is surrounded with lots and lots of rockets.
You can't afford to try and shoot them down with anti-rocket rockets.
The anti-rockets are expensive themselves.
And so it might be a cost-effective way to get the fence under the right conditions.
You have to pray that it's not a cloudy day, right?
So there are obvious problems.
That is a problem, isn't it?
Yeah.
Right, okay.
So you've already spotted a flaw in the laser thing.
Was that the same as Star Wars?
Yes, yes.
As President Reagan's initiative?
That's right.
That's really how I came to...
community was in the early days of Star Wars when they were working on these lasers, they recognized that even if you had a very powerful laser on the ground and aimed it at an incoming warhead, by the time the laser energy got to the warhead, instead of being focused on the warhead, it would be instead of being focused on the warhead, it would be split up into hundreds of little speckles, none of them having enough power to do any damage.
And that's because the atmosphere is full of little packets of slightly warmer and cooler air that are turbulently mixed.
It's the same thing that makes stars twinkle at night.
You look at a star, it's not steady, it's twinkling.
That's because of this turbulence.
I'm learning so much already.
That's right.
It was known that there was this problem and it was also known that in astronomy you could solve the problem by Looking at a dim star that was close to a very bright one and you would use the light from the bright star to measure the atmospheric turbulence and then you could distort the laser mirror or the astronomical telescope mirror in sort of the anti-turbulence way so that the light would actually focus perfectly but you had to be able to measure it and so if the Opponent
were kind enough to attack us at night in the direction of a bright star, we could get them, you know.
But, you know, most of the time, you know, he's coming from some other direction.
There are not many bright stars.
So the idea I came up with was to make an artificial star using a ground-based laser.
So I invented what they call the sodium guide star.
That was very, very secret for many years, but it worked the first time they turned it on.
That gave me some credibility in the defense parts of the government.
It was pacified credibility.
I was invited to come to Washington and head the Department of Energy's Basic Research, which I did for three years under Mr.
Bush Sr., under Admiral Watkins, and then for a while under his successor, Sir Hazel O'Leary.
I liked them both.
They were good people.
And then I... I was eventually fired by Mr.
Gore for being, you know, too picky about, you know, scientific accuracy on climate.
That is a claim to fame in itself, isn't it?
I mean, that's a badge of honour.
Fired by Vice President Gore.
Well, he did me a favour, and he did Barbara and my wife a favour.
She was anxious to have me come home.
So my wife's a big fan of Al, and I'm sort of grateful to him also.
Oh, right.
So how did he fire you?
Did he fire you in person?
Were you important enough to be called into an office?
No, I didn't get that honour, but he did instruct my boss, Hazel, who was the Secretary of Energy, who I kind of liked and vice versa.
She called me into her office after several months of the new administration and said, Will, what have you done to Al Gore?
I said, I haven't done anything to Al Gore.
So that was sort of the nature of the conversation.
Oh, I see.
So you must have annoyed him.
So she was told in no uncertain terms, get me out of there.
Get rid of Happer.
So you say that you question his scientific understanding or what?
What have you done to annoy him?
Well...
Climate in particular.
Oh, so you were already...
In fact, even in 1990, you know, he was pushing climate.
Right.
And...
And ozone and, you know, all of these environmental things, which every one of which he exaggerated just grotesquely.
I see.
So you were inconvenient, basically.
You were an inconvenient scientific voice.
That's right, yeah.
And did you ever get any sense of why Al got so behind this thing?
I mean, do you think it's, is it a cynical money-making scam?
Is it political power grab?
Or does he believe it?
No.
You know, I've asked myself that question many times.
I've met him once or twice, and I still don't know what the answer is.
It's been very profitable for him, so he's a very wealthy man now.
Hugely profitable.
And had you got on the right side, or rather the wrong side, I mean, you joined now, you'd probably be a lot richer now.
Oh yeah, that's right.
I've given up a lot to oppose it.
So, when did you first spot this scam?
I mean, it is a scam, isn't it?
It's a scam, yeah.
When did you sort of see it coming?
When was the first moment where you thought, aye, aye?
Well, when I was Director of Energy Research, because I was funding a lot of it, and so I would have people come into my office in Washington once a week, and Tell me about the research they were doing that we were supporting.
I felt I ought to know how we were spending the taxpayers' money.
I had a big budget.
It was three and a half billion dollars when a billion dollars was worth a lot back then.
It's still worth something.
But most people were just delighted to come and Tell a bureaucrat what they were doing.
They were very surprised and flattered to be invited.
But the exception was people in climate were always very defensive.
Why do you want me to come to Washington?
Well, we invite everybody to come to Washington to tell us about their research.
And they would say, well, you know, we work for Mr.
Gore.
And I would...
It was like that, wasn't it?
So that was when I began to realize that, you know, there's something funny about this area of science.
So it was kind of, it was sort of supposed to be off the books, or semi-off the books.
Yeah, yeah.
They would eventually reluctantly come, because I would have my chief of staff...
We'd point out in their contract that if they didn't come when called, that their contract would not be renewed.
So that got their attention, and they would show up.
But it would be a very painful seminar, not like normal seminars, you know, very, like playing poker.
Well, why do you not ask them a question?
Well, why are you asking them a question?
I say, always ask questions, you know, that's the only way to learn.
Well, one of them had the nerve to say, well, what answer would you like?
You know?
Right.
So it was like a sort of tutorial, I mean I don't know what you call them in America, where you've got your students who are supposed to have done their homework and really have done a very poor job.
That's right, that's right.
And it just stood out so much from the other branches of science.
People would come in and tell me, we were supporting the Human Genome Project and they just couldn't wait to come to Washington and tell me about the latest gene sequencing machine and how well it was doing and how cheap it was.
Thrilled.
And it would be the same with the high-energy physicists, how they were doing with the search for the top fork and how close they had come.
Everyone else was so happy to come and talk about their work because they were pleased in what they were doing.
They thought it was important.
And so I wonder, why don't the climate scientists people feel the same way?
Yeah.
Yeah.
See, because...
The physicists seem to be generally quite...
Is that fair?
Because physics is quite a high-end science, isn't it?
It's quite pure.
Yeah, that's right.
I think there are more sceptics from physics than any other field.
Because Dick Linson is very, very scathing about the scientific abilities of people, particularly in the climate science field.
He thinks it's almost like a non-area.
Is that fair?
Well, he's pretty sour on some of the climate people, that's for sure.
Yeah.
I think he was suggesting in one talk he gave that I saw that if you're really, really not very talented, then climate science is the area you gravitate towards.
Well, yes, and he's right, because there's so much money there that if you're willing to...
Do so-called research that reinforces the narrative.
You can get all the money you like, and then you rise rapidly within your university because the university shares some of this through the overhead.
And so you're protected.
For example, one of the chief authors of the disgraceful National Climate Assessment that came out last year.
Oh, that came out during the Trump administration, yes.
During the Trump administration.
I was in an atmospheric physics department and very, very successful in bringing in money, but did essentially no real research.
I won't say the name, not to embarrass the person.
But in the end, when it came time for a tenure decision, this was a junior person, the department voted against tenure for this assistant professor, and the administration was so upset at the amount of overhead they were going to lose that they arranged for this climate person to get tenure in the politics department, and so...
The money is still flowing in on supposedly climate research, but it's going to the politics department.
Probably more appropriate.
Maybe more appropriate.
Climate science is really about politics, isn't it?
I think it's mostly politics, yeah.
So a few years ago I wrote a book called Watermelons, and I didn't really know much about the history of science or anything, or the scientific method, but it became fairly clear to me that one of the fundamental problems with this Climate change scam is that the people in these particular fields are really not paying respect to the scientific method at all.
I mean, reproducibility?
That's right.
What are the other things you'd expect in a scientific method?
Well, self-criticism.
There's variable self-criticism.
Yes, it's really tragic and it's ruined what's a very interesting field, you know.
After all, climate is important.
It's had an enormous impact on humanity throughout history, and the better we understand it, the better it is for us.
To have had it so distorted by all of this money, show me that climate is a crisis that has to be addressed by political action right away.
You know, decades.
That's the point that Dick Linton makes.
I think he's right.
Yes, that's another area of the scientific method you've just reminded me of.
That your mind should be blank.
I mean, when Röntgen discovered X-rays, he was working on something else, I think, wasn't he?
That's exactly right, yeah.
And you don't...
You just go where the evidence takes you rather than deciding what the conclusion is.
Right.
For example, you know...
It's quite clear now that the models are predicting far too much warming.
Everyone knows that, even the climate scientists.
And so for normal science, what you would do then is say, okay, what's wrong with the models?
Let me go through my assumptions one by one and see which one might be wrong.
Yeah.
So rather than doing that, though, the community is busy trying to fudge the data.
You know, well, it's not agreeing with the model.
There must be something wrong with the data.
Well, that's a terrible sign.
Yeah.
It's not science, isn't it?
Have you heard, by the way, you mentioned normal science.
Have you heard of this concept of post-normal science?
I have, yes.
Do you want to give me your thoughts on that?
Um...
Well, it reminds me a little bit of a remark made by a colleague at Princeton, John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing game theory and economics.
And you probably know the story.
There was a movie made of him called Beautiful Mind.
So he was sort of a friend of mine.
And he was schizophrenic, as it came through in the movie.
But he just gradually got better and better.
By the time I got to know him in the 80s and 90s, he was almost normal.
And so when the Swedish Academy decided that...
Well, maybe he deserves the prize more than most.
Let's give him the prize.
They were a little nervous that if they gave him the prize, and it turned out that they'd given the prize to this raving lunatic that would make them look bad.
So they sent a team over to talk to his friends.
So I talked to someone from Sweden about John Nash and said, well, yeah, he looks completely sane to me.
I don't think he will embarrass you.
No, he'll say what he thinks, but it won't sound crazy.
Yeah.
So on the day he got the prize, of course there was lots of publicity and he was standing there in his office and there was a reporter, a young woman a little bit like you, and she had a mic and she was sticking it in his mouth and she says, Dr.
Nash, Dr.
Nash, what did you think when you heard and you learned you'd won the prize?
And he looks at her and he says, I thought it was more money.
It's sad.
Yeah, I like to...
He sounds...
It's perfectly rational, but most people wouldn't quite have said that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it was not...
I didn't think it was embarrassing at all.
Do you think...
Do you think that the world of science has changed for the worse since...
I didn't finish.
The reason I bring that up was...
Her second question is, Dr.
Nash, what do you think about the social sciences...
And he looks at her and he says, if the discipline has the word science in it, it's not science.
So that was beginning to get close to the edge.
I see what you mean.
So real science would be geology, symmetry.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
Do you think that science...
Back in the day, scientists were these kind of respected figures.
We thought they were seekers after truth in their white lab coats or whatever, and they got Nobel Prizes and stuff.
Has it been corrupted by this kind of new climate, do you think?
Or is it only that branch of climate science?
Well, I think scientists have benefited by...
An aura that has never been entirely deserved.
They've always been human beings with foibles and personal enemies.
So I think a lot of the respect they got was...
Not fully warranted.
But I think it's gotten a lot worse because of government funding.
Because they've managed to distort whole fields.
Climate science has been badly distorted, I think.
But that's happened before.
For example, we had the...
Eugenics movement in the early 1900s, which was very popular in your country and mine, too, in the United States.
And it wasn't science at all.
It was ideology disguised as science, and they would give these doctored tests to try to make...
You know, Chinese and Japanese and Eastern Europeans look, you know, subhuman compared to the good old Anglo-Saxon race, you know.
It was just complete nonsense.
And yet, lots and lots of people signed up to it, you know.
There were eugenic societies in every town.
Oh, yeah, it was very fashionable, wasn't it?
Yeah, that's right.
I think George Burnshaw or people like that embraced it.
Yeah, the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton were all big eugenicists.
Oh, right.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was not true.
It was just phony.
Right.
Which is sort of encouraging in that it means that possibly one day this fad could pass.
Yeah, the discouraging thing is the thing that made it pass so quickly was its excess use in Nazi Germany.
Right.
And so I hope we don't need that to get rid of the phoniness of climate.
There is something of the totalitarian state, isn't there, about the climate science?
You think about...
Well, Lysencloism is quite similar, I think.
Very similar, yeah.
It was driven by ideology because if you could change wheat's characteristics so it would grow in Siberia or near the Arctic Circle or apples, you could do the same things to humans.
And so if you educate them properly in the Komsomol and young pioneers, they will have children who will be born as communists, you know, and society will get better and better and better.
Is that the idea?
That was part of the idea.
Right, I see.
You were at Princeton, presumably, at the height of the Cold War, when communism really was an issue.
And now, in a way, do you not think...
I sometimes worry that environmentalism is the new communist threat.
It's the new threat to freedom and intellectual integrity and lots of other things.
Yeah.
Well, it's a mix.
There are certainly parts of the environmental movement that are very totalitarian, and then there are sincere people.
I mean, I consider myself, and you probably do too, an environmental littlest.
I mean, we love nature.
We like it beautiful and pristine and clean for our children and grandchildren.
So, environmentalist is too broad a term.
It includes us both.
No, you asked me how I got into this game, and actually what really upset me was seeing beautiful countryside despoiled by these, what I call, bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.
I mean, how can you love nature and light it with these monstrosities?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And you can love it because what you really love is the income from your windmill and the subsidies and so on.
You disguise this by saying that you love nature.
So you were called back in from the cold by the Trump administration.
What happened?
Did you get a phone call?
Yeah, some people called me from the National Security Council and asked if I would consider coming down.
Come by and chat, so I did, and we talked.
They said, well, we have all these technical problems that we need some help on.
EMP, electromagnetic pulse, and...
Other technical issues.
And I said, what about climate?
Well, you know, we prefer not to touch that.
I said, well, if you'll let me touch it myself and try and do something, I'll come and help you with the other things.
So they said, OK, it's a deal, so that's why I came.
Oh, so it was a quid pro quo.
I didn't realise that.
Yeah, that's right.
And what is EMP? What were the problems they were having with it that need solving?
Well, for example, there's this...
The perennial problem of electromagnetic pulses that For example, every now and then we get caught in a big solar storm, and that can burn out large parts of the power grid.
One of the worst was back in the 1800s when telegraph lines were first put in, and the storm was so bad it was described by an Englishman named Carrington.
But it actually set, you know, telegraph booths on fire, you know, things were arcing from this storm.
And we've had smaller ones since, and so...
You should design grids so that they can be protected against that.
And so the Trump administration decided to finally force the U.S. power industry to put in protections.
And so I was supposed to help make that happen because I understood the physics.
And it was also, you can do that artificially with a nuclear weapon.
And so I knew about the nuclear weapon effects and I was able to help that way too.
So that was...
Sort of the main reasons I was called out to try and help with that.
And did you solve it?
Well, I think we made progress.
I think things, you know, it takes a long time to solve that.
Basically, you saved the entire American grid from the next...
No, thank you, but we're getting there.
Good.
That's good.
And in return, you wanted to use your influence.
I mean...
I got really excited when Trump came to the White House.
I thought, this is going to be game over for the eco-loons and stuff.
Game over for the climate-industrial complex.
But it seems to be quite schizoid, the White House, in terms of different factions, some of which are obviously true believers in the great climate scam.
That's right.
There are a few true believers, there are some opportunists, and then there are these political realists, real politic types who are worried about votes.
So there are very few who really want to take this on.
Mr.
Trump is one of the exceptions.
I think he would be delighted to take it on if he were given free reign, but his advisers are not enthusiastic.
Isn't that an exciting thought?
President Trump unleashed.
Well, he's sort of unpredictable.
Yeah, he's that, but I wish...
Do you have chats one-to-one with him in the White House?
Yes, yes.
He was enthusiastic.
We had several discussions.
But after every meeting, his advisors would come back with counter-arguments about why this was such a terrible idea and And, you know, dragged out the process month after month.
And so eventually it was obvious that it was time to begin the re-election campaign.
Right.
And at that point it was too late to take it home.
I see that.
I imagine what you were hoping for was something on the lines of this red team, blue team thing I discussed, where you'd get...
Well, how would that work exactly?
Well, on other major systems, for example, in the Defense Department, if there's a big new weapon system, you bring in the experts on this particular technology and you have them try and shoot it down.
Or, for example, you're designing a new nuclear weapon and the lead is taken by Los Alamos.
You bring in hostile...
It's a very good process.
It works like a charm.
It saved us You know, billions of dollars in other areas, and yet here's this area which is going to cost many trillions, and we're unable to do it for climate.
Because we don't even discuss it.
Yeah, that's right, yeah.
So it's really bizarre.
Did you find, when you were talking to President Trump, that he was very quick to understand the points you were making?
He understood it, yeah.
He didn't need me to tell them that.
Right, that's interesting.
And he had already gone through the same arguments on pulling out of Paris.
There was enormous...
Opposition to that within the White House and across Washington and the Republican Party, not just the Democrats.
That's frightening, isn't it?
Yeah.
There are quite a lot of kind of rhino squishes.
Yeah, well, whatever you call them.
Whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
But to his credit, you know, he was as good as his word he pulled out.
How do you...
So why do you think he got away with that?
What gave him the courage or the independence to make that tough decision?
Well, I think he thought it was the right thing to do for America.
You know, I felt...
I was a little disappointed that he didn't stress how crazy the science was, so his arguments were that it's a terribly unfair deal to America.
So he was not...
Willing to articulate the fact that it's based on nonsense, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's why a really good blue ribbon committee, you know, red team, would provide the kind of ammunition that he needed for that.
So, in a nutshell, you know, you are, you probably won't admit this, but you are one of the world's greatest living physicists.
What, Ewan Freeman Dyson?
Well, that's an exaggeration.
I'm a pretty good businessman.
You're pretty good.
Because now I've got you, I want you to kind of explain to my, not that I have many climate alarmists among my listenership, but suppose there's somebody listening and they're worried about climate change.
They think it's the big issue of the time.
What would you say to them to persuade them otherwise?
Well, I would ask them to try and look at some of the counter evidence.
For example, we have this little group called the CO2 Coalition, and there are several little white papers there that lay out the arguments without equations, but clearly.
And so they should read sort of responsible criticism of this.
And so one of the CO2 coalition white papers is think for yourself, you know, it's a white paper.
And people have a hard time thinking for themselves.
So if you think for yourself, most people I know who think for themselves when they start digging into this, they come over to our side.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But CO2 is...
I mean, is it any way dangerous?
Is it...
Of course not.
I mean, you and I are sitting here breathing out huge amounts of CO2, and our lungs have got 40,000, 50,000 parts per million CO2 compared to only 400 out in the air.
And it's absolutely essential.
The reason you get sick from hyperventilating is because you have too little CO2 in your body.
So CO2 is essential for proper functioning of animals.
Breathing reflects is controlled by CO2. If you have too little CO2, then you stop breathing and you can die.
Yes, yes.
CO2 is very, very good for plants.
It's almost never been at low levels the way it is today.
Over geological history.
So we're in a famine with respect to CO2. So the idea that adding CO2 is in some way harmful is just baffling.
You know, if you look at the science, it's not at all harmful.
It's actually good for the world.
And am I right in thinking, I sometimes say this very confidently, but there is no evidence, is there, other than computer models, that CO2 is driving catastrophic...
Climate change?
There's no evidence at all.
No, I mean, even the measured climate change, climate always changes, but the rates of warming are a third of what was predicted by the first IPCC models, and no one knows how much of that one-third is still natural because we're coming out of an ice age,
little ice age, I should say, that ended around 1800, and And you can see that very, very clearly were the glaciers, because glaciers started to recede around 1800, 1790.
It's very striking in Alaska, where many of the coastal glaciers were charted by Vancouver, in particular Glacier Bay.
So if you ever get a chance to visit Glacier Bay, you'll learn a lot about climate, just looking at how the ice has receded.
But the ice began to melt by 1790 and by 1880.
Most of the ice in that bay was gone, the entire glacier was gone, and there was almost no increase in CO2 by 1880, you know.
So it has been warming, but the warming began long before there was any increase in CO2, and we don't know how much of the current warming is still part of that natural, you know, rebound from the little ice age.
Do we even know how much anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to climate change?
Well, you can estimate it.
Most people, and I'm in that camp, feel that it's on the order of 1 degree centigrade warming if you double CO2. It might be 1.3, it might be 0.8, but of that order.
But that's not enough to worry people very much, and so they've invented all of these positive feedback mechanisms that a little direct warming from CO2 will be greatly amplified, and the villain is supposed to be water, vapor, and clouds.
But there's no real good evidence that that's happening.
In fact, there's a lot of counter-evidence that's probably not happening.
Right.
Well, I feel that you've covered that subject nicely now.
I can't imagine anyone listening to this podcast will ever again think that CO2 is the primary driver of climate change.
Well, you get lots of propaganda.
Yeah, you do.
So how are we going to win this one?
Well, one thing that would help a lot is for Mother Nature to continue to not warm.
And every additional year with very, very modest warming compared to predictions makes it harder.
And I think that's why there's this increasing hysteria, you know.
It's global warming, it's climate change, it's climate crisis, it's climate emergency.
People are getting very nervous on the cult side that people are losing interest.
You know, they can sort of see.
I mean, you go out...
You see the beautiful mountains to the north of us, all snow covered here in Spain.
Why are they still covered with snow this winter?
Wasn't the snow supposed to be a thing of the past?
I read that in the Independent.
Yeah, you did as well.
Yeah, exactly.
By the way, before we go, just one thing.
Do you know anything about ocean acidification?
I do.
I know a lot.
Because I've got this theory that they invented ocean acidification as a kind of fallback position.
Yes.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
But I think you're quite aware that the ocean is fairly alkaline.
pH is 8 if you're a chemist.
Plus or minus a few tens of a pH unit.
And if it weren't for the CO2, the pH of the ocean would be about 13.5, which is like household ammonia.
So we need to be grateful to CO2 dissolved in the ocean for making it livable.
Right!
I hadn't heard that argument before.
So ocean acidification...
As it's known, it's actually a good thing.
It's a good thing.
The fish love it.
And if you double CO2, you might be able to drop the pH to, I don't know, 7.8.
But the ocean is very insensitive to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
And you already know that's true, because if you look at the CO2 levels in the past, when they've been two times, five times, ten times now, the ocean was teeming with life.
When its pH was a little bit lower, it got down to maybe 7.6 on the average.
But the other thing people don't realise is that the pH in the ocean...
I'm sorry to keep using pH units, but that's what...
No, actually, do you know what?
We all did it at school.
I know about pH 7.
pH 7 is neutral.
Okay, so...
So if you look at the ocean today, the pH varies from maybe 7.5 at depth to, you know, 8.3, you know, in the surface of the Red Sea, you know, it varies all over the place.
And even between day and night, it fluctuates up and down by 0.2, 0.3 pH units.
So the natural variations of pH in the ocean are much, much bigger than anything you would get from WCO2. So it's a non-issue.
Right.
Yeah.
So...
I'm so glad that we've got you being evil on two issues there.
You're saying that CO2 is great for the planet, makes it green, and you're pro-ocean acidification.
Thank you, Dr Happer.
It's really good to meet you, and it means I get the chance to pin onto your lapel one of these badges, which everyone who goes on the podcast get there, a red pill shaped, and they say SF, which stands for Special Friend.
Oh, thank you.
So you're now a special friend.
Thank you very much, James.
Thanks a lot.
A pleasure.
Good to meet you.
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