Joe Rogan interviews climate skeptics Richard Lindzen and William Happer, who argue CO2’s warming impact is overstated—even doubling it has minimal effect without unverified water vapor feedback. They critique politicized climate models, suppressed dissent (e.g., NSF/NASA funding biases), and exaggerated claims like 3% GDP warnings as existential threats, comparing the field to historically distorted sciences like phlogiston or eugenics. Happer warns of Bill Gates-backed geoengineering risks, while Lindzen highlights how net-zero policies inflate energy costs, harming global electrification efforts. Both stress climate science’s complexity—Navier-Stokes equations remain unsolved—and blame ideological funding for stifling debate, not physics. The episode reveals how fear of backlash silences dissent, turning climate alarmism into a self-sustaining financial and political narrative. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Dick Linson, and my whole life has been in academia.
Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard.
And I did spend a couple of years at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado.
Then part of that was because at Harvard I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations.
So I went to Seattle for someone who did.
And then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there about three, four years, moved on to Harvard, spent about 10 years there, and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013.
I've always enjoyed it.
I mean, the field of atmospheric sciences, when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable.
So you could look at phenomena.
One of them that I worked on was the so-called quasi-biennial cycle.
Turns out the wind above the equator, about 16 kilometers, 20 kilometers, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year, and so on.
And, you know, we worked out why that happened.
And there were other things like that.
So it was a very enjoyable period until global warming.
I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton.
And like Dick, I'm a science nerd.
But I was actually born in India under the British Raj.
My father was an Army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American.
And that was before World War II.
So when I came to America as a small child, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project.
So I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge.
And that's probably why I went into physics.
I thought, this looks like an interesting way to make a living.
And if I can do it, I'll do it.
And I have.
And I've done a number of things.
I spent a lot of time at universities at Columbia, at Princeton.
I also served for a couple of years in Washington as director of energy research under President Bush Sr.
And I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here.
I first became suspicious when I was director of energy research.
I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers' money, and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing.
And there was one exception.
That was the people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful.
You know, we work for Senator Gore.
We don't work for you.
And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research.
I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be glad to take my money.
No, what happened was there was, I would say with the first Earth Day, 1970, there was a real change in the environmental movement.
It began to focus much more strongly on the energy sector and much less on saving the whales.
And there was a big difference.
I mean, the energy sector involved trillions of dollars.
The whales, not so much.
And at that time, it was cooling, this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much.
But, you know, you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something.
And it was cooling from the 1930s.
1930s were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the 70s.
And that's why they were saying, well, you know, this is going to lead to an ice age.
And they focused on that for a while.
And then in the 70s, and at that time, well, what do you say?
You know, if you're worried about an ice age, they said, well, it'll be the sulfates emitted by coal burning, because that reflects light, and the less light that we get, the colder we'll get.
But then the temperature stopped cooling in the 70s and started warming.
And that's when they said, well, we have to warn, now scare people with warming, and you can't use the sulfates anymore.
But the scientist called Suki Minabe showed that even though CO2 doesn't do much in the way of warming, doubling it will only give you a half degree or so.
But if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little, you added water vapor, which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you had doubled the impact of CO2, which now gives you a degree, which still isn't a heck of a lot, but still it was saying you could increase it.
And that's when people started saying, well, now we better find CO2.
It's increased because of industrialization and so on.
You wanted to deal, you know, the energy sector is trillions of dollars.
Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels, it's big bugs.
And one of the odd things, I think, in politics, I don't see it studied much.
Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars.
If you look at the Kent McKinsey report on, you know, eliminating CO2, net zero, they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Well, if you're giving out that much, you don't need that much of your politician.
All you need is millions for your campaigning.
And all you're asking are the recipients of people who are getting the money that you are giving them, a half percent, a quarter percent, you're golden.
So that's much better than giving out $100,000 and having all of it back.
On the one hand, you're told the science is settled.
Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder.
I mean, you went to college.
How many climate scientists did you know?
I mean, one of those.
But on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports, they're pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2, and we don't understand them at all.
So here you have the biggest phenomenon we don't understand at all, but the science is settled.
Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians'decisions, where they have to, like, in the UK, they were getting rid of cows.
And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on, which are available in places.
You know, there are places where you have, you're lucky, like in Norway or Canada, you know, Quebec, where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean.
But there's a problem with politicians.
I remember once being in D.C. and some Republican politicians came and said, you know what we just did?
We banned incandescent light bulbs.
They said, wasn't that a great thing?
I said, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today.
What's the point?
Because at the time, what was replacing it, compact fluorescents, which were awful.
All they had to do was wait and do nothing and LEDs would come along and people would say, okay, I prefer that.
Well, you know, it's interesting when they have these decisions that they make like that that do turn out to be negative ultimately and that yet people still allow them to make silly decisions that don't seem to be making sense.
This is the disturbing thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting, especially a lot of very polite, educated people that have followed the narrative that you follow if you're a good person and if you're a person who trusts science, and that is that we have a serious problem, we have to address it now, or there will be no America for our grandchildren.
It's just, to me, it's very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance of that we have settled this, that the science is settled from so many people and both the left and in academia and even on the right.
There's a lot of people on the right that believe that.
This episode is brought to you by Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.
A nice cold happy dad is low carbonation, gluten-free, and easy to drink.
No bloating, no nonsense.
Whether you're watching a football game or you're golfing, watching a fight with your boys or out on the lake, these moments call for a cold, happy dad.
People are drinking all these seltzers in skinny cans loaded with sugar, but Happy Dad only has one gram of sugar in a normal-sized can.
Can't decide on a flavor?
Grab the variety pack.
Lemon lime, watermelon, pineapple, and wild cherry.
They also have a grape flavor in collaboration with Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg.
They have their new lemonade coming out as well.
Happy Dad, available nationwide across America and in Canada.
Go to your local liquor store or visit happydad.com.
For a limited time, use the code Rogan to buy one Happy Dad trucker hat and get one free.
Enjoy a cold, happy dad.
Must be of legal drinking age.
Please drink responsibly.
Happy Dad, Hard Seltzer, Tea and Lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California.
You know, the weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been, you know, from core samples over a long period of time, it's this crazy wave.
And like, no one was controlling it back then.
And we're supposed to believe that we can control it now.
You know, in other words, you know, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees, but that was because most of the Earth was not affected.
Much of the Earth anyway, very much.
But, you know, somebody says one degree, a half degree, what's his name?
Cucheras at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for.
I mean, doesn't anyone ask a half degree?
I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.
It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.
And what I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier.
How much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that's called save the world climate, some crazy like that where everybody goes.
Actually, quite a lot, but I mean, it took very funny forms.
So for instance, in, let's see, 1989, for instance, I sent a paper to Science magazine questioning whether this is something to worry about.
And they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest.
So I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it and published it, and the editor was immediately fired.
Wow.
About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the Iris effect, that clouds, which were greenhouse effect at upper levels, contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling, as a negative feedback.
And we got the paper, put it, got reviewed, it was published.
Again, the editor was fired immediately.
But the new editor came on immediately and said, he's inviting papers to criticize it.
And suddenly there were tons of papers criticizing it, looking for anything that differed from what we did, including one that found a difference that actually made the CO2 even less important, but it was different, so he thought he could pass it through it.
No, it's insane.
And even now, there's something called gatekeepers.
I don't know, are you familiar with the release of emails from East Anglia?
No, I'm not.
Okay.
This is 20 years ago or something almost.
Somebody, anonymous, released the emails from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm, and they were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on.
And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on.
Well, I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy, and that's what really sucked me into it.
I had never paid much attention to climate science before, but I was spending a lot of money, the taxpayers' money on it, and so I thought I'll have to learn a little bit about it.
And I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not appreciate my questioning.
They were very strange because almost any other science, when they got a call from Washington, come in and tell us what you're doing, they were just delighted to come and make a case about how important their work was.
But the climate scientists were completely different.
Well, you know, I was working for President Bush Sr. and when Carter and Gore won the election, you know, Gore couldn't wait to fire me, you know, at the behest of all of his protégés.
So he, you know, Washington, fortunately, it's very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire because you can't find them in the org chart.
So it took him two or three months to find me.
But they finally did fire me.
I was glad to be fired.
I wanted to go back to do research.
I was tired of being a bureaucrat, so I'm grateful in some sense for that.
Your colleagues that weren't working with you, like other scientists, were they reluctant to discuss this kind of information with you guys when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?
Well, you know, my field is actually hard physics.
You know, I'm a nuclear physics trained and I've done a lot of work with lasers.
And these are things you can measure.
They don't have much political influence.
A lot of them have a military significance.
And in fact, the reason I was brought to Washington is because I invented an important part of the Star Wars Defense initiative, which I can say about later.
I had never really paid any close attention to science until then.
So once I had this experience in Washington, I started looking into it a little bit, but I didn't have time to look a lot because my own research was going still at Princeton, and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company.
And so, you know, forming the company and getting it going and funded used up most of my time.
I didn't have time to look at climate.
But eventually that was behind me.
And I invited Dick to come give a seminar at a colloquium at Princeton.
And that's really when I began to get very interested in it.
And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science.
You know, it completely politicized.
If you can't ask a question, you know, that's a bad, bad sign.
And if you have 100% consensus determining the truth, that's an even worse sign because, you know, the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation.
And that wasn't true of the climate science community.
You know, they would predict all these things, and none of them ever happened.
And there was no consequence.
You know, one failure after another, and nothing ever happened.
Well, I think speaking as a physicist, I don't know how it is in other fields.
And from Princeton, I think most of my colleagues recognize that there's a lot of nonsense there, but they're afraid to speak up because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money.
Dick mentioned that the love of money is the root of all evil.
And in universities, for example, at Princeton, we have enormous new building program.
It's funded to a large extent from overhead, from climate grants, you know.
And you're talking about, you know, not small change.
You know, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, for construction.
So it's like, you know, this famous drama of this Norwegian playwright, Enemy of the People, Ibsen.
And the point of the drama was there was this resort town in Norway where you would come and you would be treated at the spot.
You'd drink the water and go home healthy.
Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid.
A local doctor said, you know, we're killing people.
We're not curing them.
He was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city.
Another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue.
I mean, in the U.S., and I think that's in a way fortunate.
It's almost a right versus left issue.
And as a result, you have people—universities are almost entirely on the left.
And so it's something they support.
You know, the money end of it is sort of funny.
I mean, I have the feeling at MIT that our president, Sally Kornbluth, probably spends her time worrying about how she can use climate money to support the music department.
You don't think about it too much, but the holiday season comes with some pretty unique jobs like a haunted houseworker, a professional pumpkin carver, gift wrapper, elf, or real bearded Santa's.
And all these jobs require a unique set of skills.
If you need to hire for a role like that or any role, really, ZipRecruiter is the way to go, especially since you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.
Whatever you're looking for, ZipRecruiter can help you find the perfect match, and it works fast.
You'll be able to find out if there are any people in your area who are qualified for your role right away.
You'll also have access to their advanced resume database, which helps you connect with top candidates sooner.
Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise.
Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.
And right now, you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.
Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash Rogan.
ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
And if they take a step outside of the narrative and say, I think we need to re-examine what's going on with CO2 in the atmosphere, and it seems there's a politicalization of this subject, and that's bad for science, that's bad for education, it's bad for everything.
And the attraction, I mean, if you're an administrator, if you're a president of a university, that often overrides everything else, you know, that you're raising money.
I remember years ago, I started college at Rensselaer, and I made the mistake of mentioning to someone that I appreciated the fact they never bothered me.
I transferred out after my sophomore year.
So it began bothering me.
And I realized the president of Rensselaer was making over a million and a half dollars.
This is years ago, probably making much more now.
And the fundraiser came back to me and said, do you know how much money she raises?
I've had conversations with people, and I say, why do you think that?
Like, what do you know about climate change?
And almost none of them have any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they've been, what Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie, which is so far off.
He thought we were all going to be dead today.
There's very little change between 2006 and today.
Okay, now you can take data from every station and filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years.
That's called a low-pass filter.
And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe.
It turns out very poorly because most climate change, by that definition, is regional.
So for instance, in this area, let's say the states like Louisiana, Alabama, Gulf states, they had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming.
Nobody paid much attention to it because that's normal.
Different areas do different things.
You have reasons why it's local.
I mean, if you're near a coast, near a body of water, the circulations in the ocean are bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time, on time scales ranging from a few years for El Niño ENSO to 1,000 years.
And so this has nothing to do with the global average.
The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets.
And so you'd look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot, so it was useful.
But for looking at the Earth's climate, I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device.
You know, that's something there's argument about.
I think, you know, for instance, a man called Milankovic in around 1940 made a convincing argument, and I think now it's correct, that orbital variations created a change in insulation, incoming sunlight, in the Arctic in summer.
And that controlled the ice ages.
And the thinking was pretty simple.
He was saying that, you know, every winter is cold.
Every winter has snow.
But what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle.
And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier.
Takes thousands of years, but eventually it's big.
And in recent years, for instance, there have been young people who have shown that that works.
It's interesting, there was even a national program called CLIMAP to study this.
It's around 1990 or so.
And they found something peculiar.
They found that there were peaks in the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume, but that the time series were not lining up right.
The young people looking at this said, you're looking at the wrong thing.
If you're looking at the insulation, you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume, not just the ice volume.
And then the correlations were excellent.
So this was a theory, Milankovitch, that I think has been reasonably sustained.
But the people doing this got no credit, nothing, because, you know, early in my career, these people would have been rewarded.
Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with.
But you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue.
The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it.
It's all CO2.
CO2 is the control.
Don't confuse me with other possibilities.
But nobody is quite sure about the sun.
We have not got good records of the sun for a long time, so we're stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago.
And one of the proxies is when the sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10.
These stick around for long, you know, thousands of years or longer.
And you can, from that, infer how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago.
And they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant.
It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, you know, this radioactivity that's produced changes from year to year.
If you don't take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon-14 dating, you know, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon-14 in it, and you get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today, because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies.
There's a pretty good historical record of that.
So it's clear the sun is always changing.
And over the last 10,000 years, since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings.
And that's particularly noticeable near the Arctic, you know, in high latitudes in the north.
For example, my father's home in Scotland, I was a kid.
I would walk up into the hills south of Edinburgh and you could see these farms from the year 1000 where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today.
It's too cold today, but it was clearly warm enough in the year 1000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland.
So what caused those?
It was not people burning oil and coal.
And so I think the best guess as to what it was is some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days, because they do correlate with the carbon-14.
Now, when we have estimates like, say, of the Jurassic or any dinosaur age, is there enough of an understanding of the differences in temperature back then that we know whether or not they ever experienced ice ages?
With the ice ages, as I say, orbital theory was the main thing.
The fact that you have, you know, various factors determining the orbit of the Earth versus the Sun and so on, give you periodic changes in the incoming radiation as a function of geography in the Earth.
Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said that he correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi-periodic, really only began three million years or so ago, and at first they were oscillating a lot faster than today.
And that was approximately the time that the isthmus of Panama closed.
So one of the suspicions is that when the Panama Isthmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat in things like the Gulf Stream.
For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe.
And that was about the time that these fluctuating ice ages began.
Well, I think stopping the funding for this massive funding for climate would help because it's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds.
If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you'll be elected to societies, you'll win prizes.
So I think, for example, if some administration in Washington wants to slow this down and get some sanity, they should cut the funding or they should at least open up the funding to alternate theories of what is controlling climate.
Because the theory that the control knob is CO2 doesn't work.
And it just seems so insane that if we move in the same direction and we, as you say, if it really is holding back climate science by 50 years, that's a travesty.
Well, you know, Dick would have made a lot more progress and his colleagues would have made a lot more progress if they hadn't been forced to deal with this CO2 cult.
And we might understand climate today without that.
But I mean, I wondered at times, you know, when you had the Soviet competition with the U.S. and they were the first ones into space.
And we suddenly began a program to get more and more kids to get into STEM.
That has its downside.
First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much.
And the second thing is with peer review, I mean, peer review is new.
I mean, it wasn't that common before World War II.
But people have pointed out it has its virtues.
But, you know, you can see the Royal Meteorological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions.
And the instructions were you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify or if it's plagiarized.
It's repeating something that already exists.
And that was pretty fair because how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not or so on?
That's asking too much of that.
But today, peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity.
If you're not going with the flow, you can get rejected.
And that's a lot of things structurally need to be, I think, rethought a little bit.
The physicists have done pretty well with Archive, where they have a publication vehicle using the Internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what's up on it.
But all sorts of things like that need to happen.
I mean, what Will is saying is true, I'm sure.
Science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this.
Well, for example, there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe where The claim was that the great gene pool of the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low-key Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen.
It was all completely nonsense, but they had learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that, and you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being great eugenicists, you know, protecting the American genome, and it was all nonsense.
It was just complete bullshit.
And yet, and the only thing that stopped it really was the Nazis, because they took it over with a vengeance, you know.
They were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and Britain, and they took it to its absurd extreme.
No, I mean, what Will is saying, I mean, it had a practical consequence, by the way.
It actually led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which held that America was going to restrict immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century.
So there would be a quota for England and Scotland, which was fine, a little bit less for Germany, almost nothing for Eastern Europe, almost nothing for Italy, and so on.
And that was used in the run-up to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.
The average person that's not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals where they're trying to figure out how the world works.
When you hear stories like that, you hear that kind of stuff, and you're just like, oh, this has always been a problem.
What could have been done to protect the scientific process from this sort of an ideological invasion, or at least shelter it somewhat to make sure that something like eugenics doesn't ever get pushed or climate or anything that's just not logical and doesn't fit with the data.
Well, the trouble is, you know, when something like eugenics comes around, the population is told that this is science.
Right.
And how are they going to say no?
I mean, you had various famous laboratories devoted to this.
It wasn't a fringe thing.
Right.
And so I don't know how you would distinguish it at that time from science.
Today, there are books on it, and you have the correspondence of biologists who are saying, well, it's a little bit dicey, but they're saying it's bringing it to the fore of public attention, so maybe that's a good thing.
We'd have been a much poorer country because so many leading Americans, you know, creative, productive people have immigrated, you know, fairly recently.
What I'd read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost and that they believed this late frost might have contributed to ergot growth.
Because apparently that does happen a lot when the plants grow and then they freeze and then they get mold on them and that mold could contain ergot and that has LSD-like properties, which totally makes sense if they're eating LSD-laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch.
I mean, it's really strange to think that this is causing young people not to want to have children, not to want to continue, to have no hope for the future.
And I think he would have been a fascinating president.
But I think there are too many things to concentrate on in the world.
And if you really want to do a deep dive into the actual science of climate and CO2's impact on climate and what actually causes us to get warmer or colder, that's a lot of work.
It's a lot of work.
And I don't know if the Senator of Vermont has enough time to do that work and to really do it objectively or to talk to someone like you, to have an informed conversation with someone who's studied it for decades and go, okay, there's a lot more to this than I thought.
And why does it fit in the same damn pattern where people get attached to an idea because that idea is attached to their ideology?
I mean, for instance, you know, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole, that's actually handled in a third-year graduate course.
You know, it deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject.
And it's a real problem in a field.
It's true throughout science, where you're trusting people to behave, I think, decently, but that material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone.
And how you deal with it, how you approximate it.
I mean, the same is true with nuclear power, with other things.
These are technical issues.
They're not trivial.
And you're asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions.
It's a tough issue.
It involves a certain amount of trust.
And what we're describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.
That's what's so frustrating about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated when they're like, climate change is a giant issue.
Like, there's so many times I've seen very fun YouTube videos where they catch people at these protests and some joker just starts interviewing them and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for.
It's fascinating that you left the house.
Like you had nothing better to do.
You don't know why you're protesting, but you're there and you got a sign and you still don't even understand it.
That's how powerful this thing has become in our society.
And the fact that they've been so that the Powers at Bee or whoever is involved has been so successful with pushing this narrative that it's one of the number one anxieties that young people have about the future.
In a place where we may very well be involved in wars.
But the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency.
Listen, you want to be someone that's in the news?
You've got to keep moving.
You've got to keep it moving.
You stop doing rap music, start acting.
You've got to keep it moving.
And that's, you know, she's an entertainer.
Well, she had a very unfortunate experience with that blockade in Israel.
So maybe she's out of the business now, but I doubt it.
But when you're taking a 16-year-old kid and having her as a face of climate change, and as you said, this is something insanely difficult to digest for the average person.
And you know she doesn't have this data at her fingertips.
I mean, it's how many people can solve partial differential equations?
I mean, this is one of the complaints I have, which is sort of odd.
People blame this on models.
And what the models are doing is they're taking the equations of fluid mechanics, something called the Navier-Stokes equation, and they're doing it by dividing it into discrete intervals and seeing how things change with distance and time and so on.
And one of the things that we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution.
But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on.
At any rate, they do this, and I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can.
And they get answers that will often be wrong.
But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe.
Kunin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100.
That's not a great deal.
It's not the end of the earth.
You're already much richer than you are today.
So what's the panic?
And it's true.
The models don't give you anything to be that panicked over.
So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models.
So, you know, it's a confusing situation.
The models have a use.
They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is.
You can use them to see what interacts with what and then study it further.
Joe, let me just say a little more about what Dick commented on, the Navier-Stokes equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans.
And it really is a very hard mathematical problem to solve because they're not only partial differential equations, they're what are called nonlinear partial differential equations.
And so there's a joke about Werner Heisenberg, who was the inventor of quantum mechanics, a very bright guy, and he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II.
And so he was captured by the Americans and the British, and because of this activity, he was forbidden to work on nuclear physics later, you know, after the victory.
And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics on solving the Navier-Stokes equation.
And he was, as I said, a tremendously talented physicist, but he found it very hard.
He didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations.
And so one of his students supposedly said to him, well, you know, Professor Heisenberg, they say that if you've been a good physicist when you die and you go to heaven, that the Almighty allows you to ask two questions, and he will answer any question you ask.
And what will you ask him?
And Heisenberg supposedly said, well, I will ask him why general relativity and why turbulence.
Turbulence is the Navier-Stokes equation.
He says, and I think he will be able to answer the first one.
Well, you know, they're asking you to have great confidence in a calculation involving this miserable equation that is so hard to solve, at least very far into the future.
You can solve it for a short time, but it's very hard to go much further.
One of Dick's colleagues at MIT, a man named Lorentz, why don't you tell him about Lorentz?
Yeah, the typical description of this theory was that it's as though a butterfly flapping its wings in the Gulf of Alaska causes hurricanes two years later in Florida.
Now, when we make models based on incorrect data about CO2 levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like.
At what point in time, do you think another country needs to screw up the same way Nazi Germany ran with eugenics and it ruined eugenics in the United States, where they're like, oh, my God, this is a horrific idea.
Do you think something like that has to happen in another country where they have to take this climate change green energy thing to its full end?
Well, I think they did it because of the Fukushima thing, and because the Green Party is so powerful in Germany, and they not only turned off their plants, not nuclear and coal as well, but they blew a lot of them up.
You know, you see these pictures of the plants, you know, being blown up by dynamite just to make sure that nobody restarts them.
Well, and this is great physical athletes that they have an intelligence of moving their body in a way that they understand things at a much higher level than anybody else that does whatever their athletic pursuit is.
They probably wouldn't do that well on an ACT test.
But what's scary is when you count on the people that are supposed to be the people that are obsessed and studying this one thing, like this climate change emergency that we're supposed to be under, and then you find out, oh, wait a minute, this is not, this isn't like an exact science.
Still, there's a very clear motivation to keep that graph going.
Especially now with social media.
So many people that, like we were talking about Greta Thurnberg, I mean, I don't know what her motivations are, but I do know that there's a lot of people out there that have large social media platforms that all they want to do is connect themselves to something that people are talking about all the time.
And there's a lot of money in that.
And there's a lot of power in wielding that influence.
And to do so than just hop on any bandwagon that comes along and not really know what you're talking about is it's a real problem that we have in society today.
Yeah, the social media aspect of it is a new problem.
Another new problem is AI and fakes.
Like you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles.
And it's just like it's very, it takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today.
And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, especially climate change, you could scare the shit out of somebody very quickly with a nice video, and it doesn't even have to be real.
Now, when people like Bill Gates are talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the earth and protect us from the sun's rays, like where is all that coming from?
Especially if, like, you would imagine even the majority of the people.
Well, I'm sure, but even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms.
Like, hey, a few people can't make a decision that will literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all.
Well, just technically, it would be extremely difficult because the amount of material you have to get up to the stratosphere to mimic a large stratovolcano.
Even Bill Gates probably can't afford that, and I'm not sure the U.S. Treasurer could either.
Joel, let me bring up another targeted group, and that is farmers and ranchers, you know, because of their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming.
Just a couple years ago, I was invited to come down to Paraguay by some farmers there who were worried about the upcoming climate talks in the Persian Gulf.
And the European bankers were demanding that Paraguay turn most of its ranch land back into forests, you know, to save the planet.
And otherwise, they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay.
And so the ranchers were worried that they're going to be put out of business and their families put out of business.
And so I was there for a week, and I talked to the president.
And luckily, it turned out they had a very sensible president.
And he didn't need me to recognize it was nonsense.
But he was, I think, grateful to have someone with a science background confirm his suspicion that it was all nonsense.
So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers, you know, to go to hell.
And they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay.
So there were no consequences, and the ranchers did not suffer.
And if people can get people to do their bidding, they often love to do it, even if it's preposterous, like getting you to kill half your cows so that you have a less high methane count you're releasing from your organization.
It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in social media.
It's really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants.
It seems very coordinated and actually kind of impressive that they've managed to silence questioning scientists and really put the fear of God into people that read things and don't agree with it.
As I was mentioning, I mean, already by 1989, Science Magazine was...
In fact, one of the ironies with Science Magazine, which is, you know, an important magazine, it had an editor who was Marsha McNutt, who actually had an op-ed appear in Science Magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this.
But you know Dick's point about forbidding questioning.
It's just unbelievable.
When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia, and the grand old man there was Robbie I.I. Robbie.
And Robbie came from an Eastern European Jewish family, and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education.
And so he would always tell me, you know, when I would go home from school every day, my mother wouldn't ask me, what did you learn today in school, Izzy?
She called him, Izzy, Izzid or.
And he would tell her, and then she would say, and did you ask a good question today?
So he said she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question, which would meant that the wheels were turning in his head than whether he had memorized something.
Do you think there's more uniformity in thinking in academia now with the pressure of social media and the pressure of these echo chambers that people find themselves?
Yeah, there's people like Mr. Beast, some fun guy on YouTube that I think he has, what does he have, a hundred and how many million subscribers does he have?
Something insane.
Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before.
Yeah.
Nobody saw it coming.
Did it on his own.
Yeah, it's a weird time.
And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media, which is also disturbing.
And when you see mainstream media also going along with all these climate change ideologies and all these different things that are attached to the narrative that you're not allowed to deviate from, it's just it gets very frustrating.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure about this, but my recollection was as a kid in New York that you had newspapers like the New York Times that were always sort of center-right, left, but you had others, the Journal American and so on.
And they differed in their coverage, but on the whole, they covered the same news.
If something happened, it would appear in both.
I realize in retrospect that wasn't always true.
But today, I have the feeling that if I look at the Post in New York or the New York Times, I'm looking at two different worlds.
Well, I think it's these kind of conversations with people like yourself that will help.
Because the more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that also question it.
We get a kind of understanding of this pattern that does go back to like what you're talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history.
You go, there's times where you're on the wrong side of things.
You don't realize it because you've been lied to and you've been, you know, these politicians are not.
But it's also the abuse of science is too much of a temptation for politicians.
I mean, science - it's hard to say, but if there are a way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority, it's a methodology.
And that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology, you're anti-science.
Whether that helps or not, maybe people don't care.
But I think people do, but they're scared to deviate again from the narrative.
Like, how do you think, do you think it's possible to get in people's heads, hey, we have to, at the academic level especially, separate ideology from truth.
You can't attach believing in something that is like so firmly a part of being a progressive person or being a conservative person that you're unwilling to look at the data and look at facts.
But with the funding agencies, the government is in a position to say funding agencies must take an open view of certain subjects, or all subjects for that matter, and not lay down rules that you cannot question.
I think one of the great strengths of American science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington.
But, you know, you could get funding from the National Science Foundation or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research or from some other organization.
And they all competed with each other and they didn't like each other very much.
And so if you couldn't get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the Army or some other place.
So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country.
And people used to talk, we need an office of science.
I thought that was a terrible idea, you know, to that means one-point failure.
You know, there was someone in a position to throttle some important.
Department of Energy, wasn't that the department where from the time Trump won the election to Biden leading office, they gave out something like $93 billion in loans?
It is kind of pathetic, but it's also kind of funny, like how in this day of transparency, you know, there's so much information that's available today.
It's so easy to find things out.
They would try to pull something like that off and then do it successfully right in front of everybody's face.
But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, which is a good university, and he gave a good colloquium, the next day a Nobel Prize winner from my department walked in and said, what son of a bitch invited Lensen to give this talk?
Yeah, what Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because early in the Star Wars era, we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles.
And so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high-power lasers.
And so during a classified summer study in 1982, there were some people from the Air Force, some generals and technical people, and talked about the problem is if you even have a beautiful blue,
clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward Austin, by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target.
And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers, but the inverse problem of a star does the same thing.
When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point.
You've got lots of speckles.
And so astronomers knew how to solve that.
You know, the problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere.
They're little warm patches and cool patches.
And so what you can do is you reflect the incoming star light from a anti-wrinkled mirror.
And so it comes in wrinkled.
It bounces.
It's nice and flat.
Then it focuses and you get a point.
And you could do the same thing when you're trying to shoot an incoming missile.
You pre-wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile.
So it's called adaptive optics.
And the mirror is called a rubber mirror.
It's a mirror that you can adjust.
But to do that, you need to know how to adjust the mirror.
So you have to have some information to how do I wrinkle it, push here, pull there, et cetera.
And the way the astronomers did it was they used a very bright star in the sky.
And then for nearby stars, you could use the bright star to correct your mirror for all the neighboring stars.
But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars.
And so unless the Russians attacked us during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies, we couldn't do anything with our lasers.
So if you go to 100 kilometers, the Earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system, and so we're constantly burning up little micrometeorites.
And they're all loaded with sodium atoms, and so they get released into the upper atmosphere, and they stay there and make a layer that's about 10 kilometers thick.
And not many people know about that.
I happened to know about it.
And I knew you could use it, you know, for this method.
That's why I got called to Washington.
It was a highly secret invention for 10 years.
Wow.
That's a good question.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, then this was declassified thanks to the effort of a Livermore friend and colleague, Claire Max, a woman physicist, astronomer.
But she finally persuaded the Department of Defense to declassify it.
So if you go to any big telescope now around the world, it has one of these sodium lasers pointing up at the sky at night.
Now, it's, you know, if you probe, I think, into these issues, you realize that climate is an extreme case, but politics interfacing science is not new.
You find them in a lot of different, you find them in almost all communities and groups of human beings.
There's people that get into control and they force certain narratives.
And the fact that that happens with the highest levels of academia and with science, though, is really confusing to people like myself that are counting on everybody like you to get it right.
You know, it's worth going back to the founding of this country because if you read the things like the Federalist Papers, which was the theory of our government, what comes through loud and clear was that our founders believed that humans were extremely corrupt and not very reliable.
And given that, how do you make a system that will function, even with that?
And that's what they tried to do.
You know, that was the whole reason for the balance of power and all the things that are in there.
And so, you know, it was partially successful.
It certainly worked better than other systems for a lot of time.
At least from the outside, from my perspective, it's kind of stunning.
It's stunning how successful it is.
And again, like I said, if you're in polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up, well, we've got to do something about climate change on your scope.
And then it turns out, according to you, it's almost impossible to figure out anyway the I mean, the notion that there's a crisis has taken hold, even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis.
Actually, the worst hurricane on record on the East Coast was the last year of the American Revolution, and it had a big impact on winning the war.
What happened was this enormous hurricane, mostly in the Caribbean, but it wiped out the British fleet.
It wiped out the French fleet.
There was nothing left, you know.
Really?
It was just a tremendous hurricane.
And so the reason it affected the war was the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet, so that when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be rescued,
you know, with all of the partisans coming after him, he didn't worry about the French.
But the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane.
They had had 12 months, and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake.
And when Cornwallis got there, he was trapped because the British couldn't come in to rescue him, you know, from Rhode Island or wherever they were.