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May 2, 2017 - Louder with Crowder
45:44
ACTUAL SCIENTIST: "Climate Change is a Scam!"
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The deniers of naturally caused climate change are saying that two degrees of warming will be disastrous and that it will destroy agricultural production.
The exact opposite is true.
So glad to have our next guest on.
He's been like my white whale.
I have been chasing him, but he's a busy man.
And he's a busy man because sometimes the people with the PhDs are.
Do you have his Twitter up there?
We do have his Twitter.
His Twitter is at EcosenseNow.
When it's not their actual name, I always have a problem remembering it.
But he was one of the original members of Greenpeace, PhD in ecology, if I'm not mistaken.
Dr.
Patrick Moore, thank you for being on the show, sir.
Great to be with you, Stephen.
Well, we're always glad to have a dissident on the program.
So for people who may not be familiar with you, first off, I want to make sure I'm getting all of this right at the top.
You have a PhD in ecology, correct?
That is right, and actually when I started my PhD in ecology, the word was not yet in the popular press.
It was a word that really nobody knew.
The word environment had started to come into use, but ecology, which was up until then an obscure branch of the life sciences of biology, Okay, so to be clear, you would be considered a scientist and would it be considered a science relevant to the environment and climate?
Well, the reason that ecology is so relevant to the climate issue is it's an interdisciplinary subject.
Ecology is about the relationships among all the different factors in the environment, the atmosphere, the ocean, the earth, the sun, the planets, etc.
So you can make it as big or small as you want.
You can look at the ecology of a microcosm, like a small lake, or you can look at the ecology of the whole earth, or Sure.
People keep talking about climate science.
There's no such thing as climate science in the sense that climate science is a whole array of different disciplines interacting.
You've got meteorology, you've got atmospheric chemistry and atmospheric physics, you've got astrophysics and the sun, you've got oceanography, you've got the whole terrestrial biosphere with all the forests and the crops and the soils.
Rocks and all the ice on the poles and all of those things are interacting with each other in ways that we don't understand perfectly, but we're gaining more and more insight into it as time goes on.
Okay.
Well, I just wanted to clarify.
You would be more of a scientist in this field than, say, someone with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering.
I just want to make sure that that seems as though...
Yes, but I don't discount the layperson even.
Studying this thoroughly and having a good mind to analyze the information.
You don't have to be a PhD to understand the basics of the situation.
In particular, to understand how much uncertainty there is in this subject, rather than the whole science is settled dogma.
That's just...
Intellectual laziness, I suppose, to just say the argument's over.
Well, exactly.
To talk about it.
Well, you understand the reason I bring this up, and I talked about this, I said, listen, Bill Nye is not an atmospheric scientist.
He's not an ecologist.
He may be a great mechanical engineer.
Now, my only issue is...
He's not, by the way.
He's pretty filled with that.
He hated his job.
He loved for comedy.
It was very clear during the Fukushima situation that he didn't understand some of the very basics of nuclear physics, for example.
Right.
Well, neither do I, but I'm an idiot.
But I assume he is as well.
Him and I are in good company.
But here's my only – the reason I bring this up is because I know people are going to try and discredit you in this very interview saying, well, he's not – insert XYZ. And my point is anyone can have an opinion, but people like Bill Nye, they will use the argument against someone like me who doesn't have a bachelor's in any kind of scientific field saying, well, listen, I'm the science guy.
So for people out there listening, this guy is as much of the science guy as anybody out there.
Something else, too, before we get into some...
I would like to get into some of the nitty-gritty because I'm very compelled by your arguments, and I think a lot of people haven't heard them.
But you were...
Were you one of the founding members or one of the original members of the environmental activist group Greenpeace?
Tell people about that.
Well, while I was doing my PhD in ecology, I'd grown up in the wilderness, so I had a natural affinity for nature.
And this time was the hippie era, the height of the Cold War, the height of the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear war, and the emerging consciousness of the environment.
So Greenpeace was the synthesis of the long-standing tradition of peaceful or nonviolent protest against the establishment, along with this newly emerging consciousness, the green.
So green was the environment and peace was the people and civilization.
And we chose as our first campaign, I joined it before it was even named Greenpeace, when it was called the Don't Make a Wave Committee, and was a member of the first voyage to Alaska, to the Aleutians, to protest what the United States was doing and testing hydrogen bombs underground there.
So that was a symbol for our opposition to the threat of nuclear war.
And that was the last H-bomb the United States ever detonated.
So we kind of started off with a bang, so to speak.
Well, you started off stopping a bang, so to speak.
Yeah.
Let me ask, so people, we've established that.
What was the turnaround?
When did you leave Greenpeace?
What was the reason?
Well, there's 15 years of history in between then and when I left.
And during that entire time, I was in the top committee, whether it was the original board of directors or the international board of directors when we formed Greenpeace International in 1979.
So that's eight years after it started.
And then I was one of five international directors for my final six years in the organization.
As we drifted, and I don't mean that in a negative way, from the focus on nuclear war, because we also stopped French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific after a couple of years of campaigning.
And then someone came to us, Paul Spong's his name, he's a PhD too.
And he had been looking after the first captive orca, or killer whale as they were called then, and had come to find how intelligent The Japanese are pretty rough.
He appealed to us that we were the only protesters that knew how to go out in boats, because we had been doing these voyages to stop nuclear testing, whereas most protesters were just going down the street with a placard.
Sounds like Berkeley!
We actually got in a boat and went out and confronted the Russian whaling fleet off California.
And that was in 1975.
That went around the world and was what you'd call viral today.
We called it Mind Bomb at that time.
Media Mind Bomb was coined by one of our members.
And it was an amazing ride.
But gradually, Greenpeace...
We sort of lost the peace part because we were now involved in all these eco campaigns that didn't really care much about the people who were doing the whale killing.
I think the psychology changed to where now humans were portrayed as the enemies of the earth, the enemies of nature.
And I just didn't agree with that large issue of us being the only evil species on the planet.
It's too much like original sin for me, and I'm not into that.
Well, you know, that's not true that you say that because orca whales are vicious.
So are seals, sea otters.
They're mating patterns.
I have stand-up bits about this where I try and take some pretty rough stuff in the animal kingdom.
Of course, I use it as leverage to make fun of vegans.
But when people say animals don't treat each other as poorly as humans do, come again, stupid?
Some of what they do is on dolphins, for example.
As I'm sure you know, studying more than most mammals, they commit infanticide, some of them.
They kill for fun.
They rape other dolphins.
The point is, yes, the animal kingdom is not perfect.
Okay.
I want to move on.
So you move on from Greenpeace because their focus shifts.
Great.
I just want to set this up because people on the Internet have a very short attention span, and then we'll give you the opportunity to expand on it.
So you leave Greenpeace.
You are one of the most vocal skeptics, so to say, or deniers, depending on who you ask, of climate change.
Before we get into the reasoning, before we get into the science that I know you've presented, a litany of times which many people refuse to listen to, In a nutshell, what is your position on the currently sort of mass-accepted concept of man-made climate change?
Well, Stephen, first, there is actually no proof that we are causing the warming.
There's a number of reasons to say that.
The evidence is actually against The hypothesis that we're causing the warming, because there's been warming and cooling cycles all through the history of life, and some of them are longer than others.
Like, the last ice age before this one was 300 million years ago, and then it was warm for nearly 300 million years before it got cold again like it is now.
So that's a big cycle.
But there's smaller cycles, and the ice age we're in now has cycles called major glaciations, which there have been over 20 of in the last 2.5 million years when the ice age set on in the northern hemisphere.
Ice came in the southern hemisphere many million years earlier because it's completely different.
But the earth has cooled gradually in fits and starts for the last 50 million years.
We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period and that is well known and the graphs are available on the internet to show you that just after the time of the dinosaurs, well 15 million years after the time the dinosaurs went extinct, The Earth was at its hottest in hundreds of millions of years.
The Eocene thermal maximum.
Everybody knows about it.
They just ignore it.
Everyone knows about the thermal maximum.
What are you, a moron, Jared?
So, we've had these 22 major glaciations, and for the last million years, they've been every 100,000 years almost in lockstep with the Milankovitch cycles, which has to do with the orbit of the Earth and the tilt of the Earth.
Varying over time.
So we know that cycle.
We also know that there was a Minoan Warm Period, a Roman Egyptian Warm Period, a Medieval Warm Period, and now the Modern Warm Period.
In between each of one were cooling periods, the last one being the Little Ice Age, which began to end around 1700, as the temperature started warming again, rather than cooling.
Just for example, the last time the River Thames froze over in England was 1814.
It had been freezing over regularly for about three or four or five hundred years before that, but it stopped then and hasn't frozen over since.
We didn't cause that warming from 1700 to 1814, obviously, and we didn't actually cause this Warming trend to start at all in 1700.
Why would that be obvious if people would argue because of humans and the agricultural revolution and methane from animals?
Could they make the argument that there was greater human activity, greater livestock activity during that period, which would have been the catalyst for warming?
Of course, but they're just guessing.
There's no reason to believe that it isn't just a continuation of the warming that had already started, and it isn't happening at any more rapid a rate.
Just going back to the early 1900s, from 1910 to 1940, It warmed the same amount as it did between 1970 and 2000, which was the last major spurt.
Nassau now has so manipulated its temperature curve as to hide the cooling that occurred between 1940 and 1970.
They've just eliminated it.
Why would they do that?
They just adjust the numbers.
But why?
What would be the motivation for NASA to do that?
$1.8 billion in public funding.
That's the motivation.
Well, when you put a sticker price on it like that.
Same reason they keep saying there might be life on Mars.
40 years after it's been absolutely certainly proven that there isn't any life on Mars.
They just float the life on Mars thing every time they want to send a rocket there so that people will be in favor of it because we might find life on Mars.
But they know, James Lovelock proved when he designed the life detection system for the first Mars lander, which was looking at the atmosphere For example, on Earth, if you went to another planet and found that there was lots of oxygen in the atmosphere, you could be almost certain there was life on that planet, even if you couldn't see it.
oxygen wouldn't be in the atmosphere if it weren't for life yeah there was no oxygen in the earth's early atmosphere yes put it there I why no and most humans can survive cannot survive without oxygen Jared knows oh he can go down for a long time without coming up for air so let's get back to there's guessing with the warming okay well first off you just talked about 1.8 billion dollars you know NASA and government funding I know what people say Are you funded by big energy companies?
Is that where you make your living?
That is the main criticism.
They will always try to discredit the person or somehow question the source.
So I've got to do that to be fair here, if you can answer it to the audience.
I am not in the pay of any major fossil fuel company.
A few years ago, I did one public service announcement in which I showed that the oil sands, after they are mined, are being put back to an original forest ecology, the boreal forest of Canada.
Yes.
Because they're saying to people who've never seen what's going on that the boreal forest is being destroyed by mining the oil from the sand, which they're actually cleaning the sand.
The oil is oozing into the Athabasca River from the natural oil that's in that sand and has been for millions of years.
But they're taking it off and letting us use it to run our cars.
And so I just wanted people to see the truth of what is really being done here in Canada, because in New York and London and Berlin, they're telling everybody that we're wrecking our whole environment, and it's like a pimple on an elephant.
I mean, the boreal forest is 10% of the world's forest, the Canadian boreal forest.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I have to ask that question because you know that's going to be – those are the spears that always come out.
If someone – of course plenty of spears that you're not a scientist is the original one with people like me in which they're correct.
Okay.
So here's kind of as a layman for me where I say, okay, it seems like the earth is warming.
I'm not entirely convinced that men are the main cause of it or that it will have catastrophic results.
And I'm certainly not convinced that the EPA or the Paris Agreement or what was it, the Kyoto Protocol before, or I watched Ted Turner propose China's one-child policy to be enforced globally.
I'm certainly not far enough along down that trail.
But it does seem to be that the Earth is warming.
Now, are you saying that it is warming in a temporary scale, but in the grand scheme of the timeline of the Earth, it's not statistically significant and we don't know that men are causing it?
Is that kind of your presupposition?
No.
There is nothing out of the ordinary with what is happening now in any parameter you can name, temperature, atmospheric chemistry, etc., over the last 20 million years.
Nothing.
Nothing is happening now that is more radical than things that have happened during the last 20 million years, even during the last 10,000 years, which is the interglacial period we're in now, where it's remained fairly steady at a higher temperature than it was during the depths of the last glaciation, which began to end about 18,000 years ago and was sort of officially over about 10,000 years ago, as those huge glaciers melted.
So here we are now in the Holocene, which was actually warmer 5,000 to 9,000 years ago than it is now.
We're also in a cooling period over that length of time.
The only warming period we're in now is from 1700, at the peak of the Little Ice Age, or the depths of the Little Ice Age, as it would be better called.
And so there's patterns on patterns on patterns.
Well, let me ask you this, though, because what they would argue is, well, if you look at those periods during millions of years ago, we didn't have civilization like we do now.
a one degree, I think, average per century or 1.2 degrees per century, as they're saying.
If that is the case, let's say humans aren't the cause of it or we don't know.
Would that have catastrophic results with modern civilization?
Because people live in places like Miami.
Would it harm farming right now?
Would it harm the growth of industry?
Would there be famine and plight?
Because obviously the temperatures that occurred when the earth was very desolate but don't have the same results as they do with billions of people.
Well, the earth wasn't desolate during the warm periods It had more vegetation than it does now.
More forests and More green, in other words, because it was wetter.
And the reason it was wetter is because it was warmer.
So there's two reasons why additional CO2 in the atmosphere are entirely beneficial.
The first is a slight warming would be beneficial, and it doesn't look as though there's going to be anything more than a slight warming.
The catastrophists just exaggerated out of all proportion, and doom and gloom, the end is nigh, the world is coming to an end in 10 years.
If we don't do something 10 years later, it hasn't happened, and then they predicted again, because people forget that they predicted 10 years later.
Ten years ago that it was going to be gone in ten years.
That's how the doomsday prophets have always worked from the beginning of time.
They take a reasonably long time period, like ten years, and say, if we don't act today, in ten years we will be doomed.
And then ten years goes by, the ice caps are still there.
Al Gore predicted they'd be gone a few years ago.
They're still there, and then he's saying it again now.
Exactly the same thing he said before, which did not come true, and they get Nobel Peace Prizes for this.
It's all through history people have honored those who proclaim doom is coming.
So I don't understand.
I'm not a psychologist.
It must have something to do with psychology.
Well, the ice caps have shrunk.
The Antarctic ice caps have grown.
The ice caps have shrunken to a significant degree.
Yes, but that's because it's becoming warmer.
Right.
Yes, CO2 is increasing due to our use of fossil fuels, but there's no proof of any causal relationship there, and the best example of that is ice cream consumption and shark attacks.
They are in perfect correlation.
Okay, hold on.
Ice cream consumption and shark attacks?
Ice cream consumption and shark attacks follow each other perfectly in pattern.
Whenever shark attacks are high, ice cream consumption goes up.
It's a fact, and that is because The strong correlation there is based on a common third factor, temperature.
People go swimming in the summer and eat ice cream in the summer because it's warm.
And that's why shark attacks and ice cream consumption are heavily correlated.
And the key message there is even when factors are almost perfectly correlated, it doesn't mean there's a cause-effect relationship between the two necessarily.
There may be.
You have to prove it.
And they haven't proved it with CO2 and temperature in any shape, way or form.
Not even slightly.
And if you look back in history, I've got all the graphs from different lengths of history.
Look at the 100,000 year history, look at the 800,000 year history, the 2.5 million year history, the 500 million year history.
CO2 and temperature are out of sync more often than they are in sync.
And the reason they're in sync sometimes might be A whole slew of other factors that just happen to be affecting them to go in the same direction.
But that doesn't mean there's a cause-effect relationship.
And it's very, very clear in my mind from all I know, and I know the last 35 years I've been looking at this and study it every day, that this has turned into actually a scam.
By now it should be really hot and everything should be drying up and the poles should be deserts or whatever, no ice by now.
If people were right in their early predictions, they were wrong.
And everything is going along just fine.
So a little bit of warming would be a wonderful thing.
I always say, why are there 300 million plus people in the United States and only a few more than 30 million people in Canada?
10%.
Our country is larger than yours.
And yet, there's only 10% of the number of people here.
There's only one reason for that.
One word.
Cold.
It's true.
You would think there'd be more in Canada, too, because with the cold and the strong beer and not a whole lot to do, you'd think there'd be a population boom.
You would, except there isn't enough food to support that many people here.
We jet a lot of our food in.
And we do grow a lot of food in Canada, but we can't grow fruits here like the tropical fruits.
The key thing to understand about that though, with relation to people surviving in a warmer world, is that we are a tropical species.
We are not an Arctic species like penguins and polar bears.
We are a tropical species evolved at the equator, and the only reason we were able to come out of Africa was fire, clothing, and shelter.
Which other species don't...
Furry animals that live in the northern Arctic places, they dig a hole in the ground and get underneath the frost for the winter.
That's just what they have to do in order to survive.
When you go from the equator to the North Pole, every step of the way, the species numbers decline.
And frost and ice What about the coastal cities?
Could a one degree, two degree temperature rise wipe out a lot?
Because now we do tend to live on the coast, and that's a byproduct of, as you said, sort of an economical revolution, you know, with trade occurring by boats, occurring by plane.
Places like New York, places like Miami, places even like Los Angeles or in Japan, could they see some serious negative ramifications from just a one or two degree rise?
No.
The one or two degree rise is not enough to do that.
When we came out of the last glaciation, the temperature rose relatively quickly in time from, you know, enough to cover the whole of the northern hemisphere practically in ice right down into the northern tier U.S. states and covered most of Russia.
That melted, and the sea went up over 400 feet as a result of that melting.
And that was just 10,000 years ago.
So we have to expect that natural climate change, and nobody's going to argue that that wasn't a natural climate change.
And that was climate change.
It went from really cold to just cold, like it is now.
Because I'm more than halfway to the North Pole from the equator here.
In just barely halfway to the North Pole from the equator, and it's cold where I am.
There's still lots of snow on the mountains.
It's supposed to be springtime.
Sounds like hell.
It's one of our coldest winters in years here, and that is why, even though I will not make a prediction about the future, because I know it's not possible to be certain, and that the prophets of the future are almost always wrong anyways, the hypothesis that the solar cycles of maximums and minimums,
and we're now entering what's called a grand solar minimum, where the Sun goes quiet for perhaps decades, and that allows the cosmic rays to come into our solar system, whereas when the Sun is in its active state with lots of sunspots, it's actually sort of fending those off.
And the theory is that cosmic rays affect cloud cover by And this is actually science beyond me even, and I know a lot about science.
But when it comes to really complex physics like that, it's not really my bag.
But the Russians have been saying this for a long time, and many other people too.
There's people all around the world in the scientific community that are watching this particular pattern of change, which is the grand solar minimum, theoretically taking us now into a new cooling period that will be temporary.
I want to touch on that real quick, because we wrote about that at the website ladderwithcrowder.com, and I believe it was NASA. Courtney wrote about it.
We'll get an overlay here, where, yes, they were saying there will be a half a degree, I believe, cooling period over the next half a century.
But they said, but then after that, human-made climate change is still going to lead to catastrophe.
And my antenna went up.
Listen, we wrote about it, and people, of course, say, well, this is a misrepresentation.
No, the guy who created this study, who made this claim, still said man-made climate change is going to be a problem.
It doesn't matter what happens, Stephen.
Right.
An ice age could descend upon us and they would say it's just temporary.
It's going to come back to be a disaster.
Well, my issue as a layman is I look at it and say if a one degree...
It will be if it gets cold.
Right.
And I look at this...
Like more than half a degree.
If it gets two degrees colder, that would be one hell of a lot worse than getting two degrees warmer.
Because it affects agriculture.
Yes.
The deniers, and I call them the deniers because they're denying the actual evidence of what has actually happened over the history.
Well played.
The deniers of naturally caused climate change are saying that two degrees of warming will be disastrous and that it will destroy agricultural production.
The exact opposite is true.
It will make vast tracts of Canada and Russia, which is where most of the land is in the world, So you can grow food there.
You don't have to go many miles north of the U.S. border into Canada, and all of a sudden you can't grow anything there, because it's freezing cold eight months of the year.
They've learned to use greenhouses in many of their more northern places.
They actually have some population in their northern reaches, but that costs a lot of money to do that.
They've got huge diesel electric plants running because they're off the grid way far up north.
Now Russia is building floating nuclear reactors.
come up the rivers to these settlements in the north.
Sure.
That sounds like a good idea.
Yes.
The market of us in that is just makes your head spin.
And the media doesn't even pay any attention to it.
Russia, China, and India are now all ahead of the United States in nuclear technology.
That scares me.
But I want two questions.
So I want to go back to the NASA issue with the solar radiation patterns.
So we brought that up, and to me, just as a layman, it's remarkable the inconsistency, where they say a one degree rise in a century can be catastrophic.
A half a degree drop in half a century...
We'll be no big deal.
And then we'll go back to man-made climate change.
And of course, as you were talking about the Russians, I can't remember the guy's name, Medesedov something at the Polkovo Observatory.
It's a hard name.
Published...
Go to the website, Steven, website, The Next Grand Solar Minimum.
Yes.
And they predicted it actually, this one scientist, back as far as 2007-2009, he predicted it would begin between 2012-2015.
So he was off by a couple years, but now it's starting.
Still a better prediction than Al Gore, mind you.
But let me ask you this.
This is what people are going to be asking here because the science is very compelling.
And I can listen to someone who's a climate change catastrophist and go, well, that sounds convincing.
People will say, well, how is it that why do you think you've caught it?
And all the scientists, all this consensus in science, they've missed it and you've caught it.
And they'll say you're a quack.
How do you respond to that?
Why do so many in the scientific field agree on this concept of catastrophic man-made climate change?
You will find that nearly all that do believe that it's catastrophic are publicly funded.
The private sector would never fund this kind of crap.
The private sector funds things that may be something useful that's going The climate fear campaign is producing fear.
That is its main product, is to scare people into thinking that doom is coming.
And it works really well with many people.
But the fact is, the consensus hypothesis is crap, too.
It's a fabrication.
There is no peer-reviewed Document that actually does a proper job of analyzing how many scientists believe it's catastrophic and how many people don't.
You can believe it's natural, or you can believe it's partly manmade, or you can believe it's mostly manmade.
That doesn't mean you believe it's catastrophic.
Right.
You have to say, I believe, as Obama did, it's real, it's manmade, and it's dangerous.
Right.
You have to go all three steps.
Now, it is real.
No doubt about that.
And there's no scientist who denies that the Earth has warmed.
But we do know that NASA and NOAA have both manipulated the data set to make it look like it's warmed more than it actually has.
We know that for a fact.
But it has warmed.
That's a different issue.
Whether it is good or not is another question.
And whether it is man-made or not is another question.
These are other questions.
And so some people just wrap that whole thing up into one big ball and say, humans are causing catastrophic climate change, and it's proven.
Well, none of those other steps are actually proven.
Right.
Well, people, they do bring out those charts, and of course there's the hockey stick graph, which then they said was debunked, but then they actually said the person who debunked it, you know, again, questioned the source.
No, no, the intergovernmental panel on climate change has discarded it.
They've discarded it.
The reputable scientists that are on the side of the human-caused climate change, because they're employed by the IPCC, whose only mandate is to look at human-caused climate change.
they're employed by the IPCC, whose only mandate is to look at human-caused climate change.
And so if the IPCC said it isn't caused by humans, that would be self-abolition.
And so if the IPCC said it isn't caused by humans, that would be self-abolition.
So they are inherently conflicted by their own mandate.
So they are inherently conflicted by their own mandate.
That's the worst problem with this at an international level.
That's the worst problem with this at an international level.
The Russians are the main ones who are looking at natural causes of the cycle.
The Russians are the main ones who are looking at natural causes of the cycle.
But here's the most important point.
But here's the most important point.
Consensus is not a scientific word.
Consensus is not a scientific word.
It has no place in science and never has.
It has no place in science and never has.
It is the refuge of scoundrels who want to stop dialogue.
Right?
Michael Crichton said that.
And he's right.
And the fact here, go back in history.
They actually dare to use the flat earth as an example of how the climate change skeptics are flat earthers.
Right?
Actually, everybody was a flat earther.
That was the consensus.
Galileo and Copernicus and others proved that to be wrong.
They were in a minority.
They weren't the consensus.
Darwin was in a minority.
Einstein was in a minority among his colleagues who believed that Newtonian physics was correct and perfect.
And Einstein came along and brought in relativity, and at a certain point, 100 scientists signed a criticism of his theory of relativity, saying he was wrong.
And Einstein's reply was, why 100?
One would be enough.
And that is true in science all through history.
It only takes one person to see, you know, Faraday's understanding electricity, and Darwin understanding evolution, and Mendel understanding genetics.
You know, these are modern figures.
So go back to Socrates.
He was one against all, right?
We have to destroy this idea that consensus has a place in science.
Consensus is a political and social word, meaning the people agree and all voted for this, most of them voted.
And consensus is a difficult word because it doesn't mean unanimous agreement.
Right.
It just means most.
Well then, what's the difference between consensus and unanimity?
is that in consensus there are people who disagree with the majority view.
There's every chance that they are right at any point in time of the dialogue because they often turn out to be right.
And so therefore they must be right sometimes if they are.
It happens.
It's happened all through history that even one person can be right and wrong.
And everybody else is wrong.
And that's how science works.
It doesn't work by consensus.
That's fascinating.
Okay, two more questions before we leave.
And, Duncan, do you have any questions that you wanted to toss?
I'm only convinced that a certain someone doesn't give a damn about the polar bears.
Yes, exactly.
Clearly, Patrick Moore does not care about the polar bears.
They're soulless killing machines.
They hunt humans.
All right, two questions.
You mentioned if it goes up a degree or two degrees, the increase in climate, that it would make sort of this Alaskan or this tundra wasteland up there in Canada maybe semi-inhabitable or a place where you could farm.
On the flip side of that, and I've heard this argument from climate change activists, a one or two degree increase, could that prove catastrophic and create famine in places much further south?
For example, in the African Sahara, places like Zambia, where they have difficulty growing food.
Could there be that end result there?
No, there could not.
And the reason for that is when the earth warms and cools...
It does so exorbitantly towards the poles.
So, three million years ago, all of Canada's Arctic islands were forested with giant camels in them.
The camels originated in this side of the world, actually, and they migrated the other way when we came this way.
So did the horses.
It's an interesting story, but it's too long for this.
The long and the short of it is, the people who came this way ate all the camels and horses over here.
The people on the other side said, whoa, those things look useful.
And so they didn't eat all of them.
And the whole silk trade...
Silk Trail was based on camels.
And then there's the horses of Arabia.
So it just goes to show you how stupid the people that came this way were.
I think they could have used it.
Well, we've talked about that.
That's a big part of the sort of idea of Native American germ warfare.
Well, biological warfare years before germ theory.
They hadn't domesticated the horse.
They were coming in contact with animals that apparently started here, went there, were coming back, and of course you're going to get sick.
They could have used a fat pride movement back then, it seems like.
It seems like it would have been useful.
Millions of years ago.
Okay.
So it's a no, but how does that, again, the question is, people in Africa south of the equator, their crops wouldn't dry up?
They wouldn't see heat waves that could destroy their agriculture?
Between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago, so for a 4,000 year period after the ice retreated and we came into this interglacial period, the Sahara was green and there were goat herders all over it, writing things on rocks.
So we know that to be a fact.
And it was a little bit warmer then, one or two degrees warmer than it is now.
So what's the deciding factor there, if it was warmer and it was more lush?
More water being evaporated off 72% of the world's surface, which is the oceans, and thereby more rain falling on the land.
So a warmer world will almost certainly categorically be a wetter world.
There may be some places where it gets drier, but there'll be a lot more places where it gets wetter.
And this is just a fact, that in a warmer climate there'll be more moisture in the atmosphere.
And that will maybe make more clouds.
You just blew my mind, Dr.
Moore.
I mean, honestly, that's one thing that I hadn't really considered.
I thought, well, okay.
I think that, as a layman, I think that in the northern hemisphere, you could probably grow more.
You'd probably see some die-off in the southern hemisphere.
I didn't think of the overall consequence of warming resulting in precipitation, evaporation.
The other factor, though, Stephen, that's really important, is when the Earth warms, it can warm five degrees on the pole and not hardly warm at all at the equator.
It warms more towards the poles, both ways, than it does at the tropics.
The hottest places in the world are not at the equator.
They're at about 30 degrees, 20 to 30 degrees, where the Sahara Desert is.
They're the driest places with the less clouds.
The equatorial zone is very cloudy and wet.
That's where all the rainforests are, in Indonesia, in Brazil.
Yeah.
And the Congo of Africa, that's the equatorial rainforest.
So that movie sucked.
They are, you know, we are a tropical species.
I come back to that all the time.
Yeah.
We couldn't live where we do now.
Then what the hell are you doing up there in Canada?
Hold on, Naki Jared has a question.
We got kicked out by the people further south, I think.
I understand you're not a weathermanologist.
That said, do you think, I feel as though you see, when people can't convince you that there's going to be catastrophic results of climate change, man-made climate change, they point to, oh, we'll scare them with just everyday evidence of, oh, see, there's a storm in Ohio.
Irregular weather.
Irregular weather patterns as a way of convincing people of climate change.
Do you see that as part of a strategy of these alarmists to try to take very tangible, hey, there's a drought in California, climate change?
Or is it valid?
Or is it valid?
Are there super irregular weather patterns?
It's a well-known ditty that first it was global warming, and then when it stopped warming, they changed it to climate change, and then they blamed everything with the climate, whether it was colder or hotter or drier or wetter, they blamed everything on climate change then.
And then when that didn't bear out, you would say to them, well, what about last winter?
It was really cold.
And they would say, well, that's not climate, that's just weather.
Right.
Climate is different than weather.
Now all you hear is extreme weather.
Because that's all they've got left to latch onto is a big rainstorm or a big snowstorm.
Suddenly the California record snowstorm is part of climate change.
Right?
And part of...
But the truth is, if you Google Roger Pilkey, P-I-E-L-K-E Jr., who's at Boulder, Colorado, a tenured professor, who studied catastrophic events, not just weather, but The amount of economic loss due to extreme weather and all that whole area.
It's been reducing now for years, especially the loss, because we are capable of building things which stand up to extreme weather.
But the extreme weather has gone down.
Tornadoes are down, hurricanes are down, drought is down, and flooding is down.
Worldwide.
Well, you know, I can only speak anecdotally.
We can speak anecdotally.
I have family in Texas, and it's very, very lush and green, whereas when they moved to Texas 10 years ago, it was very, very dry and brittle and brown.
And remember, up in northern Michigan, Lake Michigan, everyone there had to move their chairs back a little bit where they had on the beach because the lake was so full.
The beaches were almost gone.
Yeah, the lake was so full.
Stephen, today, The United States has the lowest level of drought, 7.4% or something, than since they started the drought index.
Now, they didn't start it in the 30s, so it would have been a lot.
You know, the 30s had the dust bowl, and so there was more drought then than there has been any time since then.
And it was hotter then in the 30s.
If you go to realclimatescience.com, or maybe it's.org, but anyways...
Steve Goddard's website, you will see that he shows how they've changed the records to eliminate the really big heat storms of the 30s.
1934-36, there were hundreds of cities in the United States over 100 degrees on the same day in July.
And that's never happened since.
And yet they've suppressed that now.
He's got the headlines from the newspapers and the stories that talk about it.
But nobody, you know, everybody's memory is like three years.
Well, they always claim, well, this isn't peer-reviewed, and he's a quack, and they debunk them because they consider it a blog.
That's what happens.
Unless you get into the peer-reviewed, and it seems like it's very difficult to get any kind of peer-reviewed published paper that's skeptical of this.
Well, that's the other reason that people think there's a consensus is because The LA Times, for example, some years ago now, adopted an explicit policy of not publishing anything that questioned man-made climate change.
And many other publications have done that both explicitly or quietly.
They just don't publish it.
And there's lots to publish.
And this whole theory of solar activity and cosmic rays is getting almost no press.
But in the background on the internet, there's lots of interest in it and there's lots of people who are following it.
Because it seems to be, you know, Willie Soon, for example, Smithsonian Institute, astrophysics, was smeared by the New York Times because the Smithsonian takes money from companies that are in fossil fuels.
Big companies that can afford to support the Smithsonian.
He gets paid a salary by the Smithsonian, and he was smeared because he's in the pocket of oil companies.
No, that's not why he was smeared.
He was smeared because he says it's the sun, stupid.
And he shows in publications with a couple of...
There's a family in Ireland that is just amazing on this.
They're all PhDs.
The Connellys, they published with him, showing that there's a much stronger correlation between total solar irradiance, sunshine basically, and the temperature Right.
And the Russians, like we were talking about at the observatory there, their head of astrophysics and science, I can't remember his name.
They've talked about this for a while.
That's kind of been his main bag.
Gosh, we could go on forever.
Listen, Dr.
Moore, If we were able to find someone who could have a civil dialogue debate on this conversation, would you be willing to return and allow us to moderate it here?
Yeah, I would.
I can almost guarantee you that they will not accept.
Right now you've got Alex Epstein, the author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and Leonardo DiCaprio's foundation president had agreed to debate him.
This is the second time at the last minute.
He had a 20,000 seat coliseum lined up for this debate on the moral case for fossil fuels.
With the head of DiCaprio's foundation, the guy dropped out with no explanation and no communication to Alex just yesterday.
Well, we've had that from our end too.
But on the record, you would if we could find someone else who would agree to it.
I'll debate anybody in an organized, properly organized debate structure, yes.
Sure, absolutely.
And the truth is, you know, 20,000 Coliseum, this will, if we do it here, we'll reach millions of people.
We'll make sure both parties agree upon it.
I watched Ivanhoe yesterday, and today I'm going to use the mace and chain.
That will be my chosen weapon.
Yes, there you go.
We appreciate it.
You are a gentleman.
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