Tom Harris, president of the International Climate Science Coalition, attended the Heartland Institute’s 13th Annual Conference in Trump’s D.C. hotel, where 300 experts—including Dr. Will Happer and Dr. Tim Ball—argued climate models overpredict warming by double or triple, citing minimal temperature rises since 1880 and potential solar cooling. He criticized media bias, like CBC’s refusal to present dissent, and highlighted flawed urban weather stations (e.g., NASA’s sparse one per 1,200 km). Harris also exposed Greta Thunberg’s fossil-fuel-dependent sailboat travel as hypocritical and condemned wind/solar supply chains for environmental exploitation, from China’s polluted mining to bat deaths. Fossil fuels, he insists, fuel prosperity and environmental progress, dismissing alarmist deadlines like the BBC’s 18-month "doomsday" claim as fear-driven propaganda. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.
My guest tonight is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition.
He joined me to talk about his Washington, D.C. climate change conference.
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Well, friends, I guess it's time to blow through your life savings and give up on that diet you've been meaning to start.
Live a little.
Because according to environmentalists, we have only 18 months to save the earth.
Control of the World's Energy00:12:37
My guest tonight debunks that claim and so much more.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Trump's America really is a fossil-fueled utopia, isn't it?
The Americans are drilling, pumping, exporting, and building pipelines all over the place.
It's a boom in the oil and gas sector in America.
While here in Canada, we are nearing nearly one decade of study and examination just to get the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project built, if it ever gets built.
But there's another great thing happening in Trump's America around the issue of fossil fuels and the effect they have on the environment.
And that great thing is discussion.
Here in Canada, all the fancy people and our moral and intellectual superiors at the state broadcaster love to remind us all that the science is settled.
The need for scientific examination of any theory related to human-induced global warming is no more.
We should all just shut up and fork over our climate tithing to save us all from burning on a boiling globe.
But it's not so in Trump's America.
Scientists are able to speak out and express their disagreement on the theory of global warming.
They are able to question and argue and debate.
They are even able to be keynote speakers at quote-unquote denier conferences held in Washington, D.C. in Trump's Hotel of all places.
Which brings me to my guest tonight.
Joining me tonight in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon from his home in Ottawa is Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition, and he is fresh off the recent Heartland Institute's 13th annual international conference on climate change.
Joining me now is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition from Ottawa.
But Tom is recently back from DC.
Tom, thanks for joining me.
Why don't you tell us all why you were in DC at, of all places, the Trump International Hotel?
Yeah.
I mean, my wife was taking pictures for the first half hour just in our room.
I mean, it was pretty incredible.
And it was a great place to go.
And believe it or not, it was less expensive than the other places they looked at.
So we held the conference at the Trump Hotel.
The Heartland Institute were the hosts.
And we presented awards to various people.
Dr. Tim Ball got an award.
And I quoted a couple of times from Winston Churchill when I presented the award to him.
He got the Lifetime Achievement in Climate Science Award.
And I basically said this.
I said, you have enemies?
Good.
That means you stood up for something sometime in your life.
And of course, Dr. Ball is a very brave person.
I mean, he's been in horrible court cases.
He's been before government hearings, thousands of presentations.
So it was just really wonderful to give him the award.
And he had a nice presentation by video conference as well, which I think was one of the best talks there.
So it was quite an exciting meeting.
It was called the International Climate Change Conference 13 and or 13th International Climate.
You know, it's 13th anyways.
And they had 300 people.
They sold out.
And we had economists and climate scientists and engineers and policy experts showing us that the climate scare is, first of all, not based on sound science.
But what it is driving, actually, this is an interesting thing that we're hearing more and more.
It's driving an attempt to push the world to global government and in particular, world socialism.
Because if you think about it, if you control carbon dioxide, and remember, 80% of the world's energy is fossil fuels, if you control the main effluent from that, which is carbon dioxide, then you control the world's energy.
And if you control the world's energy, you essentially control the world.
And, you know, a good example of that was a few winters ago when Russia turned off the gas to the Ukraine.
You know, it really is a massive tool.
And one of the real strengths of the United States now is going to be that they are going to become more and more of an exporter of oil because of the shale revolution.
So this is going to change world politics.
They won't have to be with their military in so many places to protect the oil lines.
So there's a lot of changes going on.
There was also an open letter that was announced at the conference, and I should read you a little bit of it.
It was to President Trump, authored by a number of people.
And they asked President Trump to do two things.
First of all, they asked him to get going on this Commission on Climate Security proposed by national security scientist Dr. Will Happer.
He's a former Princeton physics professor, and we really have to get going with that.
So that's a really important thing.
The other thing, and they're trying to really get this meme into the public mind, and that is climate delusion.
It says, second, we ask that you frequently tweet about the climate delusion to break through the media blackout that has kept much of the public from learning about the climate realist position.
So we're asking President Trump to use his influence to get out this idea.
The climate delusion is really influencing the public.
And we want people to understand it is a delusion because it's not based on real data.
You know, since 1880, we've seen a one degree, slightly more than one degree temperature rise, which is certainly not dangerous.
So the whole climate scare is based on these computer models.
And during the conference, various scientists showed us how badly these models are working.
Depending on what data you compare it with, it's either double or triple the, you know, the amount of warming that's being forecast is double or triple what's really happening.
So we also heard about the benefits of fossil fuels and the fact that if we want to go back to the 1800s with our level of prosperity, then yeah, get rid of fossil fuels.
That's the way to do it.
How was your conference received in the mainstream media?
Because I imagine they were attacking your conference as a bunch of anti-science deniers.
But I just pulled up the speakers list on my computer as you were talking there.
And you have climate scientists from MIT.
You have someone from the American Association of State Climatologists.
You have Timothy Ball, amazing, like you said, from the University of Winnipeg.
I mean, you really have some pretty deep thinkers in the field of actual scientific research and study.
And yet, I'm sure a lot of the criticism levied at you is coming from the likes of former waitresses.
And of course, the liberal control media.
You know, the bottom line is these are scientists from all over the world who have many peer-reviewed published papers.
Nira Shaviv, for example, from Israel was speaking about how the sun is undoubtedly a very heavy influencer on climate.
And Dr. Ball points out that that's a real problem because by the middle of this century, we're going to be getting to a time when the sun is in what's called a grand solar minimum.
And if it's like previous grand solar minimums, we're going to see the coldest conditions in centuries.
And yet the Canadian government is planning for warming.
You know, the point that really is crazy is if it warms a little bit, then Canada can simply use the farming practices that are used in Arkansas.
But if it cools, we lose our crops because there's nobody farming north of us.
So this cooling threat, and you know, Professor Abdu Semitov from the Polkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg in Russia, he's another.
And there are many of them that are now saying that the whole climate debate is upside down.
First of all, it's more likely to be cooling than warming.
And secondly, we should be helping people adapt to climate change.
And here's the real scandal.
And this is what should really upset social justice warriors.
I think we spoke about this last time, is that 95% of the billion dollars a day that goes to climate finance is going to try to stop climate change.
There's only 120th of it, one, you know, 5% that is going to help real people now.
And if this cooling is coming, people are going to need help.
There's all sorts of things we can do to help them.
But stopping climate change, no, that's not one of them.
Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the hypocrisy of the climate change movement.
It's always a theme when I do interviews with the denier side.
I wanted to, and you know, I'm always apprehensive of talking about Greta Thinberg because she is a child and I think a mentally ill child being exploited by the adults around her.
But she's actually given up, or so she says, airline travel to fight climate change.
And I guess good for her, she's putting her money where her mouth is.
But she's going to travel to North America and I guess the Americas in general, because she's going to the climate change conference in Chile later on in the year.
But she's traveling in a state-of-the-art sailboat and she claims this is low carbon.
But the boat itself is aluminum and is just rife with technology that you need fossil fuels to extract.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, where do they think they get aluminum?
I mean, it's, you know, hugely energy dependent.
And that's, of course, why it's very valuable to recycle aluminum because it does take so much energy to mine it.
And we're not running those steam shovels and other kinds of power equipment.
We're not running them with wind and solar power.
We're using fossil fuels.
And of course, the actual manufacture of aluminum itself takes huge amounts of energy.
And it's got to be reliable, dependable energy, something like hydro, for example.
Again, wind and solar just doesn't cut it.
And, you know, one of the things that she doesn't seem to understand is that in many ways, wind and solar are not environmentally friendly.
In fact, it's interesting.
Dr. Elizabeth Anderson gave a talk recently at Carleton, two talks, one on solar and one on wind, on the real environmental costs of these things.
And, you know, they mine, for example, for the rare earths to go into the supermagnets in wind turbines.
They do that in China under terrible environmental conditions.
In fact, you could say, and that's not even counting the bird deaths and the bat deaths.
Bats are even more threatened than birds.
You could say wind in many ways is the most dirty power on the planet.
Okay.
And similarly with solar, you know, she was showing that the manufacture of solar plants, solar cells, photovoltaics in China is done in an extremely dirty way.
In fact, interestingly, their green city in which they generate a lot of these energy sources is one of the most polluted cities in the world.
Okay.
And so I encourage people to look into that more deeply because wind and solar, boy, you know, they have a lot of problems.
The bat kill problem is something people don't know much about.
They should, though, because there are more bats being killed than birds.
And sadly, bats can be killed just by passing near a turbine blade, because if they pass into a region of very low pressure, there's a sack in their head that bursts and they die.
So, and you know, bats typically eat about a thousand mosquitoes in a night.
So, yeah, we don't want to get rid of bats, that's for sure.
But it's sad when I see a child really influenced like that, because, you know, one of the greatest threats to survival in the world today is a pessimistic anticipation of the future.
I mean, this is something that a lot of psychologists have looked at, and they basically say what we really need is a positive worldview for where humanity is going as a species.
And so it's very sad to see when children have such a negative worldview.
Pessimism's Perils00:09:14
That's one of the reasons that I'm so enthusiastic about the space program.
Not only was I an aerospace engineer, but it's a positive alternative future where we can do new things and move forward as a species.
And that's the kind of thing I wish children would focus on.
And that's one of the reasons that I write in that field as well.
Speaking of a pessimistic anticipation of the future, what a great way to put it.
I've got some terrible news for you, Tom.
We're all going to die in 18 months and not 12 years like they keep promising us.
A headline from the BBC, climate change, 12 years to save the planet, make that 18 months.
These people are like a doomsday cult.
They're just anticipating the comet to come and they're going to, you know, just jump on the comet and go somewhere else.
It's really, it's really frightening to see how they, it's, like you say, there's a hopelessness for the future that I think is really bad to instill in an entire generation of people.
But I think they just need the urgency so that they can justify how much they want to tax me.
Well, also, I think it's that media throw, you know, mainstream media thrive on negative news.
And in particular, on this issue, I was actually speaking to an editor of a leading Eastern Canadian newspaper.
I won't say who because it's somewhat confidence.
I asked him, you know, why don't you show both sides of the climate debate?
He said, oh, well, we agree with David Suzuki.
I said, yes, but do you have anybody on staff who has even a Bachelor of Science so that you could actually judge as to who was more likely right?
And he said, well, no.
And so then I said, well, then why do you do it?
He said, well, our advertisers wouldn't like it.
So I thought about it.
Yes, that's true.
Negative news sells.
A big headline that says, you know, global temperature has risen a trivial amount in the last, well, since the beginning of the 20th century, it's virtually nothing.
And even since 1880, we're talking about one degree, which has been a beneficial thing.
That kind of headline doesn't sell press.
So if you're going for high circulation numbers, yes, catastrophe sells.
But there's another factor, Sheila.
Many of the sponsors and newspapers are using the climate scare to generate their sales.
Okay.
They're saying, buy our product and we're reducing greenhouse gases.
We're going to save the world.
Now, if you spend $12,000 on a radio, sorry, a newspaper ad, the last thing you want is Tim Patterson or Tim Ballery and Clark writing an op-ed on the other side saying you can't stop climate change.
So I thought about it.
Yeah, it's largely financially driven when it comes to the media.
It's partly because they're left-wing and it's part of their laundry list of ideals to support this.
But I think it's also largely financial.
You know, I did an investigation into the CBC based on a complaint that I had received from a viewer.
They had written to the CBC's ombudsman complaining about the coverage this, it was a story, sort of an inconsequential story, I guess.
It was about how these islands off the East Coast are disappearing.
And it's erosion.
Erosion is doing it.
Ocean currents is doing it.
But somehow the CBC and their guest blamed it on climate change.
And the viewer had actually written to the ombudsman saying, this is unscientific kookery.
And you could have at least presented not even just the anti-climate change side of the debate, but just someone who with the common sense to say ocean currents erode things.
That's what they've always done.
And the CBC ombudsman wrote him back saying, it is our policy not to provide balance on issues of climate change because the scientific consensus says the science is settled, which is actually an unscientific phrase in and of itself.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, back in the year 2000, I contested the CBC.
I wrote to their president and I said, you know, show us that there is this consensus of scientists who agree that we have a climate crisis.
And he assigned the letter actually to his omsbudsman to answer.
At first, they didn't answer.
I wrote again, and of course, it took a little pressure.
But he finally, the ombudsman, David Bazay, actually, he's passed away, but he's finally sent me 10 pages of answer in which he showed there was a consensus in the media that there was a consensus in the climate change community.
He didn't actually interview a single scientist or a single scientific organization in supporting this contention.
So in fact, it was the media where there was a consensus, but there was no proved it.
And you know, it's interesting.
None of these polls, this famous 97% thing, is nonsense because they either don't ask the right question or they don't ask the right people.
They'll ask in these polls, they'll ask, do you think climate change is real?
Do you think humans contribute to climate change?
Well, yeah, of course we do.
But that's not the question.
The question is, are we causing climate change so dangerous it's worth billions of dollars a day to try to stop?
They don't ask scientists that question.
And the reason they don't is because scientists would say, I don't know.
Or they would say, probably not.
Very few of them would say yes, because that billion dollars a day could go to so many other important causes.
And the other thing is, they're often not asking the right people.
They have to ask people who don't work for government, because of course those people are going to say what they're told to say, have to ask independent scientists who study the causes of climate change.
You know, not bark beetle experts who study what climate change does.
We want to know from the people who study the causes.
And I think, Sheila, that if they did that, they would find there was kind of a bell curve where most scientists would say, I don't know if some of the evidence says we are, some we aren't.
I think some scientists would say, definitely not, like Tim Ball.
And then you'd have Jim Hansen and others saying definitely yes.
But I think the vast majority of them would say, wow, this is a really immature field.
It's a very new field.
I mean, things like clouds, for example, we don't understand.
And yet, clouds have 10 times the influence of all human activities combined.
So until we understand natural climate change, how can we understand how much humans are contributing?
And that's the point Dr. Ball makes all the time: our understanding of natural climate change is really bad for one simple, well, a number of reasons.
We don't have a theory of climate.
So theoretically, that's one of the reasons.
The other reason is there's very, very little data.
Did you realize that in the whole of northern Canada, going into the Global Historical Climatological Network, there is one data station?
And that happens to be in a place called Eureka, which is a refugia.
It's a warm area.
So we don't have data.
There's huge areas of the Earth across the oceans, in Africa, Antarctica.
I mean, you know, most of the world is ocean.
We don't have sensors to give us proper surface readings.
So until, and so that's the first thing we need to do.
If we're really serious about this, we need to get data to best understand what's really going on.
And in fact, I'll read you a little quote here from the Tim Ball speech that I gave because Dr. Ball, as I say, he went back to university to study why weather forecasting was so bad.
It led him to produce a long-term record to accommodate some of the short and medium-term cycles.
You see, Tim is a fan of Sherlock Holmes's warning, and here it is: it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.
Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts.
So, Tim is a fan of Sherlock Holmes.
He's also a fan of Winston Churchill.
If I can read one more quote, I think this sums up Tim Ball just perfectly.
Tim Ball says, or sorry, Winston Churchill said, if you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever.
Use a pile driver.
Hit the point once, then come back and hit it again, then hit it a third time.
A tremendous whack.
So, as I told the audience, Dr. Ball throughout his career has given the climate scare a tremendous whack.
And that's why he got a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I mean, he's really one of the bravest people I know.
He's my hero.
Yeah, he's really been put through the ringer.
I just jotted down a quick note as you were talking about the surface readings to detect overall trends in weather patterns and temperature.
And I think it was Willie Soon, Dr. Willie Soon.
I was at a Friends of Science event in Calgary.
He's great.
For those who don't know, Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and a geoscientist.
And he was pointing out the fact that many of the places where they take the readings, these weather stations where they take the readings and then put them into the computer and crank out their models.
Temperature Sensing Flaws00:05:13
A lot of these are not in places where they should be.
For example, they are in the middle of a parking lot, a paved parking lot, or they're on a roof, a dark roof.
Where the conditions around them affect the temperature readings, and yet that's the data that they're using to predict or to create these climate models, and then they're using those climate models to tax me.
I know.
And the other thing is, NASA considers an area covered if there is a temperature sensing station within 1,200 kilometers.
Okay, now think about it.
1,200 kilometers is roughly the distance from Ottawa to Myrtle Beach.
So that says NASA would say that a region is covered if you have one temperature sensing station in Ottawa, you don't need any until you get to south of Myrtle Beach.
So, I mean, the bottom line is huge amounts of the world have no temperature sensing stations at all.
And so, yeah, they're in the wrong place in many cases.
But also, we have very, very few.
We don't know what's happening to the Earth's climate right now, let alone 50 years in the future.
I wanted to talk to you about something that just sort of wandered into my mind because you were talking about how wrong weather predictions always are.
And the Weather Network the other day, they had tweeted something about if Canadians want to fight climate change, we need to stop eating meat.
And then, just a couple of days later, I see Tim Hortons is offering some mung bean abomination, masquerading as an egg for their new like beyond meat breakfast sandwich, needs an exorcism.
What do you think the motive is for all these companies and all these organizations now saying, okay, well, you got to use less fossil fuels to fight climate change, but also you need to live off insects basically now to save the planet in 18 months?
Well, I think in most cases, it's just a desire to be politically correct.
And, you know, the left have defined essentially what political correctness is.
And sadly, it's not giving inexpensive electricity to the poor.
It's trying to save the planet or everybody should go vegan or something.
But I think that in general, we have to expose the consequences of the climate scare because the consequences are disastrous.
It's not just that we'll lose our conveniences.
It's that millions of people will starve around the world if we, in fact, are not able to use fossil fuels for agriculture and for heating and all those sorts of things.
Because fossil fuels is the lifeblood of civilization.
And this is one of the things that they pointed out in the conference.
We had economists there who were showing a very interesting phenomena that most people on the left don't understand.
And that is that once you get to a certain point in development, the richer you become, the more you protect the environment.
Okay, it's actually an upside-down you.
At the beginning, as you industrialize, the environment gets worse.
But you get to a certain point when beyond that, the richer you are, the more you protect the environment.
Okay, that's called Kuznets curve.
And in fact, President Trump in his Earth Day speech of this year back on the 22nd of April, he didn't reference the curve, but he referenced the idea.
And of course, that's exactly right.
We need to have wealthy societies to have the time and the energy and the money and the resources to protect the environment.
So, yeah, we need capitalism to promote prosperity, and that's how you protect the environment.
But, you know, forget about climate change.
We're not controlling that.
We do want to protect the environment, though, from pollution by getting wealthy.
You know, what a great way to end our interview.
Tom, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
You're such a wealth of information and common sense, and you're pretty fearless yourself.
I mean, you take a lot of heat for just questioning the consensus, so-called settled science.
Thanks for coming on the show and hopefully we can have you back on too.
Okay, that would be great.
Thanks Sheila.
Thanks, Tom.
If you're interested in seeing some of the discussions that happened at the Heartland Institute's 13th Annual International Conference on Climate Change, they've done something really great.
They live streamed their speakers to YouTube and to their website.
So you can see it all there.
And if you're interested in learning the other side of the climate change debate, that's a really great place to start.
That's the side that the fancy people don't want you to see.
They have some really smart people at the Heartland Institute challenging the so-called consensus.
And if you're interested in seeing more of Tom Harris's work, he's often published in PJ Media.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.