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Jan. 4, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:42
Episode 361 Scott Adams: Impeachment, The #Wence, Socialism, Syria, Kevin Hart,
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Hello everybody. Coming in here quickly.
Good to see you all.
What a wonderful day it is for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm Scott Adams, your host.
And it's time to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
Yes, if you've prepared You can grab your mug, your cup, your glass, your stein, your chalice, your tankard, if you will, fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Let's talk about Kevin Hart.
You all know the story about Kevin Hart.
He was going to host the Oscars, but then...
Folks found some old tweets of his which were considered offensive to the gay community and therefore disqualifying.
Kevin Hart decided not to be part of that controversy, so he pulled himself out of the running.
Apparently, they're having trouble finding a replacement.
And I can see why.
But the good news here is that Ellen DeGeneres has decided to take up the case of Kevin Hart.
And although she is in the LGBTQ community, and that's exactly who he is alleged to have insulted 10 years ago, I guess, in his tweets, she says he's grown, he's apologized, it's time to move on.
And I have to say, this is one of the most positive things I've seen in a year, really.
Because here's the standard that I think we should all live by.
The standard that we've been living by is totally destructive.
And that standard says that if you've ever made a mistake, that's who you are forever.
That we're going to judge you by your mistakes.
The reality is that people grow.
They get smarter, they get better, and it's supposed to work like that.
When you're born, you're a little selfish baby, and if you do everything right, you get better until you die.
So you get more open-minded, you get more kind, you get more understanding.
You know, you become a little bit more accepting of other people.
In a perfect world, you would become better every day of your life.
But when you take somebody like Kevin Hart and you say, hey, 10 years ago you did something offensive, when it seems fairly evident that he's a different person now, And I say different person in the same way we're all different people than 10 years ago.
And Ellen DeGeneres is quite generously, and I think wisely, showing some extreme leadership here in exactly the way that we need it and the time that we need it.
Now, Roseanne was a different situation because she was blamed of doing something in the present, which I believe was completely misunderstood.
So she was falsely accused, which is different than the Kevin Hart situation where he did, in fact, say some offensive things.
He thought it was in the service of humor, but he probably would not make those same jokes today.
So that would show that he's grown.
I love the fact that Ellen is taking this on because I think that moves the LGBTQ community another notch forward, in my mind.
The big improvements in the LGBTQ world is getting equal rights and gay marriage and just being treated at least equally under the law.
And, of course, societal acceptance is its best ever.
And it feels like this is the last push.
There's always a smaller and smaller thing to win.
When you get the big wins, the things to win are smaller and smaller.
But this would be pretty significant.
I think if the LGBT community can show this kind of leadership, which is to establish the principle that you can be an idiot 10 years ago, You can be offensive 10 years ago, and you can get better.
And that we should recognize that, because we want people to do that, right?
Don't you want people to become better?
See, I would apply the same argument to President Trump and have a number of times.
I hear people say, he did this or that in the 70s.
Now, whether or not he did this or that in the 70s, None of us are really the same people, if we're that old, as we were in the 70s.
Everybody was worse on almost every dimension of, I don't want to say personal political correctness.
I'd rather say open-mindedness and accepting of our fellow humans with differences.
Every one of us is better today at that Than we used to be.
We all got better.
Shouldn't we be celebrating that?
Shouldn't we be encouraging that?
Rather than saying, ah, that thing you did 20 years ago was bad.
Anyway, let's talk about Syria.
Is it my imagination?
Or is the world coming around to the opinion that Trump's decision to move out of Syria is absolutely the right one?
And apparently Elizabeth Warren came out completely in favor of it and even went so far as to say we should get out of Afghanistan.
So she was agreeing very much with President Trump.
And we're seeing people on both sides agreeing.
And the current thinking, I just tweeted an article from the LA Times that I thought summed it up pretty well.
The current thinking is that Our presence in Syria just wasn't helping.
And that when we get out, we're no longer the common enemy of Iran and Russia in some kind of a proxy fight.
But rather, the worst thing that could happen to Iran is to no longer be able to say to Russia, hey Russia, you know, Russia and Iran have a common interest in maybe beating back whoever the United States wants to win.
But what happens when we When we leave?
Well, when we leave, they're kind of going to turn on each other, I think, because Russia's interests are going to start to diverge a little bit from Iran's interests.
And I think Iran has a lot to worry about there.
Because if you think about it, probably Russia Has more to gain by being good to the United States than by being at our necks.
And I think that we might see some good changes there.
So Syria is looking like a good decision.
Let's talk about the economy.
So the stock market is, you know, taking a dump and Apple's taking a dump and everybody's talking about Chinese, the China trade talks.
Some of the experts, such as Gordon Chang, expert on China and North Korea, points out that the Chinese economy is very dependent on us, but I didn't really realize this, but it turns out that the United States is not terribly dependent on the Chinese economy.
We're buyers and they're sellers, and it's a different world.
So, in theory, Once the China trade talks get settled, and I figure everything gets settled eventually.
That one certainly is going to get settled.
Whenever that happens, what's going to happen to stocks?
It feels like we're entering one of the best stock buying periods of all time.
Now there's uncertainty, and you should never take advice on finances from cartoonists.
But if you had to pick One period that might be the very best time you could buy stocks, it would be when the economy is generally strong, so strong that the Fed had to raise interest rates, and that it's being suppressed by something very specific, in this case the Chinese trade talks, and there's almost no chance that we'll lose them in the long run.
In the long run, We're going to have a Chinese trade agreement.
Is the long run six months?
Is it a year? I don't know.
But we're going to have a deal.
And I would think that buying stocks before the deal would be a much better deal than buying after.
But again, I don't give financial advice.
You should not buy stocks because I said so.
I, however, will be buying stocks.
Fortunately, I had enough cash that was uninvested that I could move some into the market now.
It's a good time, in my opinion, but I'm not giving you financial advice.
I'm seeing more and more about the wall slash fence.
This suggests to me that everybody's opinion is starting to come to the same thing.
I'm not the first person to point this out, but I might have been one of the first to point out that there wasn't much disagreement to begin with.
It's just what you want to call it.
Do you call it a wall? Do you call it a fence?
Do you call it a whence? What do you call this thing?
So even now Ann Coulter has said the words that a fence like Israel has could get the job done.
We've seen clips of Chuck Schumer saying that maybe fences would be all you need.
So we're very close to the point where somebody's gonna say Let's turn it over to the engineers.
Let's just give them a budget and see where the engineers want to put stuff and get something done.
But, as you may have noticed, a lot of the political fighting is about Trump personally.
There seems to be a great dislike of him that can really only be explained as a personal thing.
Because it seems to me that if you go back in time to when Trump got elected, didn't it seem like the complaints were that there were a whole bunch of things they were afraid were going to happen?
They were afraid he was going to round up people.
He was going to deport 14 million people.
He was going to start a nuclear war.
So if you take the time machine back in your head to 2016, the biggest complaints about Trump were about things he had not done, but they were afraid he was going to do.
Now, how did that turn out?
We've got a little over two years that we can look at and we can say, how close were they In being afraid of these particular things that they thought he would do.
And the answer is not even close.
The economy did go up until the Fed punched it in the nose.
And then the trade war, we expect the economy to take a breather because we're waiting for that to sort out.
So I'd say as long as jobs are good, the economy is solid.
That's a good rule of thumb is that if jobs are good, everything's going to be fine.
And we look at him pulling out of Syria with a whim, looking to pull out of Afghanistan, looking to either making progress in Yemen with a little U.S. pressure, and North Korea looks like it's heading in the right direction.
So I would say, and of course 14 million people have not been deported and it doesn't look like there's any chance of that happening.
So I would say that the worst fears of what Trump would do have largely been shown to be empty.
They were empty fears.
So if you noticed how the criticism has shifted.
So the criticism has shifted from we think he will do this in the future and now it's been so debunked or disproven because we're now in the future.
We're a few years into the presidency and those worst Worst worries are clearly not coming true and clearly there's no real risk that they would.
In fact, things are moving the opposite direction.
But people don't give up their criticisms.
People don't change their minds just because the facts change.
Oh, they should. Wouldn't that be great?
Wouldn't it be great if people changed their minds because the data changed?
But people don't do that.
That's just not the way we're wired.
We're wired to keep our opinions, even if all the facts change, and even if all the facts show that we're wrong.
So have you noticed, and I don't know if I've heard anybody else say this, but it seems like we've gone from worrying about what he will do, because that all got debunked by just waiting and seeing he didn't do it, It seems the criticism has become intensely personal.
Am I wrong?
Romney's talking about Trump's character.
Very personal. Now, he says that that will have an impact on people, and that argument is fair.
But it's very personal.
You saw that the first Muslim American who got...
Elected for Congress has said that they're going to, quote, impeach the mother effer.
Now doesn't that sound personal?
When you look at all the reasons for why they don't want to give him the fence or the wall, it's kind of personal.
They want to impeach him not because of what he did, but it's sort of personal.
So in other words, there's a hatred of the president as a human being that really is the focus of their anger right now.
It's gone from he might do these dictator things to, okay, he keeps following the law, he does whatever the Supreme Court tells him, he's got good advisors, keeping him out of trouble apparently, at least big trouble, and now it's just personal.
So here's how the wall slash fence And impeachment and those things could possibly be resolved or avoided.
And it goes like this.
The president should call out that the resistance has simply become personal and that that's not good for the country.
Now, that alone is probably not a kill shot.
It's not going to change anything right away.
But I think it would be useful for him to stop arguing about the policies.
Because weirdly, people agree with him on the policies.
Who is disagreeing with the president on jobs?
Nobody. Who's disagreeing with him on prison reform?
Well, that looked pretty good.
Who's disagreeing with him on Syria?
Well, there's a lot less of that happening.
People on both sides are saying, yeah, that's looking pretty good.
Who disagrees with him that we need strong border security in some kind of fence wall-y kind of way?
Nobody disagrees. So the president has actually reached this weird situation where kind of everybody agrees on the big stuff.
And I think he could make the case now that he couldn't have made before, which is now it's just personal.
I would argue, and by the way, I haven't heard anybody say what I'm going to say right now.
But, and I need some fact checking, so I could be completely wrong about this, but give me some fact checking on this.
The president said that after the midterm election, in which the Democrats picked up a lot of seats in the House, the president said that maybe he would become a little bit kinder and less harsh in his demeanor.
I forget the exact words, but that was the sense of it, right?
He said that publicly, he said it clearly, that maybe he would be a little kinder and gentler in his personal demeanor.
Has that happened? Has there been a difference in the president's public demeanor since the midterm?
Because he said that he would look at maybe being a little less harsh.
I'm looking at your comments right now.
I'm seeing only yeses.
I got one no.
Now, of course, it's subjective, right?
But it seems to me that he's made a strategic change that's deliberate and has so far been reasonably consistent.
What did he say when Mitt Romney tore into him about his character?
He said that Mitt Romney, he hopes he can be a team player.
That's not really the kind of thing that you would have expected in the past, right?
You would have sort of expected him to tear him apart.
We've seen him say that Nancy Pelosi would make a good speaker and that she is very strong.
I don't know that he would have said that before.
Now, we should expect him to still use his little nicknames, and he'll still make fun of Elizabeth Warren for her claims.
So I would expect him to keep saying the funny, popular things he said before about the same cast of characters.
But they're not terribly mean, are they?
When the president is making fun of Elizabeth Warren for the Pocahontas stuff, it's not really that mean.
It's more funny.
You know, it's useful, it's persuasion, but it's more funny.
So, I'm watching the president's critics becoming the worst things that they hated about him, which is their personalities, their demeanors, their choices of words.
So when you see a member of Congress say they want to, she wants to impeach the mother effer, And everybody claps.
Who's, you know, who's bringing the bad, uh, Who's bringing the bad role model to Congress?
Who's bringing the bad role model to government?
So there's a sort of a micro trend to watch for 2019.
Will President Trump continue to be a kinder, gentler person in terms of his personal insults and such?
Well, probably not entirely.
Because if somebody who's, let's say, an external country or something comes after him, I'm pretty sure he'll go after him hard.
But so far, so far, he's brought a lot more civility to the office than we've seen in the past.
Meanwhile, his critics have become him.
They've become the uncivil, unreasonable, let's make it personal people.
So the president has an opportunity for a counter move, which is to say, let's not make it personal.
You know, rejecting border security funding is just making it personal.
If you'd like to keep me out of it, let's turn it over to the engineers and let them decide the best way to use that money.
But if we're all agreeing that better border security is a good deal and we all agree that $5 billion isn't that much in terms of the government, let's not make it personal.
All right. I saw an article That says the country is warming to socialism.
They're warming up to socialism.
In other words, the polls show that people are liking socialism and some of the things that would come with that, like presumably universal healthcare and free college and stuff.
So, and I say...
A lot of people are saying, I'm not warming up to socialism.
There's something to say for that.
So I don't promote socialism, but I would say that we might be in a situation where regular old capitalism just doesn't work the way that we want it to.
So if the middle class is indeed suffering more than ever, I'd say that capitalism isn't working.
If the middle class is not thriving, I think that would be the ultimate test.
So, I don't know which way the numbers are going right now, and I'm not saying that if capitalism isn't working, we should do a full tilt to socialism.
I would like to suggest a third way.
Way number one is socialism.
Way number two is capitalism.
I would argue that those are two approaches that will not work.
Socialism, we know, has its problems.
I think all of you watching this probably agree, just because of the people who watch this Periscope.
But I would argue that if the middle class has been taking it in the shorts for a decade or more, that I would say that capitalism is not working at the moment.
Now, it still mostly works.
But what could we do to tweak capitalism without becoming fully socialist?
Could you do it? Is there anything we could do that's a third way?
And I'm going to suggest that there is.
And it looks like this.
A lot of the things that are ruining our lives right now have to do with too much technology and diversion and our brains are getting fried and we're chasing, you know, trying to keep up with the Joneses,
etc. I think the only way that the world is going to work in the future is if the government gets a little bit more involved, not a lot, but a little bit more involved, In promoting those technologies and companies that can lower the cost of a high quality middle class or lower class life.
I've said this before, but the highest quality of life I ever had was in a college dormitory.
Which was the lowest expense, lowest living conditions, you know, physically, in terms of the building, I've ever experienced.
But it was still my highest quality of life because they got everything else right.
I had a challenge, I had something to work on, you know, my classes...
It was intellectually challenging.
I was around people my age.
My basic stuff was taken care of.
I didn't have to worry about paying the bills.
I didn't need to cook or wash dishes.
It was a cafeteria. So I think the big improvement in the future will be figuring out how to have an inexpensive life that's still really good, completely doable.
So I think socialism in its complete form doesn't work.
I think capitalism in its pure form does not work.
And we can see that right now.
And that we need some kind of a modified capitalism that is a little more enlightened about working on lowering the costs.
of a high quality life.
Either by organizing people better, by trying new things in small tests, by maybe funding things that would cause the cost of a house to go down.
In other words, putting attention on startups and innovation.
Alright, as you know, I have been digging in deep on the climate change question.
I am still exactly on the fence about how much we should be worried about it.
What I've discovered so far is that there are about 25 different arguments about climate change.
And, you know, let's say 25 different, let's say, skeptical criticisms of different parts of climate change.
And I wanted to start by dispelling the worst arguments.
So there are some arguments the skeptics make that are just bad.
They're bad arguments.
So I'm going to tell you which ones to stop using.
Because there are still good arguments on both sides.
Good enough that I can't yet take a side.
But there are certainly some arguments on both sides that are so bad that you should ignore them and maybe look at the stronger arguments on both sides.
So maybe we should just get rid of the garbage and get to the good arguments.
Because if the good arguments from the skeptics hold up, Well, then the climate people have a lot of explaining and vice versa.
So let's just look at their best, most verifiable claims and see if they work.
But let's get rid of the bad ones first.
So here are the bad arguments about climate science out of the 25 or so arguments.
One of the worst arguments is that scientists used to tell us That the world is cooling and that we would have to worry about a global cooling.
So in the 70s, climate scientists were saying, hey, the world is getting cooler.
And so the skeptics say, okay, how can it be true that they used to say it's getting cool and now you're saying it's getting warm and therefore the one thing we can know for sure is that scientists don't know how to predict this stuff.
That is a bad argument.
It's a bad argument. Here's why.
The people who were saying that it was going to be cooler was a small group of scientists.
The people who now say that it's getting warmer is pretty much the vast majority of scientists.
Those are not comparable situations.
There have always been small groups of scientists who have been wrong.
So when a small group of scientists says anything, That turns out to be wrong.
It is not an indictment of science.
So please stop saying scientists got it wrong in the past, so maybe they're getting it wrong in the future.
In the present, it's the vast majority of scientists using lots of different science, lots of different measuring devices, etc.
Now, there still are some good skeptical arguments, But let's get rid of the one that says a few scientists in the past got picked up by some big media, you know, like Time Magazine, and got reported.
But it was more about taking something that was small and just a few scientists believed and turning it into a news story.
There was never a situation where the majority of scientists thought it would be cold in the future.
So just stop saying that.
It's not a good argument. Another argument you hear is that people say, I will not believe that climate change is a problem until I see rich people no longer buying beachfront homes, until I see banks no longer willing to give loans for beach property.
Until I see that, I'm not going to believe it's true that the ocean is rising.
Here's what's wrong with that argument.
It's a terrible argument.
Do you know who buys beachfront property?
Rich people.
Do you know who doesn't care if the sea level rises and makes their property worth less money 30 years from now?
Rich people.
I'm telling you this as your local resident rich person.
So, I gotta plug in some power here, hold on.
Rich people do not need to care about whether they're making a good financial decision.
I have personally made bad financial decisions because I wanted to enjoy something for a while, and if I were poor or scraping by, I would not have done those things.
I personally would buy beachfront property even if I thought in 30 years I'd have to get rid of it or it'd be worth nothing.
If I could enjoy beachfront property for 30 years and then I had to just throw away my house, I might still do that.
Okay.
So if apparently some of you are saying that it's frozen and there's no sound, but others are saying that, yeah, you might have to back out and come back in.
um uh Damn it! I hate that it froze up just when I was talking about this.
Effin' subject. Oh my God!
Of all things, this was the only thing I wanted this periscope to be about.
Alright, so I'm going to get back on point because at least some of you say it's fixed.
Alright, the other bad argument is that people say they're not worried about the glaciers melting because if you put ice in a glass of water and you wait for the ice to melt, it does not change the water level.
Well, that's true, but that's not the argument for climate change.
So if you think that melting ice doesn't change how much water there is, you are missing two things.
Number one, not all of that melted ice is sitting in the water.
Some of it is on land.
If ice that's on land melts into the water, you have added water.
So stop saying that the ice cubes in your glass of water are telling you something.
Your ice cubes are in the water.
The glaciers are not all sitting in the water.
Then secondly, the other big reason that the water level would rise is because when you warm the oceans, they expand.
And the warming might not be equal in all parts of the world, so that you could have sea level rising in some places and never rising in others.
So for example, the California coastline doesn't seem to be rising or not as much as other places, and that would be expected under climate change.
Because the warming is in different places.
So stop saying the ice cubes in your glass tell you anything.
That's a bad, bad argument.
Here's another one. The medieval period was warmer than it is now.
And in the medieval period, we didn't have any CO2 or not much that was added to the atmosphere by people.
So people say, wait a minute, why was it so warm in the medieval period when they didn't have CO2, or at least not CO2 added by human activity?
That is a bad argument.
It's a bad argument.
Now it is true that there was lower CO2 and yet higher temperatures in the medieval period, but unfortunately for the skeptics, The climate experts have a really good explanation for that.
And apparently they know that sun activity was different then, and there was a shortage of volcanoes during that period.
And when you have fewer volcanoes, you have more warming.
Does it work that way? I may have it backwards.
But anyway, the scientists know that there was differences in sun activity and differences in volcanoes, so they actually have a perfectly acceptable reason why the medieval times were warmer.
So I would say that's a bad argument from the skeptics, because the response to the argument...
I can't personally verify whether the response to the argument is right, But it certainly sounds credible.
So I would say that the medieval argument is weak.
I wouldn't use it.
Here's another one.
Satellite images show us that ice on the planet is shrinking.
So here's the bad argument from the scientist's point of view.
So they say, look at our satellite pictures and you can see right with your own eyes.
That the ice is shrinking.
Here's what's wrong with that argument.
Now again, I'm going to modify any of these opinions as I'm learning new things.
So everything you hear me say is a preliminary, until I get better data, you know, argument.
Because I've actually changed my opinion on several points already.
Here's what's wrong with the argument that the satellite shows that the ice is decreasing on the planet.
My understanding is we have not always had satellites.
And that we haven't had really satellite pictures before 1979, I think.
And I'm told that 1979 was an unusually cold year.
So if you start your measuring from an unusually cold year, It would not be surprising that there's less ice today.
If we had satellites that could go back a hundred years, would we see the same shrinkage or would we see the ice level go up and down in some kind of a cycle that did not have much to do with CO2? I don't know.
But I do know we don't have satellite measurements Before a certain year, and that wasn't too long ago.
So I would say that the argument from climate scientists who say that the satellites show you visually that the ice is shrinking, it's accurate, but it only goes back to 1979, so it doesn't tell you enough just by the satellite.
Now, of course, that's not their only argument, and I'm not saying it is.
But if it's the only argument presented It's weak.
Here's another one.
The climate scientists say that the risk of sea level rising is dire because eventually it could have an impact on a hundred million people.
A hundred million people could be impacted by rising sea levels.
What percentage of the planet is 100 million people?
Let's say we've got 8 billion people by the time 100 million are negatively impacted by rising water.
What percentage?
Yeah, so it's about 1.5%.
I think I calculated 1.3%.
So about 1.3% of the population would be negatively impacted by rising sea levels over decades.
Is that a catastrophe?
Now, if 100 million people died, that's a catastrophe.
But if 100 million, which is 1.3% of the world, Has to rearrange their lives.
And here's the fun part.
Who owns all the property by the beaches?
Is it the poor people?
Well, in some countries, yes.
But where their most money is involved, where it would be the hardest to move because they've got a building there and they've got assets there, there's somebody rich who owns that.
So, do we care that, let's say, 50 million rich people have to adjust their lives and 50 million poor people have to just move 100 yards away?
It's probably harder than that.
They may have to just find a new place to go.
But they're going to have a lot of time to do that.
It's not like they have to pick up and move on Tuesday.
They're going to have decades to sort it out.
So when I see the argument that the sea level is rising, I say to myself, my God, my God, that does sound bad.
But when the people who are telling me it's a problem say it will affect 100 million people over the course of decades, I say, you just told me that's not much of a problem.
If the estimates are true, 100 million people who have to readjust their lives, half of them are probably rich, the other half didn't own anything to lose, they just have to move.
It feels affordable.
Here's the other bad argument, which we saw recently, and I won't talk too much about this because I already did, but the estimate that we could take a 10% hit to our GDP by the year 2100.
Now, of course, it's not all happening in the last year.
It's something that would be more of it in the later years and less of it in the early years.
Would we even notice that we made 10% less in GDP than we could have over 80 years?
We wouldn't. We literally wouldn't even notice.
How do I know that?
Simple. Suppose I told you that our current GDP right now is 10% lower than it could have been if we'd made different decisions 80 years ago, which is probably true.
Can you feel it?
You don't even notice.
You just notice the things are the way they are.
The two biggest economic arguments coming out of the warming camp, using their own numbers, are really not that scary.
So they're weak arguments.
I saw somebody ask about coral bleaching and the idea that the warming of the ocean is killing the coral habitats, I guess.
Apparently, nobody is doubting the question that there's more bleaching, meaning that the coral is turning white when it gets distressed.
So I think everybody agrees is more.
There is some disagreement from the skeptics that it's caused by warming as much as caused by runoff from farming and irrigation or whatever.
There's other causes.
And then there are other people who say that it's not that unusual in history For coral reefs to be greatly distressed, they turn white, but then you check back in a few decades and they're completely revived.
So we can't know exactly whether this is one of those times when it's cyclic or not.
But at the moment, I would say that argument tilts toward the climate warming argument.
I would say the skeptics maybe have a little weaker argument here.
But they do have an argument, so I would say that much is hard for us to sort out.
Alright, so those are the worst arguments on both sides.
And one of my Twitter followers, Gregory Markles, I think?
If you're not following him, you should, because he digs in on a lot of the arguments that I get into online.
And he tends to be the most clear thinker in the game.
And one of the things he pointed out yesterday, which I agree with a lot, is anytime you try to talk about climate change, it turns into whack-a-mole.
And it doesn't matter which side you're talking about.
Both sides have a whack-a-mole laundry list strategy.
So if you say to either side, either the skeptics or the majority of scientists, if you say to them, I'm debunking your point, and here's how I'm debunking it.
If you do a good job, do they ever say, oh, good point, you debunked me?
They do not. They just move to the next thing on the list.
So if you say, well, the way you're measuring temperatures is not credible because you've made adjustments.
Then they say, well, we don't rely on just that.
We also look at the satellite.
We look at the ice core.
We look at three other ways to measure temperature, and they're all in agreement.
So you have this perpetual whack-a-mole problem.
And likewise, if the climate scientists say, look, skeptic, this was your skeptical claim.
I just proved that your skeptical claim is invalid.
What does the skeptic do?
Do they say, oh, okay, you've convinced me.
Now I believe in climate change.
They do not. They say, but I've got another reason.
So the whack-a-mole problem is probably why we can't reach consensus.
Because nobody can give in on a point, they just move to another point.
Skeptics do it, and the scientists do it.
And between the two of them, there are so many moles to be whacked that you could never have a debate.
Because you could never have a debate because you would never have enough time.
Each group would just keep saying, okay, well, if you don't like that, I've got another piece of evidence.
So what Gregory pointed out, and I agree, is that maybe instead of arguing every point, we should look to both sides' best, most checkable points.
So you'd want two qualities to dig into.
One, is it a major point?
Because there are lots of major arguments and then minor arguments.
The minor ones are stuff like, what about the ice in my glass?
You know, those are the minor ones.
But there's some that are just big, important ones, and there are ways that you can actually tell who's right.
It's objectively you can tell.
And the one that Gregory pointed out, and I agree, Is a famous climate skeptic, Tony Heller.
And please fact check me if I get this wrong.
Because I've seen so many climate stories now.
I may be conflating things.
But I believe this is true.
And I know Tony watches these.
He's been following this conversation.
So he might have an answer for this.
But I believe he's made the claim That the thermometers around the world have been adjusted over time, and those adjustments are telling the story that maybe if they hadn't been adjusted, you might have gotten a different story.
And so therefore there's a credibility problem with the measurements.
Now part of that argument, I believe, and here's the part I want you to fact check me on, is that if you looked at only the measuring devices that have not been adjusted, And never changed.
They've always been in the same place and nothing changed about them.
It's the same technology, etc.
So the longest continuing measurements don't show the warming.
Using the publicly available data that both the scientists and the skeptics have access to.
Now that claim is completely checkable.
And the claim is not only checkable, By third parties, you could actually figure out, did Tony Heller really pick the right measurement devices?
Are they really the ones that have not experienced any kind of adjustment?
And is it true when you look at the same data the scientists are looking at, that they do not show warming if you take out all the ones that had adjustments?
That claim, it seems to me, is testable.
And it's one of the most important claims on the skeptic side, one of the strongest ones.
So if we can debunk that claim, then I would say the Tony Heller arguments are going to lose a leg.
I mean, he makes a number of arguments and you'd have to look at them separately, but that's a big one.
That's in the top three at least, right?
Maybe the top one.
And it's checkable.
Wouldn't you like to see that checked?
What do the scientists say when Tony Heller presents his list of all the measurements that don't show the warming?
Do they say you picked the wrong ones?
Do they say that you looked at the wrong data?
I don't know. So I would say that's an open question, and it's something that I think some people are looking into it at the moment.
But it gives you a possible way forward.
I think the first thing you have to do You say that there are 25 arguments in this whole climate change thing, everything from ice core and measuring devices and, you know, well there's just 25 different arguments.
But probably 20 of those arguments Are weaker than the best five.
And the best five might be some pro-climate change and some anti-climate change.
I don't know what those best five would look like.
But let's figure out what the best five are.
Because they might be something we can just check.
So, that's my goal right now.
My goal is to get the skeptics to stop saying the weakest skeptical things.
And try to figure out what are the strongest skeptical things.
So get off the weak ones, get on to the strong ones.
Likewise, the climate scientists who have done a horrible job of persuading.
I can't judge their science.
But on the persuasion perspective, it's obvious that they've done a terrible job because half the country isn't buying it.
So they too should maybe back off of their weaker arguments, if they can identify which are the weaker ones, and try to just stick with the strongest ones.
I'll give you an example where they might be.
So one of the stronger arguments might be sea level.
Because I'm a little, let's say, I'm a little dubious.
about whether they can measure ice changes over time.
So I don't know if that will ever be their strongest argument, especially if the satellites don't go back beyond 79.
But it seems to me that they could make a prediction about sea level, make a five-year prediction.
Let me ask you this.
If you're a skeptic of climate change, I'd like to see your answer in the comments.
If you're a skeptic of climate change, and the climate scientist said, I'll make you a deal, sea level change is the one thing we absolutely know is going to change at a rapid rate, assuming everything else we know about the climate is true.
If it's true that CO2 is rapidly rising the temperature, Then we'll see sea level go up, and in five years you'll definitely be able to see that our predictions are right.
If they made that prediction and said, here's the deal, in five years you need to change your mind if we hit this prediction, would you accept it?
Would you, and I know most of you are probably skeptics, for those of you who are skeptics, would you accept that the scientists are right If they could call where they're going to hit the home run, and it was only five years, it's not a long time, and in five years you look at it and you go, damn, they hit it.
Or it's even worse than they say.
That would also help their argument.
Would that convince you?
Now, some people are saying that sea level is Not a good measure because the land is also changing.
So in other words, if there's an underwater volcano and the underwater volcano creates a new mass underwater or an island gets bigger or something from a volcano, you would have rising sea level.
So I don't know that we can measure sea level and predict it because of stuff like volcanoes, but I'll bet we can.
Better than other things.
So anyway, the strong arguments are probably about sea level rise.
If we can maybe get a better idea about ice change, that would be great.
And one of the strong arguments that I haven't dug into enough is that all of the various measuring methods give you the same result.
In other words, if you look at the thermometers, Or if you look at the ice core samples, or if you look at whatever the satellites do about temperature, and I think there might have been two or three other measures, but they're all compatible, and they all tell the same story.
Is that true? That's the story.
Now, if that's true, that's a really good argument.
But I'm kind of skeptical that all of those measurements really match up.
You know, I worry that they're forced to match.
But that's not a claim.
That is only a skeptical question.
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