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Jan. 6, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:00
Episode 363 Scott Adams: Sonic Weapon Hysteria, Climate Change and Dancing AOC
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Well, it's a beautiful Sunday morning.
Unless you're watching this on replay.
And then there's a one in seven chance that it's a Sunday.
Hello and good morning.
You know why you're here.
I know why you're here.
Everybody knows why you're here.
It's because... You like the simultaneous sip.
And the simultaneous sip is going to happen in just a moment.
Grab your mug, your cup, your glass, your chalice, your tankard, your stein.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah. So, the news...
It's not really interesting at the moment, if you haven't noticed.
And I can't think of a better endorsement for the president.
If you could come up with one single sentence that would tell you the president's doing a good job, what would it be?
Maybe it would look like this.
There's no news.
Because they don't really cover good news.
We've had plenty of good news.
The economy is going well, etc.
We're not especially going toward war.
We seem to be going away from war on every dimension.
So what does the news have to talk about?
The biggest story in the news?
I'm not even making this up.
The biggest story in the news is AOC dancing on a video in college.
And desperately the news business is trying to turn this into a something.
And I think the latest attempt is to say that the conservatives were offended by it or somehow they had a bad reaction to an attractive young person dancing.
And I'm thinking to myself, well, that didn't happen.
You know, there were certainly people who wanted to mock her for acting, I know, silly when she was in college.
But does anybody take seriously anything that anybody did in college, especially dancing-wise?
Do you want to be criticized for your college dancing?
I don't think I could handle that criticism.
My college dancing, not so good.
So anyway, when you have a non-story like that dominating headlines, that's really good news.
Because if there were bad news to report, there would certainly be a lot of reporting of that bad news, don't you think?
So that's all good.
Let's talk about my favorite topic.
Climate change. So what I'm doing here is, for those of you joining late, I'm not a denier and I'm not a believer.
I'm someone who believes that we citizens can't penetrate this topic.
It's an impenetrable topic and people just default to their biases or their teams because they can't really understand it.
But I'm drilling down and I'm going to try to make this sort of an extended tutorial so as I learn things, I'll try to simplify them and then share them.
And I'll tell you, it is fascinating.
I thought that I would get to the boring part of this topic, but it doesn't get more boring.
There are just levels and levels and levels, and what you could learn about this seems infinite.
And I'm not even talking about the science.
So I'm completely outside of the science part of it, because that's not the part I understand.
But just watching the psychology of it, the way it's communicated, the persuasion of it, Trying to solve it like a mystery is really, really interesting to me.
And that's sort of the level I'm going to be talking about.
So I'm going to be essentially taking the side of you viewers.
In the sense that I'm going to be talking about this as someone who is in the public and is asked to make a decision about climate change.
We're all being asked to decide what we want to do about it so that we can influence our governments, etc.
So I'm going to help you decide and I'll take little chunks of it as we go.
So here's an interesting thing.
One of the biggest arguments that the skeptics make To say that climate change is not a problem.
The skeptics will tell you that there was a medieval warming period.
And they say that if you include that medieval warming, It doesn't make it look that warm today.
In other words, there was a warming period, and then there was a little mini ice age, and then it's warm again, but all we're doing is getting back up to normal.
So that would be the skeptics' claim about the importance of this medieval warming period.
Now, here's what I'm learning about this medieval warming period, and it's interesting in both ways.
First of all, it seems that science does agree That there was a medieval warming period.
But their defense against that is that it wasn't everywhere.
That there was a warming in the North Atlantic, you know, the European kind of area.
But the other parts of the planet, at the same time, were unusually cold.
And that if you looked at all the proxies, and I guess there may be 10 different ways that you can measure temperature, so you're looking at everything from leaves to ice cores to about, now I can't remember, but I just read a list of something like 10 different ways you can study things and say, okay, oh, tree rings is another one.
And so the scientists say The medieval warming existed, but it was localized, and it was extra cold in other places.
So now I say to myself, okay, and some of the theories about why it was extra warm in that one place included maybe there were volcanic activities, there were unusual sun activity, and maybe the ocean circulation was different in that area for a time.
Now, what do I tell you when you see more than one explanation for a thing?
If you see one good explanation for something, there's a good chance it's true.
But when you see multiple explanations that are different to explain the same thing, you should get a little suspicious.
So we have a situation here which, again, I wasn't there.
I didn't have a thermometer during the medieval period.
I didn't measure the earth.
I'm not a scientist. I don't understand all the proxies that they use to measure temperature.
You and I can't penetrate the reality.
But when you're looking at how it's communicated, it's like, oh, so you're saying that it was warmer, but only in one part of the world.
Okay, so doesn't your skepticism go up a notch when you hear that?
Because is that the case right now?
Is it the case that if you're not measuring everywhere in the world, you don't know what the average temperature is?
So are we measuring everywhere in the world now?
It's hard to imagine that we really can get any kind of precision about temperature a thousand years ago.
So let me ask you this.
So one of the ways that they can do a temperature proxy is by looking at tree rings.
So I guess they can find fossils or I don't know what the oldest tree is, but they can look at tree rings and they can determine what the temperature was a thousand years ago.
Here's my question.
How accurate is a tree ring?
And what kind of temperature differences are we talking about?
Are we talking about tree rings are accurate to a tenth of a degree?
Do you think that's the case?
Do you think you could look at a tree and determine within, let's say, a tenth of a degree what's happening?
I don't know. Are they accurate to within one degree?
I don't really know.
Do you? But all I know is that if the temperature differences that we're talking about today are, you know, it's a very big difference if we go up two degrees, are you telling me that I can tell the temperature from a thousand years ago with a tree ring to within a degree or two?
Is that the claim?
Now again, remember that everything I say about this topic is coming at it as a consumer of the news.
I'm not coming at it with any kind of You know, deep understanding.
That's the point. I'm talking as a well-intentioned citizen who legitimately doesn't know if I should be concerned about climate change.
I just don't know, and I can't penetrate the topic.
But when you tell me that it used to be that the coolness and the hotness were localized, and there could be good reasons for that, doesn't that make you wonder if they could measure it today?
Measure it today?
Does it make you wonder if, given that they don't have measuring instruments everywhere in the world, couldn't there also be places we haven't measured that are cooler than normal?
And today are there places on the earth that are unusually warm compared to the rest of the world?
Was the medieval time the only time we had this weird thing where one part of the world got warm and the other parts got colder?
Because I don't know any argument, and correct me if I'm wrong, again, this is not an argument.
It's displaying the gaps in my logic.
Is it true that today we have similar parts of the world that got a lot warmer while other parts are getting a lot colder?
Is that true? Because if it's not true, I have trouble believing that it used to be true.
And I have a terrible, you know, terrible time believing that they can measure it a thousand years ago to the level of accuracy a few degrees that we would really know anything today about the long-term trend.
So there's that.
Tony Heller, famous skeptic, I talk about him a lot, has said that a number of the temperature measuring devices around the world have been adjusted, and that has said that a number of the temperature measuring devices around the world have been adjusted, and that the adjustments were sort of judgment calls,
So when they needed to adjust, let's say, a temperature device that used to be in the shade, but now it's in the sun, or vice versa, they would, you know, use some science to say, okay, if it had been in the sun, it would be this, based on other measuring devices that are nearby, etc. And again, I ask myself, can we really measure things to that level of precision using statistical analysis?
Is that a thing? Can you really tell what the temperature was with precision, based on statistics, based on measuring other things in other places?
On the surface, it doesn't sound credible.
And again, remember, you have to remember my context is different from anybody else you're hearing.
Almost everybody else you hear talking on this topic has already decided That it's either true or fake, you know, real or not real.
I haven't decided.
I'm looking at the information and I'm telling you which parts look credible, even if they're not true, and which parts do not look credible, even if they might be true.
And when you tell me that you can measure the temperature of the Earth on an average, Through all these many proxies and that they can get you close enough within, I don't know, do you have to be within a degree or within a tenth of a degree?
And why don't I know that?
Why is it that I've gotten this far in my citizen research on the topic and I don't know if the accuracy of these proxies, these different ways that they can measure things, I don't know if they're accurate or not.
Or if they're accurate within a degree.
And if I don't know that, what do I know?
Right? It's hard to know anything if you don't know that.
Here's another thing I learned, that 90% of the warming is in the ocean.
Now, that's good to know, right?
Because it means that all the measuring devices that are on land, collectively, are only going to add up to 10% of whatever the temperature is.
So it seems to me you could throw away all the land measuring devices.
Couldn't you? Why do we even have land measuring devices when the ocean is 90% of the warming and the ocean probably doesn't suffer from the problem of being in the shade sometimes?
So shouldn't we just throw away the land measurements and just look at the ocean?
I don't know the answer to that question.
And if we did, would it give you a different result?
I don't know. Another argument against the critics and against Tony Heller's argument that the past temperatures have been adjusted are that he's only talking about American or the United States measuring devices apparently.
So around the world there have not been the same adjustments.
But even if all of the Even if Tony Heller is correct and that the US measuring devices were rigged, meaning that they were intentionally adjusted to make it look like there's more warming in the present, even if they were true, because it was only the United States and it was only some of the things in the United States, it would have been this tiny, tiny percentage of all the measuring devices.
In other words, even if Tony Heller is right, The argument is it wouldn't be enough of a change to really even notice.
So he could be completely right, but it wouldn't really change the total global average.
But here's the problem.
What's left out of that criticism is that the claim is that these changes were made all in the same direction and that there may have been some intention behind that.
If that's true, It doesn't matter that it's a small percentage of the overall temperature.
It would show some kind of a willingness or a pattern or the beginning of a pattern of intentional jiggering with the numbers which would lower the credibility.
So that wasn't addressed.
I saw a claim that the real reason for climate change is wealth distribution.
And that the people pushing climate change are really part of a secret plan to distribute wealth from the rich to the poor, or something like that.
And then the argument is that...
I see people here agreeing with that.
Okay. I consider that the least credible argument.
Anytime you have the secret cabal of elites who are behind the secret worldwide scheme, that's not believable.
Because there are way too many people working in this area for them to be all on the same leash.
If, in fact, there were a small group, a secret cabal of George Soros or the Illuminati or something, and they had the secret idea to push this fake idea of global warming, They wouldn't be able to control that secret, right? Now you're saying they haven't controlled it because I know the secret.
No, you don't. You don't have any document from somebody talking about the conspiracy.
You don't have anybody who was in the conspiracy coming forward.
There is no evidence of this that I've ever seen.
And again, every time I say there's no evidence, it only means that I haven't seen it.
So I would say If you want to be credible, you probably need to stop talking about the secret cabal of people who want to transfer wealth by telling you that there's global warming.
That's the least believable skeptical argument of them all.
Now, I was watching a famous skeptic, Dr.
Linzen. You've probably heard of him if you follow any of this skeptical stuff.
And he's a, I forget where he works, but he's one of the more serious, more credible skeptics.
So he's an actual scientist, works in the field, you know, he's close to everything.
So if he disagrees with climate science, that means something, because he's a credible guy working in the field.
And I watched a Prager University video in which he speaks in his own words and he describes his position.
And I watched the whole thing, and here's what he did not address.
The central claim of climate science.
So he was presented as really one of the strongest critics at MIT. He was presented as one of the strongest critics, most knowledgeable, and after he was done with his opinion, he had not even addressed the central claim of climate science.
So he was a critic who didn't talk about the topic.
I mean, he talked about the topic, but not the central claim.
The central claim is that the rate of warming has accelerated recently.
If you don't talk about the recent accelerating rate of warming, and all you talk about is that it's getting warmer, and it's gotten warmer in the past, sometimes it gets cooler, you haven't even talked about the topic.
So here's your red flag.
And remember, I'm giving you red flags on both sides.
So your red flag that the scientists don't have the credibility that you might want is that they claimed in the past there used to be warm parts of the world, and that explains the medieval warming well, but there were other parts that were extra cold.
But do we see that today?
And if we do see that today, how confident are we that we've measured the Earth correctly with our statistical measurements, if it can be getting warmer in one place and colder in the other?
Seems like we would have heard of that.
Secondly, when the scientists tell you they can measure the temperature a thousand years ago by looking at tree rings, maybe.
And maybe if you've combined it with your other proxies, maybe.
But it is not convincing.
To me, that they can measure the temperature a thousand years ago with any kind of precision, enough precision to really make a difference.
So I could be wrong about that.
So I'm talking as a consumer, as a consumer of this information, it's not believable.
On its face, with the amount I can understand as a citizen, it's not believable, at least in terms of precision.
But now go to the other side.
So now I've criticized the credibility of the scientists.
Let's go to the other side. So I was just talking about Dr.
Lindzen. Somebody's reminding me he's at MIT. Very knowledgeable.
He's in the middle of it. He gives his, I would say, a skeptical view.
And when he's done, he hasn't even talked about the topic, which is the unusually steep warming that is claimed for the present.
Now, if one of your strongest critics talks around the topic, but never talks about the central claim, can you feel confident that the skeptics are onto something?
Remember, the best informed, closest guy probably to the topic, and he didn't really have a criticism that goes to the central claim.
So, that raises a red flag.
All right. There's also the question of, and this one fascinates me, there are legitimate people who say that nobody has demonstrated how this small amount of CO2, even if it doubles or triples from where it is now, nobody's explained how that small amount of gas could cause a big enough temperature difference to be what people are projecting and even measuring.
And My understanding, and again, gaps in my understanding, so I'll just tell you what I understand, and maybe it can get corrected over time.
My understanding is that the reason we think the CO2 is the primary lever, maybe not 100% of the warming, but the vast majority, as scientists claim, the reason we think that is that we can't figure out what else it could be.
Am I wrong about that?
In other words, there's a correlation with CO2. We know that CO2, in principle, can raise temperatures.
The exact amount it raises temperatures is hard to know, but the scientists are still willing to say it's the majority of the reason for the change, the vast majority, maybe 90%.
But at least over 50%.
They're willing to say that based on the correlation and the lack of other alternatives.
Isn't that the argument?
It's the argument that we can't directly look at the CO2 raising temperature.
In other words, you can't take a microscope and say, oh, there's some CO2. Oh, I see it raising the temperature.
There it is. We've confirmed that CO2 is raising the temperature by exactly this much.
We don't have that kind of measurement.
We're simply looking at temperature.
We're looking at CO2. We know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
And we don't have other explanations.
Is it true that the main reason that CO2 is considered the primary driver is that we can't think of anything else that would be doing it that hasn't been debunked?
I think that's true, right?
Does that sound...
Convincing to you.
Because here's the problem. It leaves open the option that there's just a reason we don't know.
Do we still have open the alternative that we just don't know?
Seems like that's always open.
All right. The other claim that just blows my mind away.
This just blows my mind away.
The skeptics say, and I saw this even just minutes before I started this periscope, skeptics say, how do you explain that for 17 years the temperature has been flat?
To which I say, what?
That's exactly the opposite of what scientists say.
Scientists say the temperature is going up steeply.
How is it that people in 2019 can get on the internet and say, well, all the evidence is the temperature is not going up at all?
Now, I think it might be because of the satellite measurements.
So one of the popular ways to measure things is with satellites.
But the satellite measurements have been debunked by the scientists as being not a good enough measure compared to all the proxies, compared to things on the ground.
So I guess the satellites can measure the upper troposphere.
So they're measuring the air, but they're not measuring the water, and they're not measuring the land, per se.
They're measuring the air.
And I guess there are enough reasons to discount that, that the claim that the temperature is not going up in 17 years, I believe is just false, isn't it?
Isn't the one thing we could probably know better than anything is whether the temperature is going up in 17 years?
And I haven't seen anybody, nobody sent me a link to show me the temperature not going up.
But yeah, there's always some skeptic with the graph.
How is it that we could be in 2019 talking about the biggest topic in the world, climate change, biggest topic in the world, and we don't know for sure if the temperature has gone up in the last 17 years?
Now here I would put more credibility on the scientists.
It does seem to me That it would be almost impossible for the scientists to be wrong about the temperature over the last 17 years.
And we've been really looking at that stuff.
So somebody's saying, but it didn't.
Will somebody send me a link To anything that claims the temperature has not gone up.
But here's the trick. You can't use satellites as your source.
Because they've been already, you know, that has been debunked by the scientists.
So if you have evidence that the temperature hasn't gone up, let me see it.
All right. Yeah, what is the margin of error for temperature measurements?
So, I'll say this.
As a citizen, I don't believe the claim that science knows the temperature of the Earth historically within, certainly within two or three degrees.
I just don't believe that.
Now, it could be true.
But to me it doesn't sound believable.
Let's talk about, I'm going to end up talking about the sonic weapon.
Remember the Cuban Embassy and there were people who had apparently real health problems that they say were caused by maybe a sonic weapon used by someone.
Now, I told you in the very start, I said this is a classic mass hysteria and that there are no sonic weapons.
And then it happened again in Canada, in a Canadian embassy.
And again, the reports were, another sonic weapon.
And I told you again, there are no sonic weapons.
It's a mass hysteria.
Today the New York Times, or the other day, reported that they have a recording of this sound which they had suspected might have been the problem.
And it was literally crickets.
Crickets. And now they're still saying, we still think it was a sonic weapon, but the thing we recorded that we were, you know, there was a strong suspicion that was the sound that was causing the problems was a cricket.
It was a cricket. And here's my follow-up prediction.
The follow-up prediction is that the news industry will slowly walk back The idea that it was a sonic weapon.
And there are several in-between stages until they get to the point where historians will say, okay, it looks like it was a mass hysteria.
In between that, there are going to be stories like the one I just mentioned, where they say, well, there were also coincidentally some crickets, but the crickets happened at around the same time as the sonic weapon.
And by the way, we've measured all these people and we found that they had real, identifiable, physical changes in the brain and real health problems with their inner ears and stuff.
Now here's what I ask you.
If you took a hundred people chosen randomly and you told that hundred people that they may have been victimized by a sonic weapon that could affect their brain and their balance, It was just a random hundred people and nothing like that actually happened.
And you take them to the doctors and you tell the doctors, hey doctor, we suspect there's something abnormal about some of their brains.
We think they've been affected by a sonic weapon.
Do you think you'll find 10% of those hundred people are diagnosed by possibly even more than one doctor as having brain damage That is probably caused by the sonic weapon.
What are the odds you get 10% of them with a positive diagnosis, even if they were just chosen randomly and there was no sonic weapon?
Probably 100%.
I would say the odds that some of them would be diagnosed, you know, incorrectly as having some brain abnormality, because we all have different brains, right?
Probably 10% of them at least.
Would look like they had actual sonic weapon damage.
So this could not be more identical to a mass hysteria.
It couldn't be more perfect.
And I told you that from day one.
It's like, okay, this has everything about it that is mass hysteria.
And now just watch it play out and you'll see how right I am.
I remind you that when the Vegas shooter first shot and I said, it's not ISIS. And then the news said, it's probably ISIS. And I said, it's not ISIS. And then the news reported that ISIS had taken credit for the Vegas shooter.
And people said, well, what do you say, Scott?
No, you're wrong.
ISIS almost never takes credit for something they didn't do.
And what did I say?
This is the time that they're taking credit for something they didn't do.
It's not ISIS. Time goes by and we find out it definitely was not ISIS. So I'm pretty good at predicting these things ahead of time.
And the Cuban sonic weapon, I probably have never been more confident about a prediction.
It's probably as confident as you'll ever see me about a prediction.
And I've been pretty confident about some predictions.
All right. So the challenge for today on climate science is to show me any evidence that warming has Slowed in the last 17 years, but you can't use satellite data.
You have to use any of the other measuring mechanisms because the satellite is limited.
All right. Never been more wrong on this one, you say.
I could be wrong, but I've never been more confident.
I do have a history of being confident and wrong, just like the rest of you.
So, people just keep telling me the temperature, stop doing this.
How about you stop doing this?
Stop simply being a person on internet who tells me the temperature hasn't gone up.
That's useless. If you can't show me a link that goes to NASA or the IPCC or even a skeptic who's a real scientist, if you can't show me that, don't just tell me the temperature didn't go up.
You must have read it in some non-scientific publication.
Why did they make a satellite device that doesn't correctly measure the temperature?
I would guess because that's not possible.
I'm surprised that a satellite can measure the upper troposphere or the lower troposphere or whichever troposphere they're measuring.
I think it's the lower. I'm impressed by that.
But making a satellite that can measure the temperature in the ocean would be pretty darn good.
So there's a graph, you say, in the Forbes article I post it.
Don't point me to my own article.
Tell me the source. What was the source of that?
And why is it that Forbes routinely reports stuff like that and it's not in other publications?
You have to ask yourself that too.
Why not use satellite data?
Satellite data, you can Google it yourself, but the satellite measurements have been debunked by the climate scientists.
So they're not ignoring it.
They have a specific reason why it doesn't tell you what you think it does.
What is your link saying the satellite temperature is unreliable?
You could just go to Wikipedia and don't depend on Wikipedia's description.
I know you don't like that as a source, but Wikipedia will point you to the sources that will tell you that.
But Wikipedia is great at collecting links to things that are dependable.
How much would you factor in vested interest?
Well, as I like to say, there's more than one science involved in climate science.
One of those sciences is cognitive science, psychology, etc.
And all of the psychology of it suggests that we shouldn't trust anybody involved on either team.
So if you want to ask me who to believe based on vested interest, you should believe neither side.
Both sides Are pursuing self-interest, and in both cases it should be, according to all we know about science and brains, both sides should be acting irrational, at least to a degree.
So I would say it might be a tie in terms of the irrationality on both sides.
Yeah.
All right.
I will talk to you all later.
I hope there's better news or more interesting news tomorrow.
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