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Jan. 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
44:54
Episode 367 Scott Adams: President Trump’s Speech, Pelosi and Schumer’s Taxidermist, More
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Hey everybody, come on in here.
Tyler, good to see you.
Brian, Dan, Trey.
It's all guys today. Oh, no, Yvonne.
Okay. Lexa, Angel.
Alright, we've got a good mix in here.
Wow, look at those numbers piling up.
Oh, here's something interesting.
You may know that Patreon's having some problems because they kicked someone off for free speech reasons, at least that's the argument.
So my Patreon donations, of course, plummeted because the people who would have normally donated to me got off the platform for other reasons.
And then my other source of income related to these, Periscopes.
In both cases, it's very small.
It's not significant.
But I got my statement for the superhearts.
So that's where you can do a superheart on Periscope and pay me a dollar or something for the presentations.
And they plunged, I think, 90% last month.
Now here's what I ask you.
Do you think 90% fewer people hit the super hearts in the most recent month?
Maybe. I mean, it's possible.
But we live in a world where you can't trust anything anymore, can you?
In a simpler time, I would have just said, oh, it was the holidays, so the numbers are smaller, or something like that.
But now you see anything that's out of place, and your brain automatically goes to, I think it's a conspiracy.
I think they're after me.
So just to be clear, I have no reason to believe I've been targeted, at least in this particular sense.
I've been targeted before, obviously, but it does make me question it.
All right, looks like everybody's here and that means it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, grab your cup, your mug, your glass, your Your container, your tankard, your stein, your chalice, if you will.
Raise it to your lips and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Oh yeah. Well, I hope all of you by now either watched live or have seen the clips of the President's address to the public from the Oval Office, not the Oval Office, whatever, yeah, Oval Office.
And I hope that you saw the response.
Now, I wanted to jump in last night and give my response, but everybody was doing that, so I waited until the morning, wanted to process a little bit.
One of the things I like to do is to try to avoid my first impression and see how I feel, you know, a few hours later.
Let things sort of sink in.
Because your first impression, everything is sort of equal because it's fresh.
But over time, the weaker impressions fade, and then you're left with just a few dominant themes.
So until my brain has done that natural process of forgetting things that for whatever reason did not make a mark, and then the few things emerge, then I can tell what are the dominant themes, because they're the ones that last.
So I don't know if I've waited long enough, but it feels like it.
So here are the dominant themes which have lasted.
Number one, our government is broken.
I'm sure I'm not the first person who ever said that.
I may be the 300 millionth person to say that.
But rarely have you ever seen a demonstration of such dysfunction Just laid out in front of you.
It was as if the government had said, hey people, we want to show you how dysfunctional the government is.
So we're gonna have everybody come out and give you a demonstration of why nothing works.
Now, I have a different opinion of why nothing works.
And of course, throughout the ages, everybody complains about the government and it's always been a complaint that the government is corrupt or incompetent.
So in a sense, there's nothing new about the complaints.
But I do think that the base reason for why things are not working may have changed.
And here's what I'm seeing.
It seems to me that the business model of the press Trying to get you to click on things that get you excited and catch your hair on fire, which was not the business model of the press in the past.
In the past, the business of the news was to give you something like the news.
Today, it's about getting you to click stuff, getting your attention, and that requires a kind of a spin on the news to hyper- You know, hyper excited to catch your hair on fire.
And in those worlds, of course, the news media is divided in two.
So you've got your left media and your right media, and they're very different versions of the world.
So in that world, the politicians end up, you know, lining up with one of those sides.
And then the news media is sort of pulling the chains.
So in my opinion, The reason the government doesn't work is because the press is broken.
I don't know if I've heard that.
I don't think I've heard anybody say it the way I just said it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, because every time I think I said something new, somebody will say, well, that's just what somebody else said the other day, and then I realize that maybe it's more obvious than I thought.
So the idea here is that the government can't work if the press doesn't work.
And in that world, President Trump's criticism of the press is entirely legitimate, it seems.
And the press, who is it that told you that the president should not criticize the press?
Just think about this question for a moment.
Who told you that it's wrong for a president To criticize the press.
Who told you that?
The press.
The press told you that it's illegitimate for the president who they've been hammering with fake news to criticize the press.
Think about that.
You know, you're saying to yourself, wait a minute, wait, it wasn't really the press.
They just brought people on TV, or they reported on people in written form, and they asked them questions, and those pundits, who do not necessarily work for the press, they did their thing, and the press just reported it.
But that's not what really happened, because the press gets to decide who's on, how much attention they get, what kind of questions you ask.
So the press has pretended That is not the press telling you that the press should not be criticized.
At the same time, the press is doing something so bad to the country that if there are a way to make it illegal, it should happen.
But I don't think there's any way to do that within a First Amendment free speech framework.
I'm going to give you a little bit more of that in a minute, but I want to go back to the main theme, which is how did the government look.
So my main takeaway is that the president looked terrible, the Democratic response looked terrible.
I thought that both sides looked weak, incompetent, bored, and old.
That's what I got.
Weak, incompetent, bored, and old.
Both sides, equal.
The president looked like he was phoning it in.
I don't want to be cruel, and I don't love to talk about physical looks, but you can't really ignore it.
Because we're human beings, we're visual creatures, and the way things look just makes a big difference.
It's the reason that doing an address from the Oval Office has more power than doing it from somewhere else, because of the look.
We're visual creatures.
And I'm haunted by the picture.
Of Schumer and Pelosi standing there like the taxidermist had been, you know, I have in my mind this, I guess because I'm a cartoonist, I imagine these little funny stories that got us to where we are.
And I can see somebody like misdialing and saying, all right, I'm trying to find a makeup artist for Nancy and Schumer.
So Chuck and Nancy, they need a makeup artist.
Click, click, click, click, click. Hello?
I'd like you to come over and fix up Nancy and Chuck, but you've misdialed and you've got the taxidermist instead.
So the taxidermist shows up and puts on this weird makeup.
I mean, literally, Pelosi looked like her makeup had been done by a funeral director.
They didn't even look like human beings.
How in the world can your makeup and your presentation be so bad for two people?
Just think about that.
If something bad happens to one person, let's say one person has bad makeup or one person doesn't look good, you say, well, one person had a bad day.
But when you put Pelosi and Schumer up there, and they literally look like they came out of a wax museum that was, you know, its first day, and they hadn't figured out how to make good wax people.
I mean, I don't know what was wrong with Pelosi's face.
And again, I'm not the guy who makes fun of people's looks.
This is about the politics of it.
This is about the persuasion of it.
It's about how you felt about it.
So I'm not mocking anybody for their looks, because I'm not the guy who can mock people for their looks, right?
Take a look at this stuff.
I got no argument for making fun of other people for their looks, but it's part of the story.
Pelosi and Schumer looked terrible.
I mean, yeah, somebody said political zombies.
Actually, that's great. They did look like political zombies.
They looked like The Walking Dead.
Cadavers. That's exactly it.
And if I'm being fair, the president looked like he wished he had been someplace else.
There was no emotion in it.
It wasn't his words.
He was reading some other speech that obviously he approved of it.
But let's start with the president.
I think the president failed in what should have been the most important thing he needed to do in that speech.
The most important thing he needed to do was depersonalize it.
He needed to make the case that there's no longer much disagreement on the facts.
Now, he tried to make that case, but it fell flat, it was like incomplete, without also making the case that this had become a personal situation about him.
And he could have said, let's find a way to depersonalize this.
Let's just hand it off to the engineers.
Let's form a committee of, let's say, Border Patrol.
And he could have said, hey, Nancy and Chuck, join with me to meet with, wait for it, the committee from Border Patrol.
Border Patrol, yeah.
Let's meet with Border Patrol together and their engineers and see if they can tell us what this should look like to get the job done.
Something like that could move the ball.
But I'm hearing people say, oh, the President really nailed it.
The Democrats didn't do well.
I guarantee you that there are Democrats saying, oh, Nancy and Chuck nailed it, but President Trump did not.
I don't think anybody got persuaded by either side.
I saw nothing persuasive happening either way, except that they persuaded us that the government is completely broken.
Now, what was the biggest stuff they were arguing about?
They were arguing about the definition of the word crisis.
When you voted for your leaders, no matter who you voted for, were you voting for somebody to help you decide what words mean?
Were you voting for somebody to explain to you what the word crisis means so that you could make a decision on politics?
Oh, you'll act this way if we put this word on it, but we'll act a different way if you use a different word?
Why are our politicians helping us with words?
There isn't a freaking person in the country who cares what word you put on this.
Nobody cares about the word.
Stop talking about it.
Now, I realize that if you call it a crisis, you can call it a national emergency.
Maybe that triggers some different things.
But that is so the wrong way to approach a problem.
Approaching a problem by arguing about what the word means?
Come on, that is a broken government.
But again, to my earlier point, if you're just joining us, the government didn't break itself.
The press Changed its business model and its business model requires breaking the government just the way you saw.
The amazing thing and the reason that maybe my faith in government has reached at least a temporary low is that this is a disagreement without a difference.
Everybody agrees that good border control is important.
Democrats, Republicans, everybody agrees.
So you have a disagreement over a complete agreement.
Everybody agrees that we currently have metal barriers on the border and that they were important and they work.
Everybody agrees.
The president is saying, hey, let's get some metal barriers.
Sort of similar to the ones we already have, but maybe improve them a little bit.
Maybe they're taller in some places or whatever.
Complete agreement. And if you're talking about how much it costs, that's not really the problem here, is it?
The problem is not the cost.
The problem is, are we putting the money on something that makes sense?
And since both sides agree on what makes sense, border control makes sense, steel barriers make sense.
The president has already met them in the middle and then they left.
The president came to the middle and then everybody left because he was in the middle.
They couldn't handle the fact That he had done something reasonable.
They didn't know how to deal with it.
There's one part of the Democrats' response that frankly makes me angry every time I hear it.
And that's not true for most political responses, because mostly it's just blah blah blah blah.
But when the Democrats chided the President for saying that Mexico would pay for the wall, That's not the problem today, is it?
That is not the problem.
The Democrats have not ever held the position that you should not improve the border unless Mexico pays for it.
And in fact, that's the way I would turn it around.
Schumer and Pelosi have actually stood in front of the nation and said they don't want to improve the border unless Mexico pays for it.
That's kind of what they said.
Trump said he would get Mexico to pay for it, but if you can't make that happen right away, he wants us to pay for it because it's a priority.
The president's position is completely sensible.
First choice, see if you can get Mexico to pay for it.
If you can't, it's still important, then you pay for it and maybe you figure out later how you can make them pay for it directly or indirectly.
But the president's path makes complete sense with what he said in the past, makes complete sense now.
First choice, Mexico pays for it.
But we don't have a current way to do that.
So let's get it done.
Maybe they can pay for it later.
Maybe we can figure that out.
Maybe we can't. It doesn't matter because we still need it.
The Pelosi-Schumer approach is that they don't want to improve the border apparently because Mexico won't pay for it.
That makes me mad, because it's not even a good political attack.
It's the clearest signal that this is just about mocking the president.
When they bring up the Mexico paying for the wall thing, all they're doing is personalizing it.
And they're showing us that they can't do their jobs because we didn't hire them to mock the president because it feels good or it makes their people feel good.
It's just not doing their job, period.
All right. I wanted to teach you how CNN creates news out of nothing, and I'll read you from my tweets just before I got on.
I was tweeting an article by S.E. Cupps, commentator on CNN, and Here's something she actually said in an opinion piece today.
She said, and this is a quote from S.C. Cupps, she said, but for any of what Trump said to resonate, in other words, for you to believe what Trump said, you'd have to pretend you don't know what he really thinks.
Mind reading. Her entire opinion, and apparently that of CNN, because they seem to talk the same way, is that they can literally read his mind.
And that they're going to ignore what he does and what he proposes in favor of what they think he secretly thinks.
Really? This is the media being broken.
And I wanted to teach you how CNN comes up with their news.
Shall I go to the whiteboard?
Yes, I shall. So I noticed that on slow news days or when CNN just wants to hammer on the president, they have a number of techniques which they use for newsmaking.
One is read Trump's mind.
How many stories have you heard on CNN? That goes something like this.
The president is apoplectic.
The president is very worried.
The president cares mostly about.
They have lots of language to do it.
But in every case, they are telling us that they can discern his inner thoughts.
And when his inner thoughts are in conflict with what he's doing, they prefer his inner thoughts.
Take, for example, Take, for example, their inner thoughts about how he feels about immigrants coming across the border.
Here we have a policy which is in complete agreement with past and current Democrat philosophy, that you need to reinforce the border.
He's come down from as Mexico pays for it, he's come down from it has to be a big concrete wall, to exactly where they are.
Exactly what the Democrats wanted.
They wanted to spend money to improve the border.
No matter who was president, no matter who was president, the Democrats were going to spend money voluntarily to improve the border using probably steel structures.
But here's the reason they won't do it.
They won't do it because they have read the president's mind and they've determined that his intention, his intention is racist.
So in other words, his proposal to do exactly what Democrats want to do, improve the border using steel structures, if they had done it, it would be moral because in fact they've done it many times and nobody is complaining that it's immoral when it has been done in the past.
But now it's immoral, not because a steel structure is bad by itself, not because protecting the border is bad.
Nobody makes that argument.
Nobody serious makes that argument.
Instead, the entire argument is based on their thoughts about the president's inner intentions, which are not in evidence.
Except that they've read the tea leaves, so they think they can read his mind.
All right, here's another way that they manufacture news.
I always laugh when they bring commentator David Gergen on.
Have you ever seen him on CNN? They bring Gergen on whenever they need to have somebody give them attitude.
So if there's no new news, they bring him on and I will do a Dale impression of him.
The president, he always looks beaten down, doesn't he?
He looks like he's exhausted by all the badness.
The badness has me exhausted.
This president, he's doing things that we've never seen in the past.
Oh, the things he's doing.
It's just beyond the pale.
It's beyond the pale.
It's non-standard.
It's non-standard.
It's something we've never seen before.
It's unprecedented.
It's unprecedented. And he can talk for an hour without saying a damn thing.
It's just like this pure attitude play about how the world used to be better, and maybe it will come apart, and perhaps we should be worried in some vague way about a trend that will continue, but we could read people's minds and look into the future, and possibly something will go wrong, but I'm certainly beaten down, and man, do I have an attitude about it, but the only thing I know for sure?
It's President Trump's fault.
That's how you make news out of nothing.
The other way they make news is if President Trump has a good day, they break the glass and take Paul Manafort out.
They go, geez, he's got a good day.
The president may be coming out a little bit ahead here.
Get Manafort! Get Manafort!
Manafort! Manafort!
Manafort! Manafort! Look at him!
Look at Manafort! Manafort!
Manafort! Manafort! So, you see they're whipping Manafort again today because he talked to yet another Russian.
What is the one thing we know about every single Russian?
There's one fact that we know about every Russian.
They are associated with Russian intelligence.
Can you show me one frickin' Russian who is not associated with Russian intelligence?
When was the last time you saw a news story about a Russian who was not associated with Russian intelligence?
They all seem to know somebody who knows somebody at least.
They're all associated with Russian intelligence.
And by the way, this Manafort guy might actually be associated with Russian intelligence.
I'm not even telling you it's false.
I'm just saying that it's kind of a coincidence that every Russian we hear about is associated with Russian intelligence.
Some of them probably don't have their phone number.
Alright, so whip Manafort some more.
Whatever comes out of that is likely to be more about Manafort than about anybody else.
Then, of course, there's the Charlottesville hoax.
Whenever they need to, you know, whip up opinion, they pretend that the president literally said that the neo-Nazis marching and saying anti-Semitic things, that he said they were fine people.
No, of course, that is fake news.
What the president said was that there were people on both sides of the statute debate and that there were some good people on both sides of the debate.
The media only turned that into, I think he just praised Nazis.
No, that didn't happen.
He said the statue debate had good people on both sides.
CNN reports it as fact.
The racist piece of shit, yes, RPOS, racist piece of shit, tweeted it herself as her number one reason That the president is a racist.
Her number one reason is fake news.
Not only is it fake news, it's really obvious fake news.
Now, I'm going to tell you something that I probably shouldn't tell you.
I have had a private conversation with somebody at CNN, I will leave that name out of it, in which I have explained that this Charlottesville thing is fake news.
So, and let's just say it's somebody at CNN who's high enough up that their opinion would have some influence.
Yeah, I'm not going to tell you who it is.
But I know the opinion has reached them.
They've at least heard that this is fake news, and once you hear it, it's kind of obvious it's fake news.
Because the alternative is that the President of the United States was praising people who wanted to deport his own daughter for being Jewish.
That didn't happen. Or they imagined that the President of the United States thought it would be a good idea to praise neo-Nazis who are literally chanting anti-Semitic things, and that he's also the guy who's Israel's best friend, and he's also the guy who moved the embassy to Jerusalem.
I mean, none of this makes sense.
There's no way in the world.
Yeah, his grandchildren are Jewish.
Obviously, he's close with Jared.
None of it makes sense.
And yet they still report it.
And it wouldn't matter if it were just an ordinary story.
If it were just a small, ordinary story, you'd say, well, they got that one wrong.
Big deal. But it's the number one reason they used to condemn him.
The number one reason. And it's completely made up.
The other thing that they do to make news is argue that the percent of whatever the story is matters more than the absolute number.
So, for example, they say, yes, immigration brings crime into the country, but it brings it in at a lower rate than the crime rate among the locals.
So the people who are already here Have a higher crime rate than the people who come in if you include both the illegal and legal immigrants, I believe.
Now, that might be true.
And in fact, it seems to me likely to be true because in my experience, the people who are undocumented don't want to get in any trouble.
They don't want to get a speeding ticket.
You know, they don't want to get deported.
So it does make sense that they would be unusually law-abiding.
And in fact, the vast majority of them came here just to work.
They didn't come here for crime.
So I completely believe And of course, in a world of fake news, you can never know what's true.
But it makes complete sense to me that the entire population of undocumented folks in this country probably have a lower crime rate and maybe even a lower violence rate.
But does it matter that the percentage of their average is a little bit better than the citizens who are here?
Does that matter?
Let me put it this way.
If you lived in a town, because you know, analogies are great.
If you lived in a town where the crime rate was a little bit below average, not a lot.
Let's say you lived in a town.
Oh, I live in a town. I live in a town where my crime rate is probably, let's say, I'd say my crime rate here is at least 10% below the average for the rest of the country.
Should I then therefore not lock my door?
Because my crime rate is 10% less than everywhere else in the country.
So therefore, according to CNN, if I lock my door, I'm kind of a racist.
Who am I locking my door from?
Why do I think people are going to rob me?
My neighborhood is 10% safer than the rest of the world.
Well, people don't protect themselves based on percentages.
They protect themselves based on whether something might happen.
So, if I'm walking in a neighborhood that's 10% less dangerous than a more dangerous neighborhood, that doesn't make me safe.
So, I think that the CNN types, they like to make sure that their lead message is that they're not trying to discriminate against that group of people.
And I support that.
I do think it's important that every time we have this conversation, and I would say this very strongly, every time we have the conversation about immigrants and crime, it is worth noting Assuming it's true, and I imagine it is true, that their general crime rate is lower than the average.
We should say that every time.
That's a good thing to say.
It's good for everybody, if it's true.
And I assume it is.
But that doesn't make the argument.
The argument is, if you can stop a crime, Why don't you do it?
If you can stop it, you do it.
It doesn't matter if it's lower than the average.
That makes no sense at all.
All right. Let us change the topic a little bit.
I'm going to end a lot of my periscopes talking about climate change, and for those of you who are new, I do not have an opinion on climate change, whether it's real or not real in the sense of being a crisis.
There's that crisis word.
Whether it's dire. So I don't have an opinion on that.
I'm in a process of trying to drill down as much as I can to find out what's real and what isn't.
I have some preliminary conclusions.
Subject to being changed.
For example, the skeptical arguments that say the sun is behind it has been debunked, in my opinion.
The skeptics don't have an argument with the sun because you can just look at the graphs and they're not correlated with temperature.
Say the experts, and I think they're probably right about that.
So I've sort of, one by one, I've been picking off these skeptical arguments because I'm trying to get down to the strongest skeptical argument.
So I don't want to waste time debating a climate scientist about stuff that's just ridiculous.
So the sun is behind it, theory is just ridiculous.
There are a number of other ridiculous theories.
But one that is the most outrageous claim, I haven't seen the argument against.
So again, this is not my argument.
I'm telling you I've only seen one side and I'd like to see the counter argument.
And this is a surprisingly robust Claim by the skeptics.
And when I say surprisingly robust, I mean only until somebody tells me the other argument.
And it's weird that it's missing.
It's weird that it isn't obvious to me what the counter argument is.
And the skeptical argument goes like this.
CO2 is not an important greenhouse gas.
It's like the literal opposite of the claim.
So the main claim is that CO2 is the big lever that's moving the temperature.
There are other things moving the temperature, but CO2 at the moment is the main driver.
That's the claim of climate scientists, so much so that the temperature is going up at an increasing rate.
And the skeptics say CO2 isn't even a possibility.
So the skeptics would say that CO2 shouldn't even be in the lineup of possibilities because there isn't any physical, possible, scientific way that CO2 could make a difference to the temperature because it's such a small percentage compared to water vapor, right? And water vapor is the bigger player.
Now, reiterating as many times as I need to, that's not my opinion.
I'm just saying what the skeptical argument is.
Now, what do you do with an argument that just says, There's no evidence that CO2 makes a difference.
Now, I've seen people say, well, it's only a few molecules and of thousands of whatever, but that doesn't convince me because there are lots of cases where a few molecules makes a difference.
If you had a few molecules of fentanyl, it would kill you.
So I'm not persuaded by the fact that it's a small percentage.
Yeah. Try putting 1% fentanyl into your body.
So as a percentage of your total body weight, just figure out what 1% of your total body weight is.
Find out how much fentanyl that is and then inject it.
See if it makes a difference. So analogies are good when they're explaining a new concept.
The new concept is that a little bit of something routinely It can be dangerous.
It's very normal for a small percentage of something to make a big difference.
So the argument that it's a small percentage of something is not an argument.
At least it's not a persuasive one.
The other argument that the skeptics make that doesn't work is that there has been higher CO2 in the past With lower temperatures, and therefore, blah blah.
And I'm not really terribly concerned with what the Earth was millions of years ago, because there were other variables in play, so it just doesn't seem like apples and oranges.
So here's my challenge.
My challenge for today is what is the counter argument to the skeptics who say there is literally no evidence or maybe no proof that CO2 is even a variable.
That it's even a variable that makes a difference.
Now I think everybody, including the skeptics, agreed that adding CO2 adds some heat.
So nobody is arguing that CO2 adds nothing.
The argument is that it's a trivial amount.
And I want to hear the counter-argument to that, which I assume exists.
I'm just waiting for it.
All right.
That's all for now.
Somebody says there's no evidence that evolution is real.
Well, I wouldn't say that.
How are the drums going along?
Pretty well. Pretty well.
I should tell you that I've been taking online drum classes and it's working pretty well for me.
I like the whole process of it.
So yeah, I've got to the point where I can do a beat and I can do a fill and I can have fun playing my drums.
I can't quite do a whole song yet.
So I haven't seen the clip of my interview with David Backman.
Has anybody seen that? Did anybody see that video?
So I did that, was it yesterday?
CO2 is a logarithmic effect.
Exactly. I meant to say that, actually, so thank you for reminding me.
Yes, the argument that slight increases in CO2 should have no impact on the temperature are not persuasive because the argument with CO2 is that you reach a point and every little bit makes a big difference.
So that's the way of saying logarithmic, I guess.
That after you get to a certain base level of CO2, the argument is that every little bit extra makes a bigger difference than the first 10%.
I don't know if that's true, but yeah.
CO2 was 10 times higher in the past.
Again, I reject that argument.
Number one, all of the climate scientists know that what you just said is true and it has no impact on them.
And it's the most famous thing that people say.
Therefore, I'm pretty sure they have a good explanation for that.
But my common sense explanation is that there were so many other things that were likely to be different in the past.
I have to assume that the atmosphere is sort of always changing.
So, I'm not going to buy any argument about what it was like a million years ago.
I'm just not interested in that persuading me.
It never would. No, I'm saying that for me personally, anything beyond modern measurement and modern times, I would say anything before recorded history, Probably wouldn't influence me too much.
So if the only place we saw risk was a million years ago, I don't know if I'd be worried about that.
All right.
The hockey stick.
Blah, blah, blah.
Blah, blah.
Yeah, so here's the thing I've been trying to figure out about the way they measure climate, and I'm trying to figure out I can't tell, I'm getting stuck on the logic of it, but it goes like this.
There are about 10 ways that the climate scientists can measure temperature, some of them better than others.
So tree rings are kind of debatable, whereas, you know, satellites are maybe the higher level and then the direct measurements are here and then, you know, everything from coral to, I don't know, some other natural stuff that they can measure.
And what they'll do is they'll say, okay, we've got this one measurement.
Let's say it's the physical measurements.
And let's say that we've got a gap here because, I don't know, for some reason we changed the way we're using them or we found a problem.
In order to fill in the gap from one of the measurements, they will look for one of the other of the 10 measurements that can fill in the gap.
So they're using each of the 10 ways to measure, measure, to fill in the gaps that the other ways have.
Because they all have, you know, they all have a weakness.
And I'm trying to figure out, okay, does that make perfect sense?
That if you have 10 ways to measure things, if some of them have gaps, you will use the other measurements to fill those in as an estimate.
On some level, My thinking is, yeah, I see why that would make sense.
But here's the other thing I'm thinking.
Doesn't that open it up To a lot of opinion.
In other words, doesn't it take measurement to opinion?
Because you're deciding what things are reasonable proxies for the gaps.
And I'm not entirely sure that's valid.
Well, certainly not as valid as just having a good measurement.
So I don't know how much to trust that.
I imagine it's the sort of thing that if you were working and you were deeply involved in it, maybe you'd have a better opinion.
Anyway. And then somebody just said another myth here.
So one of the myths was that the skeptics say that all of the adjustments are in the direction of making the warming look worse.
The climate scientists will show you the graph of all the adjustments, and you can see that roughly half of them are adjusted down, half are adjusted up, and that they make a good case that that's just not true.
That it's just not true that everything was adjusted in one direction.
So, I will believe the climate scientist on that question of fact.
Alright, that's enough for me.
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