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Jan. 12, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:41
Episode 371 Scott Adams: The FBI, H1B VISAs, Steve King, Terrorist Deprogramming, Climate
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Hey everybody!
I see you.
Come on in here. I see many of you are running for your cups, your mugs, your steins, your chalices, your cups, your containers, your glasses.
And are you filling them with your favorite liquid?
I like coffee. And are you doing it so that you can join me for the simultaneous SIP? I think you are.
And it's time now for the simultaneous SIP. Join me!
All right, you all want to talk about Tulsi Gabbard saying she wants to run for president, but I don't have much to say about that except that Anytime Democrats have a strong woman who's got any kind of ethnic interesting thing going on, that's their strongest package.
Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, those two would be two to watch.
I don't know much else about their politics, but I don't think it matters.
Unfortunately, it doesn't matter.
I don't think their opinions on anything matters.
Certainly not yet.
So, let's talk about some other things then.
Did you all see the story about Steve King?
Let me poll you.
How many of you saw the story about Steve King allegedly saying good things about white supremacists?
So give me a yes or no.
How many saw the story about Steve King?
And what I'm doing here is I'm checking your news silo.
Because this is a story that only exists in one silo.
If you look on Fox News, not there.
If you look on CNN, it's the biggest story.
So we're getting a lot of yeses, a lot of nos.
Looks like about evenly split, maybe?
Perhaps. Some no's, some yes's, yeah.
Alright, so for those of you who have read the news today and you did not see the story about Steve King, you have to ask yourself if you're stuck in a news silo.
Are you not seeing big news?
And I think the answer is you need to sample both sides to get a sense of what the country is saying.
Now, you might say one of those sides is fake news and the other is not, but if you don't sample both sides, you really, you don't have a good sense of the world.
So CNN is reporting that Steve King has been, he said a number of things over the years and then especially something bad that makes all the other things he said over the years sound bad on race.
And what he said recently, I don't have the exact quote, but something like he was saying that he's wondering why it is that, quote, white nationalists and white supremacists are so bad when he sat in classes learning that Western civilization was good.
Something like that.
Now, if you read it, If you read it on its own, it appears to say that he's saying white supremacists are good people.
And I'm not going to read his mind.
So remember, my rule is that if somebody doesn't say it or they don't do something, it doesn't count.
Internal thoughts, generally you should ignore them.
Even if you think you're accurate, it's just not a good world if we go around imagining what other people are thinking and we imagine they're thinking something bad.
However, in this case, he actually said the words.
He said the words, at least in that quote.
Now, here's the question I ask myself.
He has also said that he doesn't support any kind of bigotry, etc.
If he had been stopped at the moment he said that, if somebody had stopped him and said, wait a minute, wait a minute, I know you're talking fast and you kind of blended some things together there.
Did you intentionally mean to say that white supremacy is okay?
If whoever he had been talking to had just stopped him and said, wait, wait, I thought I just heard you say white supremacy is okay?
Would he have said, oh yeah, that's exactly what I meant?
I don't think so. I don't think there's any chance that if they stopped him and said, that's not clear.
What are you saying? Are you saying that you're in favor of white supremacy?
I don't think he would have said, yes, that's what I meant.
And of course, he clarified later, etc., etc.
So I'm going to frame it this way.
Whether or not he was thinking he had meant it, whether he was telling the truth this time and not the truth the other time, I'm not sure it matters in this case.
In this particular case, it was sort of a political error that I don't think is recoverable.
Beyond that, it's almost a death blow for the wall.
In other words, it works so well in the opposition party's narrative that the real reason for a wall is racism.
It just fits so perfectly within that narrative that I almost think it killed the wall.
It almost made the wall impossible.
Steve King may have single-handedly, with the help of CNN and whoever else boosts the story, he may have single-handedly killed the immigration argument.
Trump might have to just give up at this point.
I'm not saying that Trump will give up.
That doesn't seem to be his nature.
But if you're scoring what's a good day for CNN and what's a good day for the president, this is a good day for CNN. I don't know how he could possibly recover from that.
But again, if you're looking for a standard of how to judge people, I would judge them by what they clarify they mean.
I would never judge them by what we thought we heard when they were speaking quickly.
Now, what I think he probably did...
He was talking about white nationalism.
I don't know what he was talking about.
I can't think of actually a good way to explain that.
So I won't try.
But I'm pretty sure it didn't come out exactly the way he wanted it to come out.
But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. Because I think reasonable people are going to look at that and they're going to say, I think he said what he meant to say.
But ask yourself this.
Do you think that a sitting senator?
He's a senator, right? Is he a senator or a representative?
I don't know. But whatever he is.
Do you think that if somebody said, hey, why don't you go on TV and tell the country that you're, you know, you like white supremacy?
Representative, congressman.
Do you think...
Do you think that he would have consciously made that decision to say that in public?
And the answer is not a chance.
There isn't the slightest chance that in a conscious way he would say those words in public, even if he thought they were true.
So whether he didn't believe it, and it was accidental, or he did exactly believe it, In either case, nobody would say those words in public.
They would know that the repercussions would be exactly what they are.
So from that perspective, it's unlikely that it came out the way he would have said it if he had thought about it carefully.
And in so doing, it has created the impression that people know what his inner thoughts are and that they're terrible.
And I don't know what his inner thoughts are, so I don't have an opinion on that.
But I will say, though, it doesn't look recoverable.
It really doesn't.
So, I won't defend him.
Probably somebody's going to take this out of context later and say, cartoonist defends terrible person.
That's not what I'm doing. He probably screwed the GOP harder than they've ever been screwed.
If you were a member of the GOP, you'd want to get rid of that guy as quickly as possible.
So, not helping.
He's not helping. So that's my opinion.
Alright, let's talk about President Trump tweeted that he wanted to make it easier for the H-1B visa immigrants, the people who typically are college educated, I think all of them, and are working in technology especially.
And he wants to even give them, make it simpler to stay, and even give them a path to citizenship.
So this is perfectly timed because it works against the narrative that all he wants to do is keep brown people out of the country.
Now what I'm waiting to see, and it feels like this would be an important data point, and I don't know, I haven't seen it reported yet.
Maybe some of you know. Can anybody tell me what percentage of H-1B visa people are white and how many are non-white?
Because that's sort of important context, isn't it?
Since the discussion about the border has turned into a racist versus non-racist discussion, if the president is promoting H-1B visa improvements so that there are more of them and not fewer of them, what percentage...
I see somebody saying 80% are Asian, Indian, but I don't...
Is that true?
Because there must be a lot of Europeans in that mix, right?
90% from India, blah, blah, blah.
All right, so all I would ask is that our news sources, since they have decided to frame this as a race-related discussion, the entire immigration thing, President Trump has said from the beginning, no, it's not about race.
We want as many productive people as we can get, and we want as few unproductive people, and that's the only criteria.
Now, if that's true, And the H-1B visa is consistent with those past statements.
That's big news. Because it would work very much against the idea that we're trying to keep out people because of ethnicity or skin color.
And it would work perfectly within the theory that he wanted smarter, capable, productive people who were adding to the country.
Now, remember I've told you many, many times that the way you can judge your worldview, I've said that we're living in different movies, and we can live in different movies because confirmation bias will make it seem as though everything that's happening is just exactly consistent with our completely different movies.
And you've seen that in real time.
But I've said that the way to test your worldview is with prediction.
So if one worldview predicts accurately what will happen and the other worldview predicts incorrectly what will happen consistently, that should tell you something.
The worldview that says that the president is concerned about national security and immigration and crime and that it's not racist Would have predicted and did predict that he would be trying to improve the number of ethnic groups coming into the country as long as they were in the qualified group.
So his statement about the H-1B visas is completely consistent with the movie that says, no, he's being misinterpreted.
This is just normal immigration control.
Normal looking out for the country.
It's about qualifications.
It's about making sure that we know who's coming in.
It's about making sure that they add to the country and not subtract.
So that movie is completely consistent with him saying, hey, yeah, let's make the H-1B visa process better and even give them a road to citizenship.
Completely an unnecessary step, right?
But the other movie This is completely inconsistent because how can you explain that he would want more of the people that your entire point of view depends on him not wanting?
So they've got a problem explaining their worldview.
They have pivoted to this very convenient Steve King thing because the Steve King thing fits perfectly in their worldview.
Now, the other movie, where the president is not operating on a race basis, but on an immigration basis, has to explain why they can tolerate Steve King.
So, that's a problem now.
Now, of course, it's typical for the president to just support everybody who's Republican, no matter what the hell they're doing, because it's just political convenience to have as many Republicans as on your side.
In this case, he's got a real problem.
So, this Steve King thing is a problem for the president.
You probably, you may never even, you might not even see it reported on the conservative news sites.
I wonder if they'll even talk about it today.
But it's going to be the big news on CNN and it will be a big problem.
All right. What are the other topics we want to talk about?
Just got Hawk Newsome wrong.
Did I get them wrong? No.
I have a difference in strategy.
My differences with Hawk Newsom were on strategy.
And his strategy that he preferred, which is to make it about race, was just not one I could be associated with.
So, if your strategy is race-based, that's racism.
All right. Yeah, I saw Beto O'Rourke.
Apparently, did he live stream or did he just take photos?
But anyway, he was doing social media while he was getting his teeth cleaned.
So he had his mouth open and there was a picture of his face with his mouth open.
And I thought to myself, Alright, when RPOS did her livestream where she was cooking, that was innovative and clever and fun.
But then Beto took something that was innovative and clever and fun and he took it to the dental office and showed his teeth.
That's a little too personal.
Thank you, but we'd like less of that.
Let's give us a lot less of that.
So I don't think Beto has quite the instinct.
Doesn't quite have the instinct for this.
Now let's talk about, I think I had at least, oh yeah.
Let me ask you this.
So we keep hearing about, there are two stories that we keep hearing about, and it's funny how they come together.
One story, of course, is that terrorists are getting radicalized on the internet.
Some would say they're self-radicalizing, meaning they're going to the internet and reading all the wrong things and it radicalizes them.
And some are saying that they're being radicalized by people on the internet.
But in both cases, let me ask you this.
Can the social media companies identify somebody who's looking around for radical stuff?
And the answer has to be yes, wouldn't you think?
Don't you think that our social media companies, and therefore the CIA and the FBI, don't you think that they can identify people who are in the beginning stages of radicalization or self-radicalization?
Now, the only way that they couldn't do that is if all that's going on behind some kind of weird, encrypted situation, but I don't think that exists, does it?
I mean, if you're trying to self-radicalize, you're probably leaving a pretty big footprint.
Now, here's the problem.
We can't go arresting people just because they googled the wrong stuff.
Because I will tell you that I've googled the wrong stuff.
I've certainly tried to find some ISIS stuff online once in a while just because I'm trying to figure out what's going on.
So you wouldn't want people to get in trouble in the real world.
For essentially a thought crime.
Somebody just googling a topic.
Even if the topic might radicalize them.
You wouldn't want to have that risk.
But. But.
Don't we also believe that the social media companies can change our opinions by what they feed us?
Is it not in evidence That advertising works?
Is it not an evidence that the ratio of stuff that you consume makes a difference?
If you see more of this and less of this, it'll make a difference.
So we know that the social media companies can effectively program people.
We know, for example, that if you watch CNN, you will come to hate the president.
If you watch Fox News only, you'll come to think he's doing a great job.
So we know, without any question, That our media can, I'm going to say brainwash us, and that we're all being brainwashed all the time and quite effectively.
Now we have some choice about which silo of information we watch, so we can self-radicalize as CNN watchers, or we can self-radicalize as Fox News watchers.
But here's my question.
Let's put those two things together.
People are self-radicalizing to do bad things.
They might become terrorists. At the same time, our social media can totally identify those people by their behavior and can program those people any way that we want.
Are we And if we're not, why not?
Are we not intentionally sending messages to the people who are trying to self radicalize to simply brainwash them back to harmlessness?
And if we're not doing that, why not?
It seems to me That we have the technology.
We could test it.
There are ways that you could test your messages.
You could even test it with, if you're the government, you could put all kinds of resources into the test, right?
You could take people who are, let's say, you've identified as potentially radicals.
You can put some brain scans on them.
You can send them different messages.
You can see which part of the brain lights up.
You could probably find out through a rigorous process of testing that some messages will effectively de-radicalize somebody who's trying to self-radicalize or they're getting radicalized for ISIS or whatever.
So it seems to me That artificial intelligence, plus the impact of social media and how it can send selected messages and test them, should be able to deprogram somebody from terrorism before they get too far into it.
Now, can anybody tell me that's not technically possible?
Or even impractical?
It's not too expensive.
It's not technically impossible, it's not expensive, and I don't see any downside.
Somebody's saying it's unethical, but keep in mind that we're all being brainwashed and manipulated all the time by all of our media sources and by the government.
So we live in a world in which you don't have a choice of being unhypnotized.
Nobody has a choice of being the one who is not being manipulated.
You don't get the option of being the person who's not being brainwashed.
Nobody gets that choice.
We're way past the point Where there are some people being hypnotized and brainwashed and some people are not.
We don't live in that world. We're all being brainwashed consistently all day long by different forces and for different reasons and with different levels of intensity and different levels of effectiveness.
But it's all happening and to all of us all the time.
I don't see why.
We couldn't use the same technology to make sure that if anybody gets a toe into the ISIS messaging that they are then immediately surrounded with everything from advertisements to images to story choices to things that come up in the top of their search until everything else they see Works against the messages that ISIS is giving them.
Now you'd have to do a lot of testing to find out the most effective anti-terrorist messaging, but that's all really doable.
It's the stuff we can do most easily.
So I just put that out there.
Now I want to give you the most fun idea that I've had recently.
Are you ready? Here's the most fun idea I've had recently.
I believe that there is a theoretical number of dogs that could solve immigration.
Dogs. There is a theoretical number of dogs we could train to not need a border wall.
Now, I'm not saying that you train the dogs to hurt people.
In fact, you should train them the opposite.
They should actually stay away from people.
But imagine that you beef up the number of sniffing dogs.
Alright, so you've got lots of sniffers.
So that's the first thing.
I'm sure there's some kind of shortage of trained dogs.
The second is, would it be possible just to have lots of dogs who sort of live but are taken care of, they're trained dogs, who just sort of live on the border and look for people.
And if they see people, they bark, you know, that's all.
They just see people and they bark and then they point at the people.
They've got a sensor and a GPS on their neck.
So you're sitting back in the home office and a dog barks.
Its bark collar activates because it knows the dog is barking.
It knows which direction the dog is looking.
And then suddenly you've got a couple of other dogs in the area and they're barking in the same direction.
And you've triangulated a human being who's coming across the border.
Now the dogs don't approach them.
The dogs just identify, bark, and then go on their business because you don't want them to have contact.
You don't want them to try to kill the dog.
You don't want the dog to get in a fight, etc.
Now, I know it's my worst idea possibly that I've ever had.
Oh, somebody's saying robo-dogs.
Yeah, I think it won't be long before literally autonomous robots are patrolling the border areas.
I'm not sure that that's kinder and gentler than border collies.
Somebody said border collies.
Nicely done.
All right. Let's talk about climate science.
I will do this at the end of my podcast so that people who are tired of this topic don't need to watch it.
Now, for those of you who are new, you know that I don't have a take on climate science in terms of, you know, which side I'm on.
I'm on this fence and I'm doing a deep dive while you watch.
To see my experience as I'm figuring out what is a conspiracy theory, what is ridiculous, what is reliable.
And I'm taking on, you know, there are probably 25 different topics.
I'm trying to take them on one at a time and see where we get.
One of the interesting things that came out of this was somebody sent a study that said that the people who are most likely to doubt climate science are white males.
And I thought to myself, well, that's kind of racist, even if it's true.
And then in the same article it said, and it was sent to me as sort of a mocking thing to say, hey, isn't it a coincidence that it's only the white males who are opposing this?
And in the same article they sent, it said in another paragraph that the more people knew about climate science within this group, so I think it's just the white males, but it said that the more they reported that they knew about climate science, the less they believed it.
And I thought about that and I thought, huh, I wonder if you could reproduce that.
Wouldn't you love to see a test where you have people self-report, because this was based on self-reporting.
Imagine if you had a test where people self-reported how much they know about climate change.
And then after that, you educate them.
So you just give them a lot of information.
You tell them the skeptical argument.
You tell them what the scientists say to debunk the skeptical argument.
And a little back and forth.
And you just give them as much as you can of the better skeptical arguments along with the most solid and well-represented scientific consensus arguments.
And then you test them at the end.
And you ask, are you more convinced that climate change is a problem and caused by humans, or less?
Which way do you think that would go?
Do you think that people who went through this education process would be like this one study found that the more they knew, the more skeptical they were?
Or would it be the opposite?
The more they knew, the more convinced they would be that the scientists got it right.
Which way would it go? And would it be the same for every demographic group?
In other words, if you're an older person, would you come to the same conclusion as if you were younger?
I don't know. I'm going to get rid of the people who say, stop talking about climate change.
Blocked. Alright, I'm telling you in advance that I'm going to talk about climate change for a long time.
It'll be at the end of the Periscopes.
If your comment is that it's boring, I'm going to block you because you have the option of just not watching.
I'm not going to change the content for a few of you who are telling me it's boring.
You're not welcome, if that's your point.
Let's face it. It is literally the biggest problem in the world.
Or not. Don't you want to know the answer?
Self-reporting is not reliable.
Yeah, so somebody said a self-reporting about how much you know about climate science is not reliable, and you are exactly correct, which is why I'm wondering if you could reproduce it in a way that was a little bit more reliable.
So you give somebody a test, maybe test them to see how much they know, and then test them afterwards.
Now, here's the next topic I've gotten to.
So I've been drilling down on all of the various skeptical charges.
I'll tell you the ones I've rejected.
I've rejected ClimateGate as being a good skeptical argument.
It's just stuff taken out of context.
It's just people talking in a casual way.
I give it no credibility.
Now again, remember, when I talk about this topic, I'm talking about what is persuasive and what looks credible to me, a non-scientist, who has a legitimate concern and wants to understand the topic.
I'm not a scientist.
I'm a citizen trying to understand it because it's important.
So if I say something is credible, that doesn't mean it's true.
It just means that it's the winning argument in my mind at the moment.
So at the moment, I would reject that.
I would also reject changes in the sun.
People say, oh, it's the sun, it's the sun.
I reject that having looked at both arguments because it is sort of crazy To think that the scientists hadn't considered the sun.
So the skeptics who say, oh my god, you've got it all wrong, it's just the sun, is absurd and ridiculous on the surface.
You have this enormous industry of people who are studying the climate, and the idea is they hadn't figured out that the sun makes a difference, and that the differences in the sun's cycles and stuff.
Indeed, if you look at a little bit of the climate science, you will see that they have calculated in the sun, they have rejected it as the explanation for the past, and then it comes into this next story.
How many of you have seen the famous skeptical chart of the ancient history, not the last hundred years, but the last many millions of years, And where it shows that the graph for CO2 doesn't match the temperature.
And therefore, if in the past CO2 and temperature were not aligned, it's probably not true today either.
How many of you have seen that skeptical chart and therefore concluded, as I did the first time I saw it, was like, whoa, is this true?
Right? That skeptical chart is a fraud.
And apparently it is one of the most persuasive frauds in this topic.
Here's why it's a fraud.
Do you know what the skeptics left out from their chart that shows the CO2 and temperature are not aligned?
What did they leave out?
The Sun That's right.
If you calculate in sun, and what we know the sun was doing then, apparently the sun was less bright, 4% less bright than some millions of years ago, and now it's getting slightly brighter.
If you calculate that in, CO2 and temperature are in lockstep.
So if you have been convinced that CO2 can't be the reason, because you say there's that old chart where CO2 and temperature don't match up, Then you are forgetting about the sun.
Because once the sun is put in, they match.
So I debunk that claim.
And I would say that's a pretty strong debunk, but everything I say should be judged as preliminary.
Let's see. What are the other things we've debunked so far?
Yeah, so...
So the question is not that the Sun matters or doesn't matter.
That's the wrong question. The climate scientists say the Sun definitely matters and that when you calculate in the Sun's impact today and in the past, it does conform with their climate theories.
So the scientists are not ignoring the Sun.
They absolutely have to include it or else their theory doesn't work.
So the skeptics saying, you're forgetting about the Sun.
They're the worst skeptics, because that's the opposite of what's happening.
They're very much including the sun.
So the remaining things which I have skepticism on are whether we're accurately measuring the temperature and accurately measuring sea level and, let's say, ice.
And the other argument that is the worst skeptical argument goes like this.
The climate is always changing.
Therefore, the climate is still changing.
That's the worst argument.
Why? Because the climate scientists are not making the argument that the climate is changing.
That part everyone agrees on.
The skeptics agree, the scientists agree.
The experts are saying it's changing at an increasing rate, and when you control for all the other variables we know to control, CO2 seems to be the one that's matching the line.
So that's the argument.
It is not a rebuttal to say that the climate always changes.
The rebuttal would be, does it always change, has it ever changed at this rate before?
Because if that's the case, then you've got a problem with the theory.
As I said before, I think it was, which skeptic?
Linzen? Richard Linzen?
Who shows the official climate scientist graph and says, if you're worried about the rate going up, here on the same graph, you can see that it went up the same rate before.
Now, I haven't seen that skeptical claim debunked, so if anybody can give me a debunk to that very specific point, I'd like to see it.
So here's the debunk, that Linzen is using the official climate scientist data, which they would agree is the correct data.
He's saying that you can't say that the rate is what's important because you can see on your own graph there's another point earlier in the century, I guess, when the rate went up as quickly.
Let's see a debunk to that.
The other thing that I'm looking into is the idea that CO2 actually has the impact on the environment that the science assumes.
So science says, some version of this, this is the non-scientist version, that the CO2 in the atmosphere will cause more cloud formation and then the cloud formation will cause the warming.
Or something like that. That's close enough for non-scientists.
Other skeptical scientists say that that has never been demonstrated.
To which I say, what?
That must be the most easy thing to demonstrate.
And the experts will say, yes, we can demonstrate in the lab anytime we want that putting CO2 in a box and adding air, adding heat warms up the box.
The skeptics say, but Earth is not a box.
Earth is an open system where heat radiates out into the universe.
Now the CO2 and the cloud cover that are sort of linked with CO2, those things become a semi-insulator, but still a lot of heat gets out.
But the semi-insulation would be enough to warm up the Earth.
Now, there's actually debate on whether that, the most basic mechanism, is even true.
So I think Happer, he's a famous skeptic, says that from a physics standpoint, it's just not true.
I'm sort of digging into that a little bit.
I want to see the argument on both sides.
The part that I'm having trouble believing Is that we can model what's happening with the clouds, because apparently there are certain types of clouds which will make it warmer than other clouds.
And I'm thinking to myself, can we really model the Earth well enough that we know what type of cloud and what height 80 years into the future and how all this is working?
And I say to myself, on the surface, That doesn't sound like a credible claim, that we have the technology to model clouds and oceans and we know what the temperature is at the bottom of the ocean, etc.
So it would be hard to convince me that we can do that with the precision that we need.
But that's the story.
So I'm digging down.
I'm still on the fence. But I will say, let me tell you this, I will say that the critics The skeptical arguments about climate change They seem, in some ways, just as bad as the climate scientist claims.
From what I can tell, or let me put it in another way, there are some claims that both the skeptics and the scientists make that are a bit impenetrable to me.
In other words, there are things that, as a non-scientist who isn't studying the topic and doesn't know all the related things, it'd be hard for me to know what's true and what isn't.
But yet, both the skeptics and the scientists make lots of claims that are somewhat easy to have an opinion on, even if you're wrong, that look like BS. So it looks to me like both groups have a lot of BS in the way they're presenting their material.
So that's why I'm on the fence.
I would say neither group is reliable at this point.
Completely reliable.
Both groups have some good points, but neither group is completely reliable at this point.
All right.
Yeah, I don't think I'll write a book on this topic, but I'm going to have a chapter in which I talk about how we think about it.
So I'm more interested in how we think about climate science than I am, well, I'm also interested in the answer, of course.
The alarmists have to make the case.
Well, they have. The alarmists have made their case, and they won.
The dominant opinion in the country is that climate change is real, right?
They had a problem.
So they made their case and they won.
The skeptical arguments that you call bad were addressing specific stupid points made by alarmists.
Well, that's a general statement.
If you have something specific, I'll listen to it.
Yeah, so being skeptical about what's going to happen in the next 80 years is quite reasonable.
But questioning whether or not we can see this warming...
The worst argument from the climate scientist's perspective is that we have these models and they've worked in the past and we're pretty sure they'll work in the future.
That argument It is largely nonsense because it follows the scam pattern of having lots of models.
Some of them are going to fit the future because you have lots of models and so of course something's going to fit.
And they've also also been adjusted to the past and tweaked as much as they can until they fit the past.
So the claim about the models is completely not incredible.
So I have a preliminary conclusion that the climate scientists' models are far more bullshit than science.
That's different from saying they're wrong, because their main case seems to be supportable without any models at all.
And the main case is that it appears things in the last hundred years have warmed up at a rate that can't be explained by any other variable we can isolate.
That's a pretty strong claim.
And I would say that the climate scientists have the stronger argument about the basic thing, which is, hey, you better watch out.
If it keeps going up like this, we're in trouble.
That's all I need to hear.
As soon as you throw that model in there, I've given up all credibility in the argument.
But the basic argument seems pretty solid.
It's called water vapor.
Now, how many of you are aware that the clouds are, at least in some part, caused by CO2? So those of you who say, it's the clouds, you idiot, or it's the water vapor you idiot, do you not know that the argument is that the clouds and the water vapor are being influenced by the CO2? So if you keep saying, alright, so here's the dumbest skeptical argument, and you're seeing a lot of people saying it right now.
And I hate to call it dumb, but there's no other way to put it.
To just say it's the clouds and the water vapor is simply dumb.
Because the argument that you're arguing against is that it's the clouds and the water vapor.
So let me say this again.
The scientists are saying the CO2 is influencing the water in the air.
That's the whole point.
That's the whole point.
They're saying CO2 is influencing how much water is in the air, and that's what's changing the warming.
If your argument is, it's the water vapor, it's the clouds, you are agreeing with the scientists.
If you can't go to the next point which says the CO2 does not cause water vapor to change, which I think you would be disagreeing with literally everyone in science ever, if you can't get to that point, you shouldn't talk in public about climate science.
All right. Somebody says clouds are a negative feedback versus a positive feedback, and what that means is that somebody's saying that the clouds would cause more cooling than warming.
The problem is that some types of clouds cause some warming, some types of clouds, and I think it has to do with the height of the cloud, cause some cooling, and that we may not be able to model that.
Now that's a fair point.
If your point is we can't model The difference is in the clouds.
I would say, well, you're on strong territory there.
You might be right, you might be wrong, but at least that's a fair thing to say.
If the only depth you can go to in this argument is to say, it's not CO2, it's clouds, then you don't even understand the argument, which is CO2 is affecting the clouds, which is causing the warming.
Alarmists haven't shown that CO2 affects clouds.
I would say that claim is the one I'm going to drill down onto.
Alright, so somebody said here that the scientists have not demonstrated that CO2 actually does even change clouds at all.
My assumption without digging down is that that's probably a ridiculous skeptical claim.
I would think, and again I haven't looked into the next level of argument, But if I had to guess, you know, gun to head, have scientists figured out that CO2 can change cloud cover in any way, I'm going to say that that's probably close to 100% likely.
But the skeptics are very strong in saying, no, that impact hasn't been made.
So I'm going to listen to the argument, and I invite somebody to send me a refutation of that to show me that there's no impact on clouds from CO2, and then I'll look for the scientific argument against that.
But that's the next thing to look at, all right?
So that's what I'll look at next. Can you block everyone saying clouds?
Maybe I will. Because we've ruled that out.
At some point, I'm going to make a list of all the things I've ruled out.
I may not ever get to the full story here.
Oh, yeah, somebody's asked me to talk about the FBI. So the New York Times has a new story that says the FBI opened the investigation in part because Trump made that joke during the debates about, hey, Russia, if you have those Hillary's emails.
I don't know that there's anything new in this story.
It just feels like they're finding any excuse to just regurgitate more Russia collusion story.
So it feels like a big nothing.
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