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Jan. 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:38
Episode 377 Scott Adams: How CNN Creates Bad News so They Can Report it
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Joanne, always the first one.
And Irv, Chris, everybody, come on in.
Starting a couple minutes early today because you want to get a jump on the world.
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And I think I know why you're here.
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Ah.
Well, if you're wondering why my sound quality is better today than it was, it's because I have several of these little clip-on mics And Three of them are the wrong kind.
And one of them is the right kind.
And I had them backwards, apparently.
So the sound you were getting was just from the device, not from the microphone.
Oh, Eric Weinstein.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
So... Eric Weinstein asked, so if you don't know Eric, he's a well-known, let's say, intellectual, I think he coined the term intellectual, dark, whatever that term is.
So he's associated with the, well, I don't want to say what he's associated with.
He's a smart guy who talks about a lot of stuff.
Now he asked on Twitter, he was the intellectual dark web, yes, and he asked on Twitter if it was true that some people don't believe there's such a thing as an open borders opinion.
And I raised my hand on Twitter and said, yes, I do not believe that people really want open borders.
Now, he responded with a number of links to articles showing that people were asking for open borders very directly and very specifically.
Yeah, somebody saying you're wrong.
So the articles that he linked to showed real people saying that they absolutely want open borders.
But do they really? So here's the part where we disagree.
So I had to concede the point, which is that there do exist people who are calling for open borders.
But they're not real.
So I'll concede to Eric the point that there are people who present themselves as open border advocates.
And if you ask them, they'd probably say, yes, I'm an open border advocate.
And if you said, what does that mean?
They would say something like, anybody can go wherever they want in the United States.
I guess that would apply to other places.
But if you want to come in and get a job, do whatever you want.
I don't think That's true.
And here's why.
Because if you combine...
Yeah, somebody's saying mind reader.
That's exactly the right thing to say.
But let me make my case and then you decide.
Now keep in mind, I'm not saying I'm reading their mind.
I'm saying I don't believe them.
Because there's an incompleteness to their alleged opinion.
And when somebody that smart...
It gives you an incomplete opinion.
You have to ask yourself, well, where's the rest of it?
And what's that mean? And the incomplete opinion is this.
Does anybody want open borders while we still have what some would call a welfare state?
Do we want open borders where all you have to do is come over and get some free stuff?
Probably not. I think you would have to, in order to have open borders, you would have to probably get rid of or at least equalize whatever the government's generosity is to its people for people on both sides.
Otherwise you get people coming for free stuff.
So if people come for free stuff, I'm not sure that the open borders people have that in mind.
They may need more of a, let's say, a bigger change.
Secondly, Does it look to you that Europe is benefiting from open borders?
So let me just ask that question.
So the closest you have open borders would be Europe.
And am I wrong that they have a big immigration problem?
Or would the open borders people say, no, no, it's the way they're doing it that's the problem.
If you just let everybody do what they wanted, everything would be fine.
Here's the problem. Wouldn't open borders get you to Sharia in a lot of places that didn't expect that to come?
At what point do people get to vote?
Where is the limit to what is open?
Would the people coming in be citizens, etc?
Now the argument for open borders, as I understand it, and I'll try to present their argument without shading it with bias.
The argument is that wherever you have a free flow of labor, things become better on average for everyone.
Because if there's an open job and there's somebody who wants it, boom, it's filled.
So you have more economic efficiency if people can cross the border any way they want.
That part seems reasonable.
That wherever you take away friction, you get a better result.
But here's the thing. Who's the better result for?
Could you sell to the United States the following proposition?
Could you sell to the citizens of the United States this proposition?
Well, things will be worse on average for many of you in the United States, but it will be so much better for the immigrants who come in that the average well-being of the world will go up.
Who buys that?
Who buys that package that says, yes, I'll take the decision that's bad for me, But on average, it'll be good.
Now, I sometimes make that decision, but I'm rich, right?
I can afford that if things are not so good for me, but it's better for the world.
There are lots of times I can get on board with that.
But if you're middle class or you're lower, you know, you're struggling, let's say, would you accept the proposition That the average is better, even though you'll be worse off, or you'll have to compete harder, or anything else.
So here's my bottom line.
I believe if I took any open borders advocate, the people who say they're open borders, and got them in a room with me, and nobody else was watching, and I had 45 minutes to talk to them, that at the end of it they would say, yeah, I realize there's no way to get there.
That's what I believe. So if somebody has a plan, but they also know there's no way to get there, could you say that they have a real opinion?
I would call it no. So, when you tell me there are open borders advocates, I say, I'm not so sure there are.
But then you show me that they're saying in their own words, yes, open borders, it's exactly what we want.
I say, I read the story, and I believe they're saying that.
But you put me in a room with them for 45 minutes with no witnesses, they're going to say, yeah, there's no way to get there.
So what does it mean to say that somebody's in favor of a plan that they know can't work?
So you're correct that there's some assumptions going on about what other people are thinking.
But until I see somebody describe a full picture, and they describe who loses, who wins, and they still think it's okay, then I'm going to be skeptical.
So I'm still skeptical.
But I will concede Eric's point that people are saying it.
Let's talk about CNN.
Hold on a second.
About 15 years ago, or whatever it was, I wrote a book called The Dilber of Future, in which I made a bunch of predictions.
One of my predictions was that the media would start killing famous people To create news.
Because there's no better news in terms of what they like to cover than a dead famous person.
Now, I'm not sure that's quite happened yet, but I would argue that almost every political story you see is caused by CNN. Now, I'm gonna say CNN as sort of my proxy for people in that side of the political spectrum.
So it's MSNBC, it's the New York Times, it's the Washington Post, et cetera.
So, and let me just give you some examples.
Of things that CNN created so that they could report on it.
CNN and their cohorts.
I'm seeing a story that Chris Cuomo was talking about how terrible it was that President Trump is quote, has silence on Steve King's recent controversial marks.
Here's the way it's phrased.
By the way, this is on Fox News site.
This is on Fox News, but they're reporting about what CNN is saying.
And they're saying that when Steve King asked, according to them, how terms like white nationalism and white supremacy became offensive.
Do you know what's wrong with that story?
It never happened.
Literally that didn't happen.
What happened was, Steve King had a sort of a complicated sentence in which he was first talking and making a point about white nationalism and white supremacy.
And then as he talked, he talked about Western civilization.
And then about Western civilization, he said, how did Western civilization become a bad thing?
The CNN and their like decided that they would, and by the way, Steve King clarified it and showed the context, and it's quite obvious that he was talking about the Western civilization.
I mean, it's very obvious.
And to imagine that a representative with this much experience went on television and said, hey, what's wrong with white supremacy?
Don't you know that didn't happen?
If somebody came up to you and said, hey, a sitting senator just came out and said, you know, white supremacy, that's fine.
I'm all for it. Wouldn't you know, without any other checking, wouldn't you know that didn't happen?
Probably 60% of the world believes that happened.
And I want to be very careful.
I'm not defending anything else that Steve King has ever said or done.
I don't have an opinion about anything else he's done.
But in this case, they have created fake news and they've actually sold it.
So it looks like even Fox News is accepting that this guy actually got on television and said, what's wrong with white supremacy?
I guarantee you that never happened.
Something like that that sounded confusing happened, but he definitely never did that.
Right, so it's exactly like Charlottesville, where the president talked about people who are good people on both sides of the statue question, and then the CNN and their folks said, aha, I think he just said that neo-Nazis are fine people.
And they've been reporting that as fact.
For a long time. Now, what's one of the biggest problems in the country?
One of the biggest problems in the country is race relations, wouldn't you say?
And especially how people feel about their president.
Did the president cause that?
Or did CNN cause that problem?
I think the answer is obvious.
If CNN had reported any of these stories correctly, Black people would say, oh, look, we got some prison reform, black unemployment's looking great.
Oh, he said something confusing about Charlottesville?
Okay, he clarified that.
I'm not going to worry about that, because obviously that was just something you needed to clarify.
And, you know, he's looking at trying to help the inner cities, hasn't done enough, but he's going after fentanyl, he's going after drugs.
Yeah, we like this guy.
So I'd say the biggest problem in the country, race relations, entirely caused by the way it's reported.
Not about the facts, because the facts don't support this.
The facts are largely made up.
Now let's take the reporting about whose fault the shutdown is.
You see CNN reporting that it's Trump's fault that there's a shutdown.
Well, in a negotiation where both sides want something and the prize is that they get to open the government if they give in, how could you possibly legitimately intellectually say that only one side is at fault when absolutely both sides have to be, you know, intransigent?
It is completely a violation of every logical Everything to imagine it's only one side's fault and the same would be if you said it's it's just Chuck and Nancy's fault it would be the same thing now ask yourself Why is it that Chuck and Nancy?
I'll be more respectful.
I'll say Senator.
I'm sorry. Why is it that Pelosi and Schumer?
Can't give in Tell me why The Democrats can't agree to something that they want because they want some form of border control, etc.
So they're literally resisting something they want and have voted for in the past.
Why? It's not because of Trump.
It's because of the way the news carries it.
The news has broken us into teams and solidified that frame.
So as long as the news says, oh ho ho, if you cave on this, you're giving in to the evil racist president and you're making the world a worse place.
As long as CNN paints it that way, the Democrats can't negotiate.
They can't. So who caused Who is it that you'd say was the most cause of the shutdown?
By far it's the news.
By far it's the news.
If there were no news, what would happen?
If there were no news, Trump and the Democrats would sit down and say, this isn't even important.
We both agree on this, basically.
What do you want, 5.7?
Will you take 3.5?
Okay, good. Boom.
Go on. It is only the news that causes the problem, and then they report on it.
In other words, they've generated their own news about racism to report on it.
They've generated their own news about the shutdown.
They caused it.
Now they report on it like it's somebody else's problem.
Let's give you some more.
What about the State of the Union?
The State of the Union is in the news because Pelosi, fairly cleverly, is saying, oh, the shutdown would make it too unsafe for us to have this because we wouldn't have enough security.
Now, none of that is true, right?
They would have plenty of security.
It would just be...
It would be bad form, perhaps.
To have it now because you would be causing a lot of security people to work for free and it wouldn't be a good look.
But what is the State of the Union?
The State of the Union is a TV news event.
It's a news event.
So the only reason that we're having a conversation about whether or not to have the State of the Union has nothing to do with whether the President can tell us what he's thinking or how the Union is doing.
He has lots of ways to do that.
It's all about television coverage.
And it's not Fox News that's saying, don't do it.
CNN is going to report this like it's a serious thing and they're going to keep this story alive.
But there's only a question about the State of the Union because of news coverage.
If you took that away and there were no news, if there was no news coverage, would Pelosi say, oh yeah, just, you know, we'll be there.
Just go tell us what's happening.
I don't think so. How about this one?
One of the biggest stories, and again, it's a headline again today, Michael Cohen being just terrible for different reasons, right?
So every week or so there's a news story about how Michael Cohen is terrible or Manafort is terrible or somebody who has been hired by the Trump administration is terrible.
What is the reason...
That so many Trump hires are so bad.
And by the way, I think even if you're a supporter, you would acknowledge that there is a shocking number of Trump administration hires, you know, since the beginning, that were just horrible.
What causes that?
Well, what causes it is the way the news has reported on this president.
They've poisoned him.
It's impossible for him to choose from the same base of qualified people that anybody else could choose from.
Any other president who was not so framed by the media would say, hey, do you want a job?
And there would be all these great qualified people, and you'd just be picking the best people.
You end up with Manafort because you don't have options.
Now, Cohen was just sort of a holdover from his non-political days.
I don't think anybody saw a Cohen turning on him.
And by the way, the reason that you hire a Cohen to take care of some of your, let's say, non-public stuff is because Cohen is not such a good lawyer that he had other things to do.
Cohen is probably a terrible lawyer, but you want a terrible lawyer to do sort of the dark secret stuff that you just don't want to get out.
So that was a special situation.
What about the economy?
The economy has several major forces right now.
There's the underlying stuff of the economy, which looks good.
Most of the, let's say, the variables and the dynamics of the economy, pretty solid.
But the economy is a psychology engine.
If the psychology is right, it grows, assuming that you don't have shortages or wars or stuff.
And if the psychology is wrong, well, then you don't.
Whose psychology is pushing the market up and whose psychology is pushing it down?
Pretty obvious. The president is bolstering it with his persuasion, saying it's great and all the good things about it, and all the things he's done to make it work, which bolsters your confidence.
What is CNN reporting?
Oh, I don't know. It's looking a little shaky.
Let's find the only economist out of 100 who will say things are going to go off the rails.
Let's find a story that we can make this good trend look like a bad trend.
Let's paint it in the worst possible way.
So if the economy slows down, CNN will report on it, and they will have caused it.
Not entirely, but to maybe the largest extent.
It might be the biggest variable, is how people feel about it.
So if confidence goes down, who caused it?
It wasn't you and I sitting at home having our own thoughts.
It was the way it's reported.
Because that's the only thing we really know about the big questions about the economy is the way it's reported.
All right. So, look at the biggest stories in the news and make this a habit.
Ask yourself if this had been reported straight, meaning just the facts.
Would we have this national problem that the news is reporting about?
I don't think so.
I want to take some time, each of my periscopes, to highlight bad thinking wherever I see it.
So it could be bad thinking on the left or the right or in the media or in the government or whatever.
Just really, really bad thinking.
Here's the one I just saw, and it was from...
I won't even tell you who, because it doesn't matter where it came from.
It's something probably most of you have said.
So it goes like this.
Some Republican is accused of being a racist, and then somebody on the right says, hey, you Democrats...
The Democrat Party is the party of racism.
Because it's the party of slavery.
It's the party of the KKK. It's the party of all these racist things.
That, my friends, is just bad thinking.
Do I have to tell you why?
Do I have to tell you why?
You can't even say you disagree with it or agree with it.
There's just something wrong with your brain.
You're not optimized for thinking if you say that that matters.
Yeah. It doesn't really matter what happened decades ago.
Those people aren't around.
Those people are not the ones.
Everything changes.
If you tell me I should judge Hillary Clinton by something she did in college, I'm going to say, hell no.
I might not want her to be president, but I'm sure not going to judge her for something she did in her 20s that I didn't like, even if it was racist.
Even if it was racist.
Because you know what happens if you wait 50 years and you stay alive?
Well, for a lot of people, you become better people.
You get smarter, wiser, society changes, you grow with it, you evolve.
The most normal thing in the world is for bad things to turn into good things.
Startups that don't have anything going for them become big companies.
People who used to be bad become good.
People who committed crimes in the past stopped doing it.
People who used to be cheaters become faithful.
The most common thing in the world is for people to just become better.
And if you wait 50 years, almost everybody's better.
So the claim that it's some kind of a defense for current allegations of racism because somebody else belongs to a group and the group of completely different people who have been dead for years did bad things in the past?
There is just no connective tissue between those thoughts.
And to act as though that's a response is embarrassing, frankly.
And I don't know what else to say about that.
Now, let me ask you.
Oh, the Gillette ad.
So the Gillette ad I saw a headline that said it was a big success.
And I suppose a big success means that they got a lot of clicks, which they did.
And everybody's talking about it.
But wouldn't you love to know how that meeting went?
Wouldn't you love to have been in the meeting where Gillette made those decisions?
And here's the question I'm asking myself.
What was the gender mix in the meeting?
You know, was it all men?
Probably not, right?
Wouldn't you guess that it was not a group of all men who made the decision about the Gillette commercial?
Somebody says all men.
I don't think so.
Maybe. I'd love to know.
I would love to know exactly who was in the room when they were talking about that in that meeting and made a decision.
My guess is it went something like this.
There were probably some women involved and that when they raised the idea, the men were afraid to push back.
So my guess is that the men in the meeting were sitting there quietly thinking to themselves, oh, I hate this.
I hate this.
But I don't know what to do about it.
I don't want to lose my job.
I don't want to be the one who's pushing back against...
Because think about it.
The way it was presented... Probably was, hey, let's take a stand against these bad behaviors of, you know, Me Too-ing and whatever else they highlighted.
And if you were just talking about the bad behaviors, it'd be hard to push back, right?
Like, who's going to push back against bad behavior?
So I think the men were just trapped.
And they just sat there and said, all right, let's give it a try.
Now it's possible...
That they knew exactly what they were doing and they said, oh man, people are going to flip out when they see this.
We're going to get so many clicks.
This will be good for business.
But here's the problem.
Remember when Nike did its commercial?
And what did Nike do?
I forget, but their sales went way up.
The thing is that Nike is purchased by everybody.
So if you anger half of your buyers, but you really excite the other half, you're probably going to come out on top.
But Gillette is pretty much a male product, right?
They have Lady Gillette stuff, but I think it's mostly a male stuff, male product.
I don't know how the math works for them.
I don't know how they can offend their core audience and hope that the smaller part of their audience makes up the difference.
So I'd love to see how that worked out for them.
Anyway, it's kind of hilarious.
Now my comment was that it was sexist.
And sexist because of the not mentioning women.
Now, I'm not making the point, oh, women have toxic femininity or anything like that.
But the point is, anytime you identify any segment of the population and say, this segment has a problem, You're not really on strong ground.
We don't live in a society in which that's okay.
You can't pick out any group.
You can't pick out women.
You can't pick out men. You can't pick out white, black.
You can't pick out a group and do a commercial condemning them, like in general.
So it shouldn't work out for them, but maybe it will.
Let's drink to that. He said, I'm an expert on brand destroying BS. Well, many of you have watched me cannibalize my own brand, and maybe some of you are curious about that.
Scott, you may say, why are you making people hate your Dilbert comic and hate you personally if they liked you at all before with your controversial comments on things?
And I've explained it before, which is I'm not managing my brand.
And that's my value.
My value is I'm not going to manage my brand.
I mean, I do a little bit, right?
I mean, you know, for the obvious stuff.
But... I'm probably one of the few people who has any kind of a public platform who isn't doing it for the money.
Now, I like money, and if I could find a way to monetize this, I probably would.
So if you see me making money someday from this, I hope you're just happy about it.
But I don't do it for that reason.
Nobody would do anything I've done for the last three years because they thought there was a profit in it.
I do it because I think there's this desperate societal need for a third opinion, and ideally a fourth and fifth and sixth.
I don't know too many people who are arguing in public that they can't tell, for example, if climate change is something we really need to worry about or not.
And I've talked about that a lot.
Can you imagine that that helps me in any way?
And the answer is no.
I don't see any way that will ever help me.
But could it help the country?
Could it help the world?
Well, that's the point.
The point of it is that if I can elevate the discussion, and I'm hoping that the minimum I can accomplish is to get rid of the worst arguments on both sides.
Some people say they find it boring.
So I'm trying to put these at the end of the periscopes because I'm getting two completely different reactions.
Some people are quite excited by it.
And by the way, I'm getting more, I'm getting more direct messages on the topic of climate than almost anything else, and most people are saying that they're really appreciating that I'm taking a risk on it.
And amazingly, as far as I've gone on climate change, here's a question I still can't get to the bottom of, and I don't know why.
Has the temperature gone up in an unprecedented way in the last 100 years?
Look at all the time that I've spent looking at both arguments, and all of the arguments come down to one thing.
Has the temperature gone up in an unprecedented way in the last 100 years?
Because if the answer is no, then there's nothing to worry about.
If the answer is yes, probably there's a lot to worry about.
I think we'll be fine, but you should definitely worry about it.
The most basic question, I can't get to the bottom of it, because both sides are dug in and can't send me to a link that I can just look at and say, oh, there it is.
Well, there's the temperature right there.
I've said this before, the most persuasive question One of the top two, but one of the best, most persuasive skeptics of climate is Tony Heller, who writes under the name Steve Goddard.
And he presents all kinds of detailed arguments and he does the best job of anybody I've seen on the skeptical side of making the story simple.
In other words, bringing it down to a level where everybody can understand it.
So in terms of his communication skills and in terms of his knowledge, I think he's the gold standard of skeptics.
So much so, That if he could be debunked, I would say the climate scientists win.
That's how much credibility I'm putting with him.
I think Spencer and Happer and Lindzen, some of the others, they're convincing on their own, but their arguments aren't quite as persuasive.
They don't seem to hold the same power, and I'm not sure quite why.
So, If I could find a climate scientist who would look at Tony Heller's, let's say, his assumptions and his presentations, and tell me what's wrong with them, then I would probably lean toward the climate scientist's point of view.
But it's been quite a while, and I've been talking about him for a while, and I've been looking at links, and people always send me links to say, okay, I'm going to debunk him, here's my link.
And I don't see it.
So, it's conspicuous in its absence so far.
That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Alright, I'm still looking. But it's conspicuous in its absence that his arguments continue to sort of stand unattacked.
And his arguments are largely that the data has been fudged.
Now, I disagree with Tony, on this one point.
Intention. So the climate gate used the words, you know, hide the decline and used a trick.
So that is used by many people to say, aha, we have discovered intention.
They clearly are, you know, on the surface, made a decision to fake climate science for whatever reason.
I say that's not in evidence and not even close to being in evidence.
The far more likely...
Somebody said, follow the money.
If you follow the money, you can end up in two places, not one.
The people saying they follow the money are probably saying they're being paid and therefore they're just taking the position of whoever is paying them.
That's one thing that follow the money could mean.
Here's another thing that follow the money could mean.
Bias. It could be that the scientists genuinely believe And this is my opinion.
My opinion is that the climate scientists genuinely believe what they're saying.
And that when they have a discrepancy, they do try to explain it away to maintain their original position because there's so much other information that confirms it.
You know, if you have a hundred things that confirms your opinion, and then there's this one thing that seems like, wait, these tree rings don't work, or there was this period that doesn't make sense.
They would try to explain it away.
The most normal thing you would do is try to explain away the one thing that was in disagreement with a hundred things.
So follow the money means two things.
One, you're just being a jerk, and you're taking money, and you're not even doing science, and you know you're doing it.
I don't think that's happening.
Because if that were happening, you would definitely have a whistleblower.
You know, you would have more people saying, yeah, I was in the room, I heard them talking about it, and, you know, they were all bad.
I think what you have instead is people who are biased and are operating on their bias But here's the complicated part.
They could be operating on their bias and still be right.
You could be operating on your bias and still be right.
Because they're either going to be biased for or against climate change, and climate change is either happening or not in the dangerous way.
Obviously it's happening. So I would say the Tony Heller standard is what I've come down to.
If somebody can make a convincing argument against his proposition that the historical data was was tinkered with for the purpose of selling climate change.
That's going to be pretty convincing to me if nobody can.
And if somebody can, well, I'll listen to the argument.
But the other arguments I've heard that I've dismissed I've dismissed the climate.
Climate people don't believe it because they buy beach houses.
Rich people buy houses in all kinds of dangerous places, including the one I'm in right now.
I'm in earthquake territory.
Rich people build houses.
In dangerous places.
Literally last night I was talking to a rich person who lost his house in the big California fire.
Did he know he was living in a place that could burn?
Well, yeah. It was forested.
Rich people always build in dangerous places.
It's just the most routine thing we do.
And we know that there's a pretty good chance this house will burn up or flood or be in a hurricane or something.
The argument that climate scientists forgot to consider the impact of the sun on the climate, I reject as just being stupid.
Really. They're climate scientists.
Now, if you said they calculated it wrong, and here's why, well, listen to that.
But if you say, no, climate scientists forgot the sun.
They did not forget the sun.
They did not forget the sun.
Somebody's saying, no one says that.
No one who knows what they're talking about says that.
If you were on my Twitter feed, you would see person after person saying they forgot to calculate the sun, which is not what happened.
Then the other bad argument is that historically...
Historically, that CO2 and temperatures have not been together, so why do you assume that they are now?
That argument falls apart because once you calculate the Sun with the calculation of temperature and CO2, they're in perfect alignment, say the scientists, and that seems pretty convincing to me.
The other bad argument is CO2 is a trace material.
It could not have as much effect as the clouds and we can't figure out what the clouds are doing.
To which I say CO2 is what is causing the greater water vapor.
So the clouds are because of the CO2. That's the whole point.
The point is not CO2 or clouds.
The climate science point is that the CO2 causes a difference in the cloud cover, which causes a difference in the temperature.
So most of the arguments that I can penetrate from the skeptics just fall apart.
I mean, they're just ridiculous.
So if you're a climate skeptic, I would advise you to retreat from the bad arguments.
Now, if you said, for example, also, that the temperature, I think the temperature in the United States has not been going up like it has in the rest of the country, if you say, haha, the land-based temperatures don't show this increase, I say, well, you got a problem.
Something like 95% of all the land-based measurements are in the United States.
So basically, Land-based measurements, as far as I can tell, are not really part of climate science.
Let me say that again, because that would be the most controversial thing you've ever said.
The ocean is 90% of the warming.
90% of the temperature stuff has to do with the ocean, because it's the big mass.
We have very few measurements in the ocean.
But we have lots of measurements on land.
Unfortunately, almost all of those measurements, like 90 plus percent, are in the United States.
And there's a suggestion by the climate scientists that the United States might be an outlier, meaning that we might actually not be getting warmer even if the rest of the world is, which would not be unusual.
You could have warmer and colder places even if the average is going up.
So what that tells me Is that the land-based measurements are actually not really part of the decision.
How could they be? It's only 10% of the total heat, and most of them are in the United States, and I think people agree on both sides that the United States is the exception.
So if the only land measurements we have, you know, the 90% of them, are in the one place by coincidence, is the exception to global warming, what the hell good is it?
Couldn't we just ignore land-based measurements?
And shouldn't we? I'm sure a scientist would give me a good answer to that.
Whenever you hear me say something that sounds like a conclusion in this topic, you should just assume, I don't know what I'm talking about, but if I can't figure it out, with all of your help and all the people sending me links and there are tons of scientists who are following this conversation, if we can't figure this out, you gotta wonder, why not?
That's a fair question.
So I would say that the most unbelievable claim from climate scientists The most unbelievable claim by climate scientists is we can measure the average temperature of the Earth.
And we can do it historically in a way that is precise enough that we can tell that there's something really weird going on right now.
Now I'm not saying there isn't something weird going on with temperatures.
Because it does feel like we're better at measuring things lately and that most of that change is lately.
So we probably have a good idea that lately there's something scary happening.
That part seems reasonable.
But how far back can you go to determine that it's unusual?
That part I don't believe it.
I just don't believe it.
Now, again, you don't want to be the person who's the troglodyte saying, oh, science can't do something, and then the next thing you know, you've got a man on the moon.
But, oh, can I give a reason why?
Oh, a reason why I don't think that we can measure the temperature of the Earth.
Because we measure maybe less than 1% of the ocean.
I would say. We probably measure 1% of the ocean, and 90% of all the warming in the world is in the ocean.
And if you've ever seen an ocean, water's moving around a little bit.
Have you ever been in a swimming pool where the top of the water is, you know, like, or not the top of the water, but like you're swimming through a swimming pool, and you're going through hot and cool parts just within a swimming pool?
Like you're in one part, like, hey, it's kind of warm, and then you go to another part of the same pool, and it's cold.
I can't believe That we've got enough measurements in enough places, given the size of the world and all of the fluid motions, the fact that you've got some volcanoes under the water here and there.
I can't believe it.
I'd love to believe it's true.
But it's the most unbelievable part of climate science.
Somebody's saying, please stop.
Oh, damn it. I was just going to block you for saying that.
Please stop. Is a comment which will get you blocked in the future, okay?
If you have...
If the topic doesn't interest you, I would invite you to just not listen.
And if the topic does interest you and you think I'm just saying the wrong stuff, give me a reason.
You got room.
Just give me a reason. And then you're more than welcome to stay.
Because I like being challenged on it.
Because my thinking is very approximate.
Somebody said, what about satellites?
I do not believe satellites can measure the temperature of the Earth at the level of complexity that we need, and they didn't come around until 1979.
So satellites wouldn't help you before 1979, and you kind of need to know what happened before that to make a decision about whether today is unusual.
Yes, heat rises and gets into the lower troposphere, which satellites are apparently pretty good at measuring.
But if you tell me that there is a perfect or perfect enough correlation between what's happening in the temperature at the bottom of the ocean, the bottom of the ocean, and what's happening in the troposphere, maybe.
Maybe. But it doesn't sound believable.
So they would need to convince me a little bit on that.
Yeah, and apparently the...
You've heard the stories that the magnetic north is moving.
Have you heard of that? Apparently deep within the world the The molten whatever, must be metallic, is moving around so that the North Pole is no longer the North Pole, like the magnetic North is moved like a lot.
It's not even moving a little, it's moving a lot.
Now, here's a question for you.
Did you know that the magnetic core of the Earth is the only reason that we can survive?
How many of you knew that if we didn't have a magnetic planet, we'd all be dead?
What are the odds?
So apparently what the magnetic field of the United States does is it reduces radiation.
I think I'm using the right word.
And if we did not have a magnetic world, we couldn't have life because the radiation would kill us.
The magnetic is like a force field.
Now let me ask you this.
What are the odds that you live on a planet that has literally a force field?
Do other planets have force fields?
Doesn't that make you wonder if you understand reality?
Because it's a little bit like the simulation, right?
It's a little bit like, makes you wonder if advanced aliens years ago came to the world and said, you know, we could grow life here if we could take care of this radiation.
Then somebody said, well, why don't we magnetize the lava or whatever it is, the molten whatever at the center of the earth.
If we magnetize it, then the world will evolve in a way that supports life.
So you have to wonder, was there ever a time when, you know, aliens picked up in the big, you know, pulled up in the big spaceship?
You know, let's say the Earth is this big and the alien spaceship is this big and they got a big electromagnet and they see it and they go, hey, let's magnetize this bad boy.
If we magnetize the inner core, this thing will become a force field and then life can live on it.
So I suppose, I suppose there's nothing unusual about having a force field on your planet.
I remember reading about that and thinking, seriously?
A force field?
We have a natural force field.
Because I've always wondered what the hell magnetism was for.
You know, like why does it exist?
Here's something that will blow your mind.
And if you didn't know this, it's freaky.
Hold on. Let's say you had two magnets.
Most of you already know this, but for those who don't.
Let's say you have two magnets. If you get them close, they stick together.
Now let's say you want to keep these two magnets from being attracted.
What can you put between them that will make them not attractive?
Let's say you put a 100-mile wall of some kind between them.
But it has to be, you know, the same distance because the magnetic field only, let's say, goes this far.
What can you put between two magnets to turn off their magnetic attraction?
Do you know the answer to this?
Nothing. Nothing.
Right. So a few of you knew this.
There's literally nothing.
There's no material. No material, either theoretically or in reality, that can go between these and stop them from being attracted.
Isn't that weird? That was the moment I realized I didn't understand reality.
The moment I realized that there's nothing you can do to even slow it down.
Now if you said to me, okay, you could put some kind of advanced ceramic between them and if you measured it, you could see that it took 1% off because it was a good dense material or whatever.
But it turns out that whatever magnetism is, we certainly don't have a common sense understanding of it because it is not affected by anything in the way.
Now, I don't think that's true of gravity, right?
If you put something between a planet and you, well, I guess that would just increase your attraction in the same direction.
If you don't understand why gravity can affect things no matter what's in between them, it's a weird planet.
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