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Feb. 24, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
52:30
Episode 429 Scott Adams: A Possible Path Out of TDS Forming in the Zeitgeist, More
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
Today might be the best coffee with Scott Adams you've ever seen.
That's especially true if it's the first one.
So, get in here, gather around, grab your mug, your cup, Your chalice, your stein.
Your glass, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, good stuff.
Today will be the most interesting coffee with Scott Adams that you've ever spent.
That's probably true.
We'll all see if I can live up to that.
But the way I have it planned...
It'll be the best one you've ever seen so far.
Let us start with the notion that CNN has picked Kamala Harris as their heir apparent for the Hillary Clinton replacement, if you will.
the person that they would like to see nominated for the Democrats, and the person they'd like to see president.
And here's a hilarious little thing I saw this morning.
So S.E. Kupp over at CNN was talking about how there will be lots of bad stories coming out about the Democratic candidates as part of the political process.
And that as the bad stories about the Democrats come out, it could be good for President Trump just by staying out of the blast zone.
So she was making that overall point that they would be cannibalizing each other.
And then she gives four examples.
Now these are four examples.
Allegedly, of Democrats cannibalizing each other.
One is there was a vintage Bernie Sanders footage showing Bernie Sanders long ago praising breadlines.
You've probably seen that, right?
All right, so Bernie Sanders takes a hit because there's an old video of him praising breadlines.
Then they talk about Amy Klobuchar, how she ate her salad with a comb.
So that's a story that makes Amy Klobuchar look bad.
So now Sanders looks bad because of the breadlines.
Klobuchar looks bad because of eating her salad with a comb.
And then she talks about how the Democrats are going to have to support reparations as sort of a litmus test on how that could be bad.
Now here's the one they give about Kamala Harris.
So this is a list of things that make Democrats look bad.
And here's Kamala Harris on the list.
And here's the thing that makes her look bad, according to CNN. She said she will never apologize for prosecuting rapists, murderers, and child molesters.
What? That sounds kind of good to me.
What? That's on CNN's list of things that sound bad about Democratic candidates?
Does it sound bad that she's not going to apologize for prosecuting rapists, murderers, and child blessers?
What the hell?
I don't even understand.
I don't even understand how this could have happened.
It's so far from any kind of a balanced treatment.
It's just hilarious. It's literally a list of bad things about the candidates, and the one thing they put on there about Kamala is unambiguously positive to everyone.
There's no one on the other side of wanting to go soft on murderers and rapists and child molesters.
So that was kind of mind-boggling and hilarious.
So watch for that.
More of that. The latest Trump derangement syndrome is an article in CNN, and I'm not even going to mention who wrote it because it's somewhat irrelevant.
And the speculation in the CNN article is Was that President Trump might not step down.
Excuse me. Still getting over a little bit of the flu.
That Trump might not step down after he loses, according to them, for re-election.
Now, let me give you some perspective.
When Obama was in his first term, a friend of mine, a very Republican friend, actually bet me $500 that Obama would lose re-election and he would refuse to step down and he would become a dictator.
I won $500!
Because when he said it, I thought to myself, that doesn't sound like a political opinion.
That sounds like some kind of Obama derangement syndrome.
So I said, are you serious?
You actually want to bet me $500 that Obama will not step down and that he will also lose re-election?
That's an actual bet?
And so I took that bet.
To his credit, my Republican friend paid his bet.
He paid me $500 because he believed that Obama was going to become a dictator and stay in office.
Now the situation is reversed and now we see some Democrats literally believing that Trump might try to hang on to power if he lost the election.
Now that to me, because I'm not in any kind of derangement situation, feels like just crazy.
And so we're going to talk about Trump derangement syndrome in a moment.
But first I want to hit a couple of other notes.
Are you watching all the stories about the Catholic Church?
I'm starting to...
The Catholic Church is sort of looking like Russia collusion in the sense that there is this continuous stream of...
Let's sip again.
I see calls for more sippage.
Get ready.
Simultaneous. So we're watching the Catholic Church deal with all these allegations of sexual abuse against kids, mostly.
And it's just one thing after another coming out.
Now we hear that documents may have been destroyed or never drawn up and that the numbers are growing and lives are being ruined.
It sounds like just one of the most horrible things I've ever heard of.
But here's the only thing I wanted to point out.
Every time I see a high official of the church or even any kind of a, you know, just a priest talking about the issue, are you having the same impression that I'm having?
And I just want to put this out there.
Is it my imagination?
And I think it is, by the way.
So I think this is confirmation bias, what I'm going to talk about.
And I want to ask you if you're experiencing the same confirmation bias.
That when I see a high official of the church talking, and I look at that person, they look like pedophiles to me.
Is that just me?
Is anybody having the same experience that the top officials who are talking about this are starting to look like pedophiles?
Now, I believe that this is confirmation bias, right?
Meaning that, you know, 20 years ago, if I looked at a picture of somebody who was a priest or a bishop or something, I never would have had that thought.
But now because the news is just pushing this on us non-stop, it's like, you know, Catholic Church, Catholic Church, you know, this problem is Catholic Church.
So look at some of the other comments, and you can see that a number of people are having the same experience.
Not all of you. Looks like quite a few people are saying no to it.
But I'm actually having the feeling that they all sort of look like what I imagine...
A sexual abuser or pedophile looks like.
So I'm guessing that that's just my confirmation bias, and I wanted to see if other people are having the same experience.
And it looks like some of you are.
Somebody says, pedophiles don't have a look, Scott.
I agree with what the commenter said, that pedophiles and sex abusers do not, as far as I know, do not have an identifiable look.
But why does it feel like it?
Why do they register to me like they have that look?
It's got to be confirmation bias, right?
Presumably. Alright.
Let's talk about the zeitgeist.
Do you know what the zeitgeist is?
The zeitgeist is a German word, I've said this before, because we don't have an English word that captures it.
And zeitgeist is that collective feeling that the public or society has.
So there are some things that may be unstated.
But we're all starting to think in a similar way.
That's the zeitgeist.
It's sort of that hard to define shift in people's thinking that may or may not already be in the headlines.
So the zeitgeist can move before the headlines move.
And there's a really interesting thing starting to form in the zeitgeist.
Now before I describe it to you, let me tell you why I'm qualified.
To analyze the zeitgeist.
The reason I'm qualified to analyze the zeitgeist is that's what I do for a living.
That's literally my job.
I have to look at the public, figuring out how they're feeling, what they're already thinking, the common thoughts, and then I try to turn that into a comic strip that hits that point.
Or I turn it into a book, That hits the feeling that people are having.
So somebody's defining it as the spirit of the age.
That's a pretty good definition, but that's a little new agey.
It's basically what people are feeling about stuff, and that changes over time.
So there's an interesting thing forming in the zeitgeist.
I won't be the first person to note this, but I'll put a spin on it.
So remember when the Kavanaugh thing was in the news?
The Kavanaugh thing was one of those situations where even if you believed that Kavanaugh did something bad in his high school, you probably were also quite sure that at least the one about him being active as part of a rape gang You probably knew that wasn't real.
So even if you thought any of it was real, and some people did, even the people who thought he did something wrong could see quite plainly that the news is not believable and that accusations are not always true.
Because the one about the gang rape is so obviously not true.
My personal belief is that none of it was true.
But both sides saw in the Kavanaugh thing that untrue things can derail people.
Things from the deep past.
Then we see Northam.
This was an interesting situation, especially in the sense that the public seems to have come down to the conclusion, and this is primarily Democrats apparently, that maybe we shouldn't take somebody's actions as a young person to mean as much as we've been doing lately.
In other words, people were taking what I would call a more Mature approach to Northrum, and specifically the African American voters in Virginia, who, when polled, were actually less negative to Northrum than a lot of the white people polled.
So it's kind of a maturing standard which says, in effect, look, if Northam hasn't been doing any racist stuff for the last 20 years, if we haven't seen a trace of it in his public life, and in fact he's been all on the correct side in his public life, then maybe this isn't the big deal that we thought it was.
Now, just bear with me.
I'm just going to hit all these points and then pull it together.
So the public's Collective feeling is very negative about digging stuff up from somebody's 20-year past and also in whether they should believe it and how much they should weight it.
So that's the thing.
Then we also saw the prison reform bill get approved.
It was a case where both sides came together.
And the biggest theme from that The theme was that you should forgive people even if they did something a long time ago.
So it was about giving people a second chance.
It was about letting people redeem themselves.
And so now we've got more sort of a deeper feeling about things that happened a long time ago that may or may not be true, first of all.
So now we've seen that the fake news can fool us.
And we've seen that maybe we should let people Get better.
Maybe we should say, okay, that was a mistake.
But you didn't kill anybody.
And now it's 20 years later and you've been good since then.
Maybe we treat it differently.
Then we saw the Covington situation, which was just absolute fake news.
And now people who maybe didn't believe there was such a thing as fake news started to believe.
Then there was the Smollett thing.
And again, it was fake news and people watched themselves being fooled.
But they also got to see things through the other's point of view.
So here we see a bunch of people who are dealing with situations.
We're watching the fake news.
The fake news go from something you suspect is true to something you know is true.
So at this point, the idea of fake news is solid in everybody's head.
We can see it work on both sides, right?
There's just all kinds of fake news.
My favorite part about the Smola thing was, I hope I have his name right.
I think he was the supervisor of police in Chicago, Eddie Johnson.
Do I have his name right? I'm operating from memory.
And if you remember, I think it was Eddie Johnson, talked about Smollett.
And it was, first of all, he's really charismatic, and he's just a great character, right?
And he gave a, let's say, an emotional...
Description of how bad it was in terms of not just the law, but sort of to, you know, let's call it the fabric of society.
And I would say at this point, correct me if I'm wrong, for one of the few times in history, at least recent history, When Eddie Johnson was talking about the Smollett situation, it felt like everybody who watched that was on the same side.
They were on Eddie Johnson's side.
It felt like, weirdly, even though you weren't paying attention to this, the country sort of came together.
Over Annie Johnson.
It was an amazing moment that I think got lost because we're focusing on the details of the case and it was more exciting to talk about what Smollett said or did or didn't do and talk about the Nigerians.
We sort of got lost in the details.
But think about it.
There was this moment when the entire country came together in their hatred of fake news and And their hatred of people who would abuse, let's say, victim status.
Everybody frickin' hated it.
We came together on that point.
Now keep in mind that we had some history getting up to it.
So if the smaller thing didn't happen in isolation, we'd seen some situations here.
That felt like a bit of an inflection point.
A point where the country came together for a moment and realized, are you ready for this?
And realized that we have a common enemy.
There's nothing that brings a nation together better than a common enemy.
And the common enemy was the press.
Because the press sold us this, sold us that, sold us this, probably didn't even need to hear about Northam.
I mean, we could have all been just going on with our lives and never heard about what he did 20 years ago or 1984 or whatever.
We could have been fine, just never hearing about that.
So, this is a point, Smollett, when I think the people, instead of fighting each other, there was this moment...
Where the zeitgeist changed.
It felt like an inflection point, a point where we'd been fighting each other and we realized, wait a minute, maybe we're being influenced to fight each other.
Maybe the press is the enemy and we should be united against the fake news.
Now, Here's what's coming.
The Russia collusion thing is likely, we don't know yet, you know, Mueller might surprise us, but in all likelihood the signs seem to be fairly solid that the people who believed that Trump was colluding with Russia are going to learn again that the news is playing them.
They're being played For conflict, to create conflict.
And by itself, if this were the only story in the world, probably it wouldn't change the zeitgeist.
People would just say, oh, I thought this was true.
It turns out it wasn't. I'm glad we looked into it.
But when you start looking at the larger context, even the people who are seriously anti-Trump are going to start to feel, am I being manipulated by the press?
The press lied to me about Kavanaugh.
They didn't really need to bring up Northrum.
Covington was a lie.
Smollett was a lie.
Holy crap.
Is Mueller a lie too?
What would that do to your head if you believed the media was telling you the true story about Trump and about Trump supporters, and then you start seeing the credibility of your source just falling apart?
Completely falling apart.
What happens when the president gets something like more progress with North Korea?
There are a lot of things that the president does that you can make a reasonable case with just luck or, you know, I'll give you the perfect example is the economy is great.
We typically give the president who's in charge, you know, credit for the economy after he's been in charge a few years.
So typically you would give Trump credit for a strong economy, but there are plenty of smart people, and I'm one of them, who imagine that, well, maybe the economy would have been good anyway.
Maybe not as good, we don't know.
But I'll bet a president anybody would have had a pretty good economy right now just because Things are going well in general.
So you could tell yourself, okay, I'm not going to give President Trump credit for the economy just because I don't know if it would be any different if someone else were in charge.
But North Korea is kind of special because North Korea is a situation, assuming it keeps going in the right direction, where it's hard to imagine another president could have gotten us to this point.
It would be hard to imagine that, you know, President Trump's specific skill set didn't do this.
It looks like that's the reason it's happening.
So the people who said to themselves, wait a minute, the press has been telling me that this president is crazy and ineffective and lazy and impulsive and uninformed and all those things and he will surely do everything wrong.
But why is this going right?
And it's not just going right, but it seems like there's a whole series of right steps.
Like you can see a whole trail of correct decisions that are different from what other people did.
So this one's hard to write off.
And you're going to say to yourself, wait a minute.
Has the press fooled me again?
Is this president actually doing some things that are special, that are clearly unique to his skill set, and they're successful?
And they're big. They're big deals.
Yeah, we saw the...
Again, the prison reform thing.
Other administrations couldn't get it done.
This president did. We saw ISIS. You could argue maybe they would have been defeated by any other president.
But they got pretty beat down under Trump, etc.
Now, not directly relevant to the fake news, but the whole Venezuela situation, which I do not think is a direct...
An analogy to anything that would happen in the United States, but it sure feels that way.
And so you've got this whole slate of Democrats coming out and saying, let's do something that's more like socialism.
At the same time, just by coincidence, one of the biggest stories in the headlines is that socialism isn't working in a country that's very close to us.
So you're going to start doubting The value of the anti-Trumpers message in terms of socialism just because of Venezuela.
Now again, I don't think that that's a good analogy.
I think Venezuela is just a special case with a dictator.
We don't have a dictator.
But it's going to feel like the socialist message is less credible.
Then you add on top of that, I don't have it on my picture, but the Catholic Church stuff.
And you're going to tell yourself, wait a minute, It seems, or it's starting to seem, like the Catholic Church is a whole bunch of fake news.
Fake news in the sense that they were the, let's say, the holders of morality.
So the fake news is starting to form, at least in the zeitgeist and at least in the way people are thinking about it, is that you can't trust anything.
You can't trust anything you've heard.
You can't trust anything that's reported.
Now, if we can get people to understand how much they've been had, and I think the Mueller situation is going to be a big part of that, assuming that collusion is sort of ruled out by that, The Charlottesville hoax remains the biggest mental falsehood, the biggest hoax that the anti-Trumpers still hold on to.
Now, for those of you who are new to my Periscopes, you may have also believed The fake news that allegedly President Trump called the white supremacists fine people.
That's still reported on CNN as if that actually happened.
The truth, of course, is that the context was about the statues, whether the Confederate statues should stay up or not.
That was the reason for the Charlottesville event.
And the President said there were fine people on both sides of the debate.
The news illegitimately continues to report, well, did he say that the white supremacists are fine people?
No, because there were a lot of people on both sides of the debate.
The white supremacists were a tiny amount of them.
They happened to be there at Charlottesville.
But nobody, no president of the United States is going to come out and say, I back the white supremacists.
He's certainly not going to do it when his own family is Jewish.
He's definitely not going to do it In front of Israel and then have Israel say you're the greatest.
Israel loves this president.
It's like, did Israel not notice what CNN noticed?
How does Israel not notice if the president is praising white supremacists who are chanting anti-Semitic things?
Well, the reason that Israel doesn't notice is that it didn't happen.
And that's obvious to them, because they're not in our bubble of, you know, bubble of influence over here.
It's obvious to me.
And, of course, the president clarified it as clearly as possible.
No, I disavow the white supremacists, but, you know, obviously there are good people on both sides of the statute question.
So, what I'm suggesting is that there are two futures coming together here, sort of a Schrodinger's cat situation.
And the Mueller investigation, when there is a report, and especially if it comes after something that's positive with North Korea, there is likely to be One of two outcomes.
And maybe both.
One of them would be a massive resurgence of Trump derangement syndrome like we haven't seen since the election itself.
And it could be big.
I mean, it could be a big mental illness problem.
And you're going to see people saying stuff like, well, sure, maybe he didn't collude, but I still have to be right.
So, remember the time he ate a baby?
So the anti-Trumpers are going to be concocting, through confirmation bias, crazy stuff.
In all likelihood, that's where we're heading.
Now remember, I predicted the same thing at the election, and I was as right as anybody can be right.
But there's a smaller possibility, and I do think it's a smaller possibility, let's say 20%, just to put a size on it.
There is some possibility that a substantial number of the public is going to realize after the Mueller thing shows no collusion that How often they've been had.
They will see that all the things about the president being mentally unfit, they did not bear out.
All the thoughts about the world going to hell under Trump did not bear out.
Everybody's working with him.
China's negotiating with him.
We'll probably get a good result there.
So they're going to say, everything the news told me, Everything my side told me is not true.
And we're even seeing the president's administration doing a global, you know, what do they call it?
They're trying to decriminalize homosexuality in other countries, trying to influence them to decriminalize.
So you can't look at this stuff and say, oh, he's the worst LGBTQ president.
And also the only one doing a global effort to decriminalize homosexuality in other countries?
You can't square those things.
So I think we may be reaching a cracking point.
Where the people who are in the Trump derangement syndrome bubble are seeing so many pieces of evidence that they've been had by the people who run the media, the people who feed them their opinions.
It's going to be more obvious than it has ever been that they've been manipulated.
And they might rebel.
Now, it could be that some people will, but not all.
It could be more of a massive change.
It could be a small change.
But there is at least the possibility, and it's forming in the zeitgeist, that we have a common enemy.
The Democrats and the Republicans have a common enemy.
It's the fake news.
Take the issue of border security.
The question of border security.
There was something that couldn't get solved even though both sides agreed.
We couldn't solve border funding in a context of both the Democrats and Republicans like border security.
Always have.
Always will. And we still couldn't get it done.
Why? Well, mostly the effect of the media.
The media has demonized Trump to the point where people who agree with him can't agree with him in public.
That's how crazy the press coverage has been.
Alright. So, there's some possibility that Trump derangement syndrome is either going to go bigger than it's ever been, Or could shrink.
But I think, and I've said this before, we humans are not so good at knowing the difference between being on the edge of a disaster and being on the edge of a great success or a great good thing.
We can't tell the difference.
You've heard the saying, it's always darkest before the dawn.
We're kind of at that darkest place.
Could get darker.
It could get darker.
But it also could be Doha.
So let's look for that.
All right, now let's talk about climate change.
You know that I promised that I would ask Tony Heller, noted probably one of the most prolific critics of climate change.
I asked him for his top five climate change points.
Let's say top five points.
And I wanted him to focus his best five criticisms so that we could dig down and learn a little bit.
So I'm going to take just the first one.
Now, I will give Tony a chance to be on the Periscopes.
I've already invited him.
And when we schedule it, we'll bring him up.
But I wanted to give you my first impression of just the first item.
And You should assume that when we talk about this topic of climate change, whenever anybody tries to characterize someone else's argument, they don't do it that well.
So I want to apologize in advance if I mischaracterize Tony Heller's argument.
Likewise, I apologize in advance if I mischaracterize the official climate change or NASA's opinion or NOAA's opinion or whatever.
So, point number one.
All right, and I'm gonna give you a grade here.
So, it's about sea level and natural disasters.
And the question is this.
The alarmists would say we're already seeing sea level rise.
And that we can tell that climate change and human involvement in climate change with CO2 is the reason.
And with disasters that we're already seeing disasters that are worse.
So that would be the alarmist.
The Tony Heller view, and again, I may be getting the characterization of this slightly off, but I think it's in the ballpark, that we have not seen sea level rise that can be attributed to climate change.
There is sea level rise, but that we have not seen it in a way that could be directly contributed to climate change.
And that in terms of natural disasters and storms, of course they happen, but we can't attribute it to climate change.
Now my opinion on climate change has been that both sides are full of baloney on a lot of stuff.
So I said to myself, alright, well this should be easy enough to sort out.
I'll just Google, see what the most official sources say, compare it to what Tony Heller says, and then see what seems more real.
So, let me ask you this.
Are you under the impression that the climate alarmists do make these claims?
Is it your understanding also that the climate science Consensus is accurately stated here, that we're already seeing sea level rise, and that we know it's from CO2 from humans, and that we're already seeing natural disasters in the worst.
That is the official, right?
None of that is true.
This might be mind-boggling to you, but as far as I can tell, They do not make this claim.
And they also don't make that claim.
In other words, if you go to the NOAA site, so this is the government site, N-O-A-A, and as I did, And I look for, okay, so if this is true, then I'll just look for their argument.
And I go to look for their argument.
And sure enough, the official claim by the government is that sea level has been rising since, I don't know, 1900 or something.
So claim number one, sea level is rising.
True. I'm pretty sure Tony says it's true.
And I'm pretty sure that the scientists say it's true.
But that's separate from whether it's rising higher than normal and that it's caused by climate change.
So I looked for the official government NOAA estimate that the sea level is rising at a higher rate.
And sure enough, it is.
So NOAA says that the rate is rising at a higher level than normal, a faster rate.
And so I say to myself, aha, the official word is that climate change is causing the sea level to rise at a higher rate.
And then in Noah's article, this is the official government source for things about the ocean, right?
Including sea level. And here's this quote.
Somebody named Gill, who's associated with NOAA. He says, we have to be careful about how much of the recent decade's acceleration, meaning the acceleration and sea level rise, we attribute to global warming and how much to natural variability.
What? And then Gill says, the acceleration could be coming for more rapid melting of ice sheets or increasing ocean heat content.
That would be the climate change view.
But two decades is also within the timeframe over which natural climate oscillations can influence trends in global sea level.
In other words, on the NOAA page, the most official source of what's happening with sea level, doesn't make the claim.
So this is something you see in the media, but as far as I can tell, It's not an actual claim.
So, this is something we believe is a claim, is not actually a claim.
There is not a claim by NOAA, the most official source, and I think this was a 2014 article maybe.
This is something you might see in, I suppose you'd see it in the press, but there is not an official claim.
That the sea level is rising and that climate science is already identified as a sure source.
It's not a claim. So then you go to natural disasters.
Can we already see that our natural disasters are getting worse?
Well, you probably think, of course, that's claimed all the time.
If you look at the Washington Post, the New York Times, it's claimed all the time.
But, as far as I can tell, there is no official claim like this.
This seems to be just something the press says.
If you look at NASA, I don't...
So I'm not saying it's false.
So I'm not saying this is false.
I'm saying it's not an official claim.
There's no claim. So my verdict is that...
These two claims are BS. But it's BS by the press.
It doesn't seem to be that these are actually official claims of climate alarmists.
Their claim is that you will see these things.
Their claim is not that you have already seen it in a way that we can confirm.
They do sometimes say things such as, it might be caused by climate change, we're worried that it's caused by, you know, even some people probably say it's likely, but it is not an official climate alarm claim.
That we've already seen rising sea level from climate change or that the storms and the natural disasters are worse.
It's just not a claim.
So Tony Heller says there's, you know, he's, so he's basically accurate on this.
So I would say he's accurate on this.
Now, unfortunately, Tony Heller has a couple of points working against him.
Number one, he makes attributions about Essentially, he puts a reason on why people are thinking these things that is not in evidence.
It's not a bad hypothesis, and his hypothesis is that our natural fear of big natural disasters is what's driving our alarm over these things.
That might be true, but it's not in evidence.
So I'd say that's a knock against Tony's credibility because he does fairly consistently attribute motive or internal mental processes to people that is not in evidence.
Might be right, but it's not in evidence.
That works against his credibility.
Secondly, In his very first point, he includes a graph that shows that the, I believe it's the number of times that the temperature in the United States has crossed 90 degrees is actually declining.
So Tony, in his first point in which he talks about this stuff, shows a graph that the United States temperature record shows a decrease in the number of days that are over 90 degrees lately.
Is that true or false?
Well, here's the problem.
Climate scientists do not claim that the temperature in the United States is going up.
So Tony has cherry picked A number, you know, the United States measurement, to counter the claims of global warming when in fact the global warming scientists do not claim that the United States in particular is the one that's going up, because it can go up in some places, down in some.
Now, I believe the climate change people say that most of the warming would happen in the ocean, and it would happen at the poles.
I may have that wrong, but I think that's the claim.
So in other words, the fact that the United States temperature does not show, with this one cherry-picked thing, does not show that warming, does not refute climate alarm.
But Tony included this, what I would consider an obviously cherry-picked and therefore misleading statement.
And so, credibility-wise, even though his point seems to be accurate, His credibility is low.
So we'll talk about his other points in other periscopes.
And we'll give him a chance to respond to all this.
I'm giving you my first impression to give him something to respond to.
So my first impression is that on this first set of questions, The sea level and the natural disasters, both sides are not credible.
So my claim all along is that I'm having trouble getting to an answer for myself, a personal opinion of how worried I should be, because it seems to me both sides are lying to me.
And although one of those sides has to be correct, One of them has to be correct.
So either climate warming from humans is either a big problem or it's not.
It can't both be true.
And the fact that both of them are, and I'm going to say lying, I don't want to put intent into their minds, but in terms of what is believable, both are selling me stories that I can't believe.
So it's hard for me to believe anything else they say if something they say is so obviously not true.
So here's my point.
I think Tony Heller is accurate when he says we haven't seen the rising sea level because even the official experts say that.
And I believe he's accurate when he says we have not identified the natural disasters to be caused by climate change because the experts also say that.
But Tony does two things that lower his credibility on this topic.
One is to ascribe or to attribute mental processes that are not in evidence, that people are trying to hide things or people are alarmed and that's why they're acting that way.
He might be right, but it's not in evidence.
And then cherry-picking The one place, the United States, where you don't necessarily expect to see that much warming makes me wonder why did you pick the one place that's not telling the story to tell the story.
Now one of the things that I'm borrowing a little bit from other skeptics here, but here's a question I ask myself.
Apparently there are two places that we can measure things well.
One of those places, and I'm looking for some fact checking here to tell me I'm wrong, the best place to measure temperatures for an extended period of time is the United States.
So I think everybody would agree that the vast number, you know, the biggest percentage of land-based measurement devices are in the United States and they've been here for the longest time and, you know, we have the best handle on those of any place else in the world.
By coincidence, by coincidence, the place we can best and most accurately measure the temperature, there's no global warming detected.
Now, that does not violate the idea that the planet is warming.
Because remember, the planet warming theory is that the warming is going mostly into the ocean, so that's not a land-based measurement, and it's going into the poles, and the poles are not in the United States.
But it is bothersome that the one place we can measure it best Is also one of those places where the temperature isn't going up?
Maybe. But there's one other place that the temperature, and here's the part you need to fact check me on.
I might be wrong about this. But I believe that the satellites that we've had since 1997 can measure the temperature of the upper troposphere.
If they can measure the upper troposphere, What should it show?
Well, I don't think that the upper troposphere measurements show climate change.
But, again, that's not where the theory says that the warming is going to be.
The warming will be in the ocean and at the poles.
So the fact that we can more easily measure the troposphere That's not going to tell you that much because that's not where the warming is going anyway.
So the two places that we can measure well happen to be, by coincidence, the two places the warming is not supposed to be going.
Now, does that tell you that it's a big old fraud and, you know, it's not a coincidence that the places we can measure easily are also coincidentally not the places all the warming is supposed to go?
Well, you don't want to make too big a deal about that, because that could be just a coincidence.
It could be, yeah, it could be nothing but a coincidence.
But it's certainly, it's one that raises a flag.
It's like, why is it that all the places we can measure well, we don't find the signal for climate change?
But don't make too big a deal about that, because that could be just a coincidence.
Alright, there's lots more to be said on the topic, but where I'm going to put a marker for point number one of Tony Heller's argument, I would say he's the winner of the argument that we have not seen sea level changes based on climate change, because that's not even different from what the official story is.
And also, he's right when he says we haven't seen the signal in natural disasters.
Because that's also the official word.
But I would say his argument is lacking credibility in general.
Because of two problems.
One, he puts unfounded assumptions into why people are thinking the way they are.
And by the way, I think he's right, but there's no evidence for it.
The evidence meaning that people see natural disasters and they're more influenced by them because our minds are wired to be more afraid of giant natural disasters than about other things in life.
So I think that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, but no data for that.
And then secondly, the fact that there's a cherry-picked graph that's central to his argument even on this point and didn't even need to be there makes me doubt the credibility of the graphs anyway.
Okay, so that's where we are.
How does his thinking about motive hurt his actual data?
It doesn't hurt the data, and we'll have different conversations about the data.
So we haven't really talked about the data yet, but we will.
I just want to do one and put it there.
Now, Tony will probably respond But I don't think he's going to disagree with the two points I made.
I don't think he'll disagree that his graph is cherry-picked.
And I don't think he'll disagree that there's no direct evidence that the only reason that people are worried about these natural disasters is their own mentality.
Although I think that's...
A solid hypothesis that if I had to bet, if you put a gun to my head, I'd say, yeah, it's because people are afraid of big disasters.
That's probably why. Just there's no evidence to it.
All right. And I'm going to end it there.
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