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March 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:12:19
Episode 439 Scott Adams: Talking to Dr. Shiva About Climate Change
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It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And we're going to be joined by Dr.
Shiva in a moment.
As soon as he accepts the invite, Dr.
Shiva, you should be seeing right now a message that tells you you can be a guest.
And when you do, We've got one person here already.
Well, we're going to start with just Dr.
Shiva as soon as you're on here.
And we're going to talk about some climate change stuff in a way you have not seen before, I think.
All right. There is not a lot of new news today.
There's a little bit of news about...
Apparently AIDS has been cured in a second patient, doctors think, but they're not sure.
All right, so I'm not seeing Dr.
Shiva yet. All right, I know you're on there.
You're on, so let me just send him a text.
You should see a prompt to join as guest.
So this is a brand new process today.
We're trying to use the brand new, and I mean brand new as of yesterday.
I think this feature was active, in which I could invite a guest on at the same time.
Let me make sure we're not having technical difficulties here.
Says she's waiting to join.
All right. That means I can...
There we are. Should be live any moment now.
Oops. Let me change my headset.
Hi, Scott. I think I'm on.
Yes, you are. I'm gonna change my headset so we better sound.
Okay. How's that?
Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you great.
Can you hear me? I can hear you, and I'm pretty sure they can.
Yeah, so it just got its full forum yesterday, so you're the first person I've used with this version of the release, and what it does is it allows the guest feature, which we have had before, But it also allows the Twitter notification for the first time those two features work together.
So that's brand new and we're testing it out right now.
Very nice. So, Dr.
Shiva, I like to ask people to give their own introduction because that would allow you to say the things that are relevant to what we're going to talk about in the quickest way.
So could you, for the benefit of those few people who have not already heard of you, Tell them your, let's say, academic and or professional background that is relevant to this discussion.
Sure, Scott. So this is Dr.
Shivaya Dure. You know, I'm a working engineer and a scientist.
My specific area of training is in systems science or systems biology.
And we can talk more about that, but I have four degrees from MIT. My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering and computer science.
I have another degree which came out of an integration of engineering and, believe it or not, graphics, which is called scientific visualization.
How do you visualize very complex phenomenon?
And that's from the Media Lab, a master's.
And I also have another master's degree in mechanical engineering, and my thesis was really understanding very complex wave propagation.
And then my PhD...
Is in biological engineering, but specifically systems biology.
How do you understand complex systems?
So that's my training set.
So you're a scientist.
You have four MIT degrees.
You've got a medical degree.
And the only thing we don't know is, are you qualified for the simultaneous SIPP? Yeah, I am.
Good, because we're going to have that right now.
Hey, everybody.
Grab your mug, your cup, your glass, your stein, your tankard, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me for the simultaneous sip.
All right.
Now...
Before we talk about climate change, let me set this up a little bit.
One of the reasons I love talking to you is that you have visibility through lots of different windows that average people do not.
You've seen science through different angles.
You've worked in different fields.
So you have a broad and yet deep understanding of a lot of stuff that people don't.
Now, you're not a climate scientist.
But that's not why you were asked here.
We want to hear your argument in a way that's accessible to the people who are watching.
The other part of context is I'm neither a denier on climate nor a believer.
I'm doing a deep dive, which I'm in a several-month process, to try to find out how worried I should be.
And what I've discovered is that both sides are completely convincing And both sides, if I talk about all the people, not anybody in particular, but both sides seem like a lot of bullshit to me.
Meaning that even if one side is absolutely right, there are certainly a lot of people on both sides who are trying to sell stuff that even with my limited knowledge looks illegitimate on both sides.
So that's why I can't decide who's right because they both seem not quite right to me.
And so I thought we could get a little deeper dive.
And Dr. Shiva, give us your position on climate change.
Should we be worried? Is the science solid?
Where are you on everything? Yeah, so Scott, just to set this up, you know, very much like you, I did not jump into this until recently from a science standpoint.
And I'll tell you, just for, I know you have sort of a broad viewership.
You have people who Take a left position or a right position.
And when it comes to science, as Richard Feynman, the great physicist, said, you know, you follow the scientific method.
You see something in nature and you try and explain it.
So you typically make a guess of why you think that's occurring.
It's a guess. And that's how scientists start.
And then you attempt to validate your guess by seeing if you're We lost our connection with Dr.
Shiva, so as soon as his connection comes back, we will connect him again.
So I think he just had probably a Wi-Fi problem on his end.
Let's see. There he is.
Back. We're clicking him.
We're adding a guest.
We're inviting him.
And... Dr.
Shiva, you're back. On the iPhone, when someone calls you, I had a call.
Sorry about that.
So anyway, what I was saying was, Feynman basically said you follow the scientific method, which is you see something in nature, you think something's going on, you make a guess, you then take your guess and you validate it by experiments, and if the experiments match, then you say, yes, this is matching, And I have something here.
If it doesn't, it doesn't matter whether you look great, whether you have or you don't look great, whether you say weird things like, you know, CO2 and demonization.
It doesn't matter what the issue is.
If the data matches, then you actually have something that's true.
And evidence, to be even more specific, is the unambiguous repetition of predictions.
Okay? All right. So let's apply that to climate change.
Have the climate scientists made their case under those standards?
They haven't. They haven't.
And the other thing is there is no thing called climate science.
This is a made-up field that has come up.
It really is. We need to talk about this.
And there's two phenomenon here that we need to understand before we dive into this.
There's climate and then there's weather.
And the media has been very, very clever at conflating weather to be climate and confusing both.
Climate and weather are very different things.
And the best thing I can, the analogy I can give, Scott, is you take your body.
Your body has an equilibrium.
It's a natural system.
Your temperature is around 98.2.
On any particular day, your temperature may vary, right?
Up and down based on, you may have a fever, you may have a cold, etc.
But overall, you have this equilibrium called your body's temperature.
So that equilibrium mode, which is a much larger scale of time, is called, let's say, quote-unquote, climate.
The changes that occur from time to time are weather.
Now, would you agree with me that both the skeptics as a group and the climate scientists as a group make exactly the same weasel move, which is they look outside And if the weather happens to agree with their larger theory that day, they'll make a claim.
It's like, oh, it's extra cold today or it's extra warm.
But don't both sides do that?
Well, yeah. I mean, I saw one of your videos, Scott, where you talked about Heller doing that thing with the 98 degree – I think the 90 degrees, and he said he was going down.
So here's the problem with this field, right?
Either – so you really have four types of people in this field right now, or five.
One is you have serious scientists, like a Happer, like a Dick Lindzen, in my opinion, who are physicists, who have spent their lives understanding, for example, how CO2 emits and absorbs radiation.
These are not simple equations.
So you have serious scientists.
The other extreme, you have the news media, who loves news, who loves to conflate things because they sell advertising.
And then you have two other very interesting groups.
You have celebrities, politicians, and non-profit organizations on one hand.
And then you have what I call...
Looks like he got another call coming in.
So as soon as he clears that, he'll be back with us.
There he is. And Dr.
Shiva back. Okay.
To use this word, but it's almost academics versus scientists.
And academics have been brought into the frame, including at places like MIT, where if you say anything against the narrative about climate change, your grants will get cut.
And there's $2 billion now open for impacts on climate change.
So what you have is you have serious physicists, serious chemists, serious astrophysicist guys on one hand.
And then the last group, which I call the fifth group, is the common man, which cannot rationalize things.
So they actually look at the facts based on non-rationalization.
So what's happened in what I call among the educated idiot group of the fake scientists...
No, this is what's going on.
C.P. Snow, as Linsen talked about it, talked about this.
If you go to a group of people today and you ask them, educated people, people with degrees, can you tell me the second law of thermodynamics?
Most of them can't. Can you tell me the difference between mass and acceleration?
Most of them can't. But those two questions are similar to have you read Shakespeare in the Humanities or do you know how to read?
So what we are creating now is a whole strata of people who are essentially taught in the college atmosphere to please professors And except if you told them the Earth is flat, they'd probably accept it because they get an A for it.
So I want to give this back-end milieu on what's actually going on.
There are these five groups of people.
So when a guy like Will Happer, William Happer, serious scientist at Princeton, in fact, one of the slides I sent you, in fact, in the 80s when he was getting into this field, he actually did his own climate models.
And he predicted also a warming.
And then he later said, you know, these models are too complicated.
My models were way off.
And I think one of the graphs I sent you has that.
By the way, I didn't get those graphs.
It's a PowerPoint I sent you.
I emailed it to you.
So you have serious scientists like William Happer who spent their lives understanding how this process works and have also admitted that it's too difficult.
Let's go to the, from a systems perspective, Scott, that's what I really wanted to share with your audience and you today.
Let's step back because you say, I think you're rightfully saying there's sort of two groups here, the skeptics and the quote-unquote deniers, right?
And I want to put double quotes around deniers because it has a lot of subtext there and gravitas there almost related to Holocaust deniers.
And these terms are very, very specifically chosen.
But If you step back and you just look at it very simply, and I think we can do what's called basic bookkeeping.
The Sun, Scott, is a big radiation machine.
It's about 6,000 degrees, and it puts out radiation that hits the Earth, about 340.
And by the way, what I'm sharing right now, there's no controversy on this.
Everyone agrees on both sides.
So to just simply level set, The Sun puts out around 340 watts per meter squared of energy.
So just think about the number 340 hits the Earth.
Well, for the benefit of the general audience who won't be able to follow at that level, can you give us the idiot's version?
The idiot's version is this.
All natural systems in the world, your body and the Earth, have a principle called equilibrium.
They do things to maintain their equilibrium, which means changes take place, but they know how to adjust themselves to maintain equilibrium.
This is a process.
So in this case, the Sun is putting out a certain amount of sunlight, and the Earth wants to maintain its temperature at 15 degrees centigrade.
Okay, 15 degrees, which is the average global mean temperature.
Very different than the temperature of what's occurring today or in the winter.
That's weather. We're talking about the global mean temperature is 15 degrees.
So the Earth, if you believe in natural systems, which is what we live in, it tries to maintain that equilibrium, Scott.
So the Sun hits it, a certain amount of energy comes in, a certain amount of energy is reflected.
Around 200 watts per meter is always maintained.
In order to do that, the Earth – I mean, emitted back – The Earth has to maintain 288 degrees Kelvin or 15 degrees.
So just think about the Earth. Now, doesn't that balance require that there are certain variables that always stay the same?
And if any of those variables changed, you would no longer have equilibrium, right?
Well, it's a good question.
So this is where it gets into it.
I'm a systems guy, and systems have multiple inputs, multiple outputs, okay?
And it's a complex interaction of multiple inputs working in a very dynamic system.
Again, if you look at the Earth, and if we go into it, there's the atmosphere and then the oceans, two what are called in fluid mechanics, if you take a complex, you know, graduate course, it's called two turbulent fluids.
But the bottom line, there's multiple variables, Scott.
And what the intelligence of natural systems are is they know how to feedback.
Now, Wait, I think you lost everybody on that.
Why should we assume that natural variables have intelligence?
What would make us believe that even if things got out of whack, they should trend back to being in balance?
What logic is there for that?
Great question. So, nature has You know, this is a very deep question, right?
Thermodynamics has to do a lot with this, the second law of thermodynamics, but when you take very complex systems, small and large, the reason they exist is they have to have feedback, and they try to maintain equilibrium.
So, for example, your body, if you said that it has to only maintain 98.2 degrees at every point, if it went to 98.3, you're going to blow up, or you'd freeze.
So natural systems have a property called resilience.
That's why evolution, if you believe in that, that's why we exist right now.
You and I are talking and we exist because Natural systems are able to handle variations and maintain an equilibrium over a timescale.
So is the bottom line that we could add lots of CO2, it would create a greenhouse effect, it would create warming in the short run, but there would be some kind of balancing thing that naturally and unpredictably happens?
Right. So when they do these climate models, the climate models are based on the assumption that CO2 increases, the average temperature of the Earth is going to increase.
When they do those models, Scott, the way they calculated the feedback left out a very important factor called clouds.
Okay? So, as CO2 increases...
Wait, are you telling me that climate scientists, the people who study climate, forgot to consider clouds?
Well, specifically, they did a very, very crude, highly crude approximation of clouds.
Highly crude. So, their models were fundamentally based on a positive feedback system, which means you add more CO2, The delta T in temperature keeps increasing.
Dick Lindzen, in 2000, he published a very, very important paper called The Iris Effect, which said that as CO2, as greenhouse gases increase, that the Earth has a very interesting modulating factor where cirrus clouds will get shorter, smaller, or larger, or thinner or thicker, to release infrared radiation growing.
Now, a case in point of this was this...
Dick published that in a very eminent journal.
Subsequently, the editor was fired.
Okay? Now, let me make sure I understand this.
So the idea is that The climate scientists did, they did model clouds, but they did it incorrectly because they imagined that the clouds would continue doing what the clouds always do, but in fact the clouds will change their shape with the heat and no longer do what clouds used to do, because they will be a different kind of cloud as the temperature goes up.
Is that true? It's particularly the cirrus clouds.
The cirrus clouds are literally like an iris.
If CO2 levels or some phenomenon takes place to increase the infrared radiation, to emit it or to store it, the cirrus clouds change their shape, to put it simply, like the iris in your eye.
This was something that Lindzen published in 2002.
People attacked him.
The editor was fired.
Lindzen wrote back a rebuttal, and it's since been verified.
The iris effect. So, what that shows is that the Earth has a way to modulate through negative feedback.
Now, let me... It gets even more...
Hold on. Hold on.
So, have we already seen the modulation, or is it predicted that if it gets a little bit warmer, that will kick in?
You know, the Sirius cloud, what I'm saying is this feedback system is constantly taking place.
In fact, if you look at, you could argue that the climate scientists, in one of the graphs I sent you, said that the Earth's temperature was going to continue increasing, right?
Right. This is in their own thing, and this is, by the way, from the IPCC. But they had predicted...
That the temperature would keep increasing.
In fact, starting around – it would continue to grow from 1980 all the way up.
But if you see around 2003, it's gotten flat.
Okay? Well, hold on.
Hold on. Every time you have a fact, I might need to jump in just so we don't go too far past the fact.
My understanding is that the climate scientists say that anything less than maybe a 17 year period is meaningless in terms of that could just be noise, but that any 17 year period that violated the trend would not be meaningful.
Is that not the scientific view?
Well, the scientific view is that these models can't predict over a long range.
I think there's a general consensus on that.
Somebody's saying 35 years.
So I've seen two things. I've seen that any small change within a 30-year period may not be long enough to even know anything.
Do you have a sense of whether that's meaningful or not?
Yeah, I can just go by the current data that's out there, Scott.
These models are highly variable because of the dynamics, but this is the data.
So if you look from in the 60s, Starting in the 50s to 1975, the temperature was actually going down.
Okay? People were predicting a global cooling was going to take place.
Starting from 1977...
Well, hold on. The climate scientists would say that's just not true.
They would say that the warming has happened consistently the entire period.
Isn't that their claim?
No, no. This is from IPCC. So, if you look...
This is actual data.
If you look from 1950s to 1975, if you remember, when I was in the 70s, people were saying the Earth could be going into a cooling phase.
Then, starting around 1975, the temperature of the Earth started rising.
And all throughout this period, by the way, CO2 levels are increasing.
But, starting around 2002, it's been flat.
The point is climate change.
The Earth is constantly varying.
There are positive things that increase CO2. Hold on, Dr.
Shiva. So I'm looking at a site called Skeptical Science, which I have no reason to believe that anything on this site is accurate.
But what it does is it lists the skeptical arguments and then gives the scientific counterpoint.
But I'm looking at the graph right here.
It goes from, let's see, before the 70s through to the 2000s, and it shows that every type of measurement is steadily up from ocean heat to land plus ice to atmosphere.
So the scientific claim that I'm looking at is that the temperature has consistently gone up.
I mean, it's got some jags, so there are little periods where it goes down, but it's pretty much up since 1970.
Well, Right, but look at, started around 2002 to today, Scott.
It's flat. The temperature, global mean temperature.
You see, people are confusing...
Well, hold on.
Hold on. So, we have to have a standard matter of fact.
I'm looking at what is reportedly the scientific opinion, which is that it's going up.
So, as a point of fact, there's a disagreement there.
There's a disagreement. So, we're talking about the temperature variation...
To be very specific, what people are talking about is the delta T, which is a temperature variation from the mean.
Delta T. This is the measurement that is used in all of the models.
So if you looked at the math of it, there's a big model that's calculating the change in temperature from the global mean.
And they have a big formula that they used to calculate it.
We can get into it, but it's the delta T. That delta T temperature, the change from the global mean, It has been flat for the last over decade.
Wait, hold on. I don't understand why I can't just measure the temperature itself, and if it's going up sharply, that confirms the theory, doesn't it?
And they would say, we measured it 50 different ways.
Every single way we measure it, we get the same result.
That would be the scientific view, right?
Right. I'm saying the global mean temperature, the delta change from that has been flat for the last 15 years.
But I don't understand that point.
Can you address my point?
Which is, if the temperature, just the regular temperature, It is going up according to a sharper curve than ever before, and it matches CO2. Why do I need to be measuring deltas than anything else?
What is that temperature changing, Scott?
What is the units of that temperature change?
The units, I assume, would be degrees?
I don't know. No, no, but I'm talking about the magnitude.
Since the end of the last ice age, the little ice age, the temperature has gone up by one degree.
That was when thawing took place.
Well, but is it true that the rate of increase for, let's say, the last 50 years, that there is a definite, a very sharp increase in the rate that is unprecedented?
Is there an unprecedented rate of increase?
That's not true. That's the big lie.
It's false. Let me jump in before you say that.
So I'm on this skeptical site, which I just mentioned, and I was looking for some arguments that maybe would come up so I would know what the scientists say.
And the primary, the central argument of climate scientists is that not just that the temperature is getting higher, which would not mean that much because temperatures change over time, But that the rate is greatly increasing.
And so when I look at their argument that says, somebody will say, well, the temperature is not really increasing, and then I look at these skeptical sites' answer to that, and they'll say, yes, we've measured it a whole bunch of different ways.
We've measured it from satellites.
We've measured the ocean.
We've measured the land.
We've looked at proxies, and no matter what we look at, it's always getting warmer.
And I say, hold on, hold on.
You just changed the argument.
I was asking you about the rate of increase.
That's the theory, right?
Let me finish the point.
Why is it that your best argument on the scientific side ignores your central argument?
You just said it's the rate.
Show me how the rate is going up.
And then you look at the argument and it ignores rate and says, look, it's going up.
So to me, that's a perfect example of how even if it's true, even if it's true that the climate scientists are completely right, that the CO2 is driving temperature and it's going up, that is presented as a lie.
In other words, it's presented in a form of communication That a reasonable person would have to say, well, it looks like you're trying to fool me.
Because you just changed the argument.
Your central argument is rate of increase.
And when you defend the temperature, you leave out rate of increase?
That looks like just a fraud.
Now go on. Yeah, so the graph I sent you, Scott, that's precisely what it has.
Basic calculus, the rate, what you just said, is the derivative, is a change in temperature over time.
So if you have a slope, which is an angled line, then you have a rate of increase.
Or if it's going down the other way, you have a rate of decrease.
When it's flat, it's zero.
So the rate of increase of temperature since 2002 has been flat.
And now, I also...
Hold on. But would you agree that the climate scientists would say that is not meaningful?
Because that's a short period of time.
Well, this is where we're moving into a space where all of this is governed by models.
Everything that they're talking about is governed by models.
And models climate occurs on a large timescale, weather occurs on much shorter timescales.
So this is a very malicious scientific thing that these guys are doing.
They are absolutely confusing climate, With weather.
Let me give you an example of this.
2.5 billion years ago, we had what was called a faint sun.
Carl Sagan, you know, the astronomer.
There was a very interesting paradox.
The sun was a new sun.
So 2.5 billion years ago, the amount of heat the sun was putting out was 30% less, Scott.
So if it's 30% less, what would you think the Earth's temperature would be 2.5 billion years ago?
2.5 billion years, 30% less sun, I'm going to say, I have no idea.
It's probably not 30% less.
Do you think it would be less or more?
Or the same? I would say that there are more variables than the sun, and so it would depend on the composition of the atmosphere at the time.
Exactly. So what happened was, when this phenomenon came out, that 2.5 billion years ago the sun was putting out 30% less heat, people found something fascinating.
The temperature of the Earth was around the same, around 15 degrees centigrade, 2.5 billion years ago.
So how is that possible?
How could it be we're getting 30% less?
It was called the faint sun paradox, pointed out by Carl Sagan.
That 2.5 billion years ago, the sun is putting up 30% less energy, but we have the same temperature as we have today, 15 degrees.
So a cottage industry As Dick Lindzen points out, was created by a bunch of scientists saying, oh, it must be the greenhouse gases, right?
Because the greenhouse gases must be the things that are keeping that energy here to maintain, you know, that umbrella around us to keep it at 15 degrees.
And people propose all sorts of things.
Lots of papers came out. In fact, Carl Sagan said it must be more ammonia.
All of this was disproven.
But what they did find out, it was the cirrus clouds, the iris effect.
At that time, 2.5 billion years ago, we had a thicker Cirrus cloud cover.
You have to tell me, how certain are we that the Cirrus clouds 1.5 billion years ago had an iris effect?
That feels like something we couldn't possibly know.
Well, there's a set of calculations that were performed, and those calculations, you know, science goes like this.
You start with a guess, you do your hypothesis, and you iterate.
When Dick Lindzen put out that paper.
It was refuted, but people can look it up at the iris effect.
Consistently now that effect has been shown repeatedly in experiments to exist, and in fact exists today, and it likely existed at that point.
So in other words, experiments today Show us that that's probably what was happening in the past, but we don't have direct evidence of the iris effect.
We don't have direct evidence, but we do know that the level of greenhouse gases that would have had to exist to maintain that temperature are nearly impossible.
Okay? Okay. So the point is greenhouse gases are always being pointed out in the climate change argument as the fundamental demon, as Happer said, CO2 is a demonic Satan here, that they are the modulator of the Earth's surface temperature.
When it turns out, water vapor and clouds have far more effect, and in the body of research, that research and the findings of that have been diminished.
And that is a very, very important piece because that is a feedback system that the Earth offers to modulate the surface temperature of the Earth.
Now, there's a question coming in that we should address.
Somebody asked, are you associated with any oil companies?
The answer is no, right?
No. In fact, just to point that person, remember, when I published a series of six papers using systems biology methods and I exposed that there are no Um, essentially, safety standards for GMOs, all the people on the left loved me, okay? And they said, are you working with all the green companies?
So I have no interest in oil companies.
In fact, the oil companies, Scott, love this because BP has changed their logo.
It makes them look like they're green.
So there's a bigger picture here.
No, I don't have any interest in oil companies.
You do have a connection with Richard Lindzen, though, the famous skeptical climate scientist.
Well, I think...
There are three terms, don't take this the wrong way, Scott, that are wrong, skeptical climate scientists.
Dick does not claim to be a climate scientist.
Dick is a serious applied mathematician and physicist.
I'm saying this term, climate science, has been created because once the Gores and the Clinton created this, and we can talk about this in detail...
I don't want to get too far from that, but you have a personal relationship with one of the most famous voices on this topic.
So what happened was, when I started, I was saying, wow, climate change...
It does take place, but do we have extremes?
Do we have the Arctic ice?
So I actually reached out to Dick Lindzen.
He's a professor at MIT. I wrote to him and Dick got back to me.
And Dick gave me a body of work, a lot of science, a lot of math that I had to go through to come to my own conclusions that there's climate, there's weather, climate does change, but the CO2 effect on the increase in temperature, there's no scientific evidence for it at all.
Period. So...
In fact, one of the charts that I sent you, Scott, this is probably one of the most important ones Dick shared with me.
There are 20 different models, because one of the big things we've been told is that the polar bears are going to die off, that the Arctic ice caps are going to melt.
I'm sure you've seen this, right? Yes.
Well, the IPCC, their working group of 250 scientists across the world, has nearly 21 different models for predicting the Arctic ice sheet Decay.
And if you look at that one diagram that I sent you, I think it's slide 6, there are literally 20 different models, some predicting there will be no ice left, and others predicting there will be all the ice left there.
So each one of these models...
I've got your slides, but they're...
I'm trying to find what I need.
Oh yeah, it's the one that's a colorful one.
It's not the...
This one? Yes.
No, no, no. The next one.
The next one. It's got a bunch of graphs on it.
Bunch of graphs on it. This one?
Nope. Not that one. The one that has a bunch of color graphs on it.
You'll see it. It goes from the year 2000 to 2100, and it has NIH ice extent.
That must be the one that fell on the floor.
Hold on. Okay, we'll get it.
So while Scott's coming, so what you see is these are mathematical models that are done to predict climate.
Multiple variables are involved in predicting.
So remember the three things that the climate alarmist says that The ice sheets are going to melt, we're going to have temperature extremes, and the oceans are rising.
These are the three big things.
So I want to take each one, Scott, and just share with you some facts on them.
So we're going to talk about ocean rising first?
No, no, let's talk about the ice sheet, which is that graph.
Ice sheet? Yeah.
Alright, my printer lost paper.
I'm just going to grab a piece of paper and throw it in there.
Hold on. Yeah, sure. So...
Take your time, Scott. So if you look from when Scott gets, if you go from the year 2000 to 2100, these models were created to say what percentage of the Arctic ice sheet would be left, Scott. That's what these are looking at.
Okay? Okay.
And this is slide six, by the way.
Slide five and six.
And this was done by Eisenman.
Tell me when that comes out.
I don't have anything like that in what you sent me, but let's try to proceed with that.
Okay. It's the one before the earth coming and graphs coming, the sun hitting, and then red stuff going back.
But it's just a multi...
It's got a graph of purple on it.
But the bottom line is, if we look at that paper...
It literally has 20 lines on it, Scott.
20 different predictions.
Evidence, from the scientific perspective, is unambiguous predictions.
Unambiguous. Here you have 20 different predictions of ice melting from 0 to 100.
So how can you say that's evidence?
It's not. There's no evidence that the Arctic ice sheets are going to melt and be gone by 2100, which is what the alarmists are saying.
But there is evidence that the ice has been consistently melting in current years.
Is that not true? Well, okay, so here's the ice melts and it also grows.
And now we can talk about science.
You know, there's been some very interesting science done all the way from the 20s and 30s showing that the orbit of the Earth affects the ice growth in some cyclical form Which creates insulation in the Arctic.
And that process creates a temperature differential from the Arctic to the tropics, which grows, where ice grows and it recedes.
This is a natural phenomenon that's been going on for, you know, millennia.
But what I'm trying to say is, let's focus in on the climate change alarmists.
They have no model that consistently shows, because evidence is unambiguous, predictions.
That is science. If we want to do science, unambiguous predictions, you have 20 different models which are all predicting varying amounts of ice from 0 to 100%.
It's just random, Scott.
Yeah, let me, I take that point, but of all the things that they measure, so they're measuring land temperatures, you know, ocean temperatures, they're measuring sea level, and they're measuring ice.
Of all of those things, I've always thought measuring the ice might be the sketchiest, because I'm just not sure that they can do that, even though they can see it from space, how deep is it, you know, etc.
What would you consider the gold standard of things that we do have a good way to measure that if that one thing changed, you'd say, okay, there is climate change?
In other words, would you bank everything on sea level?
Would you bank everything on ocean temperature?
Or tropospheric temperature, because maybe we can measure that with greater precision with our satellites.
What would be your most reliable one thing that you would bet it all on?
If you could put a model on that and say, okay, if your model can predict this, whether it's sea level or ice, I will change my mind.
What would it be? Okay.
First of all, you know, the climate alarmists have...
We have created a platform which is not even based on science by taking a multidimensional systems problem and saying that you've measured by one variable called CO2. It is basically not even science.
But if you were to ask me, it would be the surface temperature of the Earth, the global mean temperature of the Earth.
Okay? But, hold on.
But the global mean temperature of the Earth...
My understanding is that 90% of the warming goes into the poles and into the water.
So would you really get what you need if you're only measuring land temperatures?
And do we have enough?
My understanding is the only place we have Good long-term measurements is the United States, and there's some thinking that the United States may not have been in a place where there was a lot of warming in the first place, you know, because it's going to be in the poles and in the ocean.
So I'm unconvinced that measuring land temperatures would be the gold standard, but do you think it is?
Well, so what I'm saying, Scott, is you can't measure one thing, so you're asking me a question to reduce a multi-dimensional problem to one variable.
But what I can tell you is that we are starting to, with satellite data, we're starting to be able to measure the radiation that's being emitted across different parts of the globe.
The emission of radiation is a value that we should be measuring, the radiative forcing.
It's a term That is a little bit difficult to explain, but what I'm trying to say is that reducing this entire problem to CO2 and reducing this entire problem to saying CO2 and this Delta T is everything is how the climate change industry has started.
But let me ask you this.
If it's true that the temperature is rising and the only thing that we can measure that's changing at the same rate is the CO2, does that tell you everything you need?
Because nothing else is changing, at least changing at a rate that would make a difference to our current temperatures.
What's wrong with that logic?
That's what I'm saying. This isn't true.
What part is not true? Well, for example, I'll give you an effect.
What is the Cirrus cloud thickness as these things change over time?
Are we measuring that, for example?
There's a modulation taking place constantly.
The big picture here is we are sitting here as human beings with about a hundred year lifespan.
Wait, hold on. Yeah.
Hold on. So, on the cloud thing.
But the temperatures are only going in one direction, and the only thing that's also going in a substantially changed direction is CO2. The clouds, as far as we know, unless you can tell me that we've measured this, The clouds are not having an effect of moderating because the temperature continues to go up.
Doesn't that prove that the clouds are not modulating the temperature?
Because we don't see them doing it.
Well, I'm saying there's a couple assumptions here.
The temperature has gone up one degree over the last 200 years, which was the thawing of the last ice, the little ice age.
This is something that people will not contest.
The temperature that has...
That they claim has gone up that delta T over the last 15 years, the rate of change of temperature has been stable.
It's been zero. Delta T over time.
The rate of change is zero.
How is that square with a graph that goes like this?
Are you saying that that graph does not...
Well, you know, whenever you see a hockey stick curve, let's start looking at the units, and let's start looking at the error bars on that.
And if you look at the units on that, I believe it's like 0.2, 0.3.
These are predictions.
And the error bars on that are, you know, unknown.
You know, meaning that they're very, very high error bars.
It's even the IPCC. If you look at the IPCC report I sent you, Scott, of the big working group of 250 scientists, it's a very important report because it pretty much...
It exposes the entire...
Do you have it there, Scott? I sent it to you?
What I have is not useful.
Let me...
So, the interpanel...
Everyone knows the IPCC, I assume, right?
What they are? Right.
Yeah, the... I think everybody here knows what the IPCC is.
So the IPCC, the last major report, not the one that just came out a couple years ago, but the major one, 250 scientists, this is a conclusion.
And this is buried in the report.
It says there is no evidence and no consensus to support claims of imminent climate catastrophes or irreversible tipping points.
Two, There are indeed a 15-year hiatus in global warming from 1998 to 2013, and the climate models all failed to predict and overshot warming so bad they had to be disregarded.
Three, both IPCC and NOAA agree there was and is no trend of increasing severity or frequency of hurricanes or typhoons or even thunderstorms in the 20th and 21st century.
Four, the previous IPCC report in 2007 was wrong.
There is no evidence or likelihood that man's release of CO2 or any other behavior is doing anything to cause more droughts.
Five, the overall...
I mean, it keeps going. When this report came out, And the same kind of report came out in 1999, shortly before Al Gore did Inconvenient Truth.
By the way, in the cover of that book, in the inside cover, he's got tornadoes going the wrong way.
Hurricane's going the wrong way.
It's photoshopped. So what I'm trying to say is every time the IPCC actually brings in more scientists, they actually say this is all rubbish from a science standpoint.
And what happens is the other people react to start the PR machine.
Even when this report came out, Scott, they released a one-page press release done by the media.
We're in a situation in this country Where people do not understand physics, they do not understand math, and they're being bamboozled.
This whole thing is nonsense.
The relationship between CO2 and delta T is so nominal.
Let me give you, if you actually look at the numbers, doubling CO2, and both sides agree to this, will only change the radiative forcing By 3 watts per meter squared.
Now when you use their models, it says that Earth's temperatures are going to go up by 4 degrees.
But if you use their model, they did not include the feedback system accurately of clouds.
So I'll repeat again.
Everyone agrees that if CO2 doubles, and it's a logarithmic scale for every time it doubles, the amount of radiative forcing Which we will have additional, it will be 3.7 watts per meter squared, which is about 2%, Scott, additional.
That addition, using their climate models, will increase the temperature by 3.7 degrees.
We haven't even witnessed that.
I mean, this is going back to basic science.
We have not witnessed that at all.
What specifically have we not witnessed?
The radiation forcings or the temperature?
Well, You know, Happer is, if there is a climate expert in the world, it's William Happer.
Because he has spent his life understanding how CO2 vibrates, to keep it simple, how it emits and absorbs radiation.
And what we do know is if you double CO2, doubling CO2, it will increase the radiative forcing, you know, which means you're adding another 3.7 watts per meter.
Imagine if the sun Send us more sunlight, to keep it simple, by another 3.7.
So how much does that increase temperature?
According to the climate alarmist models, that 3.7 is going to increase temperature by close to 3 degrees.
3 to 4 degrees. Okay?
And we should have seen that already?
We haven't seen that, yeah.
We've doubled CO2. We've doubled CO2. We don't see a 4 degree increase in temperature.
So is that...
But is that...
But is that for every place on the curve that's a doubling?
Because I would imagine doubling what we have now would be a bigger effect than doubling what we use now.
No, no, no. It's a logarithmic scale.
Logarithms for every doubling, you get the same delta increase.
If you went from 200 parts...
By the way, do you know what happens when you have 130 parts per million or less of CO2? Do you know what happens, right?
Of course I do.
No, I don't know what happens. Well, we die.
Okay, we need CO2. Oh, yeah.
Okay, I do know that, yes.
So, if you went from 200 parts per million to 400, which we've doubled it, That doubling will increase the radiative forcing by 3.7 watts per meter.
Their models predict that that will therefore increase temperature by 4 degrees.
We have already gone through that doubling.
We maybe have had a half a degree increase.
Maybe. Okay?
So now if we double again, this is what the alarmists are saying, go from 400 to 800, oh my god, we're going to see an 8 degree, right?
It's not happening. Right.
I'm saying if you go to basic science, their predictions are not being revealed in the actual data.
Even Happer has had his models, and if you see that one graph, he says, this is what I predicted, but the Earth is pretty much maintaining its delta T. It's pretty much maintaining that 15 degrees.
And in their models, they purposefully did not include the effect of the cirrus clouds, which have an iris effect.
So you're looking at people who are, frankly, doing bogus science.
They do not understand equilibrium.
They do not understand feedback.
And they're leaving out variables.
And moreover, their own models are predicting four-degree increases, which have not taken place.
And based around this false science, we have now created an environment where if you, in academia, if you say anything against this...
I mean, I live up here in Cambridge.
You know, I got three professors who live around me.
Two MIT guys, one Harvard guy.
They all get funding.
Forget climate science. At MIT, if you say anything, you're going to be screwed.
There's a bigger issue going on here, Scott.
Is 97% agree?
Well, you know, this is nonsense because what's disgraceful is these scientists who know fluid mechanics, who know turbulent physics, they're keeping mum because research has become an industry.
That's what's really happened.
In 1960, the Mansfield Act was passed, which said military could no longer support science except for weaponry.
So the entire scientific field was based on the National Science Foundation and bureaucrats.
So all of scientific research grants come from one body.
So what you have now is when climate science, quote-unquote climate science, took place, Two billion dollars got released.
You go, the MIT Sloan School, you put anything climate science, you're going to get funded.
So we're looking at a deeper issue here because even the IPCC, I mean, 2013 report, the biggest working group, it even says only 17 out of the 988 100,000 glaciers in the world have records of 30 years or more, and those that are receding were doing so end of the little ice age.
Ice sheets of both Greenland and Antarctica are growing and slowing the rate of sea level rise.
This is even more important.
Sea level rise is less than three millimeters per year, far slower than the peak of 40 millimeters per year several thousand years ago.
Even the IPCC, people go read the report, admits this whole thing is nonsense.
The whole thing is nonsense.
End to end. Now, I think everybody watching this agrees that money influences things and so there should be a predictable bias in the science.
Have you talked to anybody besides Lindzen, have you talked to anybody who's actually gone and got some climate funding who actually didn't believe their own story?
In other words, have you met anybody in person who's in the climate science world, even if that's the wrong name for it, Who will admit to you, yeah, I don't even believe what I'm doing, but I need this money.
Have you run into anything like that?
Well, let me just reiterate your question.
You're asking me, have I run into people who did not believe climate change was taking place, and then they later agreed?
Is that what you're saying, Scott? People who didn't necessarily believe in climate change, but knew that's where the money was, so they pretended that they did.
Go look at the MIT Sloan School.
How many people have applied for grants?
In poverty, in anything you put climate science on, it's going to get funded pretty much.
MIT gets 20 to 40 million dollars a year.
That's the reason when Lindzen wrote his article, his paper to Trump, they try to denounce him.
And later, Dick said they apologized to him also.
Okay? This is the number one university in the world that we are supposed to believe in.
And what's happened is that Research funding, and Eisenhower talked about this.
He said, when you start giving grants to people, that's when you get mediocre science.
So what we've done is, academia is different than science.
The thing is, you follow the party line.
You do not shake the boat.
Scientists do that. Lindzen is a scientist.
Most of the people at MIT and other institutions are academics.
And I hate to say this about my alma mater, but it's disgraceful what's taking place in this country.
We do not have science taking place anymore, by and large.
Belief. I mean, the fact that you call it climate denier, Scott, think about it.
Holocaust denier.
This is a religion. And the fact that when Will Happer said, let's have a debate, bringing both sides, he's attacked.
He's demonized. I think, I think you pointed this out, we should have an open debate.
It should be completely televised, like, you know, the hearings.
Completely, end to end.
These guys do not want to have a debate on this because their science is so thin, it's based on Al Gore's Who is putting pictures of hurricanes going the wrong direction.
Now their argument would be, let's say if you were a Holocaust denier and they believed in the Holocaust because they're real historians, why would they grant such illegitimate views, you know, a platform?
So that's not crazy as a story, whether it's true or not true, that at least their cover story, if that's what it is, is solid, which is you would not grant a platform to people who are not serious players.
So how do we who don't know science know that that's not a good argument?
Because they would be giving a platform Well, let me put it another way.
There are lots of different people who have skeptical views on climate science.
They are not all as persuasive as you are.
Would you agree that the people who are skeptical of the climate emergency, would you say that there are so many people who are not serious players That if you pick the wrong people, it would just be a circus?
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Yeah, I think you're bringing up a good point.
Look, what's happened is, it's a very deep point you're bringing up.
You have a set of people, by the way, 50% of people, you could argue, who voted for Donald Trump don't believe in climate change.
Okay? Or, I'm not going to say climate change or climate alarmism.
Okay? The majority of those people, Scott, if you look at them, are everyday ordinary people who have not been indoctrinated into the process called rationalizing.
Fortunately, they still have common sense.
This is a very, very important point Dick and I had an interesting conversation about.
What you have now as a university system is creating people who rationalize stuff because you get grades, you get advanced by agreeing to things.
The person who does plumbing, the person who does electricity, the person who builds software, you know, you're running a software company, right, Scott?
If it doesn't work, you can't bullshit your way out of that, I'm sorry.
It doesn't work, it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
You can't have an opinion on it.
We have a lot of people now who are getting degrees, like Acacio Cortes, in international relations, who knows, doesn't probably know how to solve a differential equation, probably doesn't know the difference between rate of change and the second derivative, etc.
These people, Horribly are involved in promoting policies and ideas which make no scientific and physical sense.
So what you're talking about is, in reaction to that, are the climate skeptics.
A lot of people, I'm sure, who in their gut know something doesn't make sense.
Now, obviously, choosing one of them to argue with the climate alarmist would be devastating, right?
You need people who understand science, like myself, or a guy like Happer, and a guy like Lindzen and others.
To be the people who are...
But more importantly, I'm saying if you actually bring people together who are actually scientists and you put them into a room, whether they're for or against climate change, the data is so overwhelmingly showing this is nonsense.
That's why it's so horrible that scientists are keeping mum because they are afraid of going against their religion, Scott.
This is no different than something out of the Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter now.
That's what's happened. What are some good examples?
You're probably more of a student of scientific history than I am.
I know examples such as nutrition science, the consensus was pretty solidly in the wrong for decades.
I've heard the example of scientists thought that, or I guess medical science, thought that ulcers were caused by stress and that turned out not to be true.
Can you think of any other, what would be the closest example Where the scientists were this wrong, in your opinion, historically, on some other topic.
Robert Proctor has a great book called The Golden Holocaust for Tobacco.
For 50 years, scientists said smoking was fine.
Dentists would say it was good.
It was seen as a cure for asthma.
I mean, these were the ads, right?
No, no, seriously. I mean, many years ago, as I'm meeting with Noam Chomsky on something else, Noam said, you've got to read this book.
By Robert Proctor. It's called The Golden Holocaust.
And that book clearly shows how academicians colluded with big tobacco to say smoking was good for you.
Think about it. By the way, at some point we should follow up the same phenomenon that's going on with cannabis.
Alex Berenson has written a great book on it.
I'm finishing up some research showing This same lemming model is taking place.
I think what climate change or the climate alarmism discussion is revealing, Scott, is we live at a point in human history now where politicians cannot even understand this because they don't even know how to refute it.
You know, I'm going to be running in 2020 against a guy called Markey.
I mean, think about this. This guy's standing next to AOC promoting the Green New Deal.
This has nothing to do with lowering pollution.
This has nothing to do with Anything to understand science, and yet he's representing Massachusetts.
This is about one thing, money, period.
And it's that simple.
It's about researchers wanting to get their $2 billion so they could get tenure and they can proceed along their path, but it has nothing to do with looking at the fundamentals of what's taking place.
I mean, if you look at the history of this, Scott, Maggie Thatcher, if you go to the 80s and 90s, was against the coal miners.
Remember that? All right.
Maurice Gordon, I think is his name.
I forget his name. The guy who did the Food for Science program.
Do you know what I'm talking about? No.
He's the one who started the Rio conference.
This guy's an absolute criminal.
They set up Rio, and they had two groups at Rio conference in 1992.
One was the partiers, the Congress of People, you know, the Al Gore's and the politicians who know no science, and a representative of the IPCC group.
The net of it was they created propaganda.
In 1999, the IPCC said, wait a minute, none of this is taking place.
That's when Al Gore gets concerned.
He puts that inconvenient truth in 2000, and he goes on a lecture tour made about $100 million.
Every time the IPCC, which is their own group, which was created to create climate alarmism, and the scientists get together, they go against the narrative, they go back on a massive PR thing.
That's what this Green New Deal is out.
It is a reaction to the 2013 entire working group report that said the entire thing is nonsense.
Do you have an opinion on the Generation 4 nuclear as a solution to whether you believe in climate change being a problem or not, that it's the future for energy?
Have you looked into that? Well, yeah.
I mean, I saw your flowchart.
So the flowchart went like, is climate change occurring?
Green New Deal. Green New Deal could go to 50% mass extinction and a 50% golden age.
And the other one was, is climate change a hoax, right?
In which case you go to, I think, Gen, whatever, Gen 4 nuclear, and that reached the golden age.
But I think there's another point we need to make here.
And again, I don't get paid by the coal or oil industry.
Look, chemical engineers have done a lot of work over the last 50 years.
They have really refined the process of clean coal and natural gas.
Clean coal? Clean coal?
Well, what I'm saying is, if you look over 50 years ago, right?
Fundamentally, Scott, I'm not...
Look, my point is this.
It's about lowering pollution.
If we really want to have a discussion, it's about lowering pollution.
We all want clean air.
Well, that's slightly different from the nuclear question, because nuclear would also lower...
There is a fourth option, which is climate change is a hoax, okay?
We definitely...
I love the fact that I think we should put...
I mean, fusion is a long way off, but the new generation nuclear reactors make a lot of sense.
We should, you know, do a Manhattan Project type thing to support them.
And put... I mean, it's a very rational conclusion what you reach.
But I'm saying we also still have...
We've made, from an engineering standpoint, quite a number of strides in gas and coal.
We have. I mean, it's not like dirty stuff that was...
What percentage would you say from, let's say, standard dirty coal, if that was, you know, a 10 and a 10 in dirtiness, what is clean coal?
Is it an 8 or is it a 2?
I can't put a number on it.
What I'm saying is, I mean, we still have emissions like SO2, sulfur dioxide, you know, you still have greenhouse emissions, but I'm saying I think pretty much everyone would agree that the fossil fuels The methodology that we burn today also has not just stood still for 40, 50 years. That technology has also gotten better.
It's not like chemical engineers are just sitting there not doing any work.
I mean, everything has to get better, more efficient, and things have gotten better.
The bigger issue is how much of this stuff is real, and it's not where should we be really rationally putting our scientific endeavors.
What you propose with nuclear makes a lot of sense.
Many people have felt that for years, but I think with the new generation reactors, it makes even more sense.
to pursue.
So if I could summarize what you just said, even if you did a Manhattan project to make these safer, cleaner, meltdown-proof generation for nuclear reactors, which we know how to make, by the way, and Rick Perry just opened up a test site for testing fuels, which is and Rick Perry just opened up a test site for testing fuels, which is one of the important developments in this field, but even if we decided to go nuclear, the safe ones, the ones
And also, here's the cool thing, they eat nuclear waste.
Yeah, and I saw the tweet that you did with Mark Schneider.
Right, his periscopes are great.
But even if you did that, you'd still want to work just as hard as you could on making your coal cleaner, your gas less...
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
I'm saying these are engineering problems and science problems.
These are not... When you look at the alternative, when you look at those other two groups of people that we're talking about, the academics who you put your name on bedbugs in climate science, you're going to get funded.
Or searing war in climate science, you're going to get funded.
What happened was when the climate change, when the climate alarmism took place, Scott, it created a need for climate scientists, a new job.
There weren't enough people qualified to be climate scientists.
So every Tom, Dick, and Harry is now in this field now.
You know, business people are in it, sociologists are in it, anthropologists are in it, because academia is about getting grants and getting tenure.
It has become less and less about doing science.
And I think this is a more bigger issue that we need to talk about relative to this discussion.
Why is a Happer demonized?
I mean, it's crazy. Look, he may be a nerd a little bit, and maybe he didn't use the right analogy, but he's not getting Botox all day.
And his collagen injections to look good a certain way.
That's not what scientists do.
You're talking about real people who don't have time for that.
Then you have people like John Kerry and Al Gore who are a different beast.
They get Nobel Prizes, right?
So we're living in a very dangerous world on who is allowed to determine what is fact and what is not fact and demonizing people.
I think this is really dangerous.
Dr. Shiva, we could talk forever, but I like to keep these close to an hour just because they're more consumable for people.
The view into this world that you gave me, and I think most of the viewers as well, I was not really aware of this whole cloud iris concept, and it's very interesting.
I'm not going to say that I believe it, because in order to find belief in science, you'd have to be smarter than me, and I would need just...
A lot of evidence of any claim in climate before I could be convinced.
But I got to say, it's pretty darn persuasive.
So I love that.
It gives me a new thing to dig into a little bit more.
It's great context.
But the most important thing is you've convinced me to change careers because I hear I could be a qualified climate scientist and the money's there.
I'm sure you could. You should apply for a grant.
You should start a non-profit.
Everyone listening, you know, start a non-profit, put climate science on it, even if you don't believe it, and I'm sure you will get a good shot of getting funded.
That is what spends $2 billion of funding out there.
That's what's going on. But Scott, in all seriousness, I think the important point of this conversation is natural systems have equilibriums, they have feedback mechanisms, they're complex systems.
And And science is about going into the unknown, testing things, and finding truth.
It's not about essentially creating terms like climate denier.
It's not about demonizing people who spend their lifetime on this.
And that's what the point here is.
We need to get back into science and appreciating science.
You know, if Nolan Ryan, I just want to say this one, if Nolan Ryan told you how to throw a fastball, Are you going to listen to him or are you going to listen to his mechanics that had to throw a fastball or are a little eager?
But for some reason, when it comes to this field, when a physicist with their degrees and who've actually worked on these problems says something's wrong like a William Happer, he's demonized by people in the press who've never even probably taken a course in basic level physics or know the second law of thermodynamics.
That's the issue that we're dealing with in the world right now, the deception that's taking place.
All right. We're going to leave it on that note.
We're going to wrap it up. Thank you so much.
This was tremendous. I'm watching the comments.
People are blown away.
People loving this. And thank you so much.
Sure. Thank you. Be well, Scott.
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