All Episodes
Previous Next
April 11, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
44:48
Episode 487 Scott Adams: Assange, Kerry vs Massie on Climate Change, Barr on Spying
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody, come on in here We got news this morning.
It's newsy all over the place.
Hey Kim, hey Tyler, hey Joe.
Good to see you Jules, Andy, Andrew, and Robin.
Come on in. Grab your containers.
You know. A container such as a glass, a cup, a mug.
Could be a teacup, a tankard.
Could be a stein, a chalice, or a thermos.
But whatever it is, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now, please, for the simultaneous sip.
one of the best parts of the day.
So good.
What a way to start the day.
How about that? So let's start with a so-called publication called Newsweek, who printed the most despicable headline you've ever seen, maybe ever.
It might be the world's most despicable headline.
I want to show it to you here.
So if I turn my phone sideways, and it goes into landscape mode, it's a Newsweek tweet.
And the headline for the tweet says, Donald Trump Jr.
praises Candace Owens for her defense of Hitler comments.
Now, if you don't read the word comments, it looks like she's defending Hitler, which did not actually happen.
But here's the fun part.
That's what it looks in landscape mode.
Turn it this way.
If you turn it this way, a word gets cut off.
And now the tweet says, I'm going to read the tweet exactly as it shows up now, now that I've turned it to a portrait.
Donald Trump Jr. praises Candace Owens for her defense of Hitler.
That's actually what it says, if you turn at this orientation.
This way... It's defense of Hitler comments, which is just as bad.
I mean, that's as bad as you can get for a despicable headline.
If there's anybody in the world who doesn't know, Candace didn't do anything like that.
She did nothing like defending Hitler.
She didn't defend Hitler comments.
She defended her comments.
But really, this way, she defended Hitler.
This way, she defended Hitler's comments about Hitler.
Not much better, but certainly different.
Un-frickin-believable.
A couple of updates.
We'll get to Julian Assange in a moment.
A couple of updates on Generation 4 nuclear.
It is not my imagination that people are talking about it.
You saw it yesterday on Fox News, The Five.
Greg Gottfeld did an excellent job of summarizing Generation Four as being free of risk of meltdown and eating nuclear waste for its fuel.
So when you see an idea like that cross into mainstream conversation, and it's just on TV, Then you can feel that it's moved from things that geeks talk about into things that the mainstream talks about.
Now, I should confess that I intentionally put some nuclear power content in Dilbert.
So the Dilbert comic, I think it was last week, Had Dilbert inventing a safe nuclear device that nobody would believe was safe.
Now, I didn't call it Generation 4 because it wasn't.
It was a little tabletop device that Dilbert invented in the comic.
Now, part of the reason I did that is actually strategic for the benefit of the world.
And it works like this.
You probably don't know this, but over the years, Dilbert has been used in actual court cases.
So the Dilbert cartoon has been used as evidence in court cases to show that the public should have known about something because it's such general knowledge that it's in a Dilbert cartoon.
For example, there was a court case in which somebody was being sued some employer for pretending that they didn't know that the Y2K bug needed to be dealt with.
And so whoever took them to court said, everybody should have known that it was common knowledge.
So you can't say you didn't know it was going to be a problem.
Everybody knew it.
And part of that court case Was they presented a Dilbert comic to say, it's so in the public domain that it's in a Dilbert comic without any explanation, which it was.
And that's not the only time that a Dilbert comic has been used to convince the jury that something should have been understood by an average person.
Now, nuclear is moving into the Dilbert comic because it's part of what I want to do, which is to move the conversation into the public domain, get it out of the wonky scientific domain, get it into the voters' domain where something could actually happen on a political level.
So the fact that it's appeared now on Fox News is important because it's...
And the fact that it was just referred to as Generation 4...
As if maybe you readers should already know what this is.
You don't.
Not everybody. But you can see that a crossover has happened.
It's crossed from wonky, scientific, as somebody is saying in the comments, to something that you say to yourself, huh, if that was on Fox News, and it's being talked about in a Dilbert comic, maybe I should find out what this means.
Maybe I should just figure out what it's about.
And there was another news on nuclear.
Yeah, so Oliver Stone, Mark Schneider tweeted this yesterday.
So famous director Oliver Stone tweeted out one day ago, and this is the important part, this one day ago.
So look at all the stuff that's happening at the same time.
He said that hashtag nuclear energy provides the answer.
Wind and solar power simply cannot.
Within 20 years, the U.S. can convert, slashing greenhouse gas and decarbonize, blah, blah.
So details don't matter, but Oliver Stone is saying nuclear is the solution.
And if Oliver Stone, who is really quite famous as being a lefty, but he's a pretty prominent voice on the left, if he's going down hard on nuclear, First of all, let's give Oliver Stone some props.
Whether you like his work, or you like his opinions, or you don't like what he does or doesn't do, there's one thing you can't say about Oliver Stone.
You can't say he's not brave.
He's been in the military.
He's bucked tradition in a number of ways.
He's a brave guy.
I would consider this yet a continuation of his service to the country.
I mean, he was literally in the military service.
And this seems at the same level.
It's the same level.
This is a service to the country, and I would thank him for that.
So, nuclear seems to be catching on in these people's minds.
We'll see more of that.
Let's talk about Julian Assange.
Julian Assange, as you know, got picked up at the Ecuadorian embassy where he had, up until now, had some asylum, and he will probably be turned over to American justice system unless he can get the Brits to not do that.
Now, here's what's interesting.
I tweeted at first when the initial story broke.
They showed the photos of a bearded and bedraggled-looking Assange being taken out.
And he didn't look good.
He didn't look healthy. But they didn't mention the charge.
And now the charge has been mentioned.
And the charge is that he allegedly conspired, which is an interesting word, he conspired with Chelsea Manning To hack into a government top-secret account and get some information to give to WikiLeaks about, I guess, Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Now, here's...
This is an interesting question.
So first of all, it's not an espionage charge, which would be, you know, a death sentence and it would be a top-shelf kind of a charge.
And he's not being charged for publishing the information, which is good.
But he is being charged for being part of the stealing of it, which is pretty serious stuff.
Could be a five-year maximum charge, I understand.
But I don't know the details yet, and we're all in the fog of war.
So I'll just throw out some things.
Maybe you can fact check me in real time.
Chelsea Manning got pardoned, right?
For the crime that Assange is being accused of participating in?
Do I have that right? Is it true that he's being charged with a crime that his co-conspirator was pardoned for?
Now, a lot of people will say that pardon shouldn't have happened.
There'll be disagreement with it.
But let me ask you this.
If you put me on a jury trial, and you say, I'm not even going to tell you the details of this case.
I'm just going to tell you one fact.
His co-conspirator was pardoned.
And I'll say, well, what's even the charge?
What are you charging him with?
You don't even need to know.
That's going to be my whole defense.
My whole defense is that the guy you did it with, the exact same crime...
Was pardoned by the president.
And the jury says, that's it?
You're not going to tell me even what the case is?
You're not even going to tell me what the crime is?
You're not even going to tell me what he allegedly did?
That's it? That's your whole defense?
Yeah, that's my whole defense.
My whole defense, my whole defense is that his co-conspirator has already been pardoned by the president, the prior president.
How in the world...
Do you find 12 people to put this guy in jail?
How in the world can you get 12 citizens to say this guy, Assange, needs to go to jail?
And so, I think I have to raise at least the possibility that we're not yet seeing the endgame here.
Let me draw a picture of it.
There had been talk, I don't know, a year ago, whenever it happened, There had been talk about Assange offering to President Trump some valuable information in return for a pardon.
That offer was never taken up.
So what we do know is that Julian Assange has at least alleged that he has valuable information that we don't yet know about, that would be so good It would be worthy of a pardon for stealing top-secret American information, which may have gotten somebody killed.
That's how good it is.
It's that good.
Now, do you think, under the conditions that the President is looking for the spies who spied against him, he has a WikiLeaks leader who apparently was pro-Trump, During the election, Assange was apparently anti-Clinton, pro-Trump.
He also has information that Trump would probably really like to hear at exactly the right time to hear it.
Could there be a better time for Assange to have some information he wants to trade?
I don't think so.
So yeah, the timing's interesting.
And the charge is interesting.
And the low level of risk is interesting.
In other words, it's not a conspiracy.
It's not an espionage charge with a potential death sentence.
It's sort of a small charge relative to what it could have been.
Now we're still in the fog of war, so anything I say about this topic, subject to being completely wrong and falsified in the next five minutes.
But it's feeling like the whole plan is a pardon, in return probably for some information.
So my guess is, I'll turn this into a prediction.
Here's my prediction.
Either Assange doesn't go to jail You know, beyond the time at the trial.
I assume he would not get in on bail.
I don't know. But I don't think he'll be jailed for the offense.
He may be jailed while he's waiting for it to be settled.
But I don't think he's going to jail.
Or if he does, it will be some reduced kind of, you know, six months or a year or something like that.
But I feel like the point of picking him up was not to put him in jail.
That's what it feels like.
Now, some of you are screaming at me, Seth Rich, Seth Rich.
And we might find out something about that.
I wouldn't count on that necessarily being the thing we find out.
I'm not on board with the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, but Assange might know more than we do about that, so at least we might find out more than we don't.
So, yeah, he's basically already been in jail, somebody said.
In fact, the Ecuadorian embassy was like a jail.
So somebody says maybe to protect him.
Yeah, I'm starting to think that the endgame might be to find out what he knows.
That might be the major thing.
And it might be that Assange doesn't necessarily know what anybody's thinking about this, so he might be genuinely afraid.
But it's going to get interesting when we find out what he knows.
So, the fact that he's apparently pro-Trump, At least in some ways.
I don't think Assange is completely on board with all Trump policies or anything like that.
But he certainly didn't like Hillary Clinton.
That's for sure. All right.
Here's some interesting news.
Kim Kardashian is looking to become a lawyer.
She's already been, I guess, interning or something with a law firm in San Francisco.
And And she wants to take her activism to a more powerful level by actually becoming a lawyer.
To which I say, that is exactly why I've always been her fan.
I've always been a Kim Kardashian fan.
And never because of the show or the content, the reality show.
Never because of her looks or her beauty or her fashion.
It was never because of any of that stuff, because I'm not really into any of that.
That's not my deal.
I'm not disparaging it.
It's good entertainment. People like it.
That's great. It just hasn't been my personal thing.
But I have always had tremendous respect for her as an entrepreneur, as a well-meaning personality, as a good person.
And watching her take what she's developed, you know, a brand, a Wealth, the ability to get attention.
And then watching her apply that to such productive parts of the world, you know, she's worked with Van Jones on justice reform, and she looks to probably take that even larger.
And I thought to myself, you know, good for her.
Like, what a great role model.
Somebody who did her, you know, worked hard.
You know, the biggest complaint about Kim Kardashian was always unfair.
It always bothered me tremendously.
People would say that she doesn't work.
That she doesn't work?
Kim Kardashian?
She probably works harder than anybody you know.
You probably have never met anybody who works as hard as her, as many hours or as difficult.
You've just seen the fun parts on TV. All you see is, yeah, she's putting on clothes and she shows up somewhere and she just lives her life and they film it and she gets rich.
Trust me, I've spent enough time as a celebrity to know that the stuff you see is not the work.
The stuff you see is everything she did so that the two minutes you saw her on screen looked good and you cared and you were interested.
It takes a lot of work to keep that machine running and she never got enough credit for that.
By the way, I would say the same thing because speaking of Kim Kardashian makes me think of Kanye, which makes me think of a lot of the famous rappers, Jay-Z, etc.
One of the things that I don't think rappers in particular, especially the most successful ones, I think the thing that they don't get enough attention about is the level of hard work.
There's probably nothing that's more inspirational, good for the country, healthy for the world, than to see role models Work hard.
Just put in hard, hard work.
Kanye is a hard worker, right?
Jay-Z is a hard worker, and he's not stopping with...
Neither of them are stopping within their lane.
They're doing hard work, and then they're expanding their hard work, and then when they're done with that, they do more hard work.
It's like they can't stop working hard.
Insanely good role models on the hard work side of things.
All right. The other news is that Bob Barr used the word spying in his congressional testimony.
They said, are you worried about the spying?
And he said, yes, spying on the Trump campaign.
So he believes that spying happened, but he doesn't know if it was, quote, predicated, which is a good lawyer term, which means that it might have been legal and justified and it might have been totally appropriate if they had good reasons.
But apparently he is not convinced yet that He's looking into it, but he's not convinced yet that those reasons were sufficient and predicated, to use his word.
And of course the Democrats are having a little meltdown, yes.
I think meltdown is the right word.
Because things could get really interesting, and it looks like they are going to take seriously looking into how all of this came about.
It's not going to look good.
It's not going to look good.
But we're going to find out some stuff, and it makes you wonder if there's anything that Assange knows that goes...
Do you think there's anything that Assange knows that is connected in any way to what Bob Barr was saying?
About the spying. Not directly the spying part, but just about the coup attempt against the government.
And by the way, normally I'm kind of careful to say alleged.
And that's a good practice if you talk in public.
You should use the word alleged as often as possible.
It keeps you from being sued.
But when it comes to the allegation that there were people trying to overthrow the government, I don't know that you need to talk about that as an allegation anymore.
Now, you could say you don't know exactly who was thinking or doing what.
You know, you don't know what was in their minds.
You know, there's a lot we don't know.
But aren't we past the question of if it happened?
We're past that, right?
We're now at the position where we're saying, yes, there was an actual attempt to overthrow the government of the United States.
An actual attempt to do it.
I think that's a done deal.
We just don't know exactly who did what or who's guilty of what.
All right. There was a great clip of Representative Thomas Massey, Republican, grilling John Kerry, Democrat, on the topic of climate change.
It was a cringeworthy exchange because I couldn't like either people.
Unfortunately, I've learned just enough about climate change.
And, you know, if the climate change topic is this big, you know, I know just this little bit, little bit of a corner of a slice of a grain of sand of the larger topic.
But even I know...
That both of the people in that conversation were seriously messed up.
So, Massey, I think he actually understands the topic.
He might have some scientific credentials.
Yeah, he's an MIT engineer.
So he's a smart guy.
But he wasn't so smart when he was talking about climate change.
But I'm not sure you could tell.
Likewise, Kerry's answer was not so smart, but I don't know if the public can tell.
But here's my problem.
So Massey was giving Kerry a hard time because in the far distant history of the Earth, CO2 had been far higher than it is now.
Far higher. And yet, the world evolved and humans came around, etc.
So Massey was challenging Kerry on climate change by saying, There was far more CO2 in our millions of years ago past, so CO2 can't be that deadly.
And Carrie's answer is, but there weren't any people then.
Okay, those are the two stupidest things you've ever heard on climate change.
Both of those, the question and the answer, are the two stupidest things you'll ever hear on climate change.
And even I know And again, this is climate change.
This little speck is how much I understand about it.
And even I know they were both being freaking stupid in public about climate change.
They're smart guys.
I'm not saying that they're unintelligent people.
But on this topic, oh my God, it was embarrassing.
Here's what's wrong with it. The climate change claim from the scientists...
Is that there were a lot of different variables in the distant past.
The sun was not as bright, for example.
There were other greenhouse gases.
There were volcanic activities.
There were a whole lot of variables that were different in the distant past, such that having high CO2 was not the same thing as having high CO2 with our current set of variables.
Now, I just explained it better than Massey or Kerry did.
Which is, science has a perfectly good explanation.
Now, it could be wrong.
I'm not saying that science gets it right every time.
But they do have a completely rational, detailed, well-studied explanation of why it makes complete sense that there was tons of CO2 in the millions of years ago past, when a lot of other variables were different too, so that it wasn't the dominating thing.
But now, our variables are largely set, meaning that they're not changing that much over a hundred years.
In any hundred year period, the sun's brightness is not changing that much.
The other greenhouse gases haven't changed that much.
The only one that's changing, and changing a lot, is CO2. And since they know that's a greenhouse gas of some amount, the scientists have decided that that's Clearly identified as the current cause.
Now, here's the problem. Kerry was unable to describe what I just described.
And I'm a freaking idiot on climate change.
Like, I don't know anything about climate change, this much.
And even I knew more than Kerry.
At least I could have answered that question in public.
More than that, I would not have been dumb enough to ask the question.
Because I already knew the answer.
All right. Now, I don't know the details of which gases and how they interact, but that's not for the politicians or the citizens to answer.
That is for the scientists. We'll get rid of all caps boy.
Goodbye, caps boy.
Now, I want to introduce you...
A very offensive thought to most of you.
Because I know there are a lot of climate skeptics here.
And I had said a while ago something that didn't sound maybe convincing to you when I first said it.
So I'm going to introduce something that didn't sound credible the first time you heard it.
Maybe it was months ago.
But it might sound a little bit more credible today.
Let me give you some context.
You saw how Candace Owens was taken out of context to make it sound like she supported Hitler, which of course never happened.
You saw how the president was taken out of context talking about MS-13 until they made it sound like he was calling all immigrants animals.
And of course that didn't happen.
You saw how The words fine people that the president used talking about Charlottesville was taken out of context to make it sound like he was calling neo-Nazis fine people.
But again, that didn't actually happen.
It was taken out of context.
Now, how many examples do I have to give you where people on the right were taken out of context before you'll understand that that's normal?
It's not the exception.
It's not the exception.
Being taken out of context in very, you know, ordinary language, animals, fine people, you know, whatever statements about nationalism that Candace made, these are all normal words in normal language, and we're taken completely out of context, all right?
Do you think, do you think this only happens to people on the right?
Do you think That only conservatives are taken out of context.
If you think that, you have a serious problem with your worldview.
Both sides are taken out of context all the time.
It's the most normal thing happening.
So if you can't identify any time that that's happened on the left, you're missing a huge part of reality.
If you're looking at All the things that people have said on the other side of the political aisle and none of it looks like it's taken out of context, you don't know what's going on, because it is.
I'm going to talk about Michael Mann and the famous emails about climate change in which somebody writing to Michael Mann used the words, I used your trick, To quote, and it's a different sentence, but he was talking about hiding the decline,
meaning there was something, a temperature reconstruction for a period of time, the tree rings were no longer predictive, or they didn't move with temperature, and they know that.
So they tried to adjust for some data that they knew to be bad, and they were confident it was bad, and they publicly said why they were adjusting it and why they didn't trust it and what they did to adjust it.
Now, people said, well, there we have a smoking gun.
Right there we have a climate scientist saying they're going to use a trick.
No. We'll get rid of these trolls.
More trolls than usual.
So, when I read it, I said, wait a minute, I'm reading the same emails you're reading, and I don't see anything you're seeing.
I'm looking at exactly the same language, and I see a scientist saying that he's using a trick, which I interpret in the ordinary way language is used.
Trick, meaning method.
That's exactly what I saw.
A trick is just a casual email.
He means he's using a method.
And then when he said he was hiding the decline, I took that in context, because it's casual language with people who understand what they're talking about, that there was something that they couldn't explain, and they couldn't publish it without explaining it without hiding it.
They needed to hide it.
Now, that's not a word you would use in public.
But, in private, they all knew what they were talking about.
There's no evidence that they were trying to fool the public.
The evidence is they were trying to inform the public as best they understood the real situation.
That was my original interpretation, is that there was nothing to see there.
It was just ordinary language and an ordinary email that told you nothing.
I just saw a video of Michael Mann for the first time, I'd never seen this before, in which Michael Mann was asked to explain those same two terms.
And he explained them just the way I did.
I'd never seen that before.
Now here's the thing. If I read ordinary language and I say, yeah, that's just ordinary language, and then the person who was involved with it says, yeah, it's just ordinary language.
There's nothing there. I'm feeling pretty confident that it was just ordinary language.
Now, if I had come to a completely different impression and that I heard Michael Mann come up with some explanation that didn't in any way map to what I thought it was, well, then I'd have some questions too.
But his explanation of it was exactly what I saw the very first time I saw it.
It's like, there's nothing here.
Are you imagining something?
Because there's nothing here. It's just an email.
For some people working on climate science.
I don't know if they're right or wrong, but there's nothing in this email to worry about.
Here's what's important. Those emails have been used by many skeptics as the smoking gun.
Aha! We finally found it in their own words.
In their own words, they have said that they're really trying to fool the public.
It's just not there.
It's not true that Candace Owens was praising Hitler.
It's not true that President Trump called regular immigrants animals.
It's not true that President Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville fine people.
And it's not true that there's some smoking gun about climate change in which the scientists themselves have admitted it doesn't work or that there's something they're hiding.
It just isn't true.
Somebody says, didn't those emails cause Judith Curry to doubt AGW narrative?
I can't speak to what Judith Curry believes or doesn't believe, but I would not say that somebody is crazy to wonder what those emails mean.
It's not crazy to ask the question, but once the question is asked, and you hear the answer from the person who knows what those meant, and it's perfectly ordinary, why would you believe the extraordinary version?
Who would believe the extraordinary version when there's just a perfectly ordinary one?
Would it be extraordinary that Candace Owens, an educated black woman who speaks in public for a living, praise Hiller?
No. I mean, you don't need to know the details to know that didn't happen.
Would the president call all immigrants animals?
No. No, he wouldn't.
You don't need to know the details to know that didn't happen.
Would the president go on television and say that neo-Nazis were chanting anti-Semitic things while he has family members who are Jewish?
Did he go and say that there are fine people?
No. You don't need to look at the transcript.
You don't need to see the details.
On the surface, it couldn't have happened.
It's so ridiculous, you should not believe something that ridiculous when you hear it.
You should assume there's something wrong with the story the moment you hear it.
Same with the climate game emails.
If you learn anything from this, it's that the credibility of a message and the quality of a message depends entirely upon the context and the messenger.
If the messenger is not reliable, it doesn't matter what you say.
Nobody's going to believe it. If the context has changed the way your mind recognizes reality, Maybe it's time for a new truth to go through the same hole that was created by some other truth.
So most of you have gained a really completely new understanding of how badly you've been misled by ordinary language.
And watching bad people take ordinary language and turn it into an insane story that you should just discount the moment you hear it.
All right. Let me add one more topic, I think.
Sorry, my computer time down here.
Bear with me. Speak among yourself.
Talk among yourselves.
All right. All right.
You may have seen that the jobs reports are incredible.
Yeah. And by the way, let me talk about Tony Heller because you mentioned him.
So Tony Heller is the...
I've identified him as the most persuasive skeptic of climate change.
But he has one credibility problem Two.
He has two credibility problems that I can't get past.
Number one, he sees intention where I don't see it.
So he sees intention in the emails, but I don't see it.
He sees intention in the data being changed from what they thought was less accurate to more accurate.
He calls that faking it.
I don't see it because it's all public.
Michael Mann, it's public what he did.
The other changes are public as well.
They're all documented.
Other scientists get to look at it.
And then the other thing that Tony is accused of, and it's obvious that this does happen, is he cherry-picks So, for example, he's got some data in which he shows that the sea level has not risen since, I don't know, Abe Lincoln's time or something like that.
Now, if you think that the biggest problem in the world is rising sea level, and you see an accurate graph that says the sea level in this place hasn't changed in 100 years, that's pretty persuasive, isn't it? It's cherry picking, because the climate scientists do not say that the sea level will change everywhere in some way.
They say that there will be some places, because the ocean will be warmer, etc., and there are differences in how the land itself is moving in relationship to the ocean, that there will be places where it will get bad, and there might be places where the sea level will go down.
So climate change does not say that if you pick one point on Earth and you look at a hundred year period, that it's going to, that the sea level will rise.
It doesn't make that claim.
Tony tries to invalidate the climate change hypothesis by debunking a claim that they don't make.
They don't make the claim that every beach is going to have rising sea level.
Don't make that claim.
So, if you see him attacking something that you know is not the real claim, and you see him picking a certain location or a certain event, or there's one place where there's more ice, and there's this one place where the temperature didn't go up as much, and there's this one period where it didn't happen, those should all be red flags, or at least yellow flags, to say, I don't know if we're talking about the same thing here.
Now, I would also note that the climate skeptics do not all agree with each other, meaning that they seem to come at it from different angles.
Tony comes at it primarily from the angle of the data does not support the theory, and that it has been adjusted, he would say faked, to tell the story that's not true.
I don't see any evidence of intention to do that.
I only see intention to have better data.
Then you have other skeptics who come at it by saying the satellite data doesn't show the troposphere warming the way it should.
And by the way, that's my only open question.
So we have an open question on climate change.
If the theory of...
Of climate change.
By the way, did you see that Michael Mann was mocking me on Twitter?
I say this all the time, but the weird thing about being me is that when I talk about the news, I somehow get dragged into the news and then I become part of the story.
It's the weird thing about my life is that, yeah, I think I'm just talking about stuff, and then suddenly the stuff is me.
I'm like, I got dragged into the story.
So Michael Mann was mocking me, not without good reason, for misstating what AGW stands for.
I called it, I mistakenly called it anthropomorphic global warming, and it's anthropogenic, I still can't remember the right name.
Now, he was mocking me for my lack of scientific understanding, which, can somebody put the whole word there?
Anthropogenic? Is it anthropogenic?
Anthropogenic? Put the whole word there.
Alright, anthropogenic. Now, I don't mind that anybody mocks me for my lack of understanding of science.
Because I'm not making any claim.
I make no claim to understanding science.
In fact, I make the opposite claim.
I've claimed exactly that people like me can't understand science.
So my claim actually agrees with Michael Mann's criticism of me.
So in other words, Michael Mann made the same criticism of my understanding of science that I make, which is, I don't understand science, but you damn well need to explain this science to me if you want me to act like a patriot and a voter and do the right thing.
If you can't explain it to me in a credible way, don't expect anything to happen.
So my claims are all around the communication part.
I make no claim to having scientific understanding.
And I would say the same is true for most of you.
So anyway, so other people criticize climate change for the troposphere is apparently warming.
Or no, the troposphere is not warming according to how the theory says it should.
And So I'm going to put that out there as a fact check request, if any of you want to tweet at me later.
So the claim from the skeptics is that the satellites can measure how warm the lower troposphere is.
I forget which troposphere it is.
But that they can measure it and it is nowhere near the temperature That it would need to be to explain the theory of climate science.
Now, I'm not claiming it's true.
I'm claiming that's a claim.
And whenever I see a claim that looks like it's easy enough for us to understand and easy enough to measure it, I like to put it out there and see if it can be debunked.
So far, most of the skeptical claims have been debunked.
All of them, actually, that at least I've proposed.
So... That's what I'm going to say.
All right. Jobs are great.
I'll just end on this one point.
Historically, the jobs reports have been very predictive of your president getting re-elected.
So typically, you would expect that with an economy this strong, I mean, super strong economy, that you would always get that president re-elected.
Well, I just don't know if any of the old rules apply anymore.
I just don't know if any pattern that we've seen in the past still works.
It could be that people will just assume the economy is good and you could put in any president and you'd still have a good economy.
So, it's possible.
Anyway, we'll talk about that more tomorrow.
▲
Export Selection