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Nov. 25, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:03
1516 Global Warming - An Apology and Correction

So sorry for the very unclear statements in my last podcast, hopefully this will help.

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Hi, everybody. It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Listen, I'm really sorry about my last video, which provoked some entirely justified criticism of me, and I did not at all state what I meant clearly.
In fact, I stated it so badly that it was entirely misleading.
I really do apologize for that.
I tried to be very clear in my communication, but I absolutely missed the ball on that one, and I'm very, very sorry for a confusion or frustration or Or annoyance which my extremely poor communicating created.
So please accept my sincere apology for that.
Let me clarify a little bit I mean, I can't even say clarify what I meant because what I meant was so obscure.
I did say that global warming was false because it was funded by violence, but I also said that I had no capacity or skill to evaluate the source data.
So let me see if I can unravel this Gordian knot for you and make a little bit of sense out of my rather confused statements.
Global warming is a whole series of arguments, and the arguments require a whole bunch of things to be in place for it, in its current state, to be valid.
So, of course, global warming has to be occurring.
It has to be occurring only, of course, on this planet, and it has to be for the argument that is put forward by Gore and a number of other people, and not just politicians, but academics as well.
It has to be anthropomorphic, right?
It has to be man-made.
It has to be reducible or preventable.
And the only way in which it can be reduced or prevented is through a massive expansion of state power over property and life.
And that state power will be effectively and productively put into place in order to avoid the catastrophe of the results of global warming.
So when I say global warming is false, I'm not talking about the science, which I think was fairly clear because I said I'm not competent at all to judge the science, the statistics, the source data.
I'm really talking about all the dominoes that are required for global warming to be valid in the way that it is presented to the general public, of course, of which I am one.
So, for global warming to be valid, then it has to be, of course, occurring, and there seems to be some dispute or debate about that, relative to other periods of warming and cooling throughout the Earth's history, which are quite significant.
There was, I think, a great cooling in the Middle Ages and a great warming a couple of hundred years earlier.
So, there are these cycles of temperatures, which may not be specific to industrialization.
The global warming did not occur synonymous with the industrialization of the West.
The global warming occurred over 100 years after the pollution was very great in the West as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
So there's some problems with the timing.
And of course, pollution is much better than it was in the 19th century, at least air pollution.
And therefore, it's a little tough to say it's causal.
There do seem to be some very strong arguments that it's more related to sunspot activity if there is, in fact, some sort of global change in temperatures.
And the reason that that's got some strong science behind it is that global warming appears to be occurring on other planets, such as Jupiter, unless there are a lot of SUVs on Jupiter idling in the upper gaseous atmosphere.
It would seem tough to say that it's anthropomorphic, or man-created.
But even if we accept all of this to be the case, the global warming is occurring, and that it is only occurring on Earth, that it's unrelated to sunspots, that it's entirely man-created, which again doesn't seem particularly valid.
A couple of volcanoes equal more carbon dioxide emissions than just about anything else that human beings can do, so it doesn't seem to be that human-created.
Of course, there is the argument that even if it is human-created, an addition of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will result in increased vegetation, because that's what they convert it back to oxygen, right, as far as I understand it.
Again, I'm no biologist, but that's my understanding.
So, increased carbon dioxide...
Within the atmosphere will simply cause an increase in vegetation, which will in turn reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on, right?
So that's sort of my take on the early sort of part of it.
The second part, of course, which is always talked about, is that only concerted efforts by world governments will avert or reduce the man-made catastrophes of global warming and take a huge hit to the economy.
10-20% reduction sometimes is cited in the world economy, which may not be that bad for rich, tasty, pasty whiteys like you and I in the West, but that's a big deal for someone in the second or third world, right?
So... That, to me, is also not particularly well established.
But when they talk about the government being a solution, and this is, of course, the problem that it's always talked about as a solution to this problem.
And, of course, as a voluntarist, I know that that's not the case.
The government will never be a solution to this sort of problem.
And even if you believe the government is a solution to this problem, well, global warming has been talked about since the 1970s.
And there's still no particular concerted effort on it.
So even if you believe it is real, even if you believe it is man-made, even if you believe it really does need to be averted and it's worth giving up all this income to do so, then government is certainly not your solution, is not your answer, because almost nothing has been done in the past couple of decades and nothing appears imminent.
And so all of these things, when I sort of talk about global warming being false and saying it's not the science per se, the data per se, which I can't judge, I'm talking about all the dominoes that result from the premises of global warming all the way down to massive expansions in state power.
The other thing, too, if you were old enough to have a little bit of grey in your hair or a little bit of scalp in your hair, then you've been through this a whole number of times before.
I mean, for those who don't remember or who weren't around or have never known about it, global warming started off as...
Global cooling. There was going to be a new ice age.
This was around in the 70s.
And this was, of course, accompanied with other things like we're about to run out of oil, we're about to run out of food, super strained resistant bacteria and viruses are going to take over the world that will be immune to medicines.
We're gonna run out of water.
There were all of these environmental catastrophes imminently predicted in the 1970s and 1980s.
In the 1980s, it went to all these other things, and I'll put a video below, which is sort of my take on all the media scares that have been floating around.
So, if you're old enough, you've heard all of this stuff before.
Now, of course, global cooling changed to global warming.
Global warming, when that couldn't be established in any particular kind of scientific way, changed to climate change.
You know, which of course is redundant.
Climate is change.
Climate will change. Climate always has changed.
And the fact that they can't even predict whether it's warmer or cooler aspects of change over the next year or two, to me, makes it quite ridiculous to imagine that computer models can predict the temperature.
That, to me, is just complete nonsense and complete mysticism.
There's no conceivable way that any computer model can accurately predict what the weather is going to be like in 100 years.
I mean, they have trouble telling me whether it's going to rain tomorrow.
It just is, to me, completely ridiculous.
Now, the other issue which people brought up, which is completely valid, and again, I'm really sorry for the confusion, which is entirely my fault and entirely generated by me, is when I said, it's false because it is funded through violence.
And people quite rightly called me on that and said, are you saying that all science which is state-funded is false?
I'm not saying that, although it's completely understandable that people might get that from what I did say, and again, I'm sorry for that.
But no, of course, I'm in no way competent to judge whether all science that is funded through the state is false, and I think it would be a ridiculous statement to make if that were the case.
What I am talking about, though, which to me differentiates something like global warming or cooling or climate change or whatever you want to call it, what differentiates global warming from other things is that it has become a voracious serpent eating its own tail.
In other words, It's really tough to get funding for climate projects that aren't around global change.
And I would say it's practically impossible to get funding for projects which are counter to global warming.
Governments give money to special interest groups in order, like to some special interest groups, receive money in order to raise the fear levels Of others so that, you know, if we're frightened, we need someone to protect us, right?
So the government pays special interest groups in order to generate fear and hysteria, which makes people easier to take over.
It makes them give up their rights that much.
And again, I'm not saying this is all a big bunch of evil guys with thin mustaches in a back room.
I'm just saying that this is a natural tendency.
We frighten people in order to take power over them.
We create fear. We understand this when it comes to alarm force, you know?
You sell alarm systems to people by telling them about crime.
You frighten people in order to make money.
Now, that's different. It's a voluntary free market interaction and so on.
But we tell people about fears in order to sell them solutions.
And sometimes those things are very valid.
You might get sick, therefore you need insurance.
You will die, therefore it's good to have insurance to cover the costs.
As a species, as human beings, we create fear in order to get money from people.
And to me, there's nothing wrong with that fundamentally.
It's just if the money we're paying to the people to create the fear is taken at the point of a gun, that to me renders the conclusions that much more suspect.
Paying people to explore questions of science is, to me, it corrupts.
I mean, I'm skeptical about it in the extreme, the results that come out of it, because whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
We understand that if you sit at a restaurant table and you order a meal, the meal that you order is the one you get.
And if you order scientific studies...
You will only approve people who will give you, in general, the scientific results and the political conclusions that you want.
And I don't see a lot of funding for anti-global warming or skeptical global warming research coming from the state.
And why would they? Because if that fear goes away, the state can't expand its power, and that's what the state likes to do.
It's a cancer. It likes to grow until, sadly, it kills off the host.
So I'm skeptical about money that is given to scientists as part of a general, hysterical, feeding-upon-itself frenzy of the expansion of state power.
And I don't view scientists as inherently more moral or rational from a political or economic standpoint as anybody else.
You can go back through history and see a whole bunch of scientists have supported the very worst stuff that you can conceivably imagine, all for the sake of advancing their careers, getting along with the state, moving up, moving on, and all that kind of stuff.
Just look up eugenics and the Nazis if you'd like one example of this, but I mean, there are countless other examples.
So when the government is paying a particular group huge amounts of money, and that particular group is regularly churning back the increases in disaster scenarios, attacks upon skeptics, and open and repeated calls for massive expansions in state power...
Then it seems to me that the whole process has become so corrupt that I don't believe it anymore.
Again, I'm not talking about the science itself, which I can't judge.
I'm talking about paying people.
Who are you paying in order to get the results that you want?
What are you ordering, like a person at a restaurant, what are you ordering when you fund particular research into climate change?
Well, governments like to extend and expand power.
They like to frighten people so that they can take away their rights.
And therefore, you're going to fund people who will give you back the answers that you want, that you can provide to the media to scare the living shit out of everybody.
So they'll say, oh my god, we need more government, more government, and we're all going to drown!
There's a whole process that goes on there.
It's not the science, fundamentally, that I have a problem with.
I'm incredibly pro-science.
I love science. Science, to me, is only second to philosophy in the value that it brings to the world.
Or could. Right now, science beats philosophy because philosophy is in a pretty pathetic state.
But it's not science.
I mean, I'm a huge fan of science.
I love science. When you have the state shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars at people, sorry, tens of billions of dollars at people, I've heard estimates, and I might have to check this, that it's a huge amount of money, but I can't...
When you have people shoveling massive amounts of money at climate scientists with the express desire of getting back particular results, it's not that they give money to a bunch of impartial scientists, and then those scientists say...
Well, here are the results in an impartial way.
What happens is the scientists will provide the huge grand proposals and like, what is it that you want to do?
And here's whether we'll give you the money or not.
And if you're a scientist and you put forward something which says, I don't believe in global warming.
I don't believe it's man-made.
It's solar activity.
It's across the solar system.
It's not, you know, we don't mean the last thing we want is political action.
It's really bad. I mean, are you going to get funding from the state?
Well, no.
So there's a selection mechanism that occurs when the government is handing out money.
The government doesn't just fly over like a water bomber and just drop all this money on a random group of scientists.
You have to fill out particular forms.
You have to put a particular thesis forward that you're trying to prove, right?
So I'm going to go and measure these ice rings in order to establish the validity and the acceleration and the warnings and the dangers of global warming or climate change.
Then you will get the money, right?
So it's not that The science itself is inherently wrong, or that science itself is inherently wrong.
Of course not. But there is a whole political process that goes along when it comes to choosing who it is, who gets the money.
And you know this ahead of time.
You read all of their papers, right?
If you want money from the government for science, you have to give a list of your prior papers, right?
So the people in the government will say, well...
Let's look at this guy's prior papers.
Well, he's a strong advocate for global warming.
You know, we're very concerned about global warming.
Maybe that's the story they tell themselves, and therefore we're going to give this guy money, and he's going to go out, and what do you know?
He's going to find data to support global warming.
Scientists have confirmation bias just like everybody else.
Scientists want to get grant money.
They want to get ahead. They want to get published.
They don't want to be outcasts in their community.
All of this is a perfect example of how anarchy would work even in a state of society, but that's neither here nor there.
And if you are a skeptic, if you come out strongly against this, you get a lot of punishment.
You won't get the grants. You may not get the job.
I mean, especially on the internet, where everything you've ever written is publicly available.
You go for a job as a global warming skeptic in a climate change organization, what's going to happen to you, right?
People fall in line.
There is no market, right?
So when I say it has no value, I don't mean it has no truth value.
It may or may not. I don't know.
But it has no market value because it's not funded voluntarily.
To me, this is quite different from...
I mean, the ethics of it are not fundamentally the same, that the money is stolen at the point of a gun and handed out.
But to me, it's quite different from the government saying, we're going to give some subsidies to a department of engineering.
And we're not going to tell them what to do, but here's the subsidy.
We're not going to pick and choose who gets to do what particular research.
We're just going to give it to the faculty and let them do it.
It's not perfect. Don't get me wrong.
It's still fundamentally immoral.
But to me, that's very different from the money that is handed out by governments for particular research to particular scientists who have a particular bias and who are very pro-political action.
To me, that's a much more direct intervention in the process of science.
So, again, I don't want to go on too long about it.
That's my sort of differentiation.
When you get into this cycle, too, right?
The cycle where you give money to people for global warming research, they come back with all these disaster scenarios, which then triggers an additional flow of money to the people studying climate change, who then come up with more scare scenarios, who then get additional money, right? You get this vicious cycle of an ever-escalating hysteria and funding that That is a really, really tough cycle for any scientist with real integrity to break out of.
That is a really difficult thing for people to break out of.
That, to me, is very different from, you know, we give some subsidy to a psych department or an engineering department or an English literature department.
That is not a self-feeding, media-fueled, expansionist state hysteria.
It's a very, very different situation.
Again, morally, I'm not saying it's fundamentally different, but there is a feeding frenzy that occurs that is much more dangerous in terms of the expansions of state power.
With, let's just say, some English departments that get subsidies from the government, what happens is that English department is going to be very pro-subsidies to the English department, right?
I mean, they can only consume so much money.
Of course, they'll always want more, but they're really only vested in the maintenance of their own income.
And so they'll continue to lobby for the state for that, and they'll oppose any sort of privatization.
But it's a contained phenomenon, right?
You can only eat so many meals a day.
You can only consume so much salary and overhead.
There's a difference when you get this wildfire scenario, this vicious circle escalation, where people who are creating general scares based on science get more funding, which allows them to fund more scares, which gets them more funding.
That, to me, is a very different escalation.
That's asymptotic. That's a very different escalation scenario than Well, we like to get a salary, so maybe we'll go for 3% more or 5% more next year.
We'll hope for the best. We'll be pro-state, but we're not getting hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for providing particular results.
So again, I'm really sorry.
It was not at all clear.
Absolutely my fault. And thank you, everyone, so much for emailing me and writing to me and calling me an anti-science lunatic.
I can totally understand how that impression came out of what I said.
And again, I'm really, really sorry. Thank you so much.
for yanking me up by the short and curly's and giving me the good old internet wedgie to remind me to be very clear about my statements.
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