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June 20, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:12
3001 The 97% Consensus? Global Warming Unmasked!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio here.
I hope you're doing very well.
97%, 97%, that is quite a bag full of consensus.
Some other numbers that are important say 200,000 or 50 trillion, which we'll get to as we move forward in this chat, but 97% is the supposed consensus among climate scientists That climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous.
President Obama has tweeted that.
It's been repeated countless times around the world.
Obama said, 97% of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest.
They've acknowledged that the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.
So...
Let's have a look at this information.
97% is really a lot of consensus and You know, consensus in science is a real challenge.
There was a...
Dr.
Barry Marshall discovered the reason for stomach ulcers, which was often considered, like for many, many years, many decades, in fact, was considered to be an excess of acid in the stomach often brought about by stress.
And he actually found out that the cause of stomach ulcers was a bacterium and not acid.
So he fought the medical establishment for like 20 years and finally gave himself the disease so that he could cure it.
So the consensus of the medical establishment was proven to be a total fraud.
This doesn't mean, of course, that all consensus is fraud, but it certainly means that consensus is not the same as truth.
And consensus in science is completely ridiculous.
You know, at the beginning of the days of Copernicus or Galileo or Tycho Brahe, 97% of astronomers believed that The fact that there's consensus doesn't make anything true.
Nonetheless, 97% consensus is really a strong and powerful argument that, although it is an argument from authority, carries a great deal of weight.
We often rely, of course, on experts to tell us what's what, and climate science is very complex.
But I thought, wow, 97% on...
Science is largely based on computer models, which garbage in, garbage out, and also science whose models have been unable to predict the past, let alone predict the future.
There was no, like, this close-on two-decade pause in global warming was not predicted by any of the models.
And so 97% consensus on data-modeled science that can't predict the past, let alone predict the future, that seemed pretty high to me.
And it's important to figure this out, right?
Because there's sort of four dominoes that need to be in place for us to accept surrendering massive amounts of money and liberty to the governments to solve a global catastrophe called warming.
The first is that we have to believe that temperatures are continually increasing.
The second is that we have to accept that human activity, particularly industrial activity, It's contributing significantly to this continual increase in temperatures, and the IPCC says it's like 90% plus of the temperature growth is caused by human activity.
So, temperatures continually increasing, human beings contributing significantly, and third, that these temperature increases will be catastrophic.
Fourth, That government control, bureaucracies, regulation, legislation is how and the only way really to solve the problem.
Clearly, if we can solve the problem of global warming or climate change by reducing government power, that's preferable to the increase in government power.
We really have to believe that governments are willing to sacrifice votes in the here and now, because even complying with the Kyoto Accord, which is supposed to reduce carbon emission to around 1990s levels, will cost the average American household $2,700 a year while affecting a tiny fraction of a percentage point of Celsius degree change over the course of a century or something like that.
So politicians have to be willing to sacrifice votes in the here and now in order to give a slightly better climate to people 100 years from now.
And if governments are really that great at ensuring benefits to the future while sacrificing votes in the present, it's kind of hard to imagine how we have, say...
50 trillion dollars of government debt around the world, because that's certainly delivering a worse economy to the future than we otherwise would.
So, if the governments could deal with climate change, there'd be no such thing as national debts.
So, let's look at this 97%.
Wow.
So, it comes from a study by an Australian whose name is John Cook.
As in cook the data?
Let's find out.
He's the Climate Communications Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland.
And so he and his colleagues published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in May 2013.
And...
This paper doesn't say anything about whether there's dangers in climate change, whether it's catastrophic, and what it does is it got 12 or 13,000, the number of changes depending on which one of them you ask or when, they reviewed 12 or 13,000 articles And they did not check to see whether these articles were representative of the discipline as a whole.
And the number of articles is not the same as the number of scientists.
So they came up with this 97%.
That's not the same as the number of scientists, which is what everyone else says.
So there are, of course, hundreds of papers on the causes of climate change and thousands of papers on the impacts of climate change and climate policy.
And they basically went through these articles, about two environmental activists went through these articles and tried to figure out if they supported anthropogenic climate change and activity responsible for the CO2 growth, which is responsible for climate change.
Their methodology was terrible.
And in fact, Cook later on admitted that the data was not exactly great.
And so what happened was they looked for anything to do with climate change, and if they found it, they assumed that it was for anthropogenic methods.
Climate change.
So, for instance, a paper on the impact of carbon tax on emissions was taken as evidence that the world is warming.
A paper on the impact of climate change on the Red Panda was taken as evidence that human beings are causing this warming.
Even a paper on describing television coverage of climate change was seen by these researchers that carbon dioxide is to blame.
So they analyzed between 12 and just under 13,000 papers, but of those 12 or 13,000 papers, only 64 of them were initially explicitly stated that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming.
So that shaves it down just a little bit.
And then they re-examined the data, and that number came down to 4.
41 papers.
Out of 12,000 or 13,000 papers that were examined, only 41 of those papers explicitly stated that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming.
And for that, Cook said, well, the papers have to say like 50% of the increase is the result of human activity.
And the IPCC, anthropogenic global warming scenario, is that 90%.
So it's way below what the IPCC suggests.
They could still only get 41 papers out of 12 or 13,000 to support their thesis.
So far from 97% of climate scientists supporting this thesis, anthropogenic global warming, and that it's dangerous and whatever, right?
The actual consensus on simply that human beings contribute 50% of global warming is actually about 0.3%.
So, not 97%, but 0.3%.
That's terrible.
This is appalling.
And the fact that a movement would need to create and invent these kinds of numbers tells you everything you need to know about this movement.
So these hand-picked raters that Cook used to go and rate, they mostly just read the abstracts, not even the papers.
They disagreed on what a paper was about a third of the time.
In 63% of cases, they disagreed about the message of a paper with the authors of that paper.
So the authors would say one thing, and the reviewers, who were not scientists to my knowledge, said, oh, well, it's not really about that.
It's about what we want it to be about.
The editor of the magazine praised the authors for the excellent data quality, even though neither the editor nor any referees had the opportunity to check the data.
Crazy.
Now, of course, other people outside scientists requested the data.
One of the basics of the peer-reviewed scientific method is that I need to see your data to make sure you didn't make any mistakes or lie.
And so there were lots of requests for Cook and his crew to hand over the data, and they evaded and they dragged their feet.
And this is a clear violation of publishing policy for validation and reproduction of data.
So, I mean, Cook hoped to keep his data under wraps, but apparently his internet security skills are sort of on par with his statistical skills, and a hacker reached through and got the data.
Now, Queensland University threatened him with legal action if he talked about the data or did anything with the data or ran any numbers on the data, and they said, ah, well, you know, if releasing these raider identities would violate a confidentiality agreement, but that confidentiality agreement does not exist.
So, people went through the data after it was got, and when people asked for timestamps, right, if you're doing article reviews, timestamps are important because, you know, later in the day, you might be a little bit tired, you might, you know, as the project grinds on.
And...
So Cook first said, well, you know, releasing timestamps won't do anything.
And by the way, we didn't get timestamps.
There aren't any timestamps.
Turns out that there was.
And one of the timestamps shows, just one out of many, one of Cook's raters inspected 675 articles within a 72-hour time block.
That is quite...
Staggering.
Cook and his group also broke one of the fundamental rules of scientific data collection, which is that you have to get all the data and then you run your analysis.
And that is very important, right?
What they would do is they'd go out and review a bunch of articles, and then they'd analyze the data, and then they would change their sample standards or their selection criteria.
They'd go out and get a bunch more data, and then they'd change their criteria.
No, you have to have one thesis, one standard of data collection, go out, get all the data, and then analyze the results.
You're not allowed to do that in the scientific method.
And some people really pushed back.
So a bunch of investigative journalists went into this data set and found that Cook and his colleagues classified papers as supporting the 97% consensus, even though they were written by real global change or climate change skeptics.
Willie Soon, Craig Itzo, Nicola Scarfetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils Axel Morner, And Alan Carlin, these are all people who vigorously are rejecting this catastrophic anthropogenic global warming consensus, but they were enlisted in support of this 97% consensus.
So, they classified a peer-reviewed paper by Craig Itzo as explicitly supporting the consensus position on global warming.
And so a magazine or a group named Popular Technology asked the guy whether this is an accurate representation of his paper.
He said, that is not an accurate representation of my paper.
The paper examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere seasonal.
Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely that the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion's share of the change.
It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.
They also asked physicist Nicholas Garfetta whether Cook and his colleagues were accurate in classifying them in one of their papers as supporting the consensus position.
He said, Cook et al.
is based on a strawman argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC, anthropogenic global warming theory.
Which is not that human emissions have contributed 50% plus of the global warming since 1900, but that almost 90 to 100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission.
What my papers say is that the IPCC, sorry I should have mentioned the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, view is erroneous because about 40 to 70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun.
Now, the reason why, of course, climate change activists don't like the idea that The Sun has a significant effect on climate, and why they don't like to talk about the fact that all the planets in the solar system are experiencing global warming,
probably because a bunch of SUVs have been left idling on Jupiter, but they don't like talking about it because, at least so far, to our knowledge, the Sun remains outside the control of government bureaucrats.
So far.
Obviously, they're still working on it.
So, also to get to the 97% number, Cook and his colleagues also took a bunch of papers and classified them as saying no position.
They take no position on human-caused global warming.
And a lot of times that was incorrect.
Now, when Cook and the reviewers classified a paper as having no position, they simply pretended for the purpose of the 97% claim that the paper did not exist.
It doesn't exist.
It doesn't support a clinic.
It doesn't exist.
Right, so if I say 9 out of 10 dentists love X, and I surveyed 100 dentists, and 90 of them wrote back and said I have no opinion on it, and I still say 9 out of 10 dentists say X, that's not correct.
It's not valid.
So...
It's brutal.
It's brutal stuff.
And so...
As mentioned, the University of Queensland is taking legal action to block the release of the data.
And that's not good.
And another study, because this 97% thing has come up a bunch of times, another study asked geologists, when compared with pre-1800 levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
And, of course, most geologists and most sane people agree that temperatures have risen because since 1880, the Earth has been warming out of a chilly period known as the Little Ice Age.
The cause, of course, is wildly debated because the warming prior to 1940, in other words, the 60 years from 1880 to 1940, that warming could not have been caused by CO2 emissions because the emissions were too low.
So...
Is warming continuing according to the dataset?
No.
It's been for almost two decades.
There's been no warming.
So that's a challenge.
The models don't predict it.
That's number one.
And number two, is human activity primarily responsible for the warming which is supposed to be occurring but isn't?
Hard to find.
Certainly the 97% is almost completely fictitious, so we'd have to sort of say that doesn't matter.
But even if we accept these two, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Even if we accept that the warming is increasing and human beings are primarily responsible, like 90% or more according to the IPCC, is it bad?
Is the global warming that human beings are responsible for bad?
It's hard to say.
You know, it's an old joke about the American president who said, I want me a one-armed economist.
Why, sir?
So that one time, at least in my life, an economist will not say, on the other hand.
And I've not been working on my accents for those who are keeping track.
So, is it good or is it bad, global warming or climate change?
It's both.
It's good and bad.
According to significant research, and again, the sources for all this stuff is below in the low bar, according to some significant amount of research, the overall effect so far of global warming has been positive, and it's likely to stay positive until at least 2080.
So that's quite a long time down the road.
I'll be 114, so keep our fingers crossed.
And so 14 different studies were reviewed by a professor at Sussex University, and overall effects have been positive and likely to remain that way until about 2080.
So what's positive?
Well, global warming means fewer winter deaths, lower energy costs, better agricultural yields.
Remember, CO2 is a plant food.
And probably fewer droughts, probably richer biodiversity, because not many people know, but winter deaths exceed summer deaths, and not just in cold countries like England, but even in warmer countries like Greece.
Greece and England see a mortality rate increase by 18%.
Every winter.
Really cold winters, for reasons that escape me, cause rises in heart failures.
So cold and not heat is the biggest killer.
So for the last decade, English people have been expiring over the course of winter at an average rate of 29,000 excess deaths each winter.
Global warming so far has cut heating bills more than it has raised Cooling bills.
So it is causing a reduction in the need for energy consumption to heat places.
Now, of course, as you know, CO2 is very, very rare.
In fact, you could really call it a trace gas in the atmosphere.
It's less than 0.04% of the air on average.
And plants have to really work like crazy to get enough of it.
They're always at the edge of not getting enough of it.
So on like a windless day full of sun, a field of corn...
We'll suck like half of the carbon dioxide out of the air.
And so commercial greenhouse growers, they pump CO2 into their greenhouses to raise plant growth, it's plant food.
So the increase in average carbon dioxide just over the past 100 years has been from 0.03 to 0.04% of the air.
This has actually had a measurable effect on plant growth rates.
So, Dr.
Ranga Maineni of Boston University has looked at three decades of satellite data and has documented that 31% of global vegetated areas have become greener.
And only 3% has become less green.
So 31% are getting greener, 3% have become less green.
That's a 14% increase in the productivity of ecosystems and has been observed in all vegetation types.
So good for plants, good for agriculture in particular.
Dr.
Randall Donahue, colleagues at a department in Australia, also analyzed satellite data and found the greening of the earth is clearly attributable in part.
to carbon dioxide and its fertilization effects.
Greening is especially pronounced in dry areas like the Sahel region of Africa.
Satellites have shown a big increase in greening in that area of Africa since the 1970s.
So global warming you hear will harm the world's poorest and hardest and so on.
But in the Sahel region in Africa, there's been a significant decline in fat mince recently.
Partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to the fact that more carbon dioxide means more greening.
And more greening is more greenery to grow and also more greenery left over for gazelles.
So the entire ecosystem has benefited from this.
Of course, the polar bears, the tragic winter animals of climate change death, are actually doing very, very well.
Some of that, of course, a lot of that is to do with cessation of hunting, but if we look at polar bears, the three years that had the lowest polar bear cub survival in at least western Hudson Bay, 74, 84, and 92 of last century, well, Those were the years where the sea ice was too thick for the seals to appear, which are the food that the polar bears need after they come out of hibernation.
So, bears thrive on thinning and broken ice as well.
I mean, just as a whole, just by the by, the death rate from droughts and floods and storms has dropped by 98% since the 1920s.
And this is not because the weather has become less or more dangerous, but just people are getting better protection as they get richer.
So this is important to understand.
There will be changes and we will adapt.
Some of them will be beneficial and some of them will be challenging.
Now what we do know for sure though is that climate policy is already doing a lot of harm.
So policies designed by governments to help with problems of climate change are doing a lot of harm.
Building wind turbines, growing biofuels, and substituting wood for coal in power stations, this is all the policies that are supposed to fight climate change, have had almost no effect on actual carbon dioxide emissions, but they have driven people into what is called fuel poverty, which means that they simply don't have the energy they need to cook, to heat their houses, and so on, and so they go cut down trees and do other kind of stuff like that.
So, it has also made various industries uncompetitive, thus driving jobs offshore, particularly from the advanced economies of the world.
It has accelerated the destruction of forests because, like, we don't want to use coal, so when you get wood, where do you get wood from?
It has killed rare birds of prey.
The wind turbines are just guillotines for birds of prey.
And...
I talked about 200,000 at the beginning of this chat.
So globally, nearly 200,000 people are dying every year because as a result of the desire to combat global warming, we're turning 5% of the world's grain crop into motor fuel instead of food.
And this is causing 200,000 people a year to starve to death.
For what?
For almost no effect on CO2 emissions.
200,000 people.
This is a huge, staggering, significant number.
200,000 people starving to death every single year for us to assuage the prickly idiots of our environmental conscience.
So...
Now, Bjorn Lomborg, who's, I think, a great environmentalist, has been on this show.
He's pointed out that the European Union pays £165 billion a year for its current climate policies, and it will be doing that each and every year for the next 87 years.
And even climate policies in England, subsidizing windmills, wood burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles, and all the rest of that junk, will cost £1.8 trillion Over the course of the century, and in exchange for that truly staggering sum, the hope or the goal of spending all of that money is to lower the air temperature by about 0.005 degrees Celsius, which is completely undetectable to normal thermometers.
And there is a pretty accepted consensus.
Here we get to another 97.
That one actually is valid consensus.
Accepted consensus among economists is that for every $100 you spend fighting climate change, you get $3 of benefits.
For every $100 you spend fighting climate change through government programs, you get $3 of benefits.
There's your $97.
$97 wasted.
Now, I would love to see less consumption in the world.
I would love to see better environmental protection.
I'm going to give you just a couple of thoughts about things that can be done that don't involve trusting the temperature 100 years from now to self-interested, vote-hungry government bureaucrats and politicians in the here and now.
Right now, this is conservative, I think, but there is about $50 trillion in government debt worldwide.
The worldwide GDP is about $75 trillion.
There is about $50 trillion of government debt around the world.
Or, to put it another way, that's more than three Americas' worth of government debt.
Now, when you borrow, you are spending in the here and now and deferring the payment until later.
In other words, you're consuming the present while starving the future.
So, that fundamentally drives environmental predation.
The more you borrow, the more you spend in the here and now, the more you are destroying the resources to produce consumer goods and services in the here and now.
Now, have you ever heard an environmentalist say, you know what we need to do is make sure governments can't go into debt?
I mean, you can't stop individuals from going into debt, but at least individuals suffer the consequences of their own debt addiction in general.
Well, unless you're a large bank and then you get a bailout.
But anyway...
So, have you ever heard an environmentalist say, what we really need to do is go on the gold standard because the gold standard means governments can't create money out of nothing to buy votes and therefore we will not destroy the planet at an accelerated rate through the cancer of fiat currency?
Or maybe we'll go to Bitcoin, which also can't be created out of thin air.
And that way, governments will actually have to fund their own initiatives.
Because on the one hand, governments are saying, well, let's control carbon emissions.
And on the other hand, they're handing out thousands of dollars to taxpayers to go and spend stuff and go and buy stuff, which drives CO2 emissions.
Anyway, I could...
My head will explode if I think on it too long.
So, and...
Most of the Western economies are well over 100% in terms of debt to GDP. But it's actually worse than that.
Because what you want to do, if you're trying to figure out government debt, is you want to figure out not government debt to GDP, because the government doesn't have access to all the GDP, at least yet.
But you want to compare debts to government tax revenues.
Because that's the actual income you have to pay off the debt.
And of course, countries have different levels of taxation and so on.
So, if you do that, if you forget about debt to GDP, which is kind of meaningless, you compare debt to tax revenues, that's where things really matter.
That's where the numbers really matter.
So, if you do that, well, Japan has a debt to tax revenue ratio of about 900%.
900%.
Greece, still number two, at 475%.
The US jumps to 408%.
408% debt to tax collection ratio.
That's staggering.
Horrifying.
And anybody who cares about the environment must want governments to stop spending beyond their means.
Must stop governments spending beyond their means.
It's not that hard to do.
Go back to a gold standard, get a basket of fixed commodities, go to some cryptocurrency.
It's not that hard to do in terms of implementing it.
I mean, we have a political challenge, let's say.
But that's what you would have to do.
Another thing that would be helpful is...
Let's stop paying people to have kids, right?
So if you are a single mom in America, you can get about, you know, depending on where you are and what you're, about $30,000, $35,000 of tax-free benefits for having your two kids.
Well, that's not good.
More people is more environmental use.
Now, I get maybe those people will grow up to invent something that solves global warming.
I don't know.
But let's at least stop paying people to have children.
That would be, I think, a pretty good idea.
What about divorce?
Divorce is terrible for the environment.
You have people living in one house, and then they get divorced.
Now they need two houses, two cars, two sets of clothing, two toys, driving back and forth all the time.
You know, we have this no-fault divorce where you can sign up forever but get out on a whim.
Should that be more restrictive?
Hard to say, but divorce is really bad for the environment.
These are just, off the top of my head, sort of interesting and creative solutions to these kinds of problems that involve a reduction in government power to a large degree.
So, I just really wanted to point out the 97% number is...
Worse than fiction.
It's worse than fantasy.
Because at least fiction and fantasy have to have that printed on the book jacket.
And you know that it's not a documentary.
This is passed off as truth.
So if we look at these four dominoes, number one, temperatures are continually increasing.
Not really the case.
Number two, human activity contributes significantly.
Still highly debatable.
The effects will be catastrophic.
Not yet, and certainly not.
At least largely, likely not for the next more than half century.
And that government-controlled bureaucracies and regulations can solve the problem?
Not true at all.
They will make the problem worse.
They are making the problem worse.
And the consumerism, the rampant consumerism that is eating up the environment and destroying our children's future is driven in large part by government spending.
And government spending is driven by debt.
Debt is the illusion that you can have something for nothing.
And that illusion is made more possible and more cancerous by governments.
So, Francis Bacon, one of the originators, in fact, the originator, you could argue, of the scientific method, wrote in The Advancement of Learning in 1605.
He said,"...it is advisable to sift the merits of knowledge and clear it of the disgrace brought on by ignorance, whether disguised in one, the zeal of the divines." Two, the arrogance of politicians.
Or three, the errors of men of letters.
Well, Frank, it's more than 400 years on.
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