March 9, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:16
3226 How Global Warming Saved The Planet | Patrick Moore and Stefan Molyneux
Fifteen years after co-founding Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore left to establish a more sensible, science-based approach to environmentalism. Dr. Moore joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the impact of increased CO2 in the atmosphere, the myth of ocean acidification, manipulating earth temperature data sets, environmentalist anti-humanism, verbal abuse from the left, genetically modified organism (GMOs) and how "Global Warming" saved the planet!Dr. Patrick Moore is one of the founding members of Greenpeace and the author of “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist.” Get the book: http://www.fdrurl.com/patrick-mooreWebsite: http://www.ecosense.meTwitter: https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNowFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is one of the founding members of Greenpeace and the author of the highly recommended book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist.
Now, I know you've told this tale a million times before, but for a lot of my new listeners, this would be a surprise.
What was the original intention, at least in your participation in the environmental movement, and what did it turn into that, to some degree, turned you against it?
Greenpeace started with just those two words.
The first time that the long tradition of peaceful protest and nonviolence to gain change in government policies, etc., and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment, the green, Greenpeace was really a new concept and that's what gave it so much power at that time when it was defined in the early 1970s.
Our first mission was on the peace side primarily to end the threat of all-out nuclear war and we chose to protest against US nuclear hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska and sailed a boat across the North Pacific in order to bring media attention to opposition to the tests and help change the course of history.
We spearheaded the campaign that caused President Nixon to end the hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.
There were four more tests planned and this was at the height of the Cold War and the height of the Vietnam War and we kind of became heroes among a large number of people for having taken the time out of our lives to do that.
Well, as Greenpeace evolved, we next took on French atmospheric nuclear testing and We more or less won that battle to get them at least to go underground with their nuclear bomb tests.
And then we switched completely to save the whales.
For a lot of the peace people in Greenpeace, this didn't make any sense, and so some of them dropped out at that time because they couldn't see what on earth whales had to do with anything.
But the fact is our first campaigns were really of a much more humanitarian nature, and people forget that these days.
As Greenpeace evolved, The piece kind of got lost and all there was left with the green and by the time I left 15 years later after being full-time as a director of the organization and president for a short period, Greenpeace had become to characterize humans as the enemies of the earth,
the enemies of nature, and so had the rest of the movement, and it's still that way today, especially with the climate issue, as if we are the great destroyers of the planet, and everything else is good.
All the bunnies and fish and elephants and flowers and trees are all good, and we are the only evil species.
My good friend, the founder of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock, put it, humans are a rogue species on Gaia.
That was before he changed his mind about climate a few years back, and now he actually thinks that we might be doing the work of Gaia by putting CO2 in the atmosphere to prevent the slide into another major glaciation, which is due at some point in the near future.
I don't know if he recognizes it, but also in order to prevent the reduction of CO2 to the point where it was so low that plants couldn't grow anymore, we have actually brought a balance back to the carbon cycle by burning fossil fuels inadvertently.
We did it so that we could have energy, but what we've done inadvertently and which people should start to recognize now instead of demonizing CO2 to understand that it is the basis for all life on Earth We have helped keep it at a high level so plants can grow productively.
Anyways, that's what happened to Greenpeace.
It turned into an organization that was basically anti-human in the end, and that's not me.
I describe myself as not only a sensible environmentalist, but a humanitarian environmentalist.
If environmentalism rejects humans, That's not a very positive thing for the future.
And I've always said that if, you know, these people who think there's too many people in the world and that humans are bad and evil and horrible, and yet they're still flying around in jet planes two or three times a year to fancy resorts to climate change meetings, I mean, why don't they get rid of themselves first?
And then it'd be a nicer place if people would stop telling us that we're all horrible and evil and there's too many of us, you know?
That's kind of how I think of it.
I mean, I'm just joking about them all offing themselves, but I wish they'd just shut up about it because we are not evil.
Almost all people are trying to do good.
There are evil elements in the world today.
We all know what they are and what they're doing.
But most people are trying to live honest, productive lives in their communities and are not just a bunch of selfish creeps.
So let's get off this anti-human kick And turn environmentalism back to a humanitarian form of environmentalism where we do what sustainability actually says we should do, balance the environmental, social and economic factors.
The social and economic factors are about people.
The environmental factor is about maintaining a healthy environment that people will thrive in.
And of course, they all have to be looked after.
But we're doing a pretty good job in much of the industrialized world.
The rivers of Europe were dead when we took our riverboat up there in the early 80s and campaigned toxic waste coming out of the factories, plugging pipes and stuff like that, and it worked.
And now there's fish in most of the European rivers, just like there are in the North American rivers, which were also badly polluted before the Clean Water Act that was brought in.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a sort of big, broad sweep of history that a lot of people don't understand that human beings were locked in a mortal death combat with the limitations and predations of nature for most of human history.
We barely had enough food.
There were horrible diseases and terrible bears and lions and all that.
And so we had this sort of pitched battle against nature.
And then when we began through the Industrial Revolution to gain some sort of excess, that came at the expense of nature.
And there's no doubt that some of the smog and pollution of the Industrial Revolution in the early 20th century was a problem.
Then we got enough excess that we could start dealing with the effects of pollution in productive ways with scrubbers and finding ways to minimize our impact on the environment.
That was a very positive process.
And I think the original goal of the environmental movement was to make sure that we kept the planet clean enough that we could all enjoy its fruits in the future.
It did not view human beings as cancerous or antithetical to every other ecosystem and life on the planet.
I don't mean to trivialize your life work because it's hugely important what you're doing, but...
The analogy that I was sort of thinking about is if you have kids, kids leave a mess all the time, and getting them to clean up after themselves is a challenge, and it's a challenge that parents should take on willingly.
It's a long way from there to go.
People shouldn't have children because they create a mess, and I think that anti-human element where The fact that human beings can make a mess and we need to find ways to prevent the mess or clean it up when it happens to saying there really shouldn't be that many human beings, that's a huge leap that seems vastly to go against the original philosophy.
It certainly does.
And look at now, the Chinese have become wealthy enough that they are really focusing on cleaning up their air pollution.
There's a really interesting conflation going on.
All during the Paris Climate Conference, the TV was using photos of bad air quality in China as if it had something to do with CO2. And of course it doesn't.
It is true that they all come out of the same smokestack, the CO2 and the pollution.
But the CO2 is not pollution.
It's food for plants and it's odorless and colorless and has absolutely zero to do with it.
The Chinese are kind of saying, don't worry, we're going to clean up our coal plants, but what they mean is they're going to get rid of the pollution.
They're just playing along with the West on the idea that CO2 should be reduced.
They're not going to be reducing CO2. They're going to be building more coal plants.
But they're going to be cleaner plants.
Now India isn't there yet.
Their GDP per capita is still far lower than China's, and they have 300 million people without electricity.
The reason Prime Minister Modi kicked Greenpeace out of India last fall, and he did a good job of doing that, because they were undermining the energy and agricultural policies of a country that needs to bring 300 million people up out of abject poverty.
He wasn't going to let them get in the way of that.
In a way, I think that Greenpeace doing that is a form of sedition, undermining the nation's efforts to bring its people up and give them a better life.
There is simply no doubt that our energy and our industrial revolution that we've had has given us more longevity, longer lives, has made us wealthier by far, and has given us our personal freedom.
The private automobile, just for one example, provides individual humans with much more freedom than they had to go everywhere on a horse.
If they could afford a horse, then they'd have to walk.
Right.
Now, for a lot of my listeners, the idea that CO2 is anything but a pollutant, I guess it just shows how far we've come from having any personal agriculture.
Like I grew up, my aunt and uncle had a greenhouse, which was glorious, of course, in England because you could just have all kinds of wonderful plants that you wouldn't otherwise be able to grow.
Right.
How is it that we can best get people to understand that, like at the moment, I think it's like one out of every seven plants in the world is alive because of extra CO2 that we've put into the air.
How can we get people to understand just what a fundamental food it is for the entire ecosystem?
Well, I don't know if it is that people just want to have a religious belief that has a doom-day scenario in it.
So many religions do.
You know, there's supposed to be an apocalypse in most of them, and even the Pope has been sucked into this thing and is saying that the world is an immense pile of filth today and we must go back to the previous time, like when people had an average age of 35, I suppose.
And I just don't get how intelligent people cannot be aware of the fact that carbon dioxide is the basis of all life on Earth, along with water, CO2 is the most important food for life.
Everything is carbon-based that is alive on this earth.
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon, which is the chemistry of life.
And so anybody with basic science should be able to understand that, or anybody with just a grade 12 education should be able to understand that.
It is amazing That we are now teaching that CO2, carbon dioxide, is a pollutant, which gives people the impression that it's toxic.
It's at 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, which is.04%.
400 sounds like a big number, but parts per million is a small number, and 400 parts per million is only.04%.
Our breath has 40,000 parts per million of CO2 in it, and otherwise it's 4% CO2. We breathe in 30% oxygen and breathe out 4% CO2, which represents the sugars that we have burned in our body.
Which were made by plants who ate CO2. So we complete that cycle by putting the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
But we're also putting a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and that is bringing a balance back to a carbon cycle That was being depleted continuously for 150 million years.
It used to be the Earth was hotter and had more volcanoes putting CO2 back into the atmosphere.
But that stopped when the Earth cooled as it has over the four and a half billion years of its life.
And it's very unlikely that there will ever be enough volcanic activity To prevent the depletion of CO2 by the calcifying creatures in the sea that make shells out of carbon dioxide and calcium, which falls on the bottom and goes into rocks like limestone.
So there's been a constant depletion of CO2 up until during the last glaciation, 18,000 years ago at the peak of it, CO2 fell to a level that was almost low enough to cause the death of plants, 30 parts per million above the 150th We're good to go.
And we know for sure when it went down to 180 that plants nearly stopped growing.
It was a very hard time for vegetation on the planet.
And many people believe that the plants at higher elevations did die because air is thinner the higher elevation you go up.
This is just the kind of facts that we're finding from studying the history of this Earth.
So we have done life, not ourselves only, we've done life a great favor by bringing a balance back to the carbon cycle and hopefully we will continue to replenish it in the atmosphere up to say a thousand parts per million in the next couple of hundred years.
Plants will grow much faster and our agriculture will be much more productive.
Plants need less water when they have more CO2. That's proven by the pattern of greening of the earth that is occurring now as a result of our increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
So the climate change alarmists and warmists, whatever you want to call them, have got it completely 100% backwards.
CO2 is a positive effect.
It is not a negative effect.
And this is what blows people's mind, because a lot of people, when they have pushback against this sort of catastrophic anthropogenic global scare, thermageddonite warning stuff, they think that the pushback is to say, well, the effects won't be quite as bad as they say, or it's not as poisonous.
But what you're saying is that this is actually an ecosystem positive event that we're returning CO2 to the atmosphere that the plants so desperately need that through the process of...
Millions of years has been depleted that we're actually saving and extending and enhancing the ecosystem by putting the CO2 back into the atmosphere.
That is so mind-blowing for people.
I can hear exploding heads all over YouTube when this video goes out.
It's not just the atmosphere, it's also the oceans.
They've also made up this fabricated story called ocean acidification that as CO2 goes up in the atmosphere, more of it will be absorbed by the oceans and it will kill all the coral reefs and shellfish.
And the plankton that have calcareous shells and everything will die.
Well, maybe they don't say everything, but they call it a great catastrophe coming in the sea.
When, in fact, increased CO2 in the oceans increases the productivity of the phytoplankton with calcareous shells in the sea.
This is proven.
These people now, they're getting to the point of where it is a blatant conspiracy, what they're doing, because they are now changing all of the data sets of the temperature measurements that have been made, and every correction, they call it, correction or homogenation, adjustment, they're making adjustments to the temperature that was recorded at the time and making it higher.
For the most recent period and lower for the past.
Now, for some coincidental reason, when they make these adjustments, it never looks like it's getting cooler or warmer slower.
It always looks like it's getting warmer faster when they make these adjustments.
And about six datasets have now been, quote, adjusted, leading up to the Paris Convention and now, just recently, one of the satellite datasets, which are the most accurate way to measure temperature, which was showing a pause In global temperature from 2000 to now, they've made it look like it's warming by adjusting the numbers and rationalizing with all kinds of gobbledygook.
This is what's really going on and they're making up this ocean acidification.
Just to enlarge on this, we can continue burning fossil fuels and actually, if we wanted to, we could get the exact We can actually...
We control the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, not only with fossil fuels, but 5% of our emissions are from cement manufacturing, where we are taking the fossils of those ancient sea creatures that calcified themselves, which is called limestone, and making cement with it.
That's how we make cement, is we turn it back to carbon dioxide and calcium oxide.
Those creatures combined in the sea in the first place.
There's enough calcium carbonate in the Earth's crust for us to keep this planet alive and healthy for hundreds of millions more years.
Whereas if we hadn't intervened, if you just take a straight projection of what was happening with CO2 levels, it would be less than two million years from now till life began to die.
That means if you take the atomic The bomb clock that they say is so many seconds to midnight, that would be 38 seconds to midnight in terms of the time it was going to be till life died from when the earth began.
We intervened at 38 seconds to midnight and replenished the CO2 in the atmosphere.
The funny thing about it is it doesn't really look like CO2 has anything to do with warming.
It is theoretically a greenhouse gas.
If all else was equal, you'd expect some warming, nowhere near as much as they are creating in these models, which are just computer programs.
They're not the real world, yet they're sort of pretending they are for their own purposes of getting huge sums of money, a billion five going into NASA for climate research.
If you're a member of NASA, you cannot be a skeptic.
You have to retire before you're allowed to say anything.
That's why this group called the Right Climate Stuff has formed.
They are all retired NASA astronauts, space architects, etc.
and they are skeptics and they weren't allowed to talk about it when they were in NASA or it would jeopardize their 1.5 billion per year.
But it doesn't look like CO2 is going to lower the temperature, raise the temperature.
That's unfortunate in a way because a couple more degrees It would make the earth more habitable, especially northern Canada and Russia.
A huge amount of the world's land is in those northern boreal and tundra areas where if they could be productive from an agricultural and biodiversity point of view, it wouldn't be a bad idea.
But at least if CO2 doesn't prevent the slide into a cold world again, as has happened, we know eight times in the last 800,000 years these major glaciations that are in sync with the Milankovitch cycle, which is It's got to do with the Earth's orbit and the Earth's tilt and wobble, and that is presumably because of changes in solar radiation.
At least when we go into that slide, we will have enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to have productive agriculture where the dirt is still showing.
Unfortunately, the whole of Canada and Russia is going to be covered in a mile or two of ice.
That's 80,000 years from now.
It's a slow process sliding into the glaciation.
It comes out in 10,000 years from 18,000 years ago to 8,000 years ago, all the ice melted in a very short time, geologically speaking, and now we're in this interglacial period, which we think is started already to gradually go down into this long slide into the cold,
and that will be very difficult for All the species, including humans, that today do live in Canada and northern U.S. and the northern European and Russia, Japan, etc., all will go into an ice world if that does occur and if CO2 doesn't stop it, which it doesn't really look like it's going to.
Right.
I mean, this is something that's hard for people to understand because there's such a uniformity in the media and, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio with his private jets and concerns about CO2 emissions and so on.
But I sort of try and get people to understand that, number one, modeling is not… Science.
Modeling is data manipulation.
Just like your spreadsheet or your accounting system should only reflect your company's profits.
You can't just type things into it and make money.
It's just a reflection of reality.
And number two, consensus, particularly when the consensus involves significant conflict of interest, is not science.
You know, there was a consensus at one point that the world was flat and that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
And the consensus is not science.
Modeling is not science.
And particularly when the modeling which they have not only is not accurately predicting the future without all these manipulations, but can't even accurately go back and predict what did already happen.
And this idea that we're going to hang the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, trillions and trillions of the world's precious capital resources and so on, on self-referential computer modeling, which has almost no predictive ability and has not even backwards which has almost no predictive ability and has not even backwards predictability, is a truly astounding
And the degree to which this has become universally accepted is a staggering thing to those outside the matrix, how it's been achieved.
It is quite amazing.
And as I say, it's sort of like a new religion that is also a kind of far-left ideology thrown in.
Centralized control over all of us seems to be part of the formula.
Just, you know, a couple of points is that we are not doing this on purpose, the re-fertilization of the environment.
It's something that we've discovered that we're doing.
This is what people need to learn.
It's really hard to understand.
Like Leo DiCaprio, he's not really He's attacking CO2 emissions.
He's attacking large corporations.
He says they're all greedy.
His is basically the left-wing political Bernie Sanders approach to the situation.
It's got nothing to do with science.
If it did, he'd realize that he's just a giant hypocrite and should probably put a piece of duct tape over his mouth.
It's just ridiculous that he can say what he's saying and be in the 11th largest private yacht in the world or something with helicopters on it and flying around in a private jet to protest the oil sands and then coming back and telling everybody that he has experienced global warming because he was in a Chinook, which has a scientific explanation.
Air warms when it comes over a mountain range and falls down to the lower elevation on the other side.
It's called the adiabatic effect, Leo, and it's a Chinook.
It's not global warming, but he now believes that he has seen it with his own eyes and felt it with his own skin.
That's the religious side of it.
No, you go ahead.
I finished that one.
I was just wondering, Patrick, because, I mean, when I grew up, I grew up during the 70s.
I was born in 66.
I grew up in the 70s and the 80s.
And the global climate change hysteria is sort of the latest in a long line of things that actually had significantly dark effects on my childhood, you know, when I grew up.
Of course, the population explodes and zero population growth.
Hal Linden, I think, the late great planet Earth.
Paul Ehrlich with his unbelievably disastrous, we're going to run out of oil and food in the 1980s.
It was a pretty bleak series of giant waves of despair crashing through my childhood.
And I've gone through this a couple of times in the show.
Maybe if you can touch on some of these.
I wonder if the degree of investment in this latest hysteria might be there because if this one is disproven, I wonder if it's the last time the boy can cry wolf because there have been so many of these scares throughout at least my lifetime and maybe they were going on beforehand.
I think they largely started in the 60s with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and so on, DDT being another one we've talked about recently.
I wonder if they're really committed because I think if this one is disproven, I think it's going to be really tough to get away with the next one and a whole industry might...
Lord, help it would be lovely if it could vanish from the earth.
I think actually this is not a recent phenomenon.
The guy standing on the corner with a sign saying the end is nigh I think has been around since the beginning of civilization and the beginning of communication.
There is some reason...
That that gathers people together.
I guess maybe it's to come together to face the devil collectively.
More strength if you're all believing in the same disaster scenario or something.
I've never understood religion, so it's not very good to ask me why these people are doing this.
Because I am, I think, a product of the enlightenment, a product of agnostic parents who taught me science and bought me the books of knowledge when I was eight years old.
It wasn't really until I discovered ecology that I sort of got religion in a way and that I could see that through science and the infinity of the universe that you could gain an insight into the mystery of life and also recognize that it is mysterious.
People are asking me now because a lot of sperm whales, up to 30 or so, beached themselves in the North Sea the other day, last week I think it was, People all want to know why.
Why are the whales beaching themselves?
Is it the seismic testing?
Is it the military submarines?
Is it the wind turbines offshore making noises that are confusing them?
They have a need to know why this is happening.
I'm going like, do you think if a whale saw a guy jump off a bridge to his death, the whale would be able to figure out why that happened?
No.
There's no reason why we should be able to figure out why whales are beaching themselves.
There are mysteries in this world, and this is why people sort of like to believe that we have a crystal ball to predict the future of the climate.
We can't even predict a stock market or a horse race, never mind the complexity of the global climate.
Even the IPCC said, and they go against their own advice, they said, because the climate system is chaotic, coupled, and nonlinear, It is not possible to predict future climate states.
They have said that themselves.
Actually, they repeated it three times in three of the reports, 2001, 2007, and 2013, in various iterations.
They have said that.
So, at the same time, they go about trying to predict the climate and insisting that we are the main cause of the warming that's happened since 1950, when there is actually no proof of that.
That's why they say it's extremely likely that we are.
Likely is not a science word.
It is not a word that comes out of an experiment.
It is a word that is used in law and politics, like the balance of probabilities in law is that it's 50-50 likely.
The beyond a reasonable doubt is supposed to be kind of a 90% certainty.
It's not a total certainty.
And likely is a word like that.
It's a word that implies a judgment is being made.
It's not a word that implies observation and replication and the experimental method have been used to determine the truth of this situation.
And that's what a lot of people don't understand.
It just so happens that we're in a 300 year warming period that started when the Little Ice Age peaked in 1700.
And it just so happens that CO2 is going up in the atmosphere because we're putting some in.
And everybody is taking this tiny little segment of time in geologic history and saying, oh, these two things are in correlation with each other, therefore CO2 must be causing the temperature increase.
It is just completely ridiculous that scientists would say that science is settled When there isn't even any observational evidence, it's just a hypothesis that CO2 will cause warming.
And it's a hypothesis for which there is no null hypothesis.
And one of the great efficiencies in intellectual life, at least for me, is if there's no null hypothesis, I'm not even interested in the hypothesis.
In other words, if there's no way to disprove the hypothesis, then it's got nothing to do with science or facts or reason or evidence.
It is fundamentally a religious belief.
And so all of these – and there's tons of arguments floating out there in the world – You can't possibly disprove them, and I have no further interest in them.
You can come pretty close to disproving it.
I'll give you two data sets.
One is the Vostok Ice Corps, 400,000 years, showing a really strong correlation between CO2 and temperature.
They are tracking each other four different times through four different ice ages or glaciation periods and four different interglacial periods.
So Al Gore, in his inconvenient truth, said, see, when the CO2 goes up, the temperature goes up.
That dataset of temperature and CO2 has been analyzed by four different people and published, peer-reviewed.
CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years.
In other words, the temperature goes up before the CO2 goes up.
The cause never comes after the effect.
The cause is always first.
The effect is second in a cause-effect relationship.
And correlation by itself doesn't prove that one of those is causing the other either.
But there's a plausible explanation.
If the temperature is being affected by the Milankovitch cycle, which it's in tune with, makes sense.
Because the Milankovitch cycle is about the shape of the Earth's orbit and the tilt of the Earth, which would change the temperature of the Earth.
When the temperature of the Earth warms, the seas warm.
Not as fast.
There's a lag.
And when the sea is warm, they give off CO2 because warm water holds less gas, including CO2, than cold water does.
So the earth, the sea is kind of breathing.
As the temperature goes up and down, CO2 comes out when the earth warms and is reabsorbed when the earth cools.
And that's why it went down to 180 parts per million during the peak of the ice glaciation.
And that's why it came back up to 280 parts per million when the earth warmed.
Where it was before the Industrial Revolution.
So this is more or less conclusive.
Secondly, just in the recent times, in the last hundred and so years, from 1910 to 1940, there was a period of warming of 0.4 degrees over 30 years, which the IPCC does not ascribe to our CO2 emissions, because our CO2 emissions were just tiny then compared to what they are today.
Yet they say that from And then from 1940 to 1970, there was actually a slight cool period when we started really pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
And then the one that fits is from 1970 to 2000, when we also had a 0.4, perhaps 0.5 degree rise in temperatures over 30 years, the same as the one from 1910 to 1940.
So how do they know what The same factors that caused 1910 to 1940 weren't the same factors that caused 1970 to 2000, and then it flattened off for 15 years now or more.
Some people say 18 years it's been flat, and now they're readjusting all the temperature records to make it look like it's been still going up.
It's like they're not even smirking.
They're straight-facedly, bald-facedly lying.
This is what's happening, that there is no pause.
That's what they're trying to say now.
Because if there is a pause, that also disproves their theory.
Because if from 2000 to now, about one-third of all human CO2 emissions have been emitted, as China and India have ramped up their CO2, and all around the world are developing countries, so there's this exponential increase in CO2 emissions from 2000 to now.
Meanwhile, there is no significant increase in temperature, which there should be, if CO2 is so-called So it's more or less proven now that it is not.
I would say as a scientist that I can be confident in saying that.
And yeah, I certainly appreciate that pushback.
My particular point was for the true believers, there's no null hypothesis.
There's no data that they will accept that seems to disprove the thesis.
And the other thing, too, that I find really fascinating about this particular debate is the degree of emotional vitriol.
That is involved always makes me pretty suspicious about the motives of the people involved.
And you see this in particular when the left gets into the extreme hard left.
The Marxist left gets involved in any particular debate.
It usually tends to devolve into just a massive amount of verbal abuse being flung around until people either flee the arena in disgust or sort of bow down to the new masters of language.
And that seems to have been happening.
There was a time...
Where you could be a skeptic and now, of course, they've invoked the Holocaust term denier and all this kind of nonsense and it just has become so fraught with verbal abuse that it seems that would be the – if you've got the right data, just keep patiently explaining it to people as people have been doing with evolution and other things until, you know, you generally turn the tide of majority opinion.
But the amount of hysteria and vitriol has always raised my suspicions about the politicized increase of negative language in these areas.
Actually, when I post something on a site in the comments section and people come back at me, I am actually quite surprised at the level of just abject ignorance and nastiness combined with ignorance that comes across.
It is, to me, makes me fear for the Enlightenment, this whole thing, that we are actually descending into a dark age of science, not just in climate.
But in other areas as well, the social sciences in particular, and all this postmodernism, there's so much gobbledygook being published that a normal person can't even understand what they're trying to say.
And they think it's meaningful.
And it is not, though.
It is garbage, a lot of it.
And that's also, there's articles being published now about how much garbage is being published.
So...
My favorite saying is, I fear an intellectual gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.
That's how it feels in my mind.
What these people are trying to do.
They are trying to basically do at an intellectual level what the Spanish Inquisition did at a religious and persecution level.
And again, back to the end is nigh and all of that.
The world has had a lot of nasty periods, the Inquisition being one of them, where they actually burned people without any evidence whatsoever against them.
Just someone had to rat on them, like in...
The Soviet Union in the past, when all your neighbors were supposed to rat on you if they saw you doing something that wasn't right, and they did, and people got sent to the gulag because they broke some silly little rule.
Yeah.
No, and it's one thing to have freedom of speech.
It's another thing to feel that when you honestly express reasonably backed up and evidenced convictions that, you know, we've seen academics who've had inquiries and inquisitions launched against them for publishing things that go counter to a particular narrative.
There is a kind of smell of witch hunt in the air that has a significantly chilling effect on the most necessary conversations about the most contentious issues.
And now there's all this hysteria in campuses about I've been triggered and I need to get a hug and I've experienced or I've been exposed to ideas counter to my particular narrative and therefore those ideas should be banned.
It's really – it feels like we're just in this kind of, yes, a Salem witch trial kind of mentality where telling the truth is becoming more and more risky and there's fewer and fewer people to tell it to.
Well, that's the problem.
I'm on Twitter for a couple of years now.
I started a Twitter account because of the Golden Rice campaign, which I'm still working on and it's coming eventually.
I've got 10,000 followers now.
But I get these people coming in as trolls, as they call them, and just being plain nasty.
Just saying, you're an asshole or whatever.
And we're a lot worse than that.
And so I have no choice but to block these people.
And they're longer in my conversation unless they want to listen to me while I've got them blocked.
But probably not.
So you feel a little bit like you're forced into your own subgroup of people who are interested in what you're talking about.
But all the people out there who are already into the climate disaster scenario, they're just being mean and horrible and name-calling and at the same time thinking they know everything.
So it's a bit of a chasm, I would say.
But there has been a bit of a chasm open up just the other day.
Two things actually.
Michael Mann, who is notoriously nasty, actually has joined in with another group of scientists saying, you guys are wrong.
There is a slowdown in the warming, even though there is a speed up in the CO2. So there's been a paper that made the Times of London and also just day before yesterday, A paper has come out from ISIS, which is a prestigious journal reporting on marine science, saying that the threat of ocean acidification has been greatly exaggerated and that there does not really appear to be such a great threat.
And that's made the rounds.
But boy, do they come back at these people viciously.
They come back and try to destroy...
It's all about character assassination.
It's got nothing to do with science.
If you go to the Smog blog, which is David Suzuki's hate website that he doesn't acknowledge any association with, even though his personal PR guy is the brains behind it, and it's funded by some millionaire hedge fund guy or something,
I'm not sure, but it's basically a hate site that is attacking skeptic, people who are on the skeptical side of the climate issue, and then there's skeptical science, Which is John Cook, the psychologist from New Zealand's website, who is very clever at turning things around and basically a very clever propagandist.
And he does the same thing.
He discredits people and discredits ideas in a way that I guess is credible to the people who don't have much brain power or Don't have much critical thinking or whatever it is about these people that makes them so sure of themselves when there is actually no proof that CO2 is the cause of much of anything except refertilizing the earth.
And government grants.
Now, these are two big topics, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on it.
I recently did an interview regarding GMOs and the science behind not only the safety, but the health positive effects for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't either get certain supplements or wouldn't even get the food at all.
GMOs and DDT, of course, now that the Zika outbreak is back in the news and everyone's afraid of tiny flying objects which are easily dealt with through DDT. I wonder if you could just drop a few of your thoughts in about, I guess, these two acronyms and where they stand in the environmental movement.
Well, the whole GMO thing was really a sad situation because, you know, with nuclear energy, for example, there is radiation, which is an issue and can be dangerous, although the people at Fukushima Where they've evacuated, the radiation level is less than it is in Denver from the high elevation and less than it is in lots of other places where there's actually quite a bit of radiation in the environment.
So the overreaction to radiation is a fact.
But it is real.
With GMOs, there is nothing.
There is no ghost in the seed.
There is no devil in there anywhere.
There's nothing to be afraid of.
And yet they've made these words like Frankenstein food and killer tomato and terminator seed All these scary made-up names which have no basis in reality whatsoever and yet genetic modification or recombinant DNA biotech as it should be called or horizontal gene transfer is a more simple English way of describing it because we're all genetically modified.
You and I and every other living thing that was created by sexual reproduction is different from their parents because we're a random mixture of our parents genes thereby Scrambled so much that we're genetically modified.
And we have been genetically modifying plants through a conventional cross-pollination and breeding for 10,000 years.
And for the last 100 years, we've been modifying them by bombarding them with Nuclear radiation mutation and mutation-causing chemicals like colchicine, where you purposefully cause mutations in the seeds to see if anything interesting happens.
It's a scattergun approach.
You have to treat millions of seeds and then plant them and see if anything interesting comes up.
And then if something does, then you start breeding with that.
Whereas with GMOs, it's a very Precise taking of a gene, putting it on the back of a bacteria and putting that bacteria into the germ of another species where that gene gets incorporated into the DNA of that other species.
Something that bacteria have been doing since the beginning of life is horizontal gene transfer.
Only they were doing it haphazardly.
In human breeding, for example, in our society, most people choose each other.
And so that's That's basically like in the wild.
Species in the wild, nobody is telling which one to mate with the other.
They find each other and they mate.
But arranged marriage in humans, like is done in India and other countries, is direct breeding in the same way that we've been doing with plants and animals all through history.
The parents actually make a decision which male and which female will breed together.
So, that's been going on forever.
So, we have to understand that the term genetic modification is actually a very broad term that includes almost everything in agriculture and humans and all the other species in the wild.
GMOs, on the other hand, make it possible for us to take desirable traits from one species, such as the beta carotene, which is in the kernel of corn, which is what makes it yellow, There's no beta-carotene in the grain of rice, and no rice variety is able to put beta-carotene in its grain.
Golden rice is where we've taken genes from corn, put them in a rice plant, and now the rice plant not only puts beta-carotene in its leaves, which it always did, because every green leaf has beta-carotene in it, but puts it in the kernel of rice, which is what hundreds of millions of poor people are eating every day, and the poorest of the poor just get rice.
If we put beta-carotene in rice, it will end the deaths of two million children per year under age six, and it will end the blindness being caused in a quarter of a million or more children every year.
The biggest cause of child mortality is vitamin A deficiency, which is what we make with beta-carotene, and yet the Greens are against it.
As a matter of fact, Greenpeace focuses on golden rice and says golden rice is a Trojan horse for GMOs, Therefore, we must not allow golden rice to happen.
In other words, and they say, why?
Well, there may be some unknown environmental and health effects.
Unknown, if you don't know what it could be, then you don't know anything that could be wrong.
By saying unknown, you're making it sound like it's scary, like it might be a tiger behind a tree or something, but there's no tiger behind the tree.
There's nothing in GMOs that could be harmful to anybody or anything.
They get away with this and are now responsible for the deaths of 2 million children per year for at least the last 10 years.
Now, with DDT and malaria, because it became political and Bill Ruckelhaus of the EPA started the ball rolling by United States banning DDT, they forgot to discriminate between the agricultural broad-skinned spraying of DDT for insect control on crops with the medical use of DDT,
For the prevention of malaria by spraying it on the walls inside homes, not outside, in where the people are at dusk having dinner with mosquitoes all around them.
DDT not only repels mosquitoes, it kills them if they come into the house and land on the wall.
50 million unnecessary deaths occurred during the 50 years while DDT was banned by the World Health Organization, By USAID in the developing countries where DDT is still a big problem.
The United States had malaria up until the 40s, but it was eradicated by using DDT. So it was great to ban DDT in the States because there was no medical problem that DDT was necessary for.
But South Africa continued using DDT all through this time.
Mozambique had nine times the deaths Per capita from malaria because it wasn't using DDT. The story is written out.
Go to JunkScience.com if you want to see a really good documentation of the whole DDT story.
Just Google Junk Science DDT and you'll see it.
It was a real tragedy.
There we got 50 million people unnecessarily died from not being able to eradicate mosquitoes.
Bishop Desmond Tutu helped lead the effort to bring the use of DDT back in In the year 2002 to 2006, in that period, when they were discussing it at the Stockholm Convention, the Dirty Dozen.
Now there's an exemption for DDT. Any country can apply for an exemption to use DDT for malaria control, and many are.
But now with this Zika virus, it's the same situation.
We should be using DDT in the places where it's spreading in order to stop its spread and to kill the mosquitoes that are spreading it.
In the same way as we should have been using golden rice for the last 10 years at least since it was perfected in 2005 to save children.
I've always said that if golden rice was a medicine that could cure Ebola or malaria or HIV AIDS, it would have been adopted within a year of being discovered because it has no harmful side effects.
It's not a poison like medicines are.
Medicines are meant to kill an organism that is trying to kill us usually like a fluke or a bacteria or a virus.
But golden rice is a nutrient in it.
It's got beta carotene in it that it didn't have before, which is a necessary nutrient.
So, you know, it can cause harm.
It's been proven in experiments feeding children that it works, and yet it's still banned in every country.
No country has It allowed it to be legalized.
Hopefully between Philippines, Bangladesh and Indonesia where the Golden Rice is now in advanced field trials, it will be put up for registration and approval in the next year or two and finally children will get it.
But the environmental movement has a lot of blood on its hands and that's what I mean about it being anti-human.
They don't care that two million children die From vitamin A deficiency every year.
All they care about is their fundraising campaign against GMOs.
And for that, I don't know what should be done to them, but it shouldn't be very nice, whatever it is.
It almost makes you wish for a god who could inflict punishments.
Do you think that...
You mentioned this earlier about how people like Dr.
Mann seem to be coming back around a little bit.
All of these hysterias seem endlessly escalating and inevitable until they're not.
Do you think that we're sort of at the high point?
Do you think it's starting to swing back the pendulum?
Where do you think things are going as far as facts trumping hysteria going forward?
It's still pretty wild.
There's no doubt that a lot more people on the skeptic side are beginning to become activated.
We just started a new group in Washington, D.C. called the CO2 Coalition.
It's come out of the C.S. Marshall Institute, which is a post-World War II broad-based policy foundation dealing with war and peace and just about every big issue you can think of.
They catalyzed the beginning of this.
Dr.
William Happer of Princeton, emeritus physicist, is the acting chairman of our group.
Richard Linson is a director.
I'm a director.
A lot of the people in the Right Climate stuff have joined in.
We're having our inaugural meeting in New York on March the 29th.
You can go to the website, co2coalition.org.
www.co2coalition.org and learn about the organization.
We take memberships in the organization and we're trying to build a grassroots coalition to educate people about the benefits of carbon dioxide, the most essential food for all life on Earth, instead of thinking that it's some kind of pollutant that is causing harm.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, and I appreciate that work.
We'll, of course, put a link to your book and to this website because hysteria is generally end because people push back.
They're doing sort of like a life form that expires on its own, and it does take a certain amount of pushback, and right now that pushback can cost people some professional points, some happiness points, some sort of personal relationship points, but I do think it's worth it.
You know, almost everything that's good that we have is We're good to go.
Information will end up online.
And Dr.
Patrick Moore, always a great pleasure.
Enjoy Mexico, where there's considerably more global warming than I'm currently experiencing up here in Canada.
