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Nov. 23, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:00
3508 The Global Warming Hoax | Lord Monckton and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Hope you're not too toasty, because we are talking with Lord Christopher Monckton, the third Viscount Monckton of Branchley, and he is an expert on climate change science and policy, and he is appearing, if you saw my interview recently with G. Edward Griffin, he's appearing at the Global Warming, an inconvenient light conference that's in Phoenix, Arizona, from December 2nd to 4th, 2016, and we'll put the links to all of that below.
You can find out his information Lord Moncton, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Well, it's a real pleasure to be with you, and I am very much looking forward to that great conference organized by G. Edward Griffin at Phoenix.
It's being held at the wonderful Marriott Tempe at the Buttes Hotel, not far from Phoenix International Airport.
They call it Sky Harbour Airport.
So you should be able to find it very easily.
And there is room for plenty of people, so be there or be square.
So...
With climate change or global warming, I'm not sure what today's nomenclature is for it, but there has been an increasing tension as the models and the data have deviated.
Of course, it is a basic tenet of science that you make hypotheses, you make predictions based upon your best guesstimates.
But then when there's a divergence between the empirical data and your projections, it creates a certain amount of tension, to put it mildly.
And it's been a few years since I've talked about global warming on this channel.
And where is the data relative to the projections at the moment for temperature changes?
Right.
It's very simple.
The first serious predictions made based on what are called an ensemble of several models taken together.
were done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an enormous, hideous international bureaucracy, in its first assessment report of 1990.
And they predicted that by 2025, there would have been one Celsius of warming compared with 1990.
Well, now, it's not even going to be half of that.
The rate of global warming is not much more than half of what they originally predicted.
Now, that's a very big divergence.
And in fact, the other divergence is that by now, the rate at which the planet is warming should be accelerating compared to what was happening in the 1990s.
And it's gone the other way.
In fact, between approximately 1997 and 2014, 2015, there was a period of 18 years and nine months according to one of the data sets with no global warming at all.
Now, this was a complete contradiction to what the models had said.
They had said the more CO2 you put into the atmosphere, the faster the rate of global warming will accelerate.
Well, that isn't happening either.
So you have these twin divergences.
First of all, the amount of warming that should have been much more Closer to 1 Celsius up on 1990 is clearly going to turn out to be around half of that.
And also the rate at which the planet is warming is slowing down when the original theory predicted it would accelerate.
Now what do we learn from this?
We learn that the models are indeed incorrect.
And the question is why they are incorrect.
And I published a paper in the Journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Science Bulletin, In January of last year, in which I pointed out that there were various dubieties, various uncertainties, various errors in the models that had not been fully taken account of, they hadn't been corrected for.
And at that time, even I wasn't aware of exactly how many of these errors there were.
And one very big one, in particular, only came to light a few weeks ago.
When I was talking to an electronics engineer who had seen a paper published by me in Energy and Environment later in 2015, in which I said, there is a particular problem with what they call temperature feedbacks, where two-thirds of all the warming from CO2 eventually is supposed to come from.
And I said, there's an exaggeration there.
It's definitely wrong, but I don't know what it is they're doing wrong.
Well, eventually this electronics engineer comes in.
He says, yes, they are making a mistake.
But the mistake that he had found, although it was a mistake, it wasn't one that made any difference to the mathematics.
But he showed me which textbook to look in.
So I read the textbook, which is an enormous tome of 551 pages by a guy called Henry W. Bode, published in 1945 with endless updated editions since then.
It's the classic work on feedbacks in electronic systems and it's from those electronic systems, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that the methodology and mathematics of feedbacks in the climate comes.
And the moment I read that textbook, it was at once clear that they had made a howling great error.
And that error has the effect of making it look very much as though you're going to get huge, potentially very huge amounts of global warming caused by us at the high end of their projections.
And some recent climate papers have said it could be as much as 13 Celsius degrees per doubling of CO2 concentration.
Well, now this, of course, does not stack with the paleoclimate.
It's entirely nonsensical.
But I can now prove, having found where this big area is, I can now prove that the variance either side of the central estimate of global warming as a result of feedback is now only going to be kind of less than half a Celsius degree Instead of the official 1.5 Celsius degrees or the more extreme 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Celsius degrees that the more extremist pay...
So we can now rule out these very extreme kind of tipping point events which the climate communists have been threatening us with.
We can now show why it is that such events will not happen as a result of our relatively small enrichment of the atmosphere with CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Effectively, as far as the science is concerned, the scare is now over.
Our paper is actually being peer-reviewed As we speak, and assuming it survives peer review, which I expect it will, because the world's greatest expert on feedback mathematics, who is not a climate skeptic, has reviewed our paper at my request and has found that it has a strong logic that it is right.
I think we can say it's quite likely, therefore, it will pass peer review, though there will be some reviewers who will try to stop it.
And because it is telling the truth, it will eventually be published.
And I will be announcing what that error is and explaining why it's an error and what difference it makes to the mathematics, what difference it makes in particular to these high-end mathematics.
Predictions of global warming at the conference at the Marriott Tempe at the Buttes nearby the Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix from the 2nd to the 4th of December, which is only a couple of weeks away.
So get your booking in now.
It's going to be a wonderful conference.
Well, I think a lot of things that are not understood by people who are pro-global warming or who have trouble with the skeptics.
There's nobody who's got any sanity who doesn't think that CO2 is going to affect the temperature in the air.
This has been repeatedly confirmed through many, many experiments.
And there's no doubt that putting additional CO2 into a particular closed system is going to increase the temperature.
What people don't generally understand is this idea of the multiplier, that they can't get to the catastrophic numbers that perhaps they want to get in order to get the scare money from the government.
So they have this magic multiplier.
And to me, I come from sort of an entrepreneurial and business background.
If I said, well, here's our profits.
They're not going to be very appealing.
But I've got a magic multiplier that's going to make our profits so much greater.
Well, that actually would be fraud.
And I would probably end up in quite a bit of hot water.
This multiplier, which is a sort of magic way of saying that the feedback loop is going to increase.
You know, like if you take a microphone and put it next to a speaker, you get an ever-escalating increase.
It's not a system that self-balances.
It's going to go completely off the rails in an ever-escalating way.
Without the multiplier, it seems almost impossible to get to those catastrophic scenarios, and the multiplier seems very shaky to me.
Well, let's put some figures to that multiplier that you talk about.
First of all, how nice it is to talk to somebody who actually understands this stuff, because most of the interviewers I get are fairly dumb about all this, but you've got the main point, which is the direct warming.
From CO2, if you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from, shall we say, its present one part in 10,000 or whatever it is, to two parts in 10,000, then that would be expected to cause just one Celsius of warming.
In fact, even that is probably an exaggeration.
And my colleague, Dr.
Will Happer, Professor of Of physics at Princeton has come to the conclusion that that too is exaggerated by 40%.
But even suppose that it's where they say it is.
You're only going to get one Celsius of global warming per doubling of CO2. And after about two doublings of CO2, you'll run out of all fossil fuels anyway.
So that's the end of the problem.
So the idea that you're going to get massive warming out of all this is simply nonsense.
But They then come along and they say, well, that's not big enough to make a scare and get the fat salaries and get the TV slots.
So we have to use the magic multiplier, a great phrase for it, which is what is called the temperature feedback.
And I'm going to give you an example of a temperature feedback.
These things do exist.
It's not just totally spun out of nothing.
If you add CO2 to the atmosphere, or if the sun gets more intense, If you therefore get a warmer atmosphere, then the fact that the atmosphere is warming means that the atmosphere can, not that it does, but it can,
in theory, hold near exponentially more water vapour, which by its sheer quantity is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2, and that therefore this water vapour feedback, which they say is a strongly positive feedback,
will lead to a doubling of the original warming and then there are other feedbacks which in combination some reduce and others increase will overall push that doubling up to a tripling so that's how they get to their numbers but their problem is this they were not understanding the nature of the feedback curve which is a rectangular hyperbola The hyperbola is one of the three conic sections.
They were first studied and identified by Menichmus of Allopeconesos in around 330-340 BC when he was working on one of the ancient problems in mathematics, the duplication of the cube.
If you have a cube of length one side, And you want to make two cubes whose volume adds up to that of the one cube.
What's the length of the side of the two cubes?
And that was something that ancient mathematics couldn't do until Menachemus came along and used the intersection between a hyperbola and a parabola To demonstrate how you could.
I still don't understand what he did, but it's very clever.
And that was how advanced this classical mathematics was.
And of course, I did study classical mathematics as part of my classics course at Cambridge University.
I was very interested in that, so my tutors gave me special tuition in various aspects of mathematics, including the conic sections, because they are...
Particularly important when studying, for instance, the Doric order of architecture, which was a mathematical formalization of what had probably been originally a timber-built temple that had probably burned down or been destroyed in an earthquake or something, and they wanted to build it out of stone.
And they wanted to reproduce the shape of the tree trunk, etc., etc.
And all of this was very difficult unless you could use the conic sections.
So I had to study them as part of my classics course.
So when I saw the feedback curve, I had to plot it for myself because it's virtually unpublished in the literature, particularly in its complete form.
I calculated it for myself, realized it was a hyperbola, and realized at once that there was something wrong with what they were saying because they were saying there was going to be this huge danger of enormous multiplication of warming.
And I knew from the paleoclimate record, which is where you go back and look at temperatures inferred from the ratio of Oxygen 18 to oxygen 16 in air trapped in Arctic or Antarctic.
I see Antarctic being particularly good because you can go down...
Kind of 800,000 years.
And you can look at the different strata of ice.
Obviously, the stratification becomes problematic after the first few thousand years because of compaction and diffusion and so forth, the various complications.
But they have got a reasonable record going back 800,000 years.
And you just don't see over that period a variation from the period mean of more than about 3 Celsius either way.
That's how little It is.
Even with the enormous astronomical forcings and asteroids and heaven knows what else that's been going on, this has only had a tiny influence on temperature.
Now, the official explanation for this is, well, these forcings, larger than they were, they were small really, but they were amplified hugely by these massive feedbacks.
That's what I can now prove to have been incorrect.
They made a mistake because they're doing the calculation at a part of the hyperbola which is very close to where it shoots off towards infinity.
And that's where you can get these very huge predictions from.
And actually, the calculation ought to be performed very, very close to the origin of the x-axis, which is the feedback factor.
And once you correct for that Then you still get some influence from feedbacks, but it's about a third of what they say it is, about a quarter in some circumstances.
In fact, the further up the feedback curve you go, we just show that because it doesn't follow that shape, it follows a near linear area of the hyperbola, you therefore don't get very much warming.
Now, if you're listening to this, you may be thinking, is this man just a bullshitter?
Is he just making up these hyperbolas and all this stuff?
Well, no, I'm not.
I studied this at Cambridge.
I've studied it since.
And I've now had the benefit of...
One of my co-authors is an electronics engineer.
He has looked at the error I found in the engineering calculations they're using.
He's confirmed it is an error.
He's actually quite astonished he hadn't noticed it before because once you see it, it's quite a big one.
But it's quite a subtle one because in certain circumstances, it isn't necessarily wrong to do what they're doing.
It's only wrong to do what they're doing when you try to extrapolate from your central estimate out to the estimates either side, the upper and lower bounds.
And, of course, the particular one that one is worried about in such calculations is the upper bound, which is the really extreme predictions.
And we can now demonstrate, for the first time, that these extreme predictions are based on an error of mathematics.
And the exciting thing about this is that this solves the longest-standing problem in climate science, which is why is there such a large range of predictions that the models make?
Why is it between 1.5 and 4.5 Celsius per doubling of CO2? Well, the answer, of course...
is that that huge divergence comes from the feedbacks because they're all generally agreed on this one Celsius that you might get without feedbacks.
So this divergence, this variation, this huge spread in the The range of forecasts of how much we might get, this comes solely from the feedbacks, and now that we have addressed those feedbacks, we can constrain that spread to within about half a Celsius, either side of your central estimate.
Our calculations don't alter the central estimate more than a little.
They bring it down a bit, but not much.
That's where Dr.
Happer's work then comes in.
And if you bring his work together with ours, the bottom line is absolutely fascinating.
It is that you'll expect to get a global warming of approximately 1.6 Celsius per doubling, which is right at the bottom end of their range.
But the variation on the side is only 0.3 Celsius, and that's our contribution with our feedback analysis.
And so this is serious science.
It is a serious problem for the usual suspects.
And so at this conference, you will be getting some of the first details of these major errors that have ever been revealed.
We are allowed to present them at conferences.
We can't yet publish in writing what we've done because the journal must have it first.
The journal has now got it and will take a few months to review it and I'm expecting to get a certain amount of blowback.
From these highly ideological profiteers of doom in the scientific community who've been making money out of telling us it's all terrible.
The last thing they want is some layman like me coming along and saying, well, I can use mathematics that was in use in 320 BC, and I can show you from that mathematics that you people with your modern computers and such, you've screwed up.
They're not going to like that, but they will fight back against it.
But I think now that we've had the world's greatest expert on this pronounce that we are right, I think they're going to find it very hard to turn it down.
I think they will publish it.
I think it will be one of the most important papers ever published in Climate Science, because effectively this is the paper that will bring the scare to an end, and you can hear about that at the Climate Conference in Phoenix on the 2nd to the 4th of December.
Details in the links below.
So, Lord Moncton, this helps to solve to me one of the problems that I've always had conceptually with the concept of ever-escalating runaway heating.
Because all long-lived systems must have some dampening response to a perturbation.
They simply must, by their very definition.
Because otherwise, you know, billions of years ago, Earth would have gone the way of Venus and you'd have, like, sulfuric acid in the wind and so on if CO2 were to escalate.
And there must be dampening or compensating mechanisms.
It must be some kind of pendulum.
if the world has been stable enough for life to develop and for a relatively stable climate to develop, there must be some dampening mechanisms.
And the goal of the scientists who are into this mindset seems to be to find a way to bypass the natural dampening mechanisms that will occur to control or to manage the temperature so it doesn't become a self-feeding sort of massive hyperbolic disaster.
So what are the major...
What are the major systems that they attempt to use to bypass this natural balancing of this system?
Let's first of all say what the balancing mechanisms are so that we can then work out how they try to avoid the obvious.
Now our feedback analysis incidentally doesn't even touch on the question you're now raising which is are there some dampening systems?
Yes there are and if you imagine the atmosphere as a sandwich And the atmosphere is the filling in the sandwich.
What is the bread on either side?
You tell me.
I would imagine Earth and space going out on a limb.
That's right.
You've got pretty much the oceans below, because the land doesn't make that much difference to this.
It's the oceans below, and it's outer space above.
Now, outer space is, for all practical purposes, an infinite heat sink.
So any heat that's generated in the atmosphere that finds its way out to outer space is not going to come back and bite us in the bum.
It's gone.
And about a sixth of the heat that comes in and is generated by, rather not comes in, but the radiation comes in and then sets off this quantum oscillation in the CO2 molecules, which is heat by definition.
That's why people who say there's no such thing as a greenhouse effect need their heads examined.
We can go right down to the quantum level.
We can tell you which of the vibrational modes.
It's the bending mode of CO2 possessive, the dipole moment, which is essential to allow this oscillation to occur.
And this oscillation is, by definition, heat.
There is no argument about this, and there never has been from me.
I have never said there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect there is.
The question is how much difference it makes.
But if you have the atmosphere, about any warming you generate in the atmosphere, a sixth of that is going to go out into outer space.
The rest, because most of the atmosphere is down here, it increases its density as it comes downwards, will end up in the oceans, because the land...
It tends to give off any heat that it takes up.
It'll give it off in the evenings and at night, whereas the oceans have what is called an enormous heat capacity.
And that heat capacity is not as infinite as that of space, but it comes fairly close because it is so very, very big.
And I've had online today a conversation with a couple of bedwetters saying, oh, but, you know, the oceans have accumulated an enormous amount of heat in the last 20 years or so.
And I said, yes, but in that time, in the first 11 years of the reasonably well-resolved argobatic thermograph data before that, we have no idea really what the oceans were doing.
As I said, in 2003, they started measuring really consistently the ocean temperature, if I remember rightly.
They put these automated floats, which go down to depths of a mile and a quarter and come back up, taking readings of temperature and solidity at every level until they get to the surface.
Now, what they show is that in the first 11 years of that record, I haven't checked the last available year yet because their data is always rather slow coming through, but the first 11 years of that data set, It shows that the oceans did warm that top slab of a mile and a quarter.
They warmed at a rate equivalent to one Celsius degree every 430 years, which is probably the true underlying rate.
Man-made global warming is not exactly terrifying.
And the reason why it is so slow is precisely because the oceans have an enormous heat capacity.
And they will not liberate that heat rapidly into the atmosphere.
It will happen over millennia.
It spreads out the heat so that we don't get it all at once.
And that is something that they really fail to take into account.
As properly as they should in the model, they do try to take it into account, but as so often with factors that militate against climate alarm, they don't take it into account significantly enough.
So these huge thermostatic properties of the climate, that it's sandwiched between two enormous heat sinks, both of which will stop the filling in the sandwich from heating up too much.
This is a very important consideration.
So how do they get round this?
Well, The main way they do try to get round this thermostasis is by pleading that the feedbacks will cause these huge changes which we can now prove won't happen.
So this really is the end of the climate scare, assuming that we haven't made some error that none of the dozens of scientists who have now heard this argument have yet identified.
And some of them are very eminent in this field and they have studied it with great care.
I mean, the world's great expert, whom I won't name because he is on the other side of the debate and doesn't really want to have his name too much bandied around in connection with me.
But he had a very good look at it and he didn't fully understand it when he first read it because I had written it badly.
I hadn't been as clear at one point in the argument as I should have been.
But he was not deterred by this.
He printed out the whole thing.
He took two diagrams that I'd drawn from different parts of the document, one saying how they do it, and then a much later one saying how they should have done it.
And he printed out the two and put them side by side until he worked out what we were saying.
He said, aha!
He said, I see it now.
You need to say it this way.
And he said, just change this equation here.
So it says what you're saying in a clearer way.
Move one of the terms from one side to the other, and we can all understand it.
So we did what he said, and he then said, by the way, you also need to nail down the fact that the wrong way that you've identified is the way that they actually do it.
He said, I can help you there, because I wrote to the IPCC about this some time ago, and I was worried about it.
I hadn't seen what you've seen, but I knew they were doing something wrong.
And the IPCC said, yes, This electronic feedback analysis that they use as their model for doing feedbacks in the climate, that is absolutely central to their argument.
And he then supplied several references to textbooks where they explain that the way you do feedback calculations is what we have described as the wrong way of doing it.
So we think, and I've got to stress this is still provisional, we think we've nailed this.
We think this is the end of the climate scare.
And we hope, perhaps by as early as February or March next year, we will be able to go public with the paper itself, duly peer-reviewed and published, in a journal which has been running for 61 years.
It's the journal of the world's largest academy of sciences.
And we know how rigorous they are.
They put us through the ringer when we first submitted a paper there in January last year.
But they were very fair, and we answered every point that the reviewers raised, and when the editors saw that we had answered every point the reviewers raised, they said, against the advice of one of the reviewers, we are going to publish this, because although you don't like it, Everything that you have said is wrong in it.
They have either justified or corrected or adjusted where necessary.
And we think this is good science and we think it should be published.
And that's something you don't get in Western journals anymore because it's become really politicized.
And the extraordinary thing is that here in communist China, a terrible regulated regime is the one place where we now have the academic freedom to publish what I think is the honest scientific truth.
Let's talk about a few of the other projections that were made by climate scientists in the past.
And I'm thinking in particular atmospheric hotspots and the amount of radiation or heat that was going to be bouncing off the Earth and how the models have deviated from what's been measured.
All right, let's take the tropical mid-troposphere hotspot.
I'm glad you choose that one because even though it doesn't actually exist, it was I who gave it its name.
And this is...
If you look at a graph of where in the atmosphere they say this enormous amount of global warming should occur, they say that because most of the heat from the sun comes in in the tropics, and then you have the Hadley cells, and then beyond that, as you go to all the poles, the Barrow Clinic eddies that advect the heat away from the tropics and towards the poles, this process...
They say that the heat will end up at the pearls, and so it will.
But they also look at it not just latitudinally, but altitudinally, up and down.
And what they say is that in the tropics, uniquely, they would expect that with anthropogenic global warming, then there will be something like two or three times as fast a rate of warming, about three to six miles up, In the troposphere, in what's called the mid-troposphere, at a pressure altitude of about 300 millibars, as there is at the tropical surface.
And the trouble is that virtually none of the data sets show this.
We now have tens of millions of measurements of the mid-troposphere temperatures taken by radio sounds, which are instruments that are sent up by balloons, and they go up and up and up, and they take measurements all the way, and they report back by radios.
These are known as radio sands.
And there are also drop sands.
You can drop them from aircraft and they then fall through the atmosphere and again sending signals.
And we've done a few million of those as well.
And this mid-troposphere hotspot simply isn't there.
And it's really quite embarrassing to them because they had said in the 2007, IPCC report following a very bad paper by the accident-prone Ben Santa, who's one of the dozen profiteers of doom.
These scientists who are right at the heart of the scare.
And if you see their name on a paper, you can almost guarantee that it's going to be rubbish.
Well, sure enough, this was rubbish, because he said, this is what we would expect to see, and we would expect to see it only if man was the cause of the warming.
And therefore, this is the fingerprint.
Of man-made global warming.
And then two things happened after that.
One, everybody collapsed in gales of laughter when they read his paper because, of course, the atmosphere can't tell whether the warming is caused by CO2 or by the sun.
Warming is warming wherever it comes from.
And so one would expect, if there was going to be this hot spot, that it would occur whatever the We're good to go.
There was a further problem, and that was that this hotspot in any case does not turn out to exist.
And what that tells us is that there's not as much warming going on in the upper atmosphere as theory had predicted.
And there are two potential reasons for this.
One is we're not doing the measurements in the mid-troposphere correctly of temperature.
And the other is that we're not doing measurements at the surface correctly.
Now, you might think that it's more natural to assume that we're getting the surface right and the mid-troposphere wrong.
In fact, it's the other way around.
And the reason is that there are very, very few temperature monitoring stations at the equatorial surface, partly because there's very little land at the equatorial surface.
It's mostly sea.
And where it is land, it's mostly basket-case countries who don't do and haven't done reliable scientific measurements for generations as we have in the West.
And so for those reasons, we don't have accurate land measurements.
And the same with ocean measurements.
They're very patchy.
So we think that insofar as we would expect to see this phenomenon, to this extent, I go along with the models and I go along to Santa, you would expect to see a hotspot if there were significant warming.
Almost certainly what's going on is they're not measuring the warming at the surface correctly.
And this is where the satellite temperature monitoring comes in so usefully because we no longer just have thermometers down here doing the measuring.
We now have thermometers in space.
Using microwave sounding units to detect at various levels and depths in the atmosphere what the warming is.
And unfortunately for the official theory, the rate of warming gets less the further up the atmosphere you go, which is what I, in fact, would on the whole expect.
And that would indicate there isn't very much warming going on, probably less than the official records show.
Which is why I prefer that the satellite records, because they, in my opinion, give a more accurate coverage.
They have a much larger coverage, of course, than the individual temperature measurements.
They're much better calibrated.
There are still formidable problems with them.
But I just don't think we're getting global warming at the rate that we're being told.
Even if the rate that we're being told is correct, it's still only half what was predicted.
And the radiation being reflected off the Earth, there have been some questions about whether that, of course, if it's less, then you're going to get more warming, and if it reflects more into space, you're going to get more dissipation.
How has the data been peeling away from the theory with regards to bouncing, I guess, off cloud cover and Earth?
Very interesting.
Well, first of all, a paper published in 2011 established really quite well, I thought, that 97% of the albedo or reflectance, that's the mirror-like capacity of the Earth to bounce, particularly shortwave or visible radiation, straight back into space.
That reflectance is 97% from clouds and only 3% from ice and stuff at the surface and reflections of the sea and so forth.
And this comes as quite a surprise to the bedwetters because they're trying to say, oh, but if the Arctic ice melts, you get an enormous feedback because there will be more direct warming of the ocean.
It won't be reflected back into space.
This is to misunderstand the way in which reflectance works in two respects.
First the latitudinal one and then the altitudinal one.
The latitudinal one is quite simple.
It is that those very high latitudes, the angle of incidence of the sun on the ground is so great.
It doesn't come down vertically.
It comes down almost horizontally.
And it has to go through the atmosphere on the way.
But you don't get very much of the Earth's reflectance coming from the poles.
It's just they're too far away from where the sunlight really comes in, which is in the tropics.
So that's point one that they get wrong.
I actually sat down and calculated this one day because nobody had done it.
They were making these assertions.
Nobody had ever calculated what would be the effect of this reflectance.
So what I did was to do my calculations on the assumption that clouds were not really responsible for reflectance at all.
It was all down to the ice.
And even then, you couldn't make out that you'd get much of a problem.
If all the ice in the ice disappears, it's going to make practically no discernible difference as far as an albedo feedback is concerned.
But then you have to look at the altitudinal aspect of it.
And that is, as you go up through the atmosphere, there are layers of clouds.
And if this paper of 2011 is correct, then most, very nearly all of the albedo of the Earth actually comes from clouds.
How can you do an experiment yourself to do this?
Get a picture of the Earth from space.
There are quite a few of them available now.
And then simply look at it while squinting through your eyelids.
And then the light that comes through to you When you squint at it, will be the light that is the albedo that's really reflecting off the earth.
The colors will disappear.
All you'll see is the white, and that's the reflectance.
And you'll see that all of that comes from clouds.
Virtually none of it comes from ice.
And so the cloud cover, let's go through the history of what happened to cloud cover.
If you go back to 19, let me get this right now, 83.
At that point, there was a global brightening.
There was a diminution in cloud cover.
And that diminution in cloud cover persisted until 2001 for 18 years.
And according to the paper that studied this phenomenon, which was Pinker et al., 2005, the amount of radiative forcing that this produced It was equivalent to, I think it was, 0.16 watts per square meter per year.
It was a lot.
And if you take that out for 18 years, it's a very big amount.
And now, I had that reanalyzed, and she had been using unreliable data from the Earth today.
A radiation budget experiment satellite whose orbit had been degrading and they hadn't made sufficient allowance for that.
So I got an analyst to correct that for me.
So it's still 0.143 watts per square meter per year of radiative forcing from the extra sunlight reaching the ground that wasn't being reflected off the clouds because there were less clouds.
And that really is the main reason, as far as I can see, and I presented a paper on this to the World Federation of Scientists in 2010, and they subsequently published the paper after a very intensive peer review in their distinguished journal, which again has been going for half a century.
In which I showed that the majority of the global warming that happened between 1983 and 2001, that was the fast period of warming.
It died off after that.
There's been practically none since.
That was chiefly attributable to this cloud cover, and only about 30% of it could have been attributable to man.
And that result came as quite a shock to the assembled scientists, but some of them were quite impressed.
The councillor to the Chinese ambassador to Italy who was there, he came rushing up and said, I'm going to send this to Peking tonight.
I want your paper.
This changes everything.
He could see.
that if there'd been this natural cause of warming that hadn't previously been identified then this clearly had implications yet again for the determination empirically of climate sensitivity so it was quite an important result and it's since been replicated elsewhere Spencer and Braswell went on in 2009 and 2011 to do very detailed mathematical studies of clouds and they've come to conclusion that what's called the cloud feedback again which the IPCC thinks is an amplified feedback It's instead
a modestly attenuating feedback.
It actually reduces the warming rather than increasing it.
And from that, they have come to a conclusion, the same as Lindzen and Choi had come to the same year, a completely different method of analysis, the same as Herman Harder has come to just this year, a very important paper that's just about to come out.
And they have all, by completely different methods, determined that climate sensitivity is actually around 0.7 Celsius per doubling.
And then if you applied our analysis to that, you might get a variance of about half to one Celsius degree either side of that.
Sorry, about 0.1 Celsius degrees, 0.05 to 0.1 Celsius degrees either side, not one Celsius degree.
That's far too big.
Very, very small movement either side.
So we're looking at very, very small changes in temperature as a result of these papers that have come out.
And of course, how does the IPCC deal with these?
It simply ignores them.
Any results that don't fit with its plan, they don't get quoted.
There's a notorious example of this in the 2007 report.
Where Ros McKittrick, who's an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada, had done analysis together with Pat Michaels of the CEI in the States.
And they had concluded they wanted to see whether or not the temperatures as measured were accurate.
And they kept finding that where there had been enormous economic growth, In those areas, the temperatures had increased faster in the official record than where they hadn't.
And so that shouldn't have happened if proper allowance had been made in better analysis of the temperature data by the scientists before they published the results for things like what's called the urban heat island effect.
If you had nice grassland and trees there before, you put tarmac down, you put buildings around churning out heat directly and also radiating the heat from the sun in a different way, that will give you an artificial warming that isn't actually caused by CO2. It's caused by the environmental change of replacing rural areas with cities.
And any proper and competent scientific measurement of global temperature has to take account of these very local effects that have happened as urbanization has occurred.
And so this brilliantly simple analysis, absolutely devastating, by Michaels and McKittrick was ready to In time for it to be properly studied and taken account of by the IPCC in their 2007 report and they simply mentioned it in passing and said, well, we don't like that.
They didn't say, well, actually this changes everything and clearly the temperature records are not right is what they should have said.
No, we don't like it.
It's uncongenial to us.
They weren't even able or willing to give a reason.
Well, of course, bureaucrats have that luxury.
They're not market-facing.
They get their money the more that they scare.
And this is the kind of attenuating features that I think people need to understand so that they don't freak out as much, because this panic is bad for people as a whole.
If you get greater temperatures, you get greater water vapor.
Water vapor then reflects light back into space, and so you're going to cool things down.
If you get more CO2, you get more plants.
It's plant food, and therefore the plants are going to eat up the CO2 and produce the oxygen, thus bringing it back down.
And of course, historically, which I'd like to touch on now, since 1680 or so, there has been a warming trend of about 0.5 degrees Celsius per century.
Now, I'm no expert on medieval transportation, but I'm fairly sure there were not a lot of SUVs floating around in the 1680s.
And this, again, is something that is not taken into account because it should only really have started increasing in the post-Second World War period, but it was going on for centuries before.
Well, that's right.
I mean, if one goes back, you're too young, but if you go back to approximately 1694...
Which was the end of the Little Ice Age.
How do we know?
Because there was a wonderfully diligent bureaucrat called Maunder at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich who kept records of sunspots.
And it's very clear that by 1694, the dearth of sunspots that had been observed over the previous 70 years, he was the first to spot this in the sunspot records, had begun to come to know the sunspots were coming back.
Between 1694 and 1733, a period of 40 years, global temperature rose at a rate equivalent to 4 Celsius per century.
And as you say, there were no SUVs at all around at that time, no coal-fired power stations.
There was a few people lighting coal fires here and there, but there was nothing that could account for this other than this natural phenomenon of the sun becoming more active again.
And so the fastest rate of global warming that we have seen, and this was measured in the Central England temperature record, which if you do statistical tests to see the extent to which it's applicable to the global as a whole, it's at exactly the right latitude to give you a reasonable representation of global temperature change.
And what it shows is that over that period, There was this very rapid warming, and that is more than twice any rate of warming that we've seen over a 40-year period since.
More than twice.
So the idea that somehow the rate of global warming today is unprecedented in the entire temperature record, not true.
And then, of course, they also say, but of course the absolute temperature, this too is a record.
Well, no, it isn't.
It was warm in the Middle Ages, it was warmer in Roman times, it was warmer in the Minoan warm period, warmer in the Egyptian Old Kingdom warm period, warmer for 4,000 years in the Holocene climate optimum.
And why was it called an optimum?
Because until this climate change garbage came along, warmer weather was regarded as better for all life on Earth, which of course it still is.
And for 4,000 years, a short dip in the middle, temperatures were considerably warmer, probably one or two, perhaps even three degrees warmer from about 10,000 to 6,000 years ago than they are today.
There is nothing expected.
Either about absolute temperatures today or about the rate of change.
And your point about the numerous thermostatic mechanisms that exist.
You talk of, for instance, you mentioned there the CO2 increasing and therefore because it's plant food, because it acts together with water and sunlight to achieve photosynthesis.
There's been an astonishing growth.
In recent decades, of between 14, which is, I think, a more accurate figure, and on some valuations, 30% in the plant biomass of Earth, notwithstanding all the deforestations and burnings and clearings that go on, something like certainly a 14%, perhaps even a 30%.
Increase in the greening of the earth in the most literal sense, because most of these plants are green, that has been achieved by what is called CO2 fertilization.
What I call it is an end to CO2 starvation, because really at anything below about a thousand parts per million, plants are gasping for CO2. How do we know?
Because they gasp through what are called stoma tanks.
These are moths, the Greek word for moths, on the underside of a leaf.
And if you examine this under a microscope, you can see them.
And if you grow plants with a thousand parts per million CO2, like tomato plants, one of the things that happens is that the stow matter over the generations of plants become fewer in number.
What this means is that they need far less water and far fewer nutrients to produce the tomatoes than they would if there was less CO2. And so one of the great advantages of CO2, therefore, is in ending drought as well as causing trees, plants, and therefore crops to increase.
And indeed, there's been many reliable surveys done.
Leighton Stewart is a great expert on this, but many surveys done which show that staple crops increase Such as wheat and corn and all these things, they will increase their yield by somewhere between 20 and 40%.
That's the typical range.
Call it 30% on average, if you double the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
And they'll do that While using less water, which in third world countries, where starvation is, is a very important consideration.
And you never see them mentioning this in the IPCC reports.
It's all doom and gloom.
And they're simply unwilling to give the other side of the story.
But of course, there is also these numerous temperature balancing effects, one of which is discovered by a colleague...
His name will come back to me.
Just recently, which is that as the atmosphere warms, particularly in the tropics, the tropical afternoon convection, the thunderstorms by which the warmth is lifted away from the surface and taken up, a lot of it then ends up in outer space because that's where the top end of your thundercloud is.
That actually begins to happen earlier.
If it happens even just an hour earlier, It will cancel pretty much all the effort that we can put into putting CO2 in the atmosphere as far as warming is concerned.
So these very powerful thermostatic properties that exist not only in the heat sinks top and bottom, but also things like this tropical afternoon convection happening earlier, the cloud cover changing in the way that we've discussed earlier.
All of these points do act as counterbalances to any perturbation that we achieve.
And it's these counterbalances that our paper now shows far outweigh the amplifying factors which are the temperature feedbacks.
These amplifying factors do exist.
I think they've exaggerated their magnitude, but for the purpose of our paper, we've simply taken the figures as being canonical.
But even if you take those figures as canonical, you have to constrain the bounds of the impact of these feedbacks in the way that our mathematics demonstrate.
And that really draws the teeth and means that you're going to get not a tripling.
Of that one Celsius, you're going to get an increase by just 50%, and probably not much more than that.
And so, that really brings the scare to an end.
Well, this is the thing that I think people find the most startling about these kinds of arguments, because everyone is like, wait, we're not all going to die?
No, it's actually better than that.
Oh, it's really not that bad?
No, no, it's even better than that, because the planet is constantly stripping CO2 from the atmosphere.
You know, as plants and animals die, fall over, and get sunk into the mud or whatever, then the carbon is taken out of the equation.
So...
Human beings are very kindly digging into the ground, bringing that carbon back up and releasing it back into the atmosphere so that the plants can continue to flourish.
We're actually remediating a deficiency, and there's a significant positive to what's happening.
If you go back 750 million years to the neoproterozoic era, I remember it well, but you're too young.
At that time, we had, I think, something like 7,000 parts per million COs.
In the atmosphere, compared with 400 today, and yet the planet didn't catch fire.
For most of the last 750 million years, the temperature has been around 7 Celsius higher than today.
More recently, much lower, because we're in an ice age, effectively, and we're in what's called an interglacial warm period within an overarching ice age that's been going on for hundreds of millions of years.
But if you go back far enough, go back sort of 200 million years and then all the way back to 750 million years, the temperature was most of the time around 7 Celsius higher than today.
And it remained not much higher than that, even if you go back to this period where 0.7% of the atmosphere was CO2 and 0.04% today.
Big, big, big difference.
And the planet didn't fry.
And it's this kind of paleoclimate analysis which did suggest to me when I first looked at it that it was rather bizarre.
We were trying to claim that CO2 in very tiny quantities compared to what we've seen in the atmosphere before will somehow cause all this damage.
Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, who resigned from Greenpeace when they started a campaign against chlorine, which he said that's one of the elements.
You can't campaign against the elements.
They are the elements.
Get used to it.
Now they're doing the same.
They moved on from chlorine.
Carbon is their big target.
Of course, it's carbon dioxide, really, but they don't really understand the difference between a solid and a gas, these people.
But He says that what has happened over the last 140 million years in particular, since he's been around, what has happened is there's been this long decline in the concentration of CO2. It doesn't go quite in a straight line, but it is a very steady decline.
And if you projected it for another two million years, had that gone on without us intervening, then there would have been less than 150 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere compared with the 400 there is today or the 200 that there were before we started adding some CO2 to the atmosphere.
And the point about there are 280, I think there was before we started adding any.
And if it went back to 150, and remember it was 180, it went down that far during the last eight ages recently, 11,000 years ago.
If it were to go down as far as 150, all plant life on Earth would die.
It couldn't survive.
And that's why this is a really, really important consideration, that we are sparing the planet.
From what would have otherwise been its fate in a couple of million years, then all of us and all plant life, all life on Earth, could well have ended up dead because all of the CO2 would have been absorbed by the oceans and then turned into the shells of shell-forming creatures.
That goes down to the bottom.
It forms what's called sedimentary rock or limestone in particular.
Limestone, then after there's not enough...
CO2 partial pressure in the air to allow limestone to fall.
Then you go down to gypsum.
And when you go from gypsum, you go down to it not really forming rock at all.
But it will still settle into the sediments.
It won't be in the air.
And that would kill all plant life on Earth.
And so when you hear people campaigning to reduce the level of CO2, they're campaigning to take the level of CO2 immediately.
Oh, further and further away from the thousand parts per million, which is optimal for plant growth, because that's what they evolved in, in that thousand parts per million.
They're trying to take it back down towards the hundred and fifty parts per million, at which life on earth would be extinct.
It is as mad as that.
Well, of course, this is why your plants love it when you talk to them, because you're exhaling CO2 in their direction, so it's not what you say, it's that you say it with the gas that you say it.
Now, let's turn for a moment and talk to the politics of things.
I've made the case before, because people say, oh, this is pretty nefarious, this is all lied about, if all of these theories end up being disproven, then it's a big, giant scam involving hundreds of billions of dollars.
And we have this kind of funny thing, Lord Moncton, where we will say about stockbrokers or business people, well, you know, they can be corrupted by money.
They can lie.
They're corruptible.
But we create this sort of halo around the scientific community that they are sort of staunchly indifferent to any kind of economic incentives or political power or funding, that they don't fall into the same category of whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
But the reality is that a whole series of steps need to be achieved in order for the existing system to be justified for the future.
First of all, it has to be man-made.
Second of all, it has to be catastrophic.
And third of all, government action has to be by far the very best solution for the problem.
And none of those appear to be established in any rigorous way whatsoever.
I mean, if you really wanted to lower carbon emissions, you would simply not allow governments to print their own money.
You would simply not allow governments to deficit finance or to sell bonds, which are increasing the consumption of goods and services in the here and now at the expense of the future.
You could very easily, if you were concerned about all of this, you could very easily solve the problem by saying governments can't run deficits anymore.
And then it would mean much less consumption of resources.
But it always seems to point in the direction of increased government power, of shrinking rights, of increased stewardship and central planning and socialism slash communism.
The old joke about the environmentalists, the watermelon, you know, green on the outside, red on the inside.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the political motivations that are driving this because the narrative seems to be coming rather immune to facts, to put it as nicely as I can.
Well, let's get back to Patrick Moore again.
He was the founder of Greenpeace, and he is an environmentalist.
But he's not a leftist.
I mean, yes, when he was young, he was a leftist.
A lot of people are, so I'm told.
I was never young, so I don't know.
But...
Apparently, this is what happens.
People go through this phase of being gooey socialist.
This usually comes through in the moment they get their first pay slip and they realize that some enormous fraction of what they have earned has been gobbled up by big government.
They suddenly stop being socialist from then on.
But what happens, of course, is if you're clever and you become a leech upon the society, you become what's called a rent seeker in economic terms.
You don't want to work for your money, so you want the taxpayer to hand it to you for free via the government.
And if you're a scientist and you can get a good scam going, then you can make lots of money.
And of course, that kind of government-funded science is essentially a socialist enterprise.
Most of the people who go into it are socialists.
And so there is a clear political link between the left in politics and climate extremism.
As there is, I'm glad to say, a link between the center-right in politics, which tends to be more rationalized.
Pathetically emotional about things.
And climate scepticism.
I would expect to see that and that is indeed what we find.
But there is also the economic dimension that you mentioned, which is cheaper to do.
The correct economic question really is this.
Is it cheaper to mitigate our sins of emission today?
Or is it cheaper to adapt to To the consequences of those sins the day after tomorrow.
That's the question.
That's the economic question.
And it is, of course, a question of inter-temporal investment appraisal, for which the rules are very well understood by economists.
We organized and chaired a meeting of the World Federation of Scientists on this very topic in 2011.
And President Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic, who's an old friend of mine, kindly came and gave the magistral lecture, the keynote lecture in that session.
And then we all gave talks on this question.
And my talk in particular concentrated on answering this question, is it better to mitigate today or adapt the day after tomorrow?
And I did this as a straightforward calculation.
I did not use any of the political concepts that economists often like to bedevil their work with.
I said this is a straightforward calculation.
What we've got to do is to marry The central equations of climate sensitivity, how much warming do you get if for a given amount of CO2 emissions and so forth, with the standard equations of intertemporal investment appraisal, with which I'm well familiar, because I used to do these for emergency government when I worked for Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.
You know, I have a reasonable background in all of this, not that you believe it for the pathetic propaganda about me that gets spread around by the loony left.
So I did this analysis and I presented it and it caused enormous shock because I showed them that it was around a hundred times costlier To try to make global warming go away today by using more or less any of the various mitigation strategies,
windmills or closing down coal-fired power stations or whatever it might be, solar panels, than it would simply to allow the global warming to happen even at the rate that they were predicting, which we now know to be false.
And simply to pay the later and far, far lesser cost of adaptation.
So angry were the climate left at that conference, there were some there, that the deputy head of the World Federation, Professor Richard Garwin, whom I've known for years and who has advised presidents from practically all the way back to the Second World War until today, He advises every president on scientific questions.
He objected very strongly to what I'd done.
He said, I don't accept this, and I require that before we publish this paper in our journal, you will simplify your paper.
It's too long.
It's 14 pages.
That's the standard length of a scientific paper.
I said, I know you.
I've had to nail down every variable I've used, explain where I got it from, explain how I valued it, explain how it goes with the other variables, every equation.
If that wasn't there, you'd say this was too skimpy.
And now that it is all there, you say it's too much.
Come off it, mate.
He said, right, simplify it, take one of your case histories, boil it down into one page, and show how every step of the calculation is all in one page.
So I did.
And it's become quite a famous page.
It'll be very wild.
It's circulated since.
And he looked at it, and he sat down, and then he came to me and said, right, we will dine tonight, and that's how they do peer review.
They subject you to a personal grilling by the people who disagree with you.
And he said, right, take me through it.
And I went through it with him, line by line, very slowly.
I said, is there anything you don't understand?
Is there anything you think I've done wrong?
Say so, and we'll talk about it.
And he sat silent through the entire presentation at the end of it.
He put down his knife on the fork and he said, damn you, Moncton.
He said, I can't find anything wrong with any of this.
He said, but I'm not a climate scientist.
I said, nor am I. But I can understand their equations just as easily as I know perfectly well you can.
And now that you've seen those equations, I've told you where I got them from.
I can show you online the sources.
These are the official equations, and I can also assure you, and you can check with any of the economists here, that I have used correctly the standard methodology of inter-temporal appraisal, and I've used various discount rates, and you can do it at any discount rate you like, and these are the results.
And he said, yes, actually it seems to me to be a fair cop.
And so it passed review and it was published.
And, of course, to this day, the IPCC has never referred to it because if it were to do so, it would have to admit that it isn't actually worth doing anything about global warming.
In fact, their own assessment report, this latest one in 2013, for which I was an expert reviewer, they have come to the conclusion that it is more expensive to adapt than it is to mitigate.
They've accepted that.
They haven't accepted how much more expensive it is because, see what they do, because they don't want to confront what I've done.
And what has also been attempted, though I think not done as well as by me, by other economists working in this field, they have decided to use what are called integrated assessment models, which are the way that economists try to measure things when they don't understand the underlying physics, as they don't with climate change.
So they take into account all sorts of factors and externalities and this and that.
And they kind of...
And they come to an answer which is usually consistent with the official answer because that's what pays the bills.
And I don't do it that way.
I do it very precisely by taking the actual equation and saying, this is how fast CO2 will grow if we do this.
This is what it will cost to suppress it according to official sources.
I use all their numbers.
And I just show that if you use their numbers and you use their methods of analysis...
Then their conclusions cannot be justified.
The truth is it's much more expensive to do anything about this than to act later.
However, it's even more expensive than I have said in that paper, because something like, and I'm about to do some work on this because, again, nobody else has done it all.
Nobody asks any of the right questions in these debates.
But the right question is, how many people are killed because they don't have fossil fuel electricity?
Compared with how many people would be killed if we gave everyone fossil fuel electricity and therefore the CO2 concentration went up and the temperature went up.
That is the metric of death, the metric of mortality.
Again, economists are well used to the mortality metric.
It's something that they do.
It's a fairly gruesome thing to have to do.
But that is what one should do.
One should use the mortality metric and one should say, right, How many people are dying because they don't have electricity?
The answer?
Probably around 6 million a year.
Every year, a holocaust.
Dying because the international community is spending about 10 times as much trying to prevent global warming as they could spend to lift everyone out of that poverty and give them electricity.
That means...
...that these IPCC conferences, these UNFCC conferences, they have got the deaths of tens of millions on their hands.
Not that they care.
Well, this is the...
Sorry, this is the...
Oh, just wait for that echo to die now.
This is the cold-blooded aspect of all of this that I think is particularly chilling, that human lives hang in the balance, and we would never want to make...
They're dying now.
It's not something...
They're dying now at the rate of six million a year.
Even the UN, which is trying to minimize all these mortality statistics so it can get away with this absurd argument for its own increase in powers, they are admitting that two million of them are dying just because they live in smoke-filled huts.
Why is it smoke-filled?
Because they don't have cookers.
They have to use dung fires.
And the particulate pollution in those huts, because they don't understand stuff like chimneys, is killing the kids.
And it's killing them at a rate of two million a year.
That's an official UN figure.
And if you think that just that's one cause, and there are so many other causes of death from not having electricity, my estimate of six million a year is probably a terrible underestimate.
These are people who are dying now.
There'll have been a few thousand who've died during this broadcast because they don't have electricity.
That's why it's time we started to point out that it is we, the skeptics, who hold the moral high ground here.
Because the trade-off is not between everybody living happily now and then suddenly, you know, a few thousand deaths a year from global warming a hundred years hence.
We're talking about tens of millions, hundreds of millions of deaths by the time we get to a hundred years hence, actually killed by not having electricity.
Compared with probably no deaths at all from global warming.
The net effect of global warming, as we've said, is to increase crop yields.
It's to put more CO2 in the atmosphere.
It's to make the world warmer.
And warmer is always better than colder as far as keeping people alive is concerned.
And after all, in those countries that have electricity, if it gets very hot, you can live in air conditioning.
It no longer kills people in the way that it did.
Very interesting Tex-Mex studies have been done on this in Texas.
They have air conditioning levels.
We get a heat wave and nobody dies.
You get the same heat wave just across the border in Mexico and thousands die because they aren't using electricity.
And so there's a lot to be done from our side of the debate.
So this isn't some academic discussion about what might happen to our planet and its population a hundred years hence.
It's a real discussion about whether the international community will continue to ignore the tens of millions every decade who are dying now Because instead of getting together and making sure everyone's got coal-fired electricity, which is cheap compared with anything else, the levelized cost of coal-fired power is around $30 per megawatt hour.
And your so-called renewables are around four or five times as great as that.
So what do you do?
Do you expect really poor countries to put in bloody windmills?
Of course you don't.
What they're going to do It's to put in coal-fired power.
It's cheap.
It's low-tech.
These days, the kind of particulate pollutions that you get in places like China and India because they haven't spent the money to put in fluidized bed combustion, high-temperature combustion, pilotized fuel combustion, flue gas scrubbing, fly ash trapping, all of these measures that have all been brought in since my birth.
None of these existed when I was a lad.
They've all been put in.
Recently, and they're inventing more and more all the time, the only byproduct that now emerges from a modern coal-fired power station other than coal is, unfortunately, CO2. I say unfortunately, of course, it's fortunate, because otherwise the plants would all die.
But the CO2 is the only byproduct now that's of any consequence, and that's a good thing.
So we should just cheerfully build these coal-fired power stations They are, even though the methods by which they scrub all the filth out so you don't get particulates anymore coming out of coal-fired power stations, even though these are relatively high-tech things, they are built in a low-tech way so that anyone with a spanner and a hammer can keep them maintained, which is what you need in Africa.
Any expensive bit of kit in Africa will go wrong unless it's easy to maintain because they don't have the culture of maintenance.
They have something and when it dies they throw it away.
They don't kind of have the idea of keeping a car repaired or keeping a power station repaired.
And so you need to have technology that is robust and reliable and low-tech and relatively proof against people with spanners and hammers.
And that's where coal-fired power comes in.
That's why it needs to be coal-fired rather than gas-fired, rather than oil-fired.
And also, it's just so cheap.
So you get cheap, base-load, reliable, continuous power.
You don't suffer the staggering The cost, the intermittency and of course the staggeringly low energy density of these supposed renewable systems and we see this particularly in Scotland where From just about all of the landmass of Scotland, you can now see these damn full windmills.
It has wrecked the landscape.
It is killing birds and bats by the million.
All our big birds are being killed off.
A recent report came out saying bats are being killed off by the million.
Hardly a word of this appears in the lamestream media, and then only very briefly.
They don't care how many people they kill, they don't care how many creatures they kill, as long as the party line is adhered to.
And let us be very clear therefore that the greatest threat to the environment today is environmental totalitarians.
Very well said.
And, of course, when the bats die, you get more mosquitoes, which is more disease, as is the case with the birds.
And if you take away people's coal or don't deliver them coal, all they do is cut down the trees and burn them, which, again, means less recycling of CO2 and oxygen.
Now, let's finish off, if you don't mind.
I get so many messages from particularly young people who feel that the end of the world is nigh.
I guess every generation goes through that phase.
For me, it was nuclear war and so on.
But they really do feel that if a climate skeptic gets into power, that their lifespan is going to be cut short by decades, and they're going to be like dead polar bears floating down Main Street and so on.
What can you say to particularly young people to help them sort of wake up and jump out of bed with a little bit more optimism than some of the thermageddonites have given them in terms of the fiery future that awaits them and how it might not even remotely be that case but might be something a lot better than we can imagine?
This is a very interesting question.
It's a very difficult one.
I'm going to tell you a story of when I went to give a talk to some young people at King's College Cambridge just two weeks ago.
And the question was, did Donald Trump I was the only one that thought that Donald Trump did have a point.
And I said he will maintain a proper national defense.
He will maintain a proper barrier against bridled immigration.
He supports Brexit.
And likewise, he doesn't think climate change is worthy of consideration.
I then put to them a question.
I said, this is essentially a policy question.
Does Trump have a point?
So I'm going to ask you four policy questions.
There are 100 people in the room.
So it makes the percentages really easy to work out.
And I had made predictions.
And I had written the predictions down and given them to the chairman.
And I said, right, here we go.
First of all, first question, how many of you voted for Brexit or would have if you could?
And I had forecast that less than 10% would have done so.
And it was five.
Then I said, all right, let's do national defense.
Do you think it should be stronger and that some of the cuts that have happened in recent decades should be reversed so we can maintain our Western civilization?
And I predicted that less than 5% would agree with that.
It was three out of 100.
Then I said, right, now we'll do immigration.
How many of you think that immigration needs to be controlled in a slightly more vigorous way than we've managed in recent decades?
And I forecast less than 5% was two.
Then I said, how many of you think that climate change just might have been somewhat exaggerated as a threat?
I predicted less than five, and it was one.
So they're really not that much into diversity then, because they have a uniformity of opinion while claiming that they value diversity of thought.
So what I did, of course, they don't even claim to value diversity of thought anymore.
This is the thing about the government that's left.
They believe in only one point of view, and that is the party line.
And anything that departs from the party line is literally unthinkable to them.
And it was very interesting, in the bar afterwards, one particularly aggressive undergraduate committee said, how dare you suggest that climate change isn't as much of a problem as the official story says it is?
I said, because as a matter of objective scientific fact, it isn't.
And he could not encompass the possibility that there were scientists, real scientists, academic, atmospheric scientists, saying that this was all rubbish.
And so I explained my own result to him that I'd just come across.
We're still waiting, as we were at that time, for the world's greatest expert in this field to pronounce, because he will give a fair assessment.
If he thinks we're right, it'll be very hard for anybody else to say we're wrong.
And I said, these are serious scientific arguments that show that the official party line cannot be correct.
It is wrong.
And he was shattered at this revelation because they're brought up in an environment where in every school And now at university, they are only taught the party line.
They're no longer taught to think.
I'm sorry, but shouldn't he be relieved?
Like, I remember when the Berlin Wall fell and East-West tensions dissipated and the Cold War seemed to come to an end.
I woke up with a song in my heart and a spring in my step because disaster had been averted.
Shouldn't people be relieved by this news?
I knew a communist lecturer at one of the ghastly polytechnics in the North England.
He came to see me shortly after the Berlin Wall came down.
He was practically in tears.
He was so furious that the party line had been shown to be wrong again, and that people poured out of East Germany into the West as soon as they got the chance to do so.
He couldn't encompass it.
And their minds are being closed by the way they're being taught.
And I've looked into this because it's no good just talking to them and saying, well, there are these arguments and those arguments.
They are not susceptible of rational argument.
They are not taught To examine the data and reach conclusions for themselves, they are taught to parrot the party line just as avidly as they were under Lysenko or under Himmler.
They are not taught to think for themselves.
So much so that the one great liberator, once people have been taught it, is formal logic.
Now I, of course, studied this.
It was part of my classical course at Cambridge.
And I had to be acquainted with how logic worked.
It was an absolutely essential concomitant of studying anything, really.
And indeed, from the Middle Ages until my generation, everyone who went to Cambridge was taught logic, whatever they were studying, because it was necessary so they could think straight and identify bullshit.
It gives you a kind of bullshit radar that is unbeatable.
And they simply don't teach it anymore.
And so much so that I was talking to one of the world's most eminent mathematical logicians, which is a very formal branch of formal logic, a very active one now, and has many useful practical applications as well as being theoretical.
And I was giving a blackboard seminar for him and another very eminent logician from Spain in that case, at the Mathematics Institute at Cambridge.
And I'd gone through Through the mathematics of climate sensitivity, the conclusions that they were drawing from these equations, and why I considered it illogical to draw the conclusions they were drawing from the equations they were using.
And at the end of it, the mathematician there, this very eminent guy, Dr.
Richard Mathias, who's a professor now at the Université de la Réunion, he said in France...
The socialist government some years ago banned the teaching of logic in schools and universities.
I said, what?
They banned it?
They banned an entire scientific discipline.
He said, yes.
I said, why?
He said, oh, you know that as well as I do.
He said, they didn't want people thinking for themselves.
If people are taught logic, then the kind of trashy arguments that are put forward by the true believers and are put forward by school teachers to their pupils, Are shown a priori to be nonsense.
You don't even need to get into the science to know that no valid conclusion can be drawn from the arguments they're using.
Let me give you one example of this.
You will hear it endlessly said, there's a consensus.
And you're told this consensus is 97% and it's a consensus of expert climate scientists.
Right.
Now, if you go back 2,350 years to when Aristotle wrote the Refutations of the Sophists, in that book, he went around talking to all the bullshitters of his day and making a list of the categories of argument they used that were bullshit categories of argument.
And not the least of these was the argumentum ad populum, as the medieval schoolmen were eventually to label it.
The argument from headcount.
And he said, just because you are told that a large number of people say they believe a thing, that does not mean that they are a large number, or even that they are, that they say that they believe that thing, or if they do say it, that they do believe it, or if they do believe it, that they are right.
The mere fact Of a consensus gathering around a given proposition tells us nothing of the truth or falsity of the proposition around which that consensus is said to adhere.
Now, I was taught all this, so when I was told that I had to believe in global warming because there was a consensus, even before I started studying the science, I knew that there was a certain amount of bullshit here.
Now, the fact that there isn't a consensus, that came later.
I did some research a couple of years ago because a paper came out in 2013.
And this was a paper by Cook, an Australian campaigner about climate change.
And they had found a journal, which is a campaigning journal about climate change, a rather useless journal called Environment Research Letters.
Its sole job is to parrot the party line.
And they wrote a paper in which they and their fellow researchers claimed to have read the abstracts, that's the summaries, of 11,944 scientific papers published in the 21 years, 1991 to 2011, in the peer-reviewed journals of climate science and related topics.
And they said that 97.1% of all those papers had said In the abstract fact of their paper, that more than half of the global warming that's happened in recent decades was caused by us.
They said 97.1% said that.
So we eventually, after they got weeks of publicity for this gas, managed to make them give us on, you know, we threatened them with the police and they eventually cut up this list Of all 11,944 papers that they'd read, or said they'd read.
And that list contained the list of how they had themselves marked each paper.
And had they marked 97.1% of those papers as having said that most of the warming of recent decades was man-made?
No, they hadn't.
They had marked just 64 papers or 0.5% of the entire sample as saying what they said 97.1% had said.
We then read those 64 papers and only 41 of them or 0.3% of the entire sample had actually said what they'd said they'd said.
And so the true consensus about the, in any case, very mild proposition that only a little more than half of the warming that's happened in recent decades is caused by us.
It might even be true, that proposition.
It still wouldn't tell you you've got a problem.
But that's all that the consensus actually is said to say.
And only 0.3%.
of papers in the scientific literature actually say that.
It is the largest survey of its kind that's ever been conducted.
We reconducted the survey using their data sheet and we published a peer-reviewed result saying that the actual consensus is 0.3%.
No mainstream news medium has ever published our findings.
Every mainstream news medium has published their findings.
That's why I'm trying to talk to young people who haven't had a training in logic, so I can't give them the a priori arguments against the rubbish that they're taught in schools.
And if they likewise haven't ever been exposed in the mainstream media to any of the facts that establish that what they're being told is actually wrong, it's not just a duff argument so it might be right or wrong, it's actually wrong because they've just, you know, they've lied, essentially.
They're not being told any of this.
So if you go to them and you say any of the things I've just said, they are gobsmacked and they simply don't believe you.
It's as though you're a Martian, you've come from another planet.
Because so complete is the control of information by the educators now that it's particularly bad there.
What is interesting is that somebody like Trump could be elected, notwithstanding virtually every mainstream media being against him.
It was the most remarkable result.
And what it shows is that there is still a nose for bullshit among the general population.
They have begun to realize That stuff that they're told by the governing class simply isn't true.
And climate change is only one small part of this.
And that this increasing tendency of the Western news media only to reflect the Communist Party line on questions like this is now being widely discounted.
By the voters when they cast their votes.
And so I'm afraid the only answer to these robotic kids who all think the same way because they have never been exposed to anything else nor have they been taught how to think.
They've been taught not to think.
I'll go that far.
Nothing that we say will change their minds.
They'll just have to grow up as we do, get their first payslip and start to work out and start to smell the coffee.
Well, and of course, one of the great advantages in this endless 2,500-year post-Socratic war between philosophers and sophists is that we do have the Internet now, which can get out information like this to, you know, we're doing like 13 million views and downloads a month.
That really, really helps people to get back on the high horse of critical thinking, and I think that's going to be the savior of the future.
It's the new Gutenberg.
Except that when I gave a speech in 2009, just before the case, And arguably it failed partly because of this speech.
I was giving a talk to a freedom group in Minnesota, 1,200 people in the audience.
Somebody filmed the peroration, the last four minutes, on their mobile phone and uploaded it to YouTube.
And a week later, 2 million people had seen that clip.
And now it's about 5 million, I think, on different websites.
It popped up all over the place.
What happened then was very interesting.
I got a phone call from Texas A&M University from an internet monitoring unit and they said, we have been watching this particular speech with some interest.
I said, why?
And they said, this speech has received more hits over a short period.
It's got its YouTube platinum, a million hits, faster than any other political speech ever.
And they said, we're ringing you because something odd has happened.
And I said, what?
And they said, well, the hit count suddenly stopped going up.
Well, presumably everybody who wanted to see it had seen it.
It sounds to me that, you know, three or four million, whatever it was then, that's quite a lot of people.
And they said, oh, no.
They said, this, we can tell you that this was going to 20 million.
This was going to be so startling a phenomenon that even the mainstream media would not have been able to ignore it.
So I said, well, what's happened there?
He said, somebody, we don't know who, and there's no point trying to find out if the internet's like that, has put up several dozen bogus pages on the internet, each of which is tagged Moncton Video, and all of which just contains numbers and figures and spaces and dashes.
They're just gibberish.
And I said, well, they won't get very many hits, and so the search engines go for the big hits, and if we've already had three million hits, they'll choose that first, won't they?
It's a kind of self-feeding thing.
He said, yes, that's right, except that you can pay to get your pages advanced in ranking against everybody else.
He said, how do you think Google makes its money?
It doesn't make its money out of charity.
It makes its money out of advancing...
Page rankings of those who pay it to do so.
Because I'm a mere child of these things.
I had no idea this went on.
And he said, somebody has paid to advance these gibberish pages so that they get detected before yours.
So I went online and put in the words Monkton video, where previously up comes my video as number one, two, and three.
There were lots of different sites that had it.
And I couldn't find it.
It was buried after page after page.
It was nonsense.
I went through two or three screen full.
Nothing but these nonsense pages.
So I got onto Google and said, what the hell do you think you're doing?
And then suddenly you could once again get it again.
But by then the viral chain had been broken.
And so it didn't soar as they said it was going to soar.
So I said to the people at the Texas A&M, I said, how much did it cost whoever it was that did this?
He said, we think we know who it was.
We think it was called the Climate Works Foundation, which is sponsored by George Soros.
Its sole task is to destroy the reputations of people who, like you, become effective in opposing the party line on climate.
We think it's them.
We can't be sure.
However, what we can say is roughly what they spent.
It's only a rough calculation, but this is, we stress, an absolute minimum.
They said it cost them at least a quarter of a million dollars to stop that one four-minute clip from being circulated any further.
And they thought it was worth spending at least that.
It could have been 10 times that.
We don't really know.
But it was a lot of money was spent stopping that one speech from going any further.
So don't think that the Internet is necessarily a free and easy place where everybody can get their point of view across.
It isn't.
A lot of money is being spent to silence those of us who are proving effective in getting an alternative viewpoint to the Communist Party line across on climate education.
And I use this word communist rather freely because it so nicely and exactly describes the mental attitude of the people who are driving this scare.
You could also call them fascist, you could call them national socialist, you could call them international socialist, you could call them socialist.
All of those terms are encapsulated in the word totalitarian.
These are people who want to interfere in the totality of other people's lives at government level.
And that's what totalitarianism means.
And they are at the same time, as you rightly say, uniformitarian.
They all think alike because the party line is laid down for them and they know that they will always be safe if they parrot the party line.
You can't go wrong in your own scientific career if all you do is trot out the party And if you have doubts, keep them until you retire, because they can't stop your pension once you've retired.
And that, unfortunately, is why such a very large proportion of the people who do speak out of climate are my kind of age.
Plenty of grey hair, as you can see.
That's because we are old.
We are largely retired.
And that's why a lot of us, not speaking for myself, but speaking for many of the scientists who are doing this, they are eminent scientists who have come out.
Ivar Giaiva, who is a Nobel laureate, Will Happer, who's Probably the world's foremost physicist in any category, certainly the world's foremost optical physicist, and that's the kind of physics that we're dealing with when looking at the CO2 forcing, which he says is overstated by 40%.
You're looking at the late Bob Carter, a very eminent geologist.
These are senior figures, now retired Dick Lindzen, who by common consent, even on the other side, they recognize that he is an atmospheric scientist who knows more These are serious scientists who do not believe in the party line, but you never hear about them in the mainstream media.
And that's why getting to these young people is such a problem, because they only see the electronic media which are now bought and dominated in the way that Soros or whoever it was did.
They are interfered with so that our message doesn't have the same reach as the message from the other side on the Internet.
And so it is very difficult to get the truth out.
So am I therefore gloomy?
No, I'm not.
Because we have one thing they haven't got.
They have the money.
They have the power.
They have the glory.
They have the media.
They have the politicians.
They have the scientists.
But we have the truth.
And if we have the truth, we have everything.
And they have nothing.
And in due course, The truth will assert itself as it always does.
Well, we will do our very best to help get that four-minute video as well as this video out to as many people as humanly possible.
Really, really appreciate your time today, Lord Moncton.
Just wanted to remind people, we'll put the links to this below, lordmonctonfoundation.com to get more of the Lord's work and, of course, the conference in Phoenix, Arizona.
We'll put the link to that below, December 2nd to 4th.
Thank you so much for bringing such clarity.
And also, if you do get a chance to see Lord Moncton speak live, it is a treat and a half.
A wonderful public speaker, very engaging, very funny, and very stimulating.
So please go and see the Lord live if you can.
Thanks so much for your time today.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
And good luck in Arizona in December.
And hope to see you there.
God bless you all.
God bless America.
And again, be there or be square.
Marriott, Tempe at the Buttes, just down the road from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in Arizona.
You must be there.
Some of the most eminent scientists in the world will be there.
And you get me as a kind of topping on your cream pudding.
So be there and don't miss it.
It's going to be one hell of a party apart from anything else.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time.
Take care.
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