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Dec. 3, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:38
3521 Global Warming Debunked | William Happer and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Here, you can see with me Dr.
William Happer, a professor at Princeton University in the field of atomic physics, optics, and spectroscopy.
I guess women's studies was all full up, so he had to go with Plan B. He is a director with the CO2 Coalition and served as the Department of Energy's Office of Science Director under the George H. W. Bush administration.
He will be speaking at the Global Warming and Inconvenient Lie conference in Phoenix, Arizona from December 2nd to 4th, 2016.
The link will be below.
It is inconvenientlie.com.
Dr.
Happer, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you.
Now, it's been about 20 years since the predictions that originated the global warming scare, hysteria, story, fantasy, fable, whatever you want to call it, have been steadily deviating from How is this being passed off as science anymore?
Look at the beginning.
I'm like, okay, well, there are all these models.
It's weather.
It's a complex system.
There's going to be some divergence.
But this steady differentiation between empirical data and theoretical projections would seem to be undercutting the theory a little bit, yet still it marches on like this undead zombie that can't be finished off.
You're right.
I mean, if it were any other branch of science, it would have been abandoned a long time ago, or they would have made major changes in the theory.
But they're unwilling to do that.
It's amazing.
I've never seen anything like it.
But they're trying to rationalize the lack of agreement by, for example, saying that there's lots of warming, but it's being canceled by aerosols.
You know, Particulates from coal stations and stuff like that.
But, you know, that's getting harder and harder to defend.
You know, it looks like aerosols are not nearly as effective in canceling warming as people originally thought.
So I think the most obvious thing is they've grossly exaggerated the effects of CO2 itself.
Of course, it will cause a little bit of warming, but the amount looks like it's Which is, of course, in accordance with the three times multiplier that they tend to have applied to their original estimates in order to get this sort of runaway greenhouse effect, this sort of turning us into Venus effect that they projected.
So that multiplier, which a lot of people don't understand, you know, I can look like a great businessman if I could just multiply my profits by three, although that would actually be kind of illegal if I didn't have a basis for it.
But that combined with the fact that CO2 seems to have a law of diminishing returns when it comes to global warming in terms of its capacity to trap or maintain heat increases, I wonder if you could step people through both the multiplier and you've got a fantastic analogy about a barn being painted red that I think is a great way of explaining it.
Okay.
Well, you're very familiar with the theory of global warming.
My hat's off to you.
Most of my academic colleagues don't know that much.
Yeah.
But, you know, you can estimate the warming from doubling CO2 if nothing else changes in the atmosphere.
You just double the amount of CO2. And no matter what you do, you always get around one degree centigrade, you know, a little more in Fahrenheit.
So that's often called the climate sensitivity, how much the Earth warms if CO2 doubles.
You often have to wait 10 or 20 or maybe even 50 years because the ocean absorbs some heat.
So they call it the equilibrium sensitivity, meaning you wait long enough for transients to die down.
So one degree is not enough to worry anyone.
You know, it's probably good for the earth.
You know, I would like to have a little longer growing season.
All my backyard garden has been killed by frost and I would have gotten a better crop this year if we'd had a few more growing days.
So, in order to alarm people, in the cynical view, they have said, well, that's only the direct effect of CO2. There are feedbacks, and there are feedbacks that amplify this warming.
So, there are positive feedbacks.
And that's a little strange already, because most feedbacks in nature are negative.
Positive feedbacks occasionally occur, but they're very unusual.
You know, for example, in thermodynamics, one of the first things they teach you is something called Le Chatelier's principle which says that, you know, if you change some system, the system will try to figure out how to cancel the change, not to make it bigger.
So, they somehow convinced themselves that you could amplify these direct effects of CO2, and the mechanism that was suggested was that the main greenhouse gas is not CO2 at all, it's water vapor.
So if you can somehow have a little bit of CO2 make the effects of water vapor, the warming effects much bigger, then that would be enough to alarm people and keep your research funding coming in indefinitely.
So that's what they did.
And now the years have passed.
Those first suggestions were by one of my colleagues here at Princeton many, many years ago.
And there's been time enough to see whether it works.
It doesn't seem to work.
You know, it looks like if there's any feedback at all, it is just as likely to be slightly negative.
In other words, the warming may be even less than the one degree direct warming that people had expected.
And so that's the situation.
The warming has been disappointingly small from the point of view of the alarmists.
And It's not even clear how much of the warming we've seen that is actually from CO2. You know, there are natural fluctuations of temperature that could easily have caused half of it, or maybe all of it.
Well, this is the remarkable thing, is that given that we've had enough time as a species to evolve from single-stelled organisms, there must have been dampeners on the complexities of the system so that there wouldn't be this runaway.
I mean, if we were going to turn into Venus, it would have happened, you know, billions of years ago.
And so there must be mechanisms by which any sort of big spike or change in the system is self-correcting.
And of course, one of the big ones is that if you get more CO2, you get more plants.
And when you get more plants, they take out more CO2.
And so these kinds of things, it's kind of a common sense thing.
And given that CO2 was far higher in the past than it is now, if runaway CO2 was going to happen, it would have happened a lot long before we had the chance to evolve the capacity to come up with a global warming theory.
No, you're absolutely right, John.
I mean, all of the geological evidence indicates that CO2 is a minor player.
I mean, we've had ice ages with 10 times more CO2 than we have today.
You know, that's not supposed to happen according to current computer models, but it did happen.
And so, people...
I agree with you.
There must be some kind of negative feedback that tends to keep the Earth's temperature about the same.
There are many suggestions.
One of the more attractive ones is by Professor Dick Lindzen at MIT. He calls it the iris effect.
But it's related to the fact that clouds and water vapor are the big players in global warming.
Clouds are interesting.
Low clouds tend to cool the Earth.
You know that if you go out on a summer day and a cloud comes by, the sun doesn't beat down as hotly and you feel a little better in the shade.
But high clouds, cirrus clouds, which you can just barely see, you know, high above us, tend to warm the Earth because they let the sunlight through so we get hot, but they trap the infrared.
So, Professor Linsen's argument is that Because of the details of the way cirrus clouds are produced, many of them near the equator in the tropics, you will get actually less cirrus clouds if things get a little bit warmer.
And so that will tend to cancel the warming and keep the temperature stable.
So he called it the iris effect.
You know, I think it's promising.
It may be right.
It may be wrong.
But anyway, all of the evidence is there's some kind of negative feedback mechanism that's working.
Now, you've also mentioned that there's a huge boon to agriculture, and of course, most people who know the crazy argument that CO2 is some kind of a pollutant rather than what we're all made of, you know, it makes all of us pollutants.
But you've pointed out that CO2 has a significant benefit to agriculture just in terms of making plants more drought-resistant.
I wonder if you could help people sort of follow that reasoning, because I hadn't heard of it before you had mentioned it.
Well, yes, you know, when I was a In grade school, my teacher told me, well, CO2 is good because plants use CO2 to make sugar, you know, with the aid of sunlight.
They need some water, too.
And so I was surprised as I grew up to discover CO2 is called a pollutant, especially since each of us, you know, with every breath we exhale, you know, we exhale, you know, 40,000 parts per million CO2, you know, which is A hundred times more than is in the atmosphere now, so you have to scratch your head and think, why is it a pollutant if I'm exhaling this stuff?
And indeed, plants are really happy to have more CO2. They're in a kind of a CO2 famine now with respect to geological history.
If you look over the last 600 million years or so, 550 so-called Panerozoic You know, when there's been a good fossil record that you can use.
CO2 levels have typically been four or five times higher than they are measured in thousands of parts per million, not hundreds of parts per million.
And plants loved it.
You know, the Earth flourished, life flourished on the land and the sea.
You know, there was no danger from ocean acidification, all of the other scare stories you read about.
They just didn't happen.
Nor should they happen if you do the science correctly.
So, the reason that happens, there are two key reasons that plants like more CO2. One reason is that when photosynthesis evolved maybe 3-4 billion years ago, it was a long time ago from the geological evidence, there was almost no oxygen in the air.
And so the key enzyme that the plant uses to make sugar and other products of photosynthesis is called rubisco.
And this enzyme is the most abundant protein in the world.
You know, we all hear about protein, but the most abundant is the one that fixes carbon.
And this evolved so long ago, at the time of practically no CO2, that it turns out it's poisoned by oxygen.
So we think of oxygen as something that's good for us.
But, you know, if you read the health literature, actually, you know, living things have a problem with oxygen.
It oxidizes very well, including your DNA and other things.
So we're full of antioxidants that help us to live and to cope with the oxygen atmosphere that we live in now.
And plants have the same problem, but in spades, because their basic enzyme, rubisco, is poisoned by oxygen.
So at low levels now, when there's not enough CO2 at the air and the plant is desperate to find a CO2 molecule, it's been primed by sunlight.
It wants to do something.
If it can't find a CO2, it finds an oxygen molecule and there's plenty of oxygen.
And instead of making sugar, it makes nasty things like hydrogen peroxide, which chew up the insides of the plant.
And so the plant has to have all sorts of biological machinery to detoxify the This is called photorespiration and it's not good for the plant.
So the more CO2 there is in the air, the less oxygen is needed and so the less this photorespiration damages the metabolism of the plant.
So that's one reason.
Now there's a second reason and that is that the plant for every CO2 molecule that diffuses into the little holes in the plant, the little Stomata, they call them, little mouths.
Roughly 100 water molecules diffuse out.
So the plant has this dilemma that it has to have CO2 to eat, so it has to have holes in its leaf, but the holes allow the leaf to dry out.
So if you have more CO2, if you double the amount of CO2, the plant only leaves half as many holes, and so it's not so leaky for water vapor, and so it can live with less water vapor.
So now if you look at satellite images of the Earth, The earth is greening, but where it's greening most is in arid regions near the edges of the Sahara Desert, Western Australia, Western United States.
And that's because plants that were struggling to cope with low rainfall now have enough rainfall.
Rainfall hasn't changed, but there's more CO2, so they don't need as much water.
So there are these two basic things that make CO2 good for green plants.
One is It suppresses photorespiration, this toxicity of oxygen.
And two, it means the plant doesn't need as much water vapor.
I shouldn't say water vapor.
It doesn't need as much water.
Well, and of course, it costs a huge amount of energy to get water and desalinate it if it's salty and get it out to plants and so on.
So the fact that it's kind of hanging out in the air, or at least if the plant needs less water vapor or less water as a whole, is beneficial for the environment because you don't have to spend all this energy getting this water out to where the plant is if you're a farmer.
Right.
That's right.
And that's why the edges of deserts are getting greener.
Now, the theory, of course, to do with global warming has to do with if you double CO2, of course, you're going to get an increase.
And then if you add more sort of in a sort of step by step, an extra 400, 400, 400, it's going to get crazy.
It's going to go off the rails and it's going to go up in this crazy...
But the reality seems to be that, okay, you double from 400 to 800, you get a degree of warming.
But if you add another 400, you don't get a degree.
You have to go to 800, then to 1600.
So it's got this logarithmic dependence that would cause a diminishment of the effects of CO2 over time, even if you add the same amount proportionately.
Yes.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
And the technical term for that is that the warming saturates that as you...
Add more CO2, you use up the easy infrared that you can catch, and you're stuck with trying to get infrared that the molecule isn't really designed to absorb.
So, at present, CO2 is really absorbing all of the infrared it can in its main absorption band, and as you add more, it's just getting a little more infrared at the edges of this band, and that's not very efficient.
And that's why when people say compare CO2 to methane, they say, well, methane is much more potent as a greenhouse gas, but that's only because methane is not yet saturated, you know, so it still has lots of its easy pickings left to pick off, but CO2 has already used it up long ago.
You're quite right.
CO2 absorption goes logarithmically as the concentration.
If you want to get one other degree of warming, you have to double again.
So it's a multiplicative thing, not an additive thing now.
Yeah, if you take a white wall and paint it red, you say, wow, that's a whole lot of red.
But if you keep painting it red, you only get a little bit more every time.
That's right.
The first code is the most important.
Now, one thing that sort of struck me when I was looking into these 70-odd, I don't even know what the exact number is, but these 70-odd models of climate change that have been wending their way through the somewhat scientific milieu over the last couple of decades is that they tend to agree with each other a lot more than they agree with reality. but these 70-odd models of climate change that have been
And it sort of struck me like in a court case, if you have 20 people all saying the same bad thing about you, you know, it sounds really bad unless you find out that they've actually talked it over beforehand and come to a particular arrangement as to what it is that they're going to say.
And the only way that I can imagine how these very complex models could agree with each other a lot more than they agree with reality is if there may have been some, I don't know if it's covert or overt, ways of exchanging data or agreeing on parameters to make them look similar enough to be compelling to people who are ignoring the basic empirical data.
Yeah.
Well, you're right.
And it's kind of an echo chamber.
The problem is that the models are not very realistically, and you have to parametrize them.
So they're parameters that you adjust in a model, and there's more than one.
There are lots of them.
And if you look at all these models, they do what they call tuning.
You know, they put the model together and then they fiddle with these numerical parameters until they get the community accepted answer.
So if the community decides the answer is half a degree, they'll tune the model so they'll get a half a degree.
Or if it's two degrees, they can do that too.
They can get any answer you would like.
So they're not really predictions.
You know, people who think the models are predicting something don't understand really what's happening in the models.
So I don't know.
There are lots of models like that, for example, you know, models of how nuclear weapons work, what the yield is.
They have parameters in them that are adjusted and But at least in this case, you're not permitted to cheat, you know, if the model doesn't work, you know, it's too important, you know, to cover it up.
So we've spent a lot of effort in the U.S., I would guess in other countries too, to try and make sure that, you know, these codes for nuclear weapons really do work and have the basic physics right.
As far as the global warming goes as well, as you had mentioned, Dr.
Happer, that the water vapor is sort of a key thing.
70% of the warming effects tend to come from water vapor and cloud cover.
But until recently, didn't they not really work with cloud cover at all?
That seems to me to be missing a rather large component in what you would want to calculate if you even thought it was possible to achieve these kinds of predictive models.
Yeah, the cloud cover is...
Very difficult, and it's one of the parameters I mentioned.
So, they put in a very crude estimate for clouds.
They're trying to get better with it, but it's still very crude.
And it's extremely important because many people believe that the warming and cooling episodes of the Earth are probably driven mostly by clouds.
Because, you know, if you look, say, at the Sun, It does seem to be correlated with the climate.
For example, we had the Little Ice Age during the Monder Minimum when there were practically no sunspots, so the sun was clearly different.
At least it wasn't making as many spots at that time.
But there's no evidence that the energy coming out of the sun varies very much with spots.
You know, it's a fraction of a percent.
But if the sun somehow affects cloudiness, Then that could easily explain the temperature changes.
So there's a fair amount of evidence that the sun does affect cloudiness.
It's associated with ideas that go to the Danish physicist Svensmark or Nir Shaviv or the French physicist Jean Vizier.
And the idea is that clouds are nucleated by Cosmic ray tracks in the lower atmosphere, so very energetic cosmic rays come into the Earth from the galaxy and if the Sun is very active when there are a lot of sunspots,
the magnetic field from the Sun deflects these cosmic rays and so you don't form as many low clouds and so the Earth is less shielded by low clouds and it gets hotter and And during inactive periods, for example, during the little ice ages when there were not as many sunspots and presumably less solar magnetic field,
the earth was cloudier and so it was colder because it was more cloudy, not because the sun was weaker, it's just that there were more clouds to shield us from sunlight.
Anyway, that's one theory.
You know, it may be right.
I don't know whether it's right or not, but it's certainly something that should be investigated.
Right.
And this question of where the heat is going, it seems to me a bit like, in philosophy, we would call it begging the question, well, there must be heat.
The heat isn't here, so let's go play hide-and-go-seek with the heat.
Like, find out where the heat has gone, mysteriously.
And, of course, one of the places it's supposed to have gone is like a bath escape.
It has submerged into the oceans.
But I think that the new sensor came out about 10 years ago or so, that they're dropping these sensors into the ocean, and then they're coming back up and radiating, or they're radioing out.
The heat readings as they come back up.
And it doesn't seem like the ocean is the place where the heat has gone to hide.
Do you think it could be there?
Is there anywhere else you think that they're going to try and find where this mystery heat has gone?
Well, the mystery heat is what's predicted by the models.
You know, it's not measured, you know.
So the models say the Earth isn't heating.
Well, the models say there should be heating.
You don't see the atmosphere warming, even though the original models predicted it would warm, you know, so that worries you.
So if they got it wrong on the atmospheric temperature, why should they get it right anywhere else, like the oceans?
But I think the most important point here is that, as you mentioned, there is this new network of buoys floating in all the oceans.
It's called the Argo system.
You know, click on Argo and Google or something and read about it.
And it's a very fine system.
It has buoys that descend several thousand meters into the ocean and float around.
So you measure the amount that they drift in those underwater currents and then they come to the surface every couple weeks and they radio the temperature profile they measured as they were ascending to the surface and the salinity, everything that they have accumulated and then they duck down and come up again a few weeks later.
So that's allowed much better measurements of many ocean properties including heat content and it's very hard to make the case that anything unusual is happening there.
For example, the North Atlantic heat content is going steadily down over the last five or ten years and the surface heat content is hardly changing and Now, these buoys don't go low enough to get the entire depth of the ocean.
And so, you know, the alarmists say, well, the reason you don't see it warming up is it's all below the buoys, you know, where you can't measure it properly.
So, you know, so be very, very worried.
You know, that's where it is.
I'm not specialized in this at all, but the idea that heat from the surface would end up thousands of meters below the ocean in any appreciable time frame seems to me beyond ludicrous.
Well, you're right, of course.
It takes a long time for things to transport in the ocean.
They're normally transported by currents.
You know, diffusion is much too slow.
And so, for example, there's this famous ocean conveyor belt where salty, cold water up near Svalbard, you know, near the Arctic, it finally gets heavy enough that it falls to the bottom and it flows southward.
It takes a very complicated path eventually coming up in the central Pacific of all places.
But that takes thousands of years.
It's a long time period.
It's not a few years.
We've only had a few decades that CO2 has been going up.
So it doesn't compute, as they say.
Now, let's turn a little bit, and we're going to the speculative part of the conversation, but I think it's important.
So if we're looking at some shaky science, the first question to me is always motive, you know, follow the money and so on.
Now, we expect, I guess up until the recent election cycle perhaps, we expect reporters to push back against government narratives and to try and dig in and find the truth.
And in the same way, I sort of view particularly publicly funded scientists as having a responsibility if there's fear-mongering coming out of government bureaucrats and government agencies.
and calm the population and get them out of the hysteria, which we're all led to when experts tell us we're doomed and we're going to all burst into flames next Monday, we all get a little alarmed.
It doesn't seem to be happening as much with global warming or climate change, that there's a pushback from scientists.
I mean, yourself and others who I've had on the show are doing a very admirable and it seems courageous job in pushing back against this narrative.
It's not happening as much, I think, in the general scientific community.
I wonder if you could speak, if you know anything about it, as to why this pushback might not be occurring.
That community, of course, and, you know, many of my friends who I respect a lot are climate alarmists.
Few of them know anything about climate.
You know, the less they know, the more they're willing to accept the meme, you know, that...
This is the greatest existential threat the Earth has ever faced.
But it's not based on knowledge.
It's because they go to a cocktail party with other academics and they wring their hands.
And then the fact that conservative politicians whom they hate or profess to hate feel that Climate dangers are being exaggerated.
That just reinforces their belief and they have another Chardonnay and get even more upset about it.
But, you know, they don't take the trouble to actually learn about the spectrum of CO2 or the Navier-Stokes equation in the atmosphere or the Sun and all of these other things.
So, it's a tribal thing, you know, it's sort of solidarity that, you know, A part of our tribe is under attack, you know, the climate alarmists, so we have to rally around and protect them.
They've got to be right.
How is it possible that a conservative senator could be right or, you know, a right-wing candidate for president?
How could they possibly be right?
You know, we're right.
So it's not based on real science.
It's based on tribalism.
But it is also an astonishing waste of resources.
I mean, I know we're a wealthy society in general, and there is this feeling that there's this infinite pile of gold and treasure that we can keep plucking from.
But when I think of the billions upon billions of dollars that are poured into this kind of stuff, the opportunity cost of what else could be done with the money seems to me quite significant.
In other words, if it's a mistake, it's not a mistake without consequences for the world as a whole.
It's a very good point that there are opportunity costs.
If this were just some minor dispute in science, we have those all the time and people go off on tangents and they have a good time and eventually it gets corrected, but it doesn't cost very much money.
But this is costing enormous amounts of money and it's having huge effects on public policy and And in my effect, it's been very corrupting for science because there's so much money pouring into science that, you know, you think twice about, you know, about rocking the boat.
It's a little bit like this Ibsen play, you know, what did they call it?
An enemy of the people.
But this Norwegian doctor discovers that this health spa actually isn't helping people, it's hurting them.
But all the town fathers gather around and remind him that the town livelihood depends on these spas, and so he has to shut up.
And so it's a little bit like that.
So when there's enough money involved, you know, normal customs, you know, morality get changed, you know.
There's this nice quote from Pushkin.
I'm a big fan of Russian literature, but it's where there's a trough.
There are also pigs.
And again, I sort of view it as – I don't know if it's just America because this is somewhat of a worldwide phenomenon, but it seems to me that the madness of crowds seems to go through this sort of bell curve, you know, where only a few people are afraid and then there's this general all-out panic and then it kind of ebbs away at some point and then people either rush off to something new or you get a couple of years of peace and quiet.
If this sort of rough bell curve of sort of panic within society is correct, where do you think we are?
I keep thinking we're sort of at the peak and we're maybe heading down, but then there's some new other thing that comes up that people seem to get jump-started about.
Do you have any idea where we might be in this sort of bell curve of panic?
I think we're pretty close to the peak.
I mean, that's optimistic, so I'm hoping that things will get better.
You know, the whole thing really depends on nature, you know.
And so, if there's no warming for another couple decades, then it will be clear to all but the most obtuse, you know, that this is all nonsense.
And so, I think if we can delay for another ten years, then the answer will become clear.
There never was any big rush anyway, you know.
The only people who needed the big rush were the crony capitalists who wanted subsidies for this or that and the academics who wanted to keep their empires funded.
But in fact, nothing we did needed to be done right away.
There was no need to immediately put in windmills or solar cells.
So we put in a lot of junky equipment that is going to be hard to get rid of and has wasted a lot of money.
Yeah, it killed a lot of birds.
We're close to the peak, and that nature itself will save us.
Well, these political solutions don't seem to be achieving anything according to what was said that needed to be done in order to avert disaster, because it always seemed to be imminent.
There was always this mysterious tipping point that if we don't act now, there's going to be an absolute catastrophe which will be irreversible, and then the next, if we pass that, there'd just be another one, and it's like, well, didn't we just have one that was supposed to be irreversible?
And so, this Urgency, to me, when people have this kind of panic for a decision now and resources now, it's usually to overcome the faint voices of skepticism and let's wait and see if it's as big a disaster.
And so one of the things that I guess I'm concerned about is they're just going to keep inventing new and greater panics.
And because I'm not sure if the scientific literacy of the population is going down as a whole...
But now when the word skeptic is used in the realm of science, it's considered to be a very bad thing, which is why, of course, they invented the term denier, which has its Holocaust parallels.
But skepticism, I think it was Richard Feynman who said all science is founded upon skepticism of the opinions of those in authority.
And the idea that consensus is somehow a valuable thing in science rather than skepticism is really kind of an alarming lack of literacy in the scientific method, in my opinion.
You're absolutely right.
When you keep hearing about scientific consensus, it doesn't mean anything.
There have been scientific consensus many times in the past.
Most of the time they were wrong.
A good example of that was the consensus around eugenics in the early 1900s when there were all these studies of Every one of them showed that the master race was good old white Anglo-Saxon America, and so we had these restrictive immigration laws to keep out, you know, these low IQ Chinamen and Eastern Europeans and Italians.
That was all nonsense.
It was fabricated data, but all the best and brightest people in America subscribed to it.
The presidents of Ivy League universities, Alexander Graham Bell, you know, You couldn't hold your head up if you didn't support eugenics in those days.
That was, you know, 1900, 1910, 1920.
And it was simply fraud.
And yet nobody seemed to recognize it was fraud.
Yeah, and in fact, the Chinese score better than whites on IQ tests as a whole.
I mean, you look back on it and you can't believe it.
And I think his theory over climate change has many of the same characteristics.
You know, if your right-thinking neighbors are alarmed about climate change, then you should be alarmed too.
If you're not, then you're not, you know, in their league, you know.
You're anti-science, if you're skeptical, right?
That's right, yeah, yeah.
So I wonder if we could close off, and I just wanted to remind people that Dr.
Happer will be speaking at this Global Warming and Inconvenient Lie conference.
It's in Phoenix, Arizona, December 2nd to 4th, 2016.
You can get more information at inconvenientlie.com.
dot com.
But I wonder if you could help people.
We have some, of course, younger listeners, and this is all they've grown up with.
I grew up with skepticism as sort of the basis of the scientific method and recognizing that models were, you know, I actually have done computer modeling in the past with regards to environmental issues.
And I know, garbage in, garbage out, you can tweak a program that's not dependent on empirical data to produce anything that you want.
But for the younger people who've grown up with this as a constant drumbeat of doom, I wonder if you could give them the statements around patience and the fact that we have time to figure out if this is true or not.
Even if there is something that's been missed, we do have time.
We don't need the urgency to burn up billions of dollars worth of resources in the here and now.
We can actually wait and still be safe.
Yes, I couldn't agree more with that.
If I were king, I would certainly continue supporting research on climate.
I really admire these Argo buoys, for example.
Spare any money that was needed to keep those going and put in better varieties.
Same for satellites.
You know, good measurements are the thing that's going to eventually solve this problem.
You know, I would not be nearly as enthusiastic about supercomputers.
You know, I think a real problem with supercomputers, especially with the display, is you can make this display.
You can see the earth in lurid colors of red, you know, and it looks so real.
But in fact, it's nothing but a virtual reality.
It's not reality.
There's a difference between a computer and the real world.
So my advice to young people is when you go out, you know, look up at the sky.
Try and figure out what you're looking at.
You know, why is the sky blue?
You know, why do the clouds look this way?
You know, why is the wind blowing in this direction?
You know, try to Understand the world that you live in.
You'll learn a huge amount of science if you do that.
And you'll enjoy life a lot more, too.
You know, so look at that.
Don't look at computer programs.
A perfect way to end the program.
And thanks so much, Dr.
Happer, not only for this conversation, but for the work that you're doing, bringing stability, skepticism, and sanity to what is often a contentious, fear-mongering.
I guess it's going to become a debate again soon, we hope.
But I really appreciate your time today.
And again, please, everyone, check out InconvenientLife.com for the chance to see Dr.
Happer speak in Phoenix, December 22nd.
Sorry, December 2nd to 4th, 2016.
Thanks so much, Dr.
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