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The media ignores a science paper that demolishes the climate scare · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:07
  Mainstream media has betrayed our trust.
• 0:10
  Rather than tell us the whole story about the important issues of the day, they tell us only what they want us to hear.
• 0:16
  Your hosts, Tom Harris and Todd Royal will bring you the other side of the story.
• 0:27
  In July 2025, a crucially important scientific paper was published in the journal Atmospheric Measurement Techniques.
• 0:35
  Despite the paper's significance, it received no coverage at all in mainstream media and wasn't even mentioned in climate science newsletters or institutional press releases.
• 0:46
  The paper was titled, quote, development and comparison of empirical models for all sky downward long wave radiation estimation at the ocean surface using long-term observations.
• 1:00
  No wonder media didn't dig into that.
• 1:02
  Sounds pretty complicated.
• 1:03
  It was written by Jiang Haipen, Bo Jiang, Hui Liang, and other Chinese researchers, as well as Thomas Ingalls from Arizona State University.
• 1:13
  They analyzed over 30 years worth of radiation data from 65 buoys on the ocean surface and discovered that cloud properties, not carbon dioxide levels, turn out to be the dominant factor controlling energy that warms the ocean surfaces.
• 1:29
  Dr.
• 1:30
  Matthew Wiley is going to be our guest today.
• 1:32
  He explains quote, downward long wave radiation is the key mechanism by which the atmosphere transfers heat to the surface.
• 1:40
  If CO2 were truly the primary driver of surface warming, you would expect changes in CO2 to show up clearly, unquote.
• 1:48
  However, that wasn't found in the study.
• 1:51
  Because of the importance of this paper to the climate debate, we've invited Dr.
• 1:55
  Wheelki to come on today's show to explain this complicated topic.
• 1:59
  Dr.
• 2:00
  Matthew Williki is an expert in Earth Sciences with a PhD from UCLA.
• 2:05
  He's a climate realist who regularly publishes the real science of climate change on his blog, which is named Irrational Fear.
• 2:13
  We'll link to the blog in the show description when it goes to the podcast on Monday.
• 2:17
  During his time as an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, his research included climate change and the implications of warming on severe weather, humanity, and the energy transition.
• 2:29
  So welcome to the show, Matthew.
• 2:31
  Thanks, Todd.
• 2:32
  Thanks, Tom.
• 2:33
  You bet.
• 2:33
  We're glad you're here.
• 2:34
  So Matthew, how important do you consider the paper by paying et al.
• 2:39
  And why do you say this?
• 2:41
  So it's it's it's the first time that we're seeing a admission that CO2 possibly is not the primary driver of surface temperatures.
• 2:52
  And what they did was they looked at 30 years of observations, and they realized that clouds, which we've talked about for a long time, we just haven't been able to model these things or really measure them.
• 3:03
  This time they really did some interesting measurements and using buoys and things, they figured out that over 30 years time span, which is a pretty good chunk of time, that the dominant factor of how the surface of the oceans was warming, had a lot more to do with clouds than it did with CO2.
• 3:21
  And that's really different than the narrative we've been told.
• 3:24
  We're constantly told that CO2 is the control knob.
• 3:28
  If you change CO2, you change surface temperature.
• 3:31
  And it just seems like the story is a lot more complicated than that.
• 3:36
  And so this is kind of the first admission that we have observational data that's really kind of suggesting that CO2 is sure certainly a factor, but clearly does not appear to be a dominant factor at all.
• 3:48
  And now it's interesting that we there's almost, well, there was in fact no media coverage at all, even in climate science newsletters.
• 3:56
  So I mean, is this because it sounded like a complicated title, or is it because they didn't want you to know about it?
• 4:03
  It's the first one, exactly Tom.
• 4:05
  I mean, the second one is just icing on the cake, but you know, it doesn't use the words panic, it doesn't use the words tipping point, it doesn't use the word, you know, runaway feedbacks.
• 4:15
  It's basically suggesting that clouds matter more than they've told you before.
• 4:19
  So it's a little bit of an admission, a self-admission that that we were kind of oversimplifying the models before, and they're much more complicated.
• 4:27
  The media just doesn't like that type of story.
• 4:29
  They want a real simple narrative.
• 4:31
  They want to be able to point the finger at an industry or a single trace gas.
• 4:36
  And and all of this nuance just complicates the story.
• 4:39
  So the this is this this is par for the course in terms of media coverage and climate.
• 4:44
  If it doesn't fit the narrative, which the narrative is very simple, anything outside of that narrative essentially just gets ignored.
• 4:50
  Yeah, for sure.
• 4:52
  Let me ask you something, Matthew.
• 4:53
  I love how you just said that it's not simple because I do find that so often now.
• 4:57
  I I uh Tom knows this.
• 4:59
  I've I've written some books, and my first one was called Energy Made Easy.
• 5:03
  I try to make energy topics be easy, and what I found out it's anything but the irony of the book is it's wildly complicated book with hundreds of sources.
• 5:13
  But what I would like to ask you to do, because frankly, it's my own edification, but I think the audience, because like when you see the title of the paper, I would love you for you to explain it.
• 5:24
  Just talk us through it.
• 5:25
  You know, the title of the paper that we've said here in the introduction, though, but to say it again is the development and comparison of empirical models for all sky downward long wave radiation estimation at the ocean surface using long-term observations.
• 5:43
  I would be the first person to admit to you that uh as a long-time energy analyst.
• 5:48
  I know what your words mean, but even I sit here and I go, man, I'd love for you just to simply and plainly explain this.
• 5:55
  Yeah, so the the key part is long wave radiation.
• 5:59
  Um we'll get into the models and testing the models as well.
• 6:03
  But so the way that the climate system essentially works is that the sun heats the surface of the earth on the day side of the planet, and that's primarily through shortwave radiation.
• 6:15
  And that shortwave radiation passes pretty quickly through things like clouds.
• 6:19
  It passes through the trace gas, greenhouse gases that are up in the atmosphere, and it heats the surface.
• 6:25
  And as the surface heats up, it emits heat through long wave radiation.
• 6:30
  That's how it's essentially escaping the heat.
• 6:32
  And you've probably felt that before.
• 6:34
  If you've ever walked on a blacktop with bare feet, it's you could feel the surface is really hot, just the surrounding area is hot too.
• 6:40
  If you shined an infrared camera onto that blacktop surface, you'd see that it was emitting a lot of long-wave infrared radiation.
• 6:49
  It's that infrared radiation that the greenhouse gases actually work on.
• 6:54
  That's what they're trapping or or emitting back towards the surface.
• 6:58
  And it's kind of a misnomer to say we're heating anything, we're not actually heating anything.
• 7:03
  The sun is doing the heating.
• 7:05
  What essentially is happening is it's it's reducing the ability of that surface to cool because some of that cooling radiation, that infrared radiation that is going off into space is being trapped by either the clouds, and this is what they've been testing here through observations or through things like greenhouse gases.
• 7:23
  And so what they were doing was they were using observational data from buoys to test against a lot of these models that we have that are suggesting predicting of surface temperature.
• 7:36
  And what they found was that the models didn't do as well when they put so much more weight into CO2 than into clouds.
• 7:44
  If they actually put more of the radiant forcing into clouds, then the cloud that that explained the data much better, suggesting that it's the clouds that are doing more of the work in terms of trapping the heat near the ocean surface.
• 7:59
  And the oceans are 72% of the surface of the planet.
• 8:03
  So this is by far the number one driver of what's warming the planet.
• 8:07
  Another way we could say it, a different title would be we tested how well different models estimate how much heat the atmosphere actually sends to the oceans.
• 8:17
  That would be a better, a more simple title.
• 8:20
  Do the models include clouds at all, and they're just and they're just you know estimating it too low, or do they not have them?
• 8:27
  So it's very difficult.
• 8:28
  So when you think of a climate model, essentially what they're doing is they're taking the atmosphere and they're dividing it into grids into these little kind of quadrants, and each quadrant can affect the quadrants next to it, and this is how they can model it because they have to simplify this.
• 8:41
  The quadrants are multiple kilometers wide and long and tall.
• 8:46
  And so, in order to model uh clouds, you need much more granularity because this is happening at a much smaller scale.
• 8:53
  So it's very difficult for climate models right now to do anything with clouds.
• 8:58
  The cloud data is essentially just assumed and put in because the models just don't have the resolution to actually model the how small and small scale things like nucleation of clouds is.
• 9:10
  So it's in there, but it's not very well modeled.
• 9:12
  Yeah.
• 9:13
  So so the cloud size, sorry, the the granular size, the block size that you'd need, would have to be maybe only a hundred meters across to catch in all the clouds.
• 9:23
  That's right.
• 9:24
  And you know, as computing is getting better and better, the grids are getting smaller and smaller, but we're still far away from being able to.
• 9:30
  I mean, ideally, the first droplets are what you have to model.
• 9:34
  The very first, that's the energy hurdle to making a cloud is actually making the very first few droplets.
• 9:40
  So the nucleation of the vapor phase to the liquid phase, that's why we spray aerosols into the atmosphere in cloud seeding things like that, because that helps to actually nucleate.
• 9:51
  So, really, if a model wants to do this, it's gonna have to get to a really small scale.
• 9:56
  Yeah, like even millimeter size.
• 9:59
  Yeah.
• 10:00
  Yeah, but with computing, who knows?
• 10:01
  You know, maybe that's possible in some odd years, but current models just cannot do that.
• 10:06
  Yeah, Willie soon says something interesting.
• 10:08
  He said we have an article out about Willie right now on America Out Loud, actually about his recent video.
• 10:14
  Um, the thing he said if you made the grid size small enough to take in all the previously sub grid scale phenomena, it would take longer for today's computers to run the model than it would for nature to unfold.
• 10:28
  In other words, he said to forecast the climate in 10 years would take more than 10 years of computing.
• 10:35
  Well, this is kind of similar to what Todd was mentioning earlier.
• 10:37
  It seems like you know, when this when the narrative was written in the late 90s or even late 80s when Hansen was was making his testimony to Congress, we didn't really have a great idea or understanding of the climate system.
• 10:50
  But it's one of those situations where the more you know, the more you know you don't know.
• 10:54
  And we're just finding how complex this really is.
• 10:57
  And I think that's beauty because that's Earth systems.
• 11:00
  I think it's really exciting, the nuance and all that.
• 11:02
  I find that to be scientifically challenging, but it doesn't fit this kind of simplistic narrative when what you want to do is essentially, you know, make policy.
• 11:11
  Yeah, I I had I had I forget which book I wrote this in, but uh I quoted Dr.
• 11:16
  Soon.
• 11:17
  I'm paraphrasing that the way you look at climate, he said the difficulty he said there's between six to twelve variables for it.
• 11:23
  And he goes, within each of these variables, there's a there's about another two thousand, let's just say two thousand to four thousand variables that affect that one variable.
• 11:31
  He said if you are then to begin to test the various variables, say the between the six to twelve and then the two to four thousand in each one, he goes testing one of the variables typically will take a supercomputer upwards of 40 years.
• 11:44
  And the IPCC has admitted this.
• 11:46
  Um, they say that the climate system is a coupled, so meaning you can't, you don't have a single equation, right?
• 11:52
  Variables are in multiple equations and all the equations kind of play on each other.
• 11:55
  It's nonlinear, meaning it's not proportional.
• 11:57
  If you change one variable, it's not really telling you how the other variable is going to change.
• 12:01
  And it's chaotic, meaning if you look at the past history, that's not necessarily going to tell you.
• 12:06
  You don't recognize patterns in the past history because of the chaotic nature.
• 12:10
  So it's just very difficult.
• 12:12
  It's an inherently very difficult problem to predict for the future.
• 12:15
  Yeah.
• 12:16
  Chris Essex, who was an applied mathematician, he's retired now from University of Western Ontario.
• 12:22
  He said that there are knowledgeable scientists in the world who say that not only can we not model climate, but we may never be able to model it with any kind of certainty.
• 12:32
  Yeah, I mean, I think I think globally, I think that's probably accurate.
• 12:36
  I I would hope that we could do better regionally, because that's really what people are concerned about.
• 12:41
  You you know, you don't really care about a global temperature, but you do care about you know the local temperature if you're a farmer and things like that.
• 12:48
  So hopefully we can increase regionally, but yeah, globally, it's just such a complex issue.
• 12:52
  We have such small data sets.
• 12:54
  Maybe if we're a civilization of you know, a hundred thousand years and we've seen these hundred thousand year cycles actually play out.
• 13:01
  But when you're trying to predict cycles that are on the order of that that time frame, and you've got a few decades worth of data, it's just very difficult to do.
• 13:09
  Yeah.
• 13:10
  I kind of want to go back to this the simplicity issue.
• 13:14
  How though, then can we take these complex issues, make them for people that are, you know, they're watching the news or they're looking at a TikTok video.
• 13:23
  Like, what can we do though to take the complex, yeah, make it where people can understand that almost the understanding needs to be that it's so complex to say that if you don't buy, you know, if you don't burn natural gas, then all is solved.
• 13:38
  What do you think is the best way to go about that?
• 13:41
  You know, I think people, the more I speak to people, the more they appreciate the nuance.
• 13:46
  I think people kind of find that it's this beautiful system that allows life on the planet to exist, the only planet on the planet, and if I mean the only planet in the universe that we know of that that contains life, and it's because of all this change, it's this dynamic nature of the planet that allows us to thrive.
• 14:04
  And so I think one thing I tell them is look, change is not something we should be worried about or think is unnatural.
• 14:10
  People say, Well, I've noticed things change and I'm 80 years old and there's been these slight changes.
• 14:16
  I'm like, well, that should be totally normal.
• 14:18
  I think when it's time to worry is when it's static.
• 14:21
  And so you I think people really do appreciate the nuance that they don't want to get into the physics and radiative forcing and everything like that.
• 14:28
  But I think people are realizing that, okay, so you know, there's all these trace gases, there's all these feedback systems, but you're telling me it's this one trace gas that controls everything, and it happens to be the one that we exhale 40,000 parts per million of and that you can tax and regulate and it's carbon-based or carbon-based ecosystem.
• 14:47
  And so, you know, they they're starting to realize that.
• 14:49
  So I think just more discussion.
• 14:52
  Yeah, that's one of the reasons that the climate community really tried to squash any discussion, because people found an interest in it.
• 14:59
  And there's been actually multiple papers that came out that the more you know about the climate, the less anxious you actually are about the climate.
• 15:06
  Climate anxiety goes down in students when they learn more and more about the climate, when they learn about natural variability and past climate states and the little ice age and things that had nothing to do with anthropogenic CO2 emissions, their anxiety goes down, and they don't want that, right?
• 15:22
  There, there is a subset of people that are trying to keep fear as a motivating factor to change policy.
• 15:29
  And the more you learn about a system, usually the less you're afraid of it.
• 15:32
  It's just human nature, right?
• 15:34
  We're we're we fear that which we don't fully understand.
• 15:37
  And so, you know, I try not to go into the nitty-gritty physics.
• 15:40
  I consider eyes glass over.
• 15:43
  But when we start to talk about natural variability and there's all these other factors and and so much is controlled by the sun, you can kind of see him, you know, kind of shaking their head, being like, Yeah, you're right.
• 15:52
  It it seemed a little bit simplistic to me when I was watching it, you know, on the news, but nobody's really laid it out to me in simple terms.
• 15:59
  And so, you know, I think if we could just continue the discussion, that's probably the primary thing, but that's also what a lot of these folks are afraid of.
• 16:07
  Yeah, yeah, it's like a Pandora's box, they want to keep the lid tightly on, you know, and and it reminds Todd has heard this story before, but it reminds me of the complexity of the theory of general relativity.
• 16:18
  Uh, a little before he passed away in 1955, in 1953, I guess it was.
• 16:23
  Einstein was on a radio show, and the announcer said, Well, Dr.
• 16:28
  Einstein, we have about 60 seconds remaining in the show.
• 16:31
  In the time remaining, could you please describe your theory of general relativity?
• 16:35
  It's a French goodbye.
• 16:37
  Yeah, Einstein paused and said, No.
• 16:42
  Because some things don't sum up in a tweet, do they?
• 16:46
  I mean, they're just too complicated.
• 16:48
  But if you want to use this as a system to tax and to set policy, the more simplistic you can make it, right?
• 16:54
  And the more you can point the finger at a single industry, the easier it is.
• 16:58
  Absolutely.
• 16:59
  So it in that regard, let's be unsimple then.
• 17:02
  Let's uh let's tax ourselves and our audience regarding the paper.
• 17:07
  Can you kind of break down and tell us about the computer models they were comparing with the actual observational data?
• 17:14
  Yeah.
• 17:14
  So what they did was they took eight, I believe it was eight, yeah, eight, basically radiation transfer models.
• 17:21
  So when we talk about the climate, we don't really model anything in terms of like heat or anything like that.
• 17:26
  What we're modeling is the the energy that's being transferred between the systems.
• 17:31
  And so this is the essentially the the main part of the model that talks about how the surface heats up, and we call it radiative forcing.
• 17:42
  So they're kind of taking what climate models are built on top of these, and they get much more complex.
• 17:47
  They're taking one of the foundational blocks of a of a climate model and testing it against this 30 years now of uh of observational data.
• 17:56
  And so these models, you know, they go into everything.
• 17:59
  They they they're they're essentially going to climate models, they go into weather prediction models, they go into rainfall prediction models.
• 18:04
  They're they're the primary driver of the energy and energy transfers between ocean and atmosphere.
• 18:11
  They take into account lots of things like temperature, humidity.
• 18:15
  Um sometimes they make assume uh assumptions about cloud fraction because they have to do that, but they can't really model it very well.
• 18:22
  But what they did here was they introduced a few other variables called cloud water and cloud ice, and so cloud liquid water and cloud ice water is how they refer to them.
• 18:33
  And so they're adding this new complexity to this to these models and saying, look, we we can now have the observational data, we don't need to kind of come up with a theory here.
• 18:42
  Let's just make your models tweak your models such that they fit into our observations, and what they see is that what you have to do is essentially reduce, although they don't say this out loud, you have to reduce the forcing from CO2 and increase the forcing from clouds, and you match the years of observations much better than the models that allow the forcing to stay with CO2 and reduce the forcing with clouds.
• 19:08
  And so they're basically kind of flipping things on their head and saying, look, although we were saying CO2 is the control knob, it doesn't appear that it is.
• 19:16
  Our observational data suggests that if we allowed your models to put more weight into clouds and less weight into CO2, we would actually do better at modeling the last 30 years, which we already know the answer to now, because we have the observational data.
• 19:32
  So this is a nice way to hindcast because you can't test a model, right?
• 19:37
  There's it doesn't fit in the scientific method because uh uh in the scientific method of a hypothesis has to be falsifiable.
• 19:44
  And I I don't have a crystal ball, I can't look into the future.
• 19:47
  But one way that we can check and see how good our models are is to hindcast and look back now that we have the observational data, how well did you do?
• 19:57
  Well, we're doing better by putting more emphasis.
• 20:00
  Emphasis and adding these variables in terms of clouds, we seem to be modeling the true nature of the system much better than you guys do when you're putting all the emphasis on CO2.
• 20:10
  Yeah.
• 20:10
  Did the scientific community sit up and take notice or did they talk?
• 20:14
  Were they just simply glad it didn't get much publicity?
• 20:17
  I'm gonna probably think that it's the second.
• 20:20
  I think it's the latter.
• 20:21
  But these things, once they get into the, I mean, this is published in a well respected Q1 journal.
• 20:27
  This is not like some fringe journal.
• 20:30
  It's gonna be impossible to ignore this stuff.
• 20:32
  Um, you know, people are gonna start talking about it, but surely when this stuff comes out, everybody kind of shrugs and says, Well, hopefully we don't, this doesn't get too much attention because it's clearly showing that we had it a little bit wrong, and it's showing that we have it wrong on the the one factor that we want to focus all our energy on the most, which is CO2.
• 20:53
  It's it's reducing the ability of CO2 to have an effect on the surface temperature.
• 20:58
  Then why do we do all these things?
• 21:01
  I've always I've always wondered this.
• 21:02
  And Tom, please help me shape this.
• 21:05
  You know, I think I want to be clear with you.
• 21:07
  You know, I'm an energy, I'm an energy analyst.
• 21:09
  I'm not a scientist or an engineer the way you are, the way Tom is.
• 21:13
  But I've done some modeling work before, like more financial and forecasting and things like that.
• 21:19
  But I've always wondered within the modeling.
• 21:22
  I mean, I know why there's a heavy emphasis on CO2, but within their variables, are they ever including past data?
• 21:29
  And this is the reason I asked this is what you just brought up.
• 21:33
  We know there was a little ice age.
• 21:35
  We, whether you believe in a young Earth or an old Earth, we you know, you take a religious view of Earth, uh, you know, creationist view, or you take a non-religious view, more of a secular or humanist or evolution view, the Earth is X amount old.
• 21:50
  But what I've always wondered in the modeling in these, are they not taking into account that the Earth has been warmer, colder, and more parts per million in the air before fossil fuels were ever burned or discovered.
• 22:03
  Has that ever been included in any of these large uh modeling scenarios?
• 22:08
  They don't go back that far.
• 22:10
  We call so there's a common problem called the Holocene thermal conundrum, which is if you try to run these climate models back in time, they miss the fact that particularly the northern hemisphere, but we're getting more and more information that it's probably planet globally.
• 22:28
  Uh, the planet was warmer about 7,000 years ago, what we call the Holocene Thermal Max.
• 22:33
  But we know that CO2 levels were low.
• 22:36
  They were at pre-industrial or below 250, 280 parts per million.
• 22:40
  Yeah.
• 22:41
  And so the models do break down when you push them back that far because they are overestimating the effects of CO2, in my opinion.
• 22:51
  Um, and they're underestimating the effects of things like ocean circulation patterns and solar radiance and cloud cover, all these things that are much more difficult to model and and are much more nuanced.
• 23:02
  And so they can do pretty well if they model back to about 1880.
• 23:06
  Again, that's right at the end of the little ice age, so it's convenient.
• 23:09
  Um, that's where the hindcasts go back to a lot of times.
• 23:12
  But no, they they really do break down when you push them uh the farther back you push them.
• 23:17
  And there's a there's a term for it called the Holocene Thermal Conundrum.
• 23:21
  Do you want to ask one more thing, Tom?
• 23:23
  Because I was wondering this too.
• 23:24
  I'm a religious individual and believe in Jesus.
• 23:27
  And so, and Tom has heard me ask this many times.
• 23:30
  You know, I've looked at some of the climate weather breakdowns in the past couple thousand years, let's say, since the birth of you know, birth and death of Jesus Christ.
• 23:38
  And you look up in those times and you go, there was a warming during the Roman period, and then we got colder.
• 23:45
  I mean, in other words, even in these last couple thousand years before fossil fuels, before the proliferation of mankind because of fossil fuels, we were warmer, we were colder, and again, more parts per million for audience sake means more stuff in the air.
• 24:03
  And none of this had so even if you're a religious person, you you're whatever that epoch of time.
• 24:10
  We saw that the climate had been varied, and it had nothing to do with CO2 or anthropogenic global warming, meaning the Earth's warming because we're burning fossil fuels in my correct or incorrect.
• 24:23
  No, you're absolutely correct.
• 24:24
  So we have Roman warm period, we have a medieval warm period, we've got these these nice warm areas, and what we see is society actually thrives in this warm period and then really suffers in these cold periods.
• 24:37
  But in order to keep this idea of this hockey stick graph, right?
• 24:41
  This flat handle, and then the blade that shoots up.
• 24:45
  You have to really squash all of the interannual and and and all the natural variability of the past because that really muddies the waters.
• 24:52
  So there's been this real concerted effort to make suggestions that oh, these warm periods before were just regional.
• 24:59
  This was just this one area that was warm.
• 25:01
  Now we're finding that as more and more evidence comes out that it was most of these were global.
• 25:05
  Medieval warm period was for sure global because we find it in Antarctica that there was a significant warming there as well.
• 25:10
  And so it wasn't just confined to the northern hemisphere.
• 25:13
  But these is this is fact.
• 25:16
  We we should we should stop pretending that what we do in terms of our energy use in CO2 will keep climate stable somehow forever.
• 25:26
  We should be aggressively building in resilience because we know that the climate has changed dramatically in the past.
• 25:33
  It likely will again in the future, telling people and pretending, you know, that we can or virtue signaling that we can stop that somehow because of the way that we build our energy and and and have built our entire infrastructure to give us uh the benefit that we have today of you know, first world living, it's just crazy.
• 25:51
  I mean, any time period you want to look at it, the climate has shifted dramatically.
• 25:55
  I mean, the little ice age is only 150 years ago, so we don't even have to go back that far and see this stuff.
• 26:01
  And so, you know, the the goal should be building in resilience and being prepared for climatic shifts because they will come regardless of what what the CO2 concentration is in the atmosphere.
• 26:12
  Yeah, and it's strange because if you were on an ocean liner and there was a big storm approaching, you would think that the crew was crazy if they told you to get into the lifeboats.
• 26:21
  Because of course, you want to stay, you want to stay in your big solid ocean liner if there's a real storm coming.
• 26:28
  So the environmentalists tell us we have to switch to the flimsiest form of energy because there's a storm coming.
• 26:34
  There's a massive, you know, and but we're gonna stop the storm because we're gonna switch to alternative energy.
• 26:41
  So I mean, if you're concerned about adaptation, the very last thing you should do is jump in your lifeboats.
• 26:47
  The last thing you should do is make Texas totally reliant on wind and solar power, for example, because there's a storm coming.
• 26:54
  So don't you find that's kind of contradictory?
• 26:56
  They tell us we have terrible extreme weather, but we have to use the flimsiest energy sources.
• 27:01
  Oh, Corey, we're gonna stop the extreme weather.
• 27:04
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 27:05
  I mean, a lot of people always tell me it's like, look, you know, if you were in a car driving at it towards a cliff, you would hit the brakes.
• 27:12
  I say, yeah, of course.
• 27:13
  But if I'm in a car and I imagine there's a cliff, I and I drive the car into the ditch, that's also a really bad outcome.
• 27:19
  Neither of these are good outcomes, right?
• 27:21
  What you want is to have good information, whether the cliff is really there, how far away is it?
• 27:26
  And yeah, I mean, the idea of switching from reliable dispatchable energy at any moment to something that really suffers the most when you need it most.
• 27:36
  You know, these things tend to fail when we need them most, when it's really cold and the intense storms, the turbine blades freeze up.
• 27:43
  You have to de-ice them and things like that.
• 27:45
  Solar panels, you know, I've got eight kilowatts on my roof, but it snowed the last couple of days.
• 27:50
  We haven't had we haven't been producing it all.
• 27:52
  And so, you know, uh battery backups are gonna last for how long?
• 27:56
  A few hours, maybe a half a day on on industrial scale.
• 28:00
  And so, you know, it's just it's really putting the cart in front of the horse and setting us uh ourselves up for really bad outcomes because we're virtue signaling that we're gonna somehow adjust to the temperature of the planet or the weather at you know in 2100.
• 28:15
  Yeah.
• 28:15
  So I guess what one of the things that people should bring up then at public debates and presentations is look, if I really believe that super extreme weather is coming and it's gonna get worse.
• 28:27
  I don't want to get off my solid energy sources.
• 28:30
  Absolutely.
• 28:31
  You'd want dispatchable power, you can turn on and off at any moment.
• 28:34
  That would be what I would, and I would want redundancy in that system, multiple backups.
• 28:39
  Absolutely.
• 28:40
  Yeah, for sure.
• 28:41
  We have to go for a break now.
• 28:42
  Our guest today is Dr.
• 28:43
  Matthew Wilicki, and he's an Earth scientist, and he's giving us some real facts concerning a new paper that's come out showing that clouds are more significant to the climate system than CO2.
• 28:55
  So we'll be right back after the break.
• 28:57
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• 28:58
  Peter McCullough.
• 28:59
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• 31:59
  Dr.
• 31:59
  Matthew Morey.
• 32:00
  Matthew, curious.
• 32:02
  You're obviously kind of going against the grain here.
• 32:06
  You are definitely going against your colleagues, uh, government academia, even large businesses.
• 32:13
  How did you come to these views and what opened you up to looking at these facts in such a way?
• 32:18
  Yeah.
• 32:18
  So I mean, I I was a I'm an isotope geochemist by training, so I have a very analytical mind.
• 32:24
  In kind of earth science that I do, we look at a historical record.
• 32:28
  There was really isn't much modeling.
• 32:29
  We're just looking at observational data and the pages of the, you know, the book of history are in the layers of rock.
• 32:35
  If you want to learn about the Earth's history, and so um, I I really never was big on the models.
• 32:41
  And so early on in my career, I didn't push much of the climate stuff because we didn't really know.
• 32:45
  You know, in the early 90s and things like that, we just didn't have the observational data to say that this isn't an existential threat.
• 32:53
  I remember I was teaching at City College, and and I think yesterday is the 2020th anniversary of inconvenient truth came out January 26th, uh, 2006.
• 33:03
  I remember showing it to my city college students um being pretty invested, like we know we got to keep watching this.
• 33:09
  But now we have three decades of really good data.
• 33:13
  I saw my students at university telling me that this is one of the most anxious things that they think of is the climate and the future.
• 33:21
  Um, young young female students crying in my office telling me they're not going to have children because they would be guilty of bringing a child into this world when the planet's gonna end in 12 years.
• 33:32
  And so I just really started pushing back that you know, we're we're doing more damage than good.
• 33:37
  It was good to be cautious at the beginning and and to get all the observational data that we needed.
• 33:43
  But remember, warming was never the problem.
• 33:46
  Nobody really thought that a warmer planet was a problem.
• 33:48
  The the problem was with that the the island nations were gonna disappear.
• 33:51
  New York was going to be underwater, there was going to be a hurricane every other day like Katrina.
• 33:56
  None of those things are happening.
• 33:58
  We're seeing a relatively steady sea level rise.
• 34:01
  The acceleration that that people claim is not observed in 95% of tidal gauges.
• 34:06
  We're not seeing any sort of increase in extreme weather.
• 34:09
  There's a great database that has been keeping this since the year 2000.
• 34:13
  And it's just none of this stuff is coming to fruition.
• 34:16
  So, as someone that came from a real analytical background, the observational data outweigh the models because I can't test those.
• 34:23
  But I can look at the observational data and I can really see that we're we're doing a terrible disservice to young people because who cares about the planet if it's going to end in 12 years?
• 34:33
  Why would I do anything, you know, to take care of the planet right now?
• 34:36
  Why would I clean up my trash?
• 34:38
  Go out and plant a tree, do any of this stuff.
• 34:40
  The planet's going to be over in 12 years.
• 34:42
  So it's the worst way to encourage young people to be good stewards of the planet.
• 34:46
  As an earth science professor, my whole job is to teach people how to understand the earth and to take care of it.
• 34:52
  And we were doing the exact opposite.
• 34:53
  We were scaring people all for power and money from you know, from all these, all these people that are dipping into this climate industrial complex.
• 35:02
  And so I had I had just had kids when I started my academic position, and I think I lack a self-preservation instinct.
• 35:10
  So I started opening my mouth before I got tenure, and then that was that was the end of that.
• 35:16
  Yeah.
• 35:17
  It's interesting.
• 35:18
  It strikes me that the people who wrote this paper about clouds, and I'll just repeat the title again.
• 35:23
  Development and comp and comparison of empirical models are all sky downward long wave radiation estimation at the ocean surface using long-term observations.
• 35:35
  Is it possible that the mostly Chinese uh authors of this, also a fellow from Arizona State University?
• 35:41
  Is it possible they chose a headline, a title that they thought would not get media attention because they did they didn't really want to have the media digging into this?
• 35:50
  So I've worked a lot with Chinese colleagues.
• 35:53
  I did a lot of work in Tibet, and there is a lot.
• 35:57
  Yes, I did a lot of work.
• 35:58
  Uh I spent a lot of time in Tibet and Lhasa and areas like that.
• 36:02
  Um, something that we did see is that there is a lot of government inside academia.
• 36:09
  So there's a lot of top-down kind of this is what we're gonna study, this is how we're gonna study it.
• 36:15
  And if you look, China is the number one nation that is kind of cashing in on this fear of CO2.
• 36:23
  They are building two coal power plants per week to make us the solar panels that we buy and put on our roofs so we could pat ourselves on the back and say our CO2 emissions went down.
• 36:33
  So there's definitely an incentive, economic incentive for China to kind of keep this thing going for sure.
• 36:40
  So I could suspect that there's going to be there either was or will be some pressure to kind of tone this down, or maybe that's why you saw the title that you did, and not that hey, hey dummies, it's clouds, not CO2.
• 36:54
  Yeah, there's there's there's a good title.
• 36:56
  That's uh yeah, there's a there's an excellent title.
• 36:59
  So what so you're you're no longer in academia?
• 37:03
  Any are you gonna try to get back into academia?
• 37:06
  I mean, Lord knows it seems like they could use people like you.
• 37:09
  I don't know.
• 37:10
  I mean, I've you know, once these kind of shackles are off you, you could say anything you want.
• 37:15
  Um, I don't have uh funding interests from you know the NSF or things like that or green tech or fossil fuel companies.
• 37:23
  So I could basically just give my expert opinion on a lot of these things, and people seem to appreciate it.
• 37:29
  Um, and so this kind of frees me up to be very independent.
• 37:33
  But I mean, you know, the doors always open.
• 37:35
  I there's you know, never say never.
• 37:37
  So I would always entertain possibilities to come back.
• 37:40
  I, you know, I would say three years ago there was just no chance of that happening, but I'm being invited to more and more universities to come speak.
• 37:48
  Uh the conversation is opening up, so I think people are a little bit kind of more open to having the idea of somebody like me being on a faculty.
• 37:57
  Well, right.
• 37:57
  And and one of the things that would be so cool about having you back in academia is that you speak so clearly, you know, that you speak in layman's language about complicated topics, which is exactly what the students need.
• 38:09
  You know, they don't want headlines like the one that we just read.
• 38:12
  They want it expressed in layman's language, you know.
• 38:16
  So I mean it'd be great for you to get back because teaching obviously would be your forte.
• 38:20
  Uh, you know, the best gift that academia ever gave me was when the office of strategic communications came and told me to stop going to faculty meetings because I was just recently on a Fox interview.
• 38:30
  So, you know, I'm kind of still enjoying not having any faculty meetings for the last couple years.
• 38:35
  We'll see how long that lasts, but you know, we'll see.
• 38:38
  So, are there scientists who are putting out papers um who actually, at least on the surface, appear to be supporting the CO2 driving climate change, but they really have doubts about it.
• 38:50
  Like, do you think that they're all completely sold on it?
• 38:53
  Or do they say, well, I don't, I don't know about this.
• 38:56
  No, I think it's I think it's definitely the that people are kind of over-emphasizing certain points.
• 39:05
  Um, they're playing a game.
• 39:07
  It was it was there was a great article, actually.
• 39:09
  Um, a gentleman from the breakthrough institute, uh, wrote a paper about fire um and and climate change.
• 39:16
  And he he basically said, Look, we had to write this paper in this way, even though here's what we would have said normally if we didn't weren't publishing in nature, but nature's taken such an ideological stance on this stuff that we knew in order to get published in nature, we would have to write it in this way, even though the data doesn't really say what what we said in that paper.
• 39:34
  It made it through peer review no problem because it stuck to the narrative.
• 39:37
  It it got published, and then the day after it went public, he went public with the real kind of paper that they wanted to write.
• 39:44
  His name's Dr.
• 39:45
  Brown.
• 39:45
  Um, and and it was a real, and I felt it too.
• 39:48
  I mean, it's not like there's a conspiracy system in play, but because funding agencies and academic journals have really taken this ideological stance, as a young academic, you just don't see any possibility of.
• 40:00
  Of getting funded or published, the two things you essentially need to do to get tenure, if unless you're kind of toting the line.
• 40:06
  And that's why you see a lot of like emeritus professors, they start to kind of speak up because they're already done with all the funding, they don't need to do all that stuff anymore.
• 40:14
  And so there is a system that is built up that encourages kind of oversensitization, oversensitization of the climate crisis.
• 40:22
  And so I but if you you talk to those people over a beer and they're kind of like, I kind of agree with you.
• 40:28
  I'm just not dumb enough to say it out loud.
• 40:31
  And yes, science is supposed to be about skeptical inquiry.
• 40:34
  I mean, when Dr.
• 40:35
  Tim Ball was called a skeptic, he would say, Thank you.
• 40:39
  Because of course, that's what science is supposed to be.
• 40:41
  I mean, the whole I think it was um what's his name, Crichton who wrote uh state of fear.
• 40:46
  He said, when they tell you the consensus of science, he said, reach for your wallet.
• 40:50
  Science is not about consensus.
• 40:52
  The great scientists of history are great specifically because they went against the consensus.
• 40:58
  So the idea that they all have to agree, I mean, that's not science, is it?
• 41:02
  One of the best scientific consensus was the geocentric model.
• 41:05
  The Earth was the center of the universe, and it took a gentleman by the name of Galileo to speak up and be ostracized.
• 41:12
  And so, you know, this it's anytime you hear consensus, you know you're dealing with someone that's kind of a charlatan.
• 41:19
  They're they're in it for the money or they're in it for the media.
• 41:22
  I get it, I understand that you kind of bust your butt in grad school and you go and get your academic job and you don't want to rock the boat, but it that's not really any sort of pursuit of the truth or any sort of pursuit of honesty.
• 41:33
  Yeah, for sure.
• 41:34
  Okay, speaking, let's let's get a little, let's have a little fun politics in right now.
• 41:39
  Because Tom had he'd sent something over beforehand and he he had played with uh Microsoft's co-pilot AI, which you know, it's just it's very politically correct concerning climate change.
• 41:50
  And he was asking about the study, and it said the following.
• 41:54
  He said the paper concluded that cloud properties explain most of the day-to-day or month-to-month variation, variation in downward long wave radiation at the ocean surface.
• 42:05
  So that's completely expected, I would assume, and consistent with mainstream climate science.
• 42:10
  However, this does not contradict the role of CO2 and long-term warming.
• 42:16
  Agree, disagree, what's your what's your take on all that with Tom fiddling around with co-pilot force?
• 42:22
  You know, I mean, so it's taking a very kind of gentle approach, a very nice approach to this because the paper doesn't specifically say anything about CO2.
• 42:32
  So, you know, they don't make this, they don't make a claim.
• 42:35
  But I would say that if clouds explain most of the variability in the surface warming, then how can CO2 also simultaneously be the dominant driver of the same observations?
• 42:49
  That doesn't those those two things don't click to me.
• 42:52
  I understand that they they can't say it.
• 42:54
  I understand that the the AIs can't really say that at the moment.
• 42:58
  That is still heresy.
• 43:00
  But it seems to me that if you found the most important variable in the warming of the ocean surface, which is by far the most important variable in warming the global surface, then CO2 can't simultaneously be the most important factor.
• 43:15
  Now, I don't know where they think it might rank.
• 43:18
  I would think it's probably third or fourth order effect.
• 43:21
  Um, that's why in the past climate or glaciations, we see temperature rise and then CO2 rises afterwards.
• 43:27
  It seems to be just kind of a secondary player in all of this.
• 43:31
  Um, we've also had ice ages, the Saharan Indian Ice Age.
• 43:35
  That was during a time period where there's something like 1500 parts per million CO2.
• 43:39
  So I think what what it's saying, and what what people don't want to admit is that there are significantly more important drivers of the surface temperature on the planet than CO2, but all of those other factors aren't taxable or controllable or or we can't set policy around them.
• 43:58
  So we're gonna push them aside and we're gonna stick with CO2.
• 44:01
  Ding ding-ding ding-ding-ding-ding.
• 44:04
  Yeah, yeah.
• 44:05
  Unfortunately, I think we hear that there's the there's the real answer, Tom.
• 44:09
  There's the answer.
• 44:10
  I I wanted to emphasize one point you made, and that was that CO2 was 1500 parts per million in comparison with today's 422 or something.
• 44:20
  And yet you're saying it was cold at that time.
• 44:23
  There was an ice age, so it's really difficult for us to like know the specific temperature on the planet.
• 44:29
  But one thing we know really well is when ice ages happen because they really demolish the surface and they leave these giant moraines, these big geologic features.
• 44:37
  So we don't have to go and and play around with proxies and make estimates of temperature.
• 44:42
  We could just say, holy moly, there was ice all over the planet at this time.
• 44:46
  Clearly, it was a time period when it was very cold.
• 44:49
  And so, and at that time period, we had four times the level of CO2 that we did today.
• 44:54
  And you know, under the Clean Air Act, that would be considered dirty air, right?
• 44:58
  The dinosaurs were breathing dirty air.
• 45:00
  That's why we have the endangerment finding.
• 45:02
  But clearly, that didn't have a huge effect on the surface temperature of the planet because we were in an ice age.
• 45:08
  And so, you know, I don't mean to discount CO2 completely.
• 45:11
  I think that it does have an effect.
• 45:13
  I do think that the greenhouse effect is real, but it's just not the primary control knob.
• 45:18
  And this paper really highlights it, you know.
• 45:20
  Yeah, the narrative was sold as CO2 was the primary control knob, everything else is a feedback, and it's just showing that that's not the case.
• 45:28
  Yeah.
• 45:28
  Now, how high would CO2 have to get before it actually did pose a problem?
• 45:33
  And is the CO2 at that level really the problem, or is it that there's just less oxygen because it's displacing oxygen?
• 45:41
  Yeah, so that's a good question.
• 45:42
  We don't know of an upper limit.
• 45:44
  Uh, the Navy's actually done a lot of studies on this because CO2 levels in submarines are often around two, three thousand parts per million.
• 45:52
  Really?
• 45:53
  Um, yeah, yep, because they're using recycled air.
• 45:56
  We know that the the the in the Phanerozoic, the last 550 million years or so, we've seen levels four, five, six, some people even estimated about 7,000.
• 46:06
  Uh during 7,000 in comparison with the age.
• 46:09
  That's more than 10 times as high as almost 20 times.
• 46:12
  That's correct.
• 46:13
  Oh, wow.
• 46:13
  Wow.
• 46:14
  And and that's always times during real great biodiversity.
• 46:18
  So the Cambrian explosion happened at a time period when CO2 levels were really high.
• 46:22
  And so we just see it in, we see it in the anthropological record about society and how well society does during warm periods and how much we suffer during cold periods.
• 46:31
  And we see it in the in the fossil and the geologic record.
• 46:34
  Life likes warmth.
• 46:35
  That's just hands down.
• 46:36
  I mean, not everything, but almost everything likes warmth.
• 46:40
  And almost everything does better during warm periods than during cold periods.
• 46:43
  And life likes high CO2, because surely that's when most of our plants evolved when CO2 was high.
• 46:50
  Absolutely.
• 46:51
  Absolutely.
• 46:52
  So and we see the CO2 fertilization now, and NASA has been very open about that, even though it kind of goes against part of their narrative that you know, we've seen something like 30 to 35% greening on the planet.
• 47:04
  We can see this through satellites.
• 47:06
  So that's not only actually areas that are becoming greener and like move grasses and plants are moving in, but also each tree has more foliage than it did before.
• 47:15
  They're denser, they have more leaf matter.
• 47:17
  And so that's and that's directly a consequence of CO2.
• 47:20
  We know this because anybody that grows in a greenhouse injects CO2 into the greenhouse, such as you can make your tomatoes and sell them, you know, in the winter time.
• 47:29
  I have to credit Tom as you've said that many times.
• 47:32
  Tom is the one that uh yeah, I'm highlighting that Tom has mentioned that so many times.
• 47:37
  Yeah, there's a great study out of Oklahoma State University.
• 47:40
  It finds that for uh both C3 and C4 plants, there's a little variability, but uh around 1100 ppm seems to be the Mac the ideal spot for photosynthesis.
• 47:52
  Wow.
• 47:53
  So we could triple today's levels and and we're still okay.
• 47:57
  Plants, plants will love it.
• 47:59
  Yeah, wow, that's crazy.
• 48:01
  Now we only have about five minutes left in our interview.
• 48:03
  So I wanted to talk a little bit about your website, irrational fears.
• 48:08
  And uh yeah, what's the web URL and what kind of irrational fears that people got about climate change?
• 48:15
  Well, so it it I it's on Substack, but you can go to irrationalfear.com.
• 48:20
  Um that that will take you directly to the substack.
• 48:22
  And um, you know, most of the things the punchline and everything is it's just free to read.
• 48:26
  So I encourage people just to subscribe for free.
• 48:28
  If you find things that are interesting, I usually go into more detail in this, I have a little paid subscriber section where people can get the the charts and I put some of the plots up and I go into a little bit more of the nitty-gritty that some of the people don't really want.
• 48:42
  But so, you know, I I focus on climate primarily.
• 48:45
  I would say there's three things that are the biggest kind of I don't know, irrational fears or misconceptions.
• 48:52
  Um, that the system is simple, right?
• 48:54
  The science is settled and the future is predetermined.
• 48:59
  If you could, if I could just get people to rethink those three things, I think they would have a completely different take and they would be much less anxious about the climate system.
• 49:08
  This is kind of my approach to young people.
• 49:10
  And when I showed them the complexity and I showed them that the science, there's a lot of papers that don't make the media like the one we're talking about today, and that the future is very hard to predict.
• 49:19
  Here's past predictions that didn't work out from you know, some of your most noteworthy climate scientists.
• 49:25
  And so once they kind of had that framing, they were like, Oh, this does feel kind of like I have an irrational fear.
• 49:31
  I have anxiety that doesn't isn't based in any sort of observations or or or logic.
• 49:36
  And so, you know, that was kind of where I built the the name from the from the website.
• 49:41
  But there's a whole bunch of these irrational fears.
• 49:44
  I mean, climate, I think is our biggest one, but um, I would say fear of radiation is another huge one.
• 49:51
  Our our suppression of nuclear energy because of our fear of radiation, uh, it's just been terrible.
• 49:58
  We we have what's called the linear no threshold.
• 50:00
  Model.
• 50:01
  This is an idea that if you have, if you go out and get a sunburn, that means too much sun.
• 50:06
  That means no sun is good.
• 50:08
  You should never get any sun because too much sun is bad.
• 50:12
  But we know nothing works that way, right?
• 50:14
  So in radiation, we say too much radiation is bad.
• 50:17
  So that means no radiation is the goal.
• 50:19
  And that's just impossible to do.
• 50:21
  And so this radiate the regulations with radiation have really set us back in our nuclear technologies.
• 50:27
  We could have baseload power.
• 50:29
  We could be saving all our natural gas for other things, um, or shipping it or exporting it.
• 50:35
  So I mean, that's a big one that I think is is really deep ingrained in society.
• 50:40
  Yeah, the the radiation thing.
• 50:42
  The crazy thing about that, Tom, is there's another rule called a Lara, which is the lowest radiation possible to mix nuclear power plants.
• 50:52
  Um, have to take cost and literally it's levels of safety.
• 50:57
  999999.
• 50:59
  I mean, it's it's ridiculous.
• 51:00
  Like in other words, you get more radiation riding in an airplane from LA to New York than you do at a nuclear power plant.
• 51:08
  You can get it from a banana.
• 51:09
  I mean, there's a lot of well-known.
• 51:11
  I mean, there's a lot of places you can this is these are things that tell anyone go Google it, go look at the Department of Energy's websites.
• 51:19
  Um why the NRC still does this is mind-numbing.
• 51:23
  But but I'd love your comment on this, though, Matthew, is that the U.S.
• 51:27
  Department of Energy actually just got rid of the Alar regulation, which infuriates me that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission won't do it.
• 51:37
  They've now said they'll be making a decision sometime in 2027, which is what keeps nuclear.
• 51:43
  It's one of the main reasons that they spend year after year after year, and I hate to say it.
• 51:50
  It really gets the point you understand why people are suing the NRC now, going, you're you're impeding, you're impeding growth on not on non-scientific means.
• 52:00
  Please comment on that.
• 52:01
  What a long too long.
• 52:03
  Secretary Wright has the big picture in mind.
• 52:05
  I think he realizes that there's no going away from nuclear power.
• 52:09
  And the problem with SMRs, small modular reactors, is that the regulatory stuff had to be built the same.
• 52:15
  So you're gonna nobody's gonna build a 500 megawatt reactor when they can build a two gigawatt one when they have to pay the same amount to encapsulate it and the same amount of concrete and everything like that.
• 52:26
  So I've had the pleasure of speaking with with Secretary Wright a few times.
• 52:29
  I think they realized, and South Korea has been building these reactors in a few years, so we know it can be done.
• 52:34
  It's not like this is somehow impossibly done.
• 52:37
  It's the regulatory framework that is just stagnating everything.
• 52:41
  And then SMRs just they nobody sees the the benefit of an SMR right now because they're like, well, I have to do all this crazy stuff that they have to do, but I'm producing one fifth of the power.
• 52:50
  Why wouldn't we just put this giant reactor in here?
• 52:52
  And so I think the energy department has it right.
• 52:55
  I think all these regulatory commissions are self-preserving, you know.
• 53:00
  So this is IPCC is another one of those.
• 53:02
  Um, if you if you aren't creating this problem, then why do you need the commission to make the solution?
• 53:07
  And so they kind of create their own problems so they can be the solution creators.
• 53:12
  Um, but hopefully they start to kind of axe this stuff because we're gonna fall behind.
• 53:17
  I mean, there's just no uh no way around it with AI.
• 53:20
  Um, that's that's gonna be the only energy source.
• 53:22
  And you see all these companies buying up old broken down reactors and restarting them right now.
• 53:28
  That's crazy.
• 53:29
  Yeah, it strikes me that what you have here is irrational fears based on irrational fears.
• 53:33
  In other words, you have the climate irrational fear, which would then say, okay, you should use nuclear power to have low CO2, but you got an irrational fear on that too.
• 53:44
  So it's almost like, you know, we're the environmentalists have just really hamstrung society because you end up without able to use your best energy sources at all.
• 53:54
  Yeah, it's very ironic.
• 53:55
  It's the same folks that are screaming for clean energy and then against nuclear power.
• 54:00
  I just I don't even know where to start with these folks.
• 54:03
  Uh you've heard me say, Tom, and I I laugh about it.
• 54:06
  So these are the same folks who fly all over the world to different conferences, and you go, you are taking in more radiation on that airplane and horrific amounts of recycled air that we know that science knows.
• 54:21
  You don't feel good after getting off these airplanes.
• 54:24
  Like we know this, yet you're worried about a nuclear reactor that the levels of safety are so much greater than even the wind or even solar panels or wind turbines.
• 54:36
  Uh as someone that's visited now three different reactors, the level of safety and the level of expertise.
• 54:43
  If you've never had a chance, I'd say this.
• 54:45
  I'm assuming both of you probably have, and even our audience, go visit them sometimes.
• 54:50
  You will be stunned at the level of excellence um that these men and women who run these power plants are are partaking in.
• 54:59
  Yeah, and and people have got to go to IrrationalThear.com because I presume you also have stuff about nuclear there.
• 55:06
  I do.
• 55:06
  I do.
• 55:06
  I talk about new reactors and and accidents, um, you know, the the reaction coefficient and new reactors now is negative, meaning there is no runaway possibility.
• 55:16
  When the thing starts to break down, it actually slows the reaction down.
• 55:19
  The problem with Chernobyl was the reaction coefficient was positive, meaning that as it started to melt down, the reaction would go faster and faster, more heat and more heat, and you have these these these thermal runaways.
• 55:29
  But with modern reactors, that's just not really a concern.
• 55:32
  Um, you know, it's it Todd, what you were saying about kind of the hypocrisy, that's what people are the young people are really turning against the climate folks too.
• 55:40
  When they see these climate places like Bellum, Brazil, where they were all sleeping on cruise liners because none of the 80% of the city in Bellum, Brazil doesn't have sanitation.
• 55:51
  So they put them on these cruise ships, so they don't have to deal with the sewers, right?
• 55:54
  They all fly their private jets, of course.
• 55:56
  The young people see that hypocrisy.
• 55:58
  That really is like one of the death nails in all this because they're like, why are these people telling me I have to do all these sacrifices when they're jetting around all over the place, you know, and and not caring at all about this.
• 56:11
  And so that really resonates with young people.
• 56:14
  Yeah, for sure.
• 56:14
  Well, that's a perfect way to end off because if young people are waking up, that's very positive for the future, that's for sure, because they'll be in charge someday.
• 56:22
  So our guest today has been Dr.
• 56:24
  Matthew Willik.
• 56:25
  He's an expert in Earth sciences with PhD from UCLA.
• 56:29
  And in fact, people check out his website.
• 56:31
  It's irrationalfear.com.
• 56:33
  Is that right?
• 56:34
  That's correct.
• 56:35
  Yeah, that's great.
• 56:36
  Well, thanks so much for being our guest today, Matthew.
• 56:38
  Thank you, Tom.
• 56:39
  Thanks, Todd.
• 56:40
  Yeah, thank you.
• 56:41
  Okay, this is Tom Harris, Tom Od Royal, and our guest, Dr.
• 56:44
  Matthew Williki signing out from the other side of the story.