Latest / Thinking Class / #037 - Chris Martz - Why We Must Say No To Climate Alarmism

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#037 - Chris Martz - Why We Must Say No To Climate Alarmism · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Chris Marz.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Chris is a meteorology student who interns at CFACT, a committee for a constructive tomorrow, runs a hugely popular X profile and writes the climate blog ChrisMartzWeather.com.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Chris and I talk about his passion for climate science and meteorology began when he was concerned about the increasing talk of climate change, how his mind began to change as he was exposed to more data sets, how data shows a disconnect between the narrative on all-time high temperatures in the US and the reality of historic weather data, the red herrings within renewable energy policy, why he disagrees with climate hoaxes, how policy goals to combat climate change are environmentally harmful in their own ways, and how in some way may have even contributed to increasing temperatures and the motivations and ideologies behind the climate crisis narrative, and much, much more.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Chris is only 21 and he is very impressive.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's clearly got a big future ahead of him, from what I can see and hear from his rapidly growing public profile.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: While Chris challenges the perceived wisdom and climate change using data, I wouldn't describe him as a partisan per se, nor someone who is a climate denier to use common parlance, but rather someone who'd rather engage in scientific endeavour rather than following the more partisan position of following the science.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't research and present data that challenges and critiques policy and interpretation of data, then you're not really doing science.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we need more people like Chris.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching the show on, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests thinking class can attract, and the faster the show grows.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Chris Martz, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, John.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Chris, I came across you on social media on X specifically, and I think it's fair to say that you're making quite a splash.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're 21 years old, you're just about to finish your college degree, and you've seen a huge growth in followers to your X account.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think partly it's because people seem to love posts on climate data.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And also, I think it's fair to say people like your verbal jousting with detractors.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'm sure we'll get into all that as to who your fans are and who your foes are, as it were, and what it is that your platform is is building on.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps we begin with what your platform's all about, which is it's about climate science, it's about meteorology, and that's what your degree indeed has been in.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was it that made you want to go and study that?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Did you want to be a climate activist?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Were you just intellectually curious, or did you fancy being a weatherman and getting on the TV?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, back in the day, it's a good thanks for the question, John.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this is one of my favorite questions people ask me is what got me into this?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh when I started out doing when I started out in high school, I guess, or whatever, I wanted to be an engineer.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then um I kind of fell out of love with that based on some classes that I took.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then I kind of didn't know what I wanted to do for a while.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't really sure.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then I we had this really warm December in 2015.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: It was one of the warmest, if not the warmest, December on record in the United States, at least the eastern United States.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I remember sitting in church during the candlelight service where we were we usually go to, it was there was no uh heating or there were the heat was on in there because it was programmed for that time of year.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it was 75 degrees outside on Christmas Eve.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, like, this is not normal, this should not be happening.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is the this is not December weather by any means.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I always had this perception in my mind, I don't know if it was from the home alone movies or Christmas movies or just the fact that your memory gets distorted with time, but I had it in my head that we always had like snow on the ground around Christmas when I was a little kid, and we it was always cold.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: During the winter, it never got really warm.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I and and then and you can read the headlines in the Washington Post or New York Times or whatnot that tell you that this is this be the mild winters are a sign of climate change, and and there's some truth to that.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: But um, the thing is is that I I I thought this was like unprecedented, this had never happened before.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then Christmas morning, Christmas Day, it was 69 degrees, and I thought that was the warmest Christmas it ever was, and it turns out it's not.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: We actually was like 72 degrees in 1964, and it was like 68 degrees in 1932, and it was 70 degrees in 1982, I believe, in DC.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I know it was 72 or 1964, I know that, and 68 and 32.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: But um, anyway, I didn't realize that this has happened before, and I was kind of I was not really I wouldn't characterize myself as a climate activist or an alarmist, but I thought I kind of just didn't put much thought into it until that, and I just thought, okay, maybe there's something to the what the experts are saying, what the media is saying, that we're having these um that we're causing this problem or this is a problem and we're causing it, our fossil fuel emissions.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, okay, maybe they're right.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's warmer, it shouldn't, this this shouldn't be happening.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So then we get around to January 2016.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's my birthday, which is January 22nd, and uh we had a major blue, one of the biggest uh snowstorms on the east coast.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you remember that or not, uh, or if you were here, but it was uh the 2016 blizzard.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: We had uh 36 inches of snow at my house.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: The New York City had 26.7 inches, it was their largest snowstorm on record.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh DC got 17.8 inches, but the White House that got 24 inches, but the measurements are taken at Reagan and so a little suspicious.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: But it was the biggest snowstorm we had on record here in uh my neck of the woods, tied with the blizzard of February 5th through 6th, 2010.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then we had a really cold blast of air after that.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, this is weird.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're getting this really warm December, we had this fairly cold January in this big snowstorm.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: How is this happening?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I got the wheels turning in my head, and I started thinking about okay, uh, this is this is really interesting.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I started looking in the weather, and I was, and we had we we go on a little bit the following year.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: We had uh Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and of course, that was um the media was it was the headlines were all over the place about how uh this hurricane was unprecedented, all the flooding in Houston, and this is climate change.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay, well, this this is pretty bad.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: This seems like a pretty big storm.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: We've never seen this before.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then shortly after that, I was just scrolling through YouTube, I don't know what I was doing, and I came across Tony Heller's YouTube channel.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: And back then, his view, his videos uh didn't get demonetized, and he would have he had like tens of thousands of subscribers, but his videos would get tens to hundreds of thousands of views, and then of course, now his he has a hundred and like fifteen thousand subscribers, and his videos barely get ten thousand views because YouTube has demonetized his channel, and they have censored they have they have a limited reach of his videos because they don't they favor mainstream channels now versus the individual um content creators like they used to.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: But back then I found his channel and he started talking about climate and these extreme heat events in the 1930s and 1950s and 1920s, and he started talking about all these historical hurricanes like Labor Day in 35 and Galveston 1900 and 1915, uh the Indianola, Texas hurricane of 1886, Okeechobee in 1928.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't aware of any of these storms.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, I'm always the kind of guy that likes to make sure what I'm what people are saying is correct.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I went and I looked and I was like, well, yeah, what Tony's saying is correct.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it kind of started to change my mind on climate a little bit.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: I was I became the more I looked into it, the less concerned I was.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, why am I only getting a part of the story from the media about this?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Why is the Washington Post or CNN or whatever, whatever outlet you read, why is it showing us that this thing is that these streams are getting worse?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because it's clearly not if you go back far enough.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I began to realize it.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of money behind pushing climate alarmism, and it's a big, it's a lucrative industry, and um the media has an agenda to adhere to, but the truth is not really their value, and we see that on a lot of fronts, not just climate.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we saw it with COVID.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: We see it with politics in general.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: But um then I came across Joe Bastardi's page, and he's a meteorologist, he's with Aggie Weather for 32 or 33 years, and now he's at Weatherbell Analytics, and he's a frequent guest on Fox News programs, and he used to be on CNN quite a lot too, uh, before they didn't allow having dissenters on.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: And two of them, Tony and Bastardi, uh, know more about weather history and what happened on what date than anybody else I've ever seen.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: But they began to show me a perspective about the weather and climate that I never really got in school and in high school in my uh and I never got from just reading, you know, mainstream sources.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so it began to change my mind on the more I the more I read into this stuff, the less concerned I anything, I think anything unusual is going on.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I became so interested in doing these analyses, putting these charts together, that I decided to pursue a meteorology degree.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so while a lot of people in my program focus on a lot of day-to-day forecasting, and I know how to do all of that, I'm pretty good at forecasting day-to-day weather if I want to, but but my passion really is is understanding is the research.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was understanding what really works in the climate system and um and and why uh and looking at trends and stuff and seeing whether or not claims that people make about climate are true.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I like I like doing the data analysis type things.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of my that's that's my passion.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, that is an interesting arc to see you go from concerned citizen getting swept up in feeling as though something's not quite right in your part of town, and then the intellectual journey you went on.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like you as that gap opened up between what you initially thought was the case to what it what what it was that you saw was happening, that it made you realise there was um a disconnect between a prevailing narrative, which is typically, I think, around some of the things you pointed, which is emergency crisis.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: We've heard the head of the UN talk about global boiling instead of global warming.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: How how would you describe the the this this narrative and um and what the data actually shows?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So to to put a fine finer point on that, is you talked a bit there about weather and climate.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the most frequent things I guess you would hear from people who would oppose some of the things that you present in your data and your charts is uh, but this is just weather, it's not climate.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: The climate the the weather might be this, but that doesn't mean the climate isn't heating up or or whatever.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, what what is that gap?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: What's the what how would you describe that prevailing narrative and what does the data show across that weather and climate trajectory that you say you're no longer as concerned about?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for the question.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so what's funny about the United Nations is that people like there's their Secretary General like Antonio Guterres, I think that's how you pronounce his name.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I probably butchered that, but they will go on and make these public statements, and they will say that um we are in the era of global boiling, or there this is there's no time to waste, we have to act now, stuff like that.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: They have this strident messaging of do, and they all they publish these posts on Twitter or or Facebook, and they make these very bold statements uh as a call to activism, and that's basically what the United Nations just is.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: They have this, they have this agenda, and uh, but if you actually read the scientific reports that are put together by actual scientists, um, not the summary for policymakers, which is written by a bunch of bureaucrats to summarize things and take things out of con, not the W Working Group Two report or the working group three, those are the impacts, adaptation, policy reports.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Those are all written by bureaucrats, uh, with a few scientists that they select.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the actual physical science basis, which is put together by scientists, which is the working group one report, um, you can go to AR5, AR6, the most recent report.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you look at the physical science basis report, they do not echo at all any of these claims that this is really an emergency and we need to act.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, they might point out that okay, humans are virtual, it's virtually certain that humans are the primary driver of recent climate change since, say, 1850.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't tell you whether or not it's a crisis or that it's a problem.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: It just says that okay, this is this is why it's warmer.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at the sections on extreme weather, which is chapters 11 and 12, goes into it as well, there's really been no observable increase in any meteorological extreme uh the the weather events that make headlines.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we see this narrative anytime that the weather, Mother Nature goes boo, it's climate change.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: We just saw this last week, okay, with the heat wave last week up in uh the eastern United States.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was where the the uh high pressure ridge, or they call it a heat dome, it's it's it's actually called a ridge, it's a warm core high pressure system.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we call it, a meteorology heat dome is this new term that really only dates back to about 2004.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And if you do a Google Trend search on it, it just goes exponentially up as you get in the most recent few years.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's really they're called ridges, and and if you get a them kind of like blocked off in the jet stream, you give them uh some meridiano flow.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that would you get sure it gets wavy, it gets blocked off, and you get these quasi-stationary uh uh domes of high pressure ridges.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um they call them heat domes.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we saw that last week, it happened every summer.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: That always always happens, and the media got into a whole frenzy about it.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we saw some daily record temp high temperatures broken and the Ohio Valley, a few of those, and then there were uh some in the and a couple in the mid-Atlantic and a whole lot in New England, a lot a lot of daily records that were more on the low-hanging fruit side of things.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you go back and look at the actual temperature data, you will find that the heat waves of June, early June 1925, 1895, uh mid-June like 1933, late June 1988, uh, June of 1953, 1944, um, and 1934, all of those heat waves were far more intense than this most recent one was.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: And they have most of them lasted longer, especially 1988.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: 1934 was one of the hottest summers on was the second hottest summer on record in the United States, the lower 48, apart from 1936, which was the hottest.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: So these claims have no merit.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: And and you look at the records that were set.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: No station, not one long-term climate site in New England where the most intense heat relative to average was this past week and weekend.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Not one climate site broke an all-time record high for the month of June or all-time record period.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Vermont might have tied their June record of 101, which was set at North Springfield Lake, which was also set there in 2003, and it was set previously at another location in 1919.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: And many of the New England's June temperature records, you look at Maine's, uh Vermont, New Hampshire, pretty sure New York, and Massachusetts, they're all 1919, June 1919.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And those records were not eclipsed.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So if some daily records get broken during heat waves all the time, it just happens.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's in order to see whether or not a heat wave is unprecedented, like the media claims, you have to really look at the data uh and see whether or not any all-time records were broken.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because that or look at the duration of it.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing really particularly unusual about the heat wave duration.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was unusual in terms of its intensity this early, but it's not unprecedented.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the media has gets away with these claims.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And anytime the weather goes boo, that it gets climate change.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's probably gonna we're gonna probably blame rainbows on global warming here in the next couple of years at the rate we're going.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting it's getting that ridiculous.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we see this with anytime there's a wildfire, anytime there's a tornado, anytime there's a hurricane, whatever it is.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: They even blame cold air outbreaks, Arctic outbreaks during the winter when you get a polar vortex displacement or split, in a sense, temperatures to sub-zero uh Fahrenheit in Chicago.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: Global warming, like that doesn't make any sense, but they but people buy into this, and um so they always make a point.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: And in the poster child of global warming has always been more heat waves and more frequent and more intense hurricanes.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Those are the big, big things, and what do those things have in common?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: They are weather extremes.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: So when you talk about weather extremes, well, that's you gotta look at trends in that.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the trends in weather extremes, they're not getting worse, and I think we'll get into that later.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to go on a full tangent, but the media talks about these extremes all the time.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's what climate alarmists fixate on.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Anytime there's a bad weather event somewhere, it's our fault.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I go on to Twitter or Facebook or whatever platform I'm using at the time, and I tell these people I pull up the graphs, the statistics directly from NOAA that's readily available.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: I always cite my sources and link them.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's one thing that people on my side of our argument don't always do, is they're not always great about citing their sources where they get their charts from.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: They're not always good about updating data that takes like 10 years out of date.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I've always like I've always taken a John Christie approach is look at the data and plot it yourself and update it and cite your sources because that gets you some credence.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when I post sorry to interrupt, but your your source uh that you just referenced there, Noah, for the average listener.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Presumably that's uh uh uh an official organization that does data collection.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what does the acronym stand for?
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and they're they're official government agencies, so they have their their uh data is always their data's uh always pretty good.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um but so anytime you bring up the extremes like that, and you say, okay, there's somebody all today, well, heat waves are becoming more frequent in the United States, and then you show them the chart that I built, which uses data from our Global Historical Climatology Network Daily database, which is compiled by NOAA.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: You look at the data, it shows that the average per station, number of days per year that have reached 95 degrees or higher, has declined.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it was 18% lower during the 60-year period, 1961 to 2020, than 1901 to 1960.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's been declining for more than 100 years.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, well, heat extremes are not becoming more of a common.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you bring that up.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: The climate activists will turn around and they'll still they'll they'll change the subject.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: They'll say, Well, but the averages are increasing.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: And they like to do that to gaslight you to try and say, Ah, I got you, but the averages are increasing.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the topic was about extremes.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: We were talking about extremes, not averages.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so the averages, the temperature, if you look at the average, the global temperature, it's it's warmer now than it was in 1979 when we have some good satellite records because they it's a good global picture of the polar orbiting satellites, and they measure the radiation of clouds in the atmosphere.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: They can use that to calculate global average temperature in different layers, the troposphere, stratosphere, and they can even subdivide the lower troposphere, upper troposphere, lower stratosphere, upper stratosphere.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: So the average temperatures are increasing, and I think some of that could be due to carbon dioxide.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the theory, global warming theory itself, makes sense.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that you can't really prove in a laboratory experiment that carbon dioxide causes warming by reducing the rate of outgoing long way radiation.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh is very you can't replicate Earth in a lab, and and computer models have a bunch of models, are just you can get a model to say whatever you want based on whatever input you put into it.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So a model's not evidence of anything.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the theory makes sense that if you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it's Should cause some warning.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: The question is how much and and and how much warming is going to result from that.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the question is how much her mean are how much are humans contributing to the warming and how much warming will there result from that?
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And those are questions that are largely unanswered.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Even the IPCC does not know.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you actually look in the report, they will they will tell you it's virtually certain humans have caused 100% of the warming.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go into the report, chapter six, you can find that uh they don't the climate models cannot reproduce um the temperature, the observed temperatures and the instrumental record well at all.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to get and then they can't do it under natural forcing, and that's so they assume that natural forcing and natural variable internal variability does do not exist.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: They assume it sums to zero, even slightly negative, because they say earth should be cooling, not warming.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing is that we don't understand natural variability all that well because very little research is funded to look into that.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you research you get research grants if there's a problem to study, and if if climate change is primarily natural, well, there's not really a problem.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can't tax a volcano, you can't tax the oceans, you can't tax the sun, you can't tax um the clouds and the feedback mechanisms.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: So they look to study a problem, which is looking for a human cause.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're being funded to find that, you're gonna call you're gonna find you're if you're being funded to find a human cause, then you're by uh by godly, you're gonna find it.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so you get paid to shine if you find what you shine a light on, is what I'm trying to say.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the IPCC, so they just say, well, we don't know how natural variability works, so we're just gonna assume it doesn't exist.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: But if that's the case, then all the warming that occurred between 1900 and 1945, that could not have occurred because there's not enough CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion at that time to have any really meaningful impact on the radiation balance of the atmosphere.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: So that had to be natural.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: All of that warming that occurred in the early 20th century had to be natural.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: But they assume that natural variability just sums to zero over this entire time.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: So then they we don't know how they don't know how much carbon dioxide has contributed to the warming because they also don't know how much aerosols contribute to a net cooling or a net warming, because one model that they have shows carbon dioxide actually warmed the earth, or not carbon dioxide, green aerosols warm the earth by a net 0.1 degree Celsius since 1850.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: All the other models show a net cooling up to about up to a degree Celsius of cooling.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but the model estimates vary.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they just so one of the models, which is the uh Hadley Center's model, they said they say that okay, natural variability sums to zero in the climate model.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Natural variability doesn't exist.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: So the observed contribution to global surface temperature change since 1850 is zero, it's not caused any cooling or warming.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: We just just that doesn't exist.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: So then they look at the model and they show that the aerosols cooled the earth by a degree Celsius.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: But the target range is to get the earth has warmed about 1.2 degrees Celsius since 1850, hypothetically.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that they have a target range of 0.9 to 1.2 degrees Celsius, with about a one degree Celsius as the model target to produce the results.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so natural availability is zero, aerosols cool the earth by a degree Celsius.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: So how do we get it to come to the target range?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's just say that greenhouse gases warm the earth by two degrees Celsius.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: We don't actually know if they did, but it forces the model to agree with the data.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's called model tuning.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: They basically just play around with numbers arbitrarily until the model comes into agreement with the surface temperature data set.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And people will say, well, there's no evidence of that, but you there's actually a couple papers out there, and I've cited them, where they say it are if we if we tune the model to agree with the global surface temperature data sets, and they then they declare that the model is successful because it agrees, but it only agrees by coincidence, they just change some parameters in order to get the forcings to produce the desired temperature curve to come into agreement, but they don't actually understand why.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know how much carbon dioxide has warmed the earth.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: IPCC doesn't know.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: They estimate, and again, the model different models it estimates between one and plus one and plus two point two uh degrees Celsius since 1850.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big range.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: What is carbon dioxide contributed?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Plus 2.2 or plus one degree Celsius.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big range.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a huge standard error, which means it doesn't really be the measurements, don't mean anything, and actually not even measurements, they're just count estimated theoretical calculations.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: So they don't understand the physics of it because if they did, they wouldn't have this large of a range, a 1.2 Celsius range, and how much our emissions have contributed to the warming.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the evidence of Science is far from settled.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Are these the kind of models that are being used by the supranational organizations like the UN and its Paris Agreement to decide how much countries ought to focus on limiting emissions to bring down within that temperature range, you know, the famous model of we don't want to go above four and a half degrees, this is what will be on the path to four and a half.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: We need to make sure we get within two, but preferably 1.5 degrees.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this is all based on this these kind of data sets and models that you're talking about.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's what those models are based off of.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so the fact that they just arbitrarily adjust the parameters um to get the temperature, the model-produced temperature curve to match the observations, they just to turn knobs to get it to match.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: It means that the model has no predictive skill out to the future because it hasn't you didn't have it doesn't have any skill to get to the to to reproduce to hindcast to the temperatures.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: You just turn knobs, you don't know what they don't understand the actual physics of it, they don't understand the the actual mechanisms and what the radiation balances are and what's going in and out from this, from the climate system, and what these gas molecules, greenhouse gas molecules, are doing, and how much radiation that they're preventing from uh are there that the the rate at which they're reducing the the outgoing long-way radiation emission.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the aerosols, they don't know how much exactly the sun's radiation is being reflected, how much is being prevented from coming into the system.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have no idea.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: They have a bunch of ranges, and they just arbitrarily adjust the knobs until it agrees with the data.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it has no predictive skill out to the future, and it yet these models are being used for policy making, and you get these wild warming scenarios of like four degrees Celsius relative to 1850 by 2100, and that's not gonna ever happen.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so that that's a big big problem.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: The mother policy is being driven by junk modeling.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you get called a climate denier all the time, and I I suppose what I've seen with your approach to discussing the topic of climate change is actually you're interrogating data, you're publishing data, and showing how the data doesn't quite fit with the public perception.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I think that even putting it in that fair, moderate way that this is what you're doing, and ultimately you're trying to find a path to truth, whatever that is, from all the very different angles that truth needs to be looked at from.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is people will still go, You're a climate denier, you're moving away from the narrative, you're going to cause danger through this.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: How would you describe yourself as someone who's now spent time within meteorology that works around climate science?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do you where do you stand based on the data?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: It do you see yourself as someone who believes climate change is happening, but you just don't know the sources of what's happening?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Do you believe that climate change is happening and we should do something about it, or climate change is happening and we can't do anything about it?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: Or or or none of the above.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do you just seemingly try to avoid labeling and go with focusing on the data and focusing on trying to move toward truth?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: I would consider myself um probably best characterized as a lukewarmer.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't think that it's an I don't I don't like I don't agree with the people, and I and they don't mean wrong, they do a lot of great work, especially on the extreme weather front, especially on the policy front.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh on the policy front of this, I guess, if you want to call it a scam, I'm absolutely on board with that.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: But the scientific aspect of it, I don't agree with people who call it a hoax or a scam because there is a legitimate scientific footing to the whole global warming um debacle.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, as I mentioned earlier, green carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, like water vapor, which water vapor is much more important than carbon dioxide, but carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we know this because there are certain molecules that generate dipole moments, and if they generate dipole moments, then they're able to interact with uh the outgoing infrared long wave radiation.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're transparent to the incoming radiation.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: The sun's radiation can come right through its high energy, warms Earth, and the energy is emitted in order to maintain a thermal equilibrium, the amount of energy in must equal the amount of energy out, and so Earth emits long wave radiation out.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: But there are certain gases in the atmosphere, like carbon dioxide, methane, water, vapor, which generate dipole moments because of their um asymmetrical structure, which has to do with a lot of that, and they are able to intercept and absorb and emit photons of infrared radiation.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the radiation is emitted in all directions, up, down, sideways, diagonally, uh horizontally, whatever.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so the radiation that's emitted back down, it's so the Earth's the greenhouse gases, they don't trap heat.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: They always the climate alarmists always say it's they're heat-trapping gases, but even one of my professors who's now retired, he said that's not an accurate description.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: All it does is it just reduces the rate at which the earth cools to outer space.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't trap the heat, it eventually escapes, but it slows the rate.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: If we didn't have greenhouse gases, primarily water vapor, again, like 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapor.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: If we didn't have it, the earth would be much cooler.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be about, they estimate about 59 degrees Fahrenheit or about 33 degrees Celsius cooler.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not even that's just theoretical because if we got rid of the grasses, yes, earth would cool by that amount.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: But then you would have these positive feedback loops that would set in and amplify the cooling because you'd have more ice and more snow, so more albedo, and the earth would just continue to cool to who knows what.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And um, we don't even know what kind of clouds would exist on that kind of planet.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: And clouds can either have a net warming effect or a net cooling effect with different feedback mechanisms.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: It depends on the altitude of the clouds and their thickness, their optical thickness, and a whole bunch of other factors.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's very complex, uh, physic microphysics with that.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but in theory, yes, carbon dioxide adding more of it to the atmosphere should cause warming.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, a warming tendency in the lower atmosphere, the troposphere, where weather occurs and then the cooling in the stratosphere.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we have observed that.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, people will always say, well, how do you know that carbon dioxide causes is is causing at least some of the warming?
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the you can't really prove it in a lab.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Again, it's very difficult in the IPC.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know how much it's contributed to the warming, but the one fingerprint we do know is that it should cause coolant in the stratosphere.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: If although warming were natural, uh from like solar or volcanic or whatever, it would be warming in both the troposphere and the stratosphere, but it's cooling in the stratosphere.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we know that there is an anthropogenic component to that.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's the one solidified piece of evidence.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: So then it comes down to the question is okay, is this a bad thing or not?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because again, it all depends on how much you know there that just because we are contributing to that warming by some amount, I don't know how much it is, doesn't mean that it's bad or that we're gonna all die.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's the problem.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's the that's the message.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And people always seem to think that if you don't think the world's ending, that you automatically are a denier.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's very complex.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: People will have different views on this.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: People are multi-layered, we have different uh angles that we approach this from.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Not everybody fits into one camp or another.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: Some people think it's all a hoax and it's all a scam.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not going to convince them otherwise because I think a lot of those people, along with the climate alarmists, are very much set in their ways.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: They're very closed-minded, they don't want to, they both have a very political angle from this.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the people that say it's a hoax are overwhelmingly conservative, and they have a very anti-government approach to this.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't blame them on that.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: On the policy front, I'm very much with them.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you got liberals or leftists, on the other hand, who are very much for government action on this, they think it's a crisis, and you showing them that okay, it's not as bad as you're saying, they don't care.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: They don't want to listen to you.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's if it's two wings of the same bird, they're just on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as not opening their mind.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: I always try to keep a database approach to this.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: So, a lukewarmer like me or Roy Spencer or Judith Curry, we we agree that there's a human component to the warming, but just it's a question of how much and how much warming is there going to be.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because too much warming too rapidly would be bad.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'll admit that.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: Too much cooling too rapidly would be too bad.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: But a little bit of cooling or a little bit of warming is not going to kill anybody or be any of any significant harm.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't really understand this whole fixation on global average temperature.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh actually, let me get back to that.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but I'm I'll I'm I'm getting ahead of myself.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: But natural variability, we also don't know a whole lot about that either.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: And most of the warming could even be due to just changes in how the heat is distributed in the system between the oceans and the atmosphere.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I also think a lot of it, a lot of the recent warming, that big spike in temperature we've seen in the last couple of years, is actually due to the fact that we've stopped.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's been a huge reduction in the sulfate aerosol concentr, sulfur dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sulfur dioxide is a highly reflective aerosol, and it blocks out the solar radiation.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the sun's rays come in and these aerosols up here in the atmosphere, the stratosphere, uh, they block out the radiation.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: They say, Nope, you're not coming in.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that actually has a net cooling effect on the atmosphere.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a lot of sulfur in shipping fuel, especially in the shipping lanes in the tropics, and most of our radiation comes in, obviously near the equator, uh, annually.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: So when you have the ship fuel that has it rich with sulfur, it burns it, you know, it comes in, it goes in the atmosphere, it oxidizes, forms these aerosols, it's blocking out solar radiation.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 2020, there was a global standard by the International Maritime Organization, which put a ban on sulfur, pretty much a cap on the amount of sulfur that could be in shipping fuel.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it and so there were there was a lot less sulfur in that fuel being emitted in the atmosphere.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: So concentrations of those aerosols drop significantly.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And aerosols like sulfur dioxide have a much, much higher impact on radiation balance than carbon dioxide ever could.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so we get the reduction in the aerosol concentration.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: We have more sunlight coming in.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: So more sunlight's coming in, it's being absorbed in the system than it's going out.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: That means that the earth's going to warm.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we very much could be part of the reason it's warming, a large chunk of it, even, but it's not due to carbon dioxide, it's due to the fact that we're not emitting aerosols.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: And we saw a similar thing happen after the 1940s.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: We saw the kind of a ban on that, a little bit of some reduction and or increase in now, we saw an increase in sulfur dioxide emissions after the 1940s and Earth cooled.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Some of that was also due to changes in the Pacific and Atlantic multi-decadal oscillations.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the Earth cooled.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: But then after that, it started warming again because there was a reduction in the aerosols, even in the late 1970s, there was another similar uh policy.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it into full effect, I believe, this a couple years ago, 2020 or something like that.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the warming that we're seeing could very well largely be a rebound from the little ice age.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we were only now starting to see that kind of catch up because we stopped we reduced our sulfur dioxide uh concentrations in the atmosphere, thereby reducing sulfur emissions and and and shipping fuel.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: So some of the warming could be man-made in the sense that it's a recovery from the little ice age, but we were masking some of that warming because we were preventing solar radiation from coming in.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of the reason the oceans are so warm right now, the Atlantic's like record warm, is because the sun, there was more solar radiation coming in.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: The back the radiation, uh infrared radiation, the outgoing radiation emitted by Earth that is the uh and that that's reduced by the greenhouse effect, that can only warm the atmosphere.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: It cannot physically warm the oceans other than the top few micrometers of water.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Solar radiation, however, can warm ocean water because the ocean has very high heat capacity, has 1,000 times heat capacity of the atmosphere.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: So the solar radiation coming into the earth extra because we've reduced the amount of sulfur concentrations, sulfur dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, the more radiation is coming in, it's warming the ocean.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the warming of the oceans is not due to greenhouse gases, it's a physical impossibility.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, what I guess when I get to the point is is that the warming, a lot of the warming we've seen in the spike in temperature, the the greenhouse gases that we've emitted um over time, if if they've had a they've had an effect, and I think that they have had some, yes, uh, but it's gradual.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: When you see large variations in temperature, that's caused by other forcings that are that are not part of a long-term trend.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that we're saying this big spike in temperature is actually because the air is cleaner.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's not because we've reduced the amount of sulfur dioxide in the air uh through reduc through through a cap on sulfur and shipping fuel.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's especially prevalent in the tropics because that's where most of the shipping is, and that's where most of our radiation comes.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: And we had a big we have a big top of atmosphere radiation imbalance, and more radiation is coming in, uh, and it's warming the oceans by by that measure.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's not because of the greenhouse effect that the oceans are so warm right now.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's the again the greenhouse effect, the infrared radiation, the back radiation from downwelling sea uh downwelling uh IR photons caused by greenhouse gases like CO2, it physically cannot warm the ocean that much other than the top micrometers of water.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's actually peer-reviewed research on this.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's a study that was published, I think in 2018.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't don't quote me on that about it, but I have linked to it, and I think Steve Malloy has too.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but this entire um ordeal is is we don't know, even if um all the warming is man-made, it doesn't tell you whether or not it's bad or that we're and and what the impacts are.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what I was gonna what I was getting to is that global temperature, this fixation on global temperature is is kind of meaningless.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: There is absolutely no evidence, and we always hear about the climate crisis, right?
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: And how it's impacting the United Nations always talks about how it's negatively impacting humans and civilization and our well-being.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: But if you look at the actual actual data on that, and I can pull it up here, the human condition has never been better than it is today by a wide range of metrics.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: For example, if you look at um, let's see.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the life expectancy since the uh in this onset of the industrial revolution, life expectancy has more than doubled in every country, even in developing countries and and and locations and continents like Africa, uh, and places in the Caribbean, uh, some of these uh lower income, these lower GDP countries, the life expectancy has more than doubled everywhere.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that's largely thanks to fossil fuels providing us with heat and electricity and and all these life-saving technologies.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the number of natural disaster deaths have decreased by 92.2 percent since 1920, according to some other data.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and a lot of the fact now, people always say a lot of one of the arguments some skeptics use that do not like when they do this, is they say, well, the weather's not getting more extreme because fewer people are dying from it.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but that that's that's not meaning it doesn't mean anything about the weather.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: What that reflects is the fact that we have warning coordination, we have radio and TV and cell phones and all these alerts that the government and public officials could communicate with people saying, Okay, hey, there's a for the National Weather Service, hey, there's a hurricane headed your way, evacuate.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because in 1900, when the Galveston hurricane hit, they had they didn't have weather forecasting technology.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: They thought that it was gonna be a sunny day and you had one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States and it killed eight to twelve thousand people.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: It we aren't gonna ever see a death toll that high today, and most likely not, unless it's some superstorm.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we're not gonna see a death toll like the Galveston hurricane of 1900 because we know several days out that that hurricane's coming.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you need to evacuate.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we have weather models and we have satellites and we have warning coordination with public officials to say to communicate with people and to understand that these threats are here.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of them, at least meteorologically, are earthquakes and tsunamis are different.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, landslides are a little bit different, but like meteorological disasters, wildfires and hurricanes and stuff like that, um, and tornadoes, a lot of that stuff's predictable, and we can really mitigate uh well uh losses from that by warning coordination.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: And those technologies are powered by fossil fuels.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you look at the global share of the population that's malnourished, uh, it's decreased by 27.6 percent since 2000.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you look at the uh it's it's more than um, and the fossil fuels have allowed people to increase uh the it's increased access to people's access to electricity by 60 percent uh just since uh the last 25 years, since 1998.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you look at the fertilization of CO2 on global crop, you always hear about how carbon how climate change is going to kill crop yields, it's gonna cause an agricultural food crisis.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: The Secretary General of the United Nations is always talking about that.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Global crop yields are at record highs since data began uh in 1961, compiled by the United Nations, their very own food and agricultural organization.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: Global crop yields are at record highs in the last five, 10 years.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that's largely because we have better uh weather resistant, drought resistant crop varieties through genetic engineering, and there's more farms and stuff as well.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but some of it also, even the EPA has admitted, and there's an old archives page on the EPA site, that some of this enrichment of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is actually fertilizing crops and it's making them grow better.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: Even the EPA admits that.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the human condition is not in a death spiral.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: We are far better off than we ever have been, and that's largely thanks to fossil fuels, and then in part because the planet's warmer, we have longer growing seasons.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you can grow in areas that you couldn't grow 50, 60 years ago a little bit further north in the latitude and the bands.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: So it's been a net benefit in that respect that it's warmer and that we have fossil fuels.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: This this um construction of a climate emergency doesn't actually exist in any relevant data metric.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's why they focus they fixate on global average temperature and departure from 1850 climatic conditions because they think that is the control knob of extreme weather.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: They think that's the control knob of the human condition.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: But it's there's no indication that that's the case.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't show people the other data, they're gonna believe that, oh, they got that there's an alarming temperature rise.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: That must be bad.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: And people don't bother to fact check, they don't bother to read or research anything, they just believe whatever politicians or the media or their favorite celebrity tells them.
• 47:08
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• 47:13
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• 47:21
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• 47:25
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• 47:37
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• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's focus a little bit on policy, Chris, because we've spoken about the benefits of fossil fuels.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we know that policy is typically focused on the phase out of them.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm over here in the United Kingdom, we've got an incoming Labour government, presumably, but even if it was a Conservative government, we would likely see a doubling down on renewable energies like wind and solar.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, we've carpeted the North Sea with them.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've seen 16 million trees felled in Scotland since 2000 to put wind farms in.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_00: We see similar things in some of the um ancient primeval forests in Germany.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we've indeed seen um scrap nuclear power plants because of events over in Japan in the Fukushima crisis, um, despite there being different reasons behind why that happened and why that wouldn't necessarily happen in Germany.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: And nuclear is typically excluded.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I I know you have run some data that became a pretty popular post on X, which showed the efficacy of each of these energy sources.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, fossil fuels, how it stacks up against wind, solar, nuclear, using fossil fuels as the baseline.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, how much wind would you need to try and match that and what space it would take up and solar likewise, and then why nuclear is the king of them all, I suppose, even if there may be questions over long-term disposal.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I think typically it's excluded because people consider nuclear to be a dirty word because of nuclear weaponry, I would say.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: So let's let's focus on this.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say policy making, whatever we what whatever we think, fossil fuels, they're gonna run out eventually.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's the the common argument.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's accept it.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: And let's say what are the the options that we have to replace it?
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: What how much wind would you need?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: How much solar would you need?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: How much nuclear would you need?
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is a this is a fun thing to discuss.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: I always enjoy discussing uh this because it's it I think, and as you said, nuclear is heavily opposed, and it's opposed actually by people on both sides of the energy uh the energy aisle.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and sometimes for a similar reason, sometimes for not.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing people, a lot of ignorant people, as you say, hear the word nuclear and they think of nuclear weaponry, and it's it's not even close to the same thing.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's it's they they they hear the word nuclear and there's like the stigma around it.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: And then we also have people that fear because we've had accidents like Chernobyl and we have Three Mile Island, although nobody was killed from Three Mile Island, and we had Fukushima, but that was also because it was on a fault line and there's a tsunami, so maybe not maybe don't build them near the coast or on a fault line.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: But um by far, nuclear power, it kills the least people per terawatt hour on a terawatt hour basis.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: Nuclear kills the least amount of people second to solar.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: Solar power is actually the safest in terms of deaths per terawatt hour, killing 0.01 people per terawatt hour.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: Nuclear is 0.02.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you just exclude solar farms, you look at rooftop solar because of the installation and all that and the maintenance.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: A rooftop solar is actually deadlier than nuclear power.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: But if you include solar farms and all these solar arrays and fields and stuff, it's it's actually a little bit safer.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but nuclear is safer than by far more safer than coal, and it's safer than natural gas and and oil, and safer than wind, and even far safer than hydropower.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can look at this data, and our our world in data actually has a whole site dedicated to that specific topic.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so there's no so as far as nuclear being deadly, yeah, we've had some radiation accidents and stuff, and there's probably some long-term effects on people, shouldn't we?
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: But again, when it comes to that, if you look just as a in general, average nuclear is is by far the safest clean energy or safest energy technology we have, except for solar, which is just a little bit safer on a terawatt hour uh death basis.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to just you look at the the the facts here, um nuclear power is far superior.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a far superior.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you if we're trying to, if we have say fossil fuels are are gonna run out, now obviously we've heard about peak oil since the 1970s, and um eventually it is a non-renewable energy, you know, coal and natural gas and and oil, uh, they are non-renewable energy sources, but the estimations are always way too early when what's we're gonna reach peak oil or peak whatever, peak coal.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: They always say we're gonna run out, and we have we haven't.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh eventually probably will, but I don't know when that's gonna be.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: But let's hypothetically go with what you said, and let's say that we that we're gonna run out soon and we need to go on a new technology.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: What's better?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: Nuclear, solar, or wind?
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: So nuclear power is by far the most material intensive energy source.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it requires or not nuclear, it's by far the least, sorry, nuclear power is by far the least uh material intensive energy source second to natural gas.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: Natural gas is slightly less material intensive.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: But wind and solar require these largely non-recyclable plastics.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and these turbine blades last maybe uh 10, 15 years, 25 years, maybe.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: And solar panels might last 15, 20 years as well before they have to be replaced.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: A good nuclear plant can last 40 or to 80 years or more, uh if it's if it if it's kept up and running.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna have to keep replacing these turbine blades and these solar panels, and solar panels are very much uh get damaged by by weather, by sp by hail storms, for example.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: We had a there's a 350 megawatt solar array in Texas just southeast of Houston, southwest of Houston, that was destroyed by a hail storm back in March, causing millions of dollars in damage.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot be having, if we're going to be powering our society on these things, we cannot be having uh technology that's gonna be destroyed by the weather.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh wind turbines can easily get destroyed by tornadoes.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: You don't really tend to see a whole lot of that in the case of solar or of coal plants or natural gas plants or um uh nuclear plants.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they don't tend to be destroyed that often by the by the weather.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if we're gonna be powering our society on stuff, we need to have something that's reliable.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_01: And what's really compelling is that um so is the is the um material is the energy density of nuclear and how much it can power.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I did some, I ran some calculations the other day.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was a it was a viral post.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: And typical the average nuclear power station has a rating of a thousand megawatts.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's how much power installed capacity installed power capacity that a nuclear plant has is a thousand megawatts.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the uh Department of Energy and Energy Information Administration stated that in 2022, nuclear power across the United States on average had a 92.7 percent capacity factor, which means that that over the course of a year, 365 days, uh it was operating at full capacity 92.7 percent of the time.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: The reason it's at 100 is because of maintenance and refueling, stuff like that.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: Typical.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: But nuclear by far has the highest capacity factor, the highest uh efficacy of any energy source, even over fossil fuels, uh, over coal and natural gas, for example.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, nuclear has by is by far working at full capacity more time than any other energy source.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if we take into account the fact that nuclear power, it has a 1000 megawatt, a 1000 megawatt uh installed power capacity.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's going to be generated, so it has it's gonna be generated this electricity over 24 hours a day for 365 days a year, that's 8.76 terawatt hours of electricity per year.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if we assume that it has a 92%, that's with full capacity.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: If we assume that it has a 92.7 capacity factor, then it generates 8.12 terawatt hours of electricity.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that is actually going to be able to power roughly 750 uh 2, uh 527 homes based on that calculation.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot of homes, and that's all from just one nuclear plant sitting on about 1.3 square miles of land.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: So just one square mile of land, 832 acres of land, you can have a 1,000 megawatt nuclear facility operating at 92.7 percent uh power capacity over the course of year, and it powers it's enough to power 700 over 700,000 homes.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a typical solar uh photovoltaic power plant, uh typically these are called utility scale solar arrays.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to be to qualify as a utility scale solar array, you have to have an installed power capacity of our installed power capacity of one megawatt.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh one megawatt, the rule of thumb is that for every megawatt of solar, you need about 10 acres of land, and that's according to the solar and that's called that's according to the solar energy industries association.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not just making this number up.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is from the solar industry themselves.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, but most utility scale uh solar farms have an installed capacity between 10 and 100 megawatts.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so we'll be generous.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: We'll assume that a solar uh let's assume that there's a 100 megawatt solar PV array.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: And if it's uh and we also have to take into account, according to the Energy Information Administration, that solar in 2022 had a 24.4% capacity factor, the lowest of energy, any energy source.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's operating at full capacity only 24, less than 25, less than a quarter of the year, it's operating at full capacity.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: That's not sustainable by any metric.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's enough to generate roughly zero point a 100 megawatt solar farm operating at 24.4 percent capacity, generates 0.21 terawatt hours of electricity per year.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, in order to match the energy output of a 1,000 megawatt nuclear facility operating at 92.7 percent efficacy, you would have to have an installed solar capacity of 3,800 megawatts.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that would and and that would have to occupy roughly 243,000 acres of land, which is 380 square miles, compared to 1.3 square miles for a nuclear facility, just to generate the same amount of electricity.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you could have a solar farm the size of Houston, Texas, and it wouldn't be enough to even power a fraction.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: And just a 100 megawatt solar farm operating at 24.4% capacity is only enough to power less than 20,000 homes.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now look at wind power.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, typically wind power, typical utility scale wind turbines have about a 2.5 megawatt rating.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: It ranges between one and five.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: And typically large slur farms are have installed capacity between like one and 300 megawatts.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so we go with the so we go for the 2,000 or 200 megawatt rather wind farm.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you occup and that's going to occupy about 6,4 uh hundred, 64, 6,400 um square miles of land.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, not 6, um, 400 square miles, 6,400 acres because it's about 80 acres per turbine.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have a 200 megawatt hour of installed capacity, uh, you have 200 it generates 200 megawatt hours of electricity.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um sorry, it has 200 megawatts of installed power capacity um at the wind farm, that's enough to generate with and by the way, the energy information administration says that wind has a 35.9 percent uh power uh capacity factor in 2022.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: So if you counts taking that into consideration, a 200 a single 200 megawatt wind farm generates 0.628 terawatt hours of electricity in a single year, and that's enough to power a little under 60,000 homes.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that occupies, and just with that 60,000 homes powered, that already occupies 60 times as much land, or 80 times as much land rather, than a nuclear facility, and that's able to power 750 plus thousand homes.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in order to match the output of a nuclear plant to power the same amount of homes to get it for a wind farm, you'd have to have an installed capacity of 2,580 megawatts, and that's going to occupy roughly 60,480 acres or 1,032 square miles.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: So there is no way that these energy sources are at all, these solar and wind are at all sustainable by by any metric.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is madness, Chris, when you put it this way, particularly when you consider that those people who are proposing these solutions and excluding nuclear, which indeed for a long time, and I don't even know where they've landed on it, the European Union who came out with a or which came out with a a sustainable um a sustainability green deal, which started to filter into various regulations to try to increase investment in renewable technologies, is they excluded from this energy transition plan nuclear from it.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: They said that wasn't classed as a green energy.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were trying to effectively get the whole market pushed towards putting into solar, wind, hydro.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what strikes me behind those figures is that let's try and imagine the practical impact of those.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at, you know, in England, we have famous hymns, part of our national law, which talk about England's green and pleasant land.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: And genuinely, most Englishmen would be aghast and are aghast at the idea of effectively papering over or concreting over the landscape to put either onshore wind, which some people are trying to push for.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're no longer in the European Union, but we do have political parties that are still pushing for these things.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the same with our seas.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it we we know it impacts marine life, and generally we are seeing this um groundswell from less influential parties, political parties, talking about no, no, by going down this route, we're going to increase energy prices more than they already are, and they're already massive.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think the UK has energy prices five times that of the US, and we don't have much industry, and that's why.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: And effectively any doubling down on these energies will not only diminish actual environmentalism because you're going to be harming ecological habitats, landscapes, and what have you, but you're going to be diminishing the chances of you having any industry and potentially then relying on imports from elsewhere, which is, you know, our nation has stopped exporting.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: We just import.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't I don't really understand why these seem like the best ideas.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what's remarkable as someone who's in the middle of a who's going through an election process at the moment in the the United Kingdom, we go to the polls.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, by the time this episode comes out, we would have already been.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: But in 2010, someone who was who ended up becoming our deputy prime minister, he was giving a uh a speech at an election hustings talking about the policies of his party, particularly around energy.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: And someone put to him nuclear and he dismissed it, saying, No, that'd be ridiculous because it's not going to be online until 2023.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we would like that right now because at the moment we're in a position where we don't have much, many energy sources to call upon of our own without having to go to the global markets and being at the whims of everything that comes with that.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there seems to be this short-sighted view, and I find typically when I speak to people within industry groups, lobby groups, whatever, that they genuinely believe that it doesn't require concreting over vast tracts of land or the seabeds to do these things, that actually it's just about storage capacity, which as Elon Musk will tell you, is not exactly an easy thing to fix.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it's all a bit dispiriting, really.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_00: And um, as far as I can tell, most people just want to double down on renewable energies, which is which is a bit of a shame.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: I do I don't know if it was you posted it.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about what I've seen coming out of the US that was buried um in some regulations that weren't particularly high profile, but it got bipartisan agreement.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: 92% of the House voted for it, apparently, um, which is going to enable nuclear's nuclear being built at scale.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was buried in that some kind of fire.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Regulation.
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know whether there's truth to that, but I do think that when the rubber hits the road, as it were, that political parties, organizations, I think some of them may start realizing that the path that was set on isn't necessarily the path that's going to work out best.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: And there might be some pragmatism that's slipping in in the background there.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see what happens.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go, there's a couple of questions, Chris, that I want to cover off.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one, I guess, is about the climate crisis industrial complex, which you've written about.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think I'd be interested to hear if you think I've got the right take on this.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we've talked a bit about the language of emergency being employed, we see climate crisis, global boiling, all of those things.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I've always been quite skeptical when I see these things because those who are claiming to be saving the planet or making an impact and claiming that it's apolitical and for the greater goods, and that they're following the science.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_00: I tend to see that all of that language that's being used doesn't really stack up.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, the science can't tell you what to do, it can only tell you how things are, and it's political when you decide what to do.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: So that nothing can possibly be apolitical in that respect.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's also this claim to love humanity and doing things for the greater good.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: But when you actually speak to some people about the common man, you will find that their love for humanity quickly diminishes when you put an actual individual or a normal person in front of them with normal needs like everyone else.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and then you I see it in the corporate world where I see lots of firms being encouraged to do something about it, to change strategy, to move towards the energy transition.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they they call upon this vast array of sources that that have headlines that are in line with that that emergency language.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I realize that people only seem to care about propriety rather than truth, which is many-sided.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I mean by that is they try and stay on point because they believe it's going to help bring about this transformational change, it's going to be the good of any everyone, and totally overlook all of the nuances that sit behind it that suggests that actually the action we may choose to take isn't as clear-cut as we're being told it is.
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, is that the right understanding of the climate crisis industrial complex that you're talking about?
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything else to it?
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think that pretty much sums it up pretty well and uh a lot nicer than the way I say things.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, I think I think it's pretty on point.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there is a and I think another thing I really like that you pointed out about this is that a lot of these people they have they they think that what they want to do is for the better of humanity.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they they care about our well-being, but when you look at them, they have so much uh vitriol towards the human race, like they want us to go extinct, that we're a disease.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_01: And one of my favorite questions I always ask these people is is if you think that and nobody ever answers this because I this is where I really box them, is I ask them, okay, if you think that human civilization is a disease and it's destroying the planet, then why are you trying to save civilization from collapse?
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they never want to answer that.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_01: The reality is that these people are a lot of these these green activists, I think some of them, there are some out there that are true believers that do want better for humanity and they have that they have this philosophy that they think that what they're doing is right.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: I don't doubt that.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_01: I actually know a few people who who do think along those lines.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I can respect them for their passion, but they're not looking at it the right way.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but a lot of these people, if you look, if you just do a quick glance at their social media pages, or heck, you just look at their Twitter bio, they'll say that they're degrowthers, they're degrowth communists, and they want to dismantle our socioeconomic system in the West, here, you know, over in Europe and here in the United States, Canada.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they want to, they have, they want, and they what they want is their own little, they're narcissists, they want their own little clean habitat, as George Carlin said, their own little clean habitat to live.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_01: They only care about themselves, they don't care about anybody else.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: They they want, they just want their own little they have their own uh desires and outcomes from those.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's why a lot of these people, back to the nuclear thing, I think a lot of these people oppose nuclear because uh aside from the people that they're scared of they think nuclear weaponry or they think of Chernobyl or accidents that we've had with nuclear plants, uh, a lot of the reason people oppose nuclear, especially with the on the political and the politician side of this, is that I don't and the people in the bureaucracy, uh, people that work for the United Nations or in Parliament or and and and government here in the United States, I think that a lot of these people don't actually want solutions.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_01: They will they like their careers.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, their careers depend on there being a climate problem, uh issue to solve.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_01: If there's no issue, then there's no need for these people to have a job.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_01: So they actually like the fact that there's opposition from fossil fuel companies or skeptics because it keeps them, keeps everybody in business, and they don't want this to end.
• 1:11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they also if the government were to deploy a renewable energy grid, well, I guess nuclear is renewable, but solar and wind grid, uh, again, it's very weather dependent.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, wind's not barely useful when energy demand is highest when it's really hot or really cold for heating and cooling.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because you get underneath these air masses, these high pressure systems, you get cold core highs during Arctic outbreaks.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: You get this like surface high pressure systems with troughs aloft, it's Arctic, like the polar vortex, these big Arctic outbreaks.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: The wind's not blowing because it's a big giant air mass, it's very cold.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing with heat waves, you get this uh kind of ridge, this dome of high pressure, and uh this big warm core high.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Again, the wind's not blowing.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_01: So when wind energy demand is highest, wind's not going to be effective.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then during snowstorms or ice storms, solar panels get covered.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna have to have even more um you know storage capacity for this.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: These calculations I showed earlier about the amount of land area, that just doesn't even take into account the storage that you'd have to add to that.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Those are just if you assume that they're you know they're working based on those uh power capacities.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, nuclear, the people oppose that because if you have a green, if you have an energy grid that's based on intermittent, weather-dependent solar and wind technologies, uh, one, you uh weaken the grid by allowing the federal government to have to have control over energy, they regulate it, they ration it, they give you a monthly allowance on how much energy you're allowed to use because there's only so much energy that you can generate with wind and solar.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that allows the government to control everything.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Do you control energy?
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_01: You control everything, you control everybody, you control everybody's actions, and that's a big goal of these people in the climate movement is they want to control people and their habits.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they have this very anti-humanist, um, anti-capitalist approach to this issue, as you mentioned.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: And people always say that nuclear, as I mentioned earlier, is expensive to build, but that's not the case in Japan.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the case in France, it's not the case in India.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_01: India builds nuclear power for lower costs per terawatt hour than uh they do for the solar.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And France powers 70% of their grid on nuclear power, and they pay less energy per terawatt hour than the European average, you know, the E27 average.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, but when it comes to the climate industrial complex, um, these these individuals, it's very much uh about keeping the public alarmed because it's a self-enforcing kind of feedback loop.
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you hundreds of thousands of people, their livelihoods depend on there being a problem.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_01: So a crisis doesn't have to exist.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_01: The public has to have a perception that a crisis exists.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's become a lucrative multi-trillion dollar industry, and uh it's a self-enforcing, you know, reinforcing feedback loop.
• 1:14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the government can regulate energy in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to save the planet.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they do this by keeping the public alarmed over the weather, over very trivial things.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_01: But people are gullible, they buy into it.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they use taxpayer funds, at least here in the United States, to fund research grants through the National Science Foundation.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_01: And those are given now to any academic standing in line with their handheld out to solve the problem.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the scientist is then comes under pressure because of the grant, the purpose of the grant, to kind of produce research that shows that, okay, this is a problem, and we need to address it.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, they can must they can get statistical curves and produce results that show these accelerations of these trends by manipulating statistics and using some sort of some statistical analyses to get and tricks um to get desired results.
• 1:15:16
  SPEAKER_01: You can't kind of fabricate numbers in in research because that does look really bad if you just make up stuff.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there was actually some ocean acidification studies that were retracted a couple of years ago because some numbers were made up.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_01: So even if you are on the alarmist side of this, you can't make numbers up because it looks bad.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_01: But you can play around with statistics and stuff to get a kind of a desired result.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, kind of like Stephen McIntyre was talking about the hockey stick graph.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_01: You can get a hockey stick curve by just doing using various statistical tripes and stuff.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's above my pay grade, though.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_01: He's a mathematician, I'm not, but he was explaining that to me when I do my uh Twitter spaces one time.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but all that isn't inquired to or all does all that is required to ensure that people are alarmed is the average person thinks that there's a huge climate problem.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because if they think that, then he or she will have no problem giving their tax dollars to to fund climate research to solve the problem, they come up with solutions, and to ensure that it continues, that research, climate research these days mostly focuses on addressing impacts and how these how negative these impacts are gonna be, and how it's gonna affect your daily activities.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: How is it gonna affect your favorites uh hobbies like skiing, or how is it gonna affect ice skating, or how is it gonna affect the maple industry, maple syrup?
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_01: How is it gonna affect um you know um your surfing at the beach or some some weird thing?
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um climate change and wine growing or baseball, or how is it how is it gonna negatively impact these things?
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you can get somebody concerned, well, global warming's gonna ruin my nationals or Atlanta Braves game, then I wanna then I want this problem to be solved.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pay, I want to, I want to help scientists solve this problem.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be able to watch my Orioles play.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so they they they they do this by keeping people, global people just alarmed about stuff.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_01: And if you can uh and and and it gets them to vote for power-hungry politicians to that to advance their agenda, which is usually authoritarian in nature, and it gives their constituents a false promise that they're gonna be saving the planet and bettering humanity when in fact there's gonna be no measurable difference in the quality of life, and actually, there probably well, there probably will be probably be in a negative impact if we choose the net zero route.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's a guise and it's a it's a good one because it's been with us for 30 plus years, and this feedback loop it keeps the government kind of in control of things, and it also bank bankrolls academics and keeps people uh in academia and keeps people in the bureaucracy, it keeps it gives it keeps them employed with jobs.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Chris, uh I hope you have a space for a job in here.
• 1:17:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think we we need dissenters.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I know we live in a world where opinion is forming into for two tribes and that uh includes science.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm hoping I'm hoping the space for dissenters to at least add further layers to what it is that we come to view the worlds through on questions of climate change.
• 1:18:15
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go, one question I ask all my guests, Chris, is what have you changed your mind about in the course of your life?
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I know we've talked about that a little bit already today, or or recently, that you thought to be true, a universal truth, but then you ended up thinking differently.
• 1:18:32
  SPEAKER_00: What was it that made you think differently?
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we already kind of touched a little bit on that, and that was the whole climate thing.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I thought I was kind of alarmed by by the whole climate ordeal.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I thought that uh, I mean, I wasn't really like that, like I wasn't like the extinction rebellion and spraying paint uh on Stonehenge, but I was I was I was just kind of casually concerned, and I but I didn't put much thought into it.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: But when I began to actually look at the data, I started questioning it and uh and some of these alarming claims.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought that all this stuff was a you know that this was a crisis, as so to speak, was a universal truth, and I'm not convinced of that anymore.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_01: I also at one point wasn't really a big fan of nuclear power, and I just think it was because of all the stigma surrounded by it.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the more I've researched on that, the bigger of a fan I've become of it, uh especially in terms of its material, uh in the lack of material intensity that comes with it, the uh high energy density of it, it's in its uh efficiency.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_01: So I uh I thought that that was a kind of a all these like the accents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, all these things were terrible, and we shouldn't have nuclear because of that.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that was a big universal truth for me that uh that I that uh people always say, and uh it turns out that I'm not really again, I'm not convinced, I'm I'm actually convinced nuclear is really really good and better for humanity.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm a bigger advocate for it.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I would like to see our reliance on fossil fuels, at least coal and oil, uh, wane and become more dependent on nuclear power.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think natural gas is a is an okay, yes, it's a fossil fuel, but it's uh but it's the cleanest burning and most efficient uh we burning fossil fuel that we have.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I like to I think that's one thing that's kind of changed my mind.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: As far as just everyday things that I I thought, um I thought that a lot of these people on this side of the issue, I guess uh you look at these people, you look at their motivations.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that I used to think that you could have kind of a debate with a lot of these people, and that they were always inclusive of different values.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that you look at you look you get into discussions with a lot of these green activists, and they don't want to send they don't want to have a discussion, they want to censor you, they want to make sure that your career is destroyed, and they're gonna go to great lengths to make sure that happens.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, although they're usually not successful, but they will try and they're relentless with it.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I used to think that these people had a kind of common value, and that is to share truth and find truth.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_01: But I will it you find that a lot of these people have an ideology, it's very much uh kind of, I guess I should say, Marxist in ideology that they don't like they don't want people that's gonna kind of step on their toes because they have a narrative, they have an agenda they want to push.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And truth is not a value that we share, and therefore they're not interested in having an honest debate and discussion.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that's something that I've had to learn the hard way through trial and error.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, I appreciate you.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for coming on today and talking us through the the ins and outs of climate data, the myths, the truths, the red herrings, and where we might go from here.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'll keep sniggering at your Twitter account.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very good.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_00: I suggest everyone go and goes and and finds you.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you can just share where the the viewers and the listeners can find you on the in the dark corners of the internet.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, you can find me on Twitter at uh Chris Marts WX.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's my handle.
• 1:22:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can find me on Facebook at the same username or just search for Chris Marts Weather or something like that on Facebook.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_01: It should come up.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I also have a blog, ChrisMartzweather.com.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's where I post my personal stuff.
• 1:22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I do a lot of stuff because I'm interning with him this summer, which is CFAT, the committee for Christopher Tomorrow.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_01: Shout out to Tom and Mark, uh shout out to uh Craig and Mark Morano uh and the team, Gabby, all them, they're fantastic.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_01: We do great stuff.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_01: So check us out at cfact.org.
• 1:22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we we are an organization, nonprofit organization, and we uh discuss energy policy and climate and we kind of tackle on the green the greens uh with that.
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so go check us out at cfact.org.
• 1:22:50
  SPEAKER_01: Give us a follow on Twitter there as well at CFAT.
• 1:22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh yeah, that's where you can find me and you can find us.
• 1:22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And um thanks for having me, John.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_01: I hope that uh I can come back on at some point if you're if you're willing to let me back on here and uh had a great time and thanks for the wonderful discussion.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, you you'd be very welcome to come back on and take good care of yourself, enjoy your summer and keep fighting the good fight.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, you too.
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:23:47
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• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.