138. Climate physics w/ Professor William Happer

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you've gotten a private wallet setup coinbits encourages you to withdraw your Bitcoin to your own private wallet and embrace the Bitcoin standard way of life start stacking on coinbitsapp.com and save your time and energy in the soundest money ever hello and welcome to another episode of the Bitcoin standards podcast Our Guest today is Professor William Hopper the Cyrus fog bracket professor of physics Emeritus at Princeton University a long time member of the Json Advisory Group where he pioneered the development of Adaptive Optics Professor happer is a founding member of the CO2 Coalition and he served as the Director of the Department of Energy's office of science from 1991 to 1993. in 2018 he was on the National Security Council studying the impact of carbon dioxide on global warming Professor Hopper thank you so much for joining us it is a pleasure to have you here today well it's a pleasure so you are a highly credentialed scientist and yet you do not know the predominant view I would say amongst your colleagues in most universities these days wherein they happen to believe in the idea that carbon dioxide emissions are causing irreversible and destructive damage to the earth's climate so what is your position let's just begin from the beginning what is your position on what is the impact of Humanity on the climate what do you think is the case well climate has always had a big impact on Humanity you know you can read about it in the Bible That's why Joseph went to Egypt you know there was a uh drought in Palestine so the climate is always going to fluctuate and uh we're only talking about fairly small term fluctuations when we look at the recent history of say the last few thousand years but of course they're much much bigger fluctuations over the ice ages none of this had anything to do with carbon dioxide and the increases in carbon dioxide that we're seeing now also have almost nothing to do with climate few people realize how small the influence of carbon dioxide is on climate on radiative transfer but if you double the concentrations of CO2 carbon dioxide you've only reduced radiation to space by about one percent you know that's a very tiny amount and it doesn't take much change in temperature or cloudy noise there are many other factors to compensate for that so the idea that increasing carbon dioxide is causing a runaway greenhouse effect or a runaway climate change is simply not true it's never been true carbon dioxide has always changed in the past and we're a historically low levels now compared to what the Earth has been through previously and compared to the levels that are best for plants yeah I mean historically looking at the Historical track record I think it's pretty difficult to argue with people about the CO2 levels of in the past usually when I make this argument I think the vast majority of scientists will agree that CO2 levels were much higher in the past but what is the quality of evidence that we have for that at the end of the day you know science is experimentation so we can't perform experiments with time machines as far as I can tell so we can't go back to the world a million years ago and say this was the this was the concentration of CO2 back then so what kind of evidence do we have that suggests that it is that it was in fact much higher in the past well there are a number of proxy ways that you can judge the amount of CO2 in the past one of the simplest ways is you look at stomata and leaves you know when there's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere plants grow leaves with fewer holes in them you know they use these little holes the stomata little mouths I guess in Greek or something to get Co2 from the air and CO2 diffuses in and plant really doesn't like to have holes in its leaves because although it lets CO2 in it lets water out and so it dries out the plant so plants have fine-tuned feedback mechanism and when they sense that the atmosphere has more CO2 they grow leaves that have fewer stomata in them so if you look at fossil leaves you can count the number of stomata and this fossil Leaf you know and from some swamp or something where it's been preserved for a long time and if you see fewer holes you know there was more CO2 and if you see more holes you know there was less CO2 because the plant is straining to get enough CO2 to live and so it needs more holes to let molecules diffuse into the leaf so that's one it's stomata another perhaps the most important one for very old times before there were leaves or leaves of plants that we fully understand are paleo salts if you look at fossil soils and you look at the carbonate in the soil and you look at the isotope ratios of the carbonates from this you're able to model uh amount of CO2 was in the atmosphere when the soil was formed because some of that carbonate comes from atmospheric CO2 that diffuse down into the soil and that will have one ratio of carbon Quail to carbon 13 which you can measure very precisely and some of it comes from the roots themselves The Roots perspire they breathe just the same way you and I do and they release carbon dioxide has very very little carbon 13 in it you know when plants synthesize carbohydrates in photosynthesis say uh discriminate against carbon 13. so the work horse and most of these paleo estimates of CO2 is the carbon-12 to carbon 13 ratio there are other examples of that that we could talk about but that but that's the flavor of it that's how it's done and what about the evidence that these things are as old as scientists really tell us so I mean it's all right we can measure the stomata and we can measure the ratio of different carbons but how do we know that this is really a leaf that is one million years old or 5 million years old or not you know 500 or 5000 I mean at the end of the day they all get old and they can all burn down and they disintegrate what is what is your assessment of the state of evidence on that question well if they're not too old say they're less than a hundred thousand years you can use Carbon 14 dating yeah because you know the atmosphere is full of carbon 14 a radioactive form of carbon that's caused by cosmic rays and the plants absorb this and so a fresh piece of wood is fairly Radioactive with carbon 14. but if you have a piece of wood that's been sheltered from cosmic rays for you know 10 000 years it will have about half the amount of carbon 14 in it because it's decayed away and if you have a piece of wood that's even older there'll be less and less so the amount of carbon 14 is is really the gold standard for the recent past you know tens of thousands maybe up to a hundred thousand years it doesn't work forever because it all decays away after a while and there's none left and then you're stuck so there are other radio isotopes that can be used for older periods and it depends on the circumstances if it's very old for example you can look at the decay of potassium 40 in volcanic classes and so you can find a leaf or you can find uh some other remains that's surrounded by volcanic ash and then by looking at the ratio of argon 40 and potassium 40 in the ash you can judge yeah how old it is because potassium Cordy gradually radioactively decays but it has a very very long uh Half-Life compared to you know uh carbon 14. and so by picking radioisotopes of different half-lives you can uh pretty well establish what the ages of of the sediments are that you're trying to study I mean the oldest of all are you know isotopes of uranium you know uranium has uh uh lifetimes that are of the order of billions of years I don't remember the exact number but one of the reasons today we have mostly uh uranium-238 you know when you dig up uranium as opposed to you through 235 which is the valuable one that's the one that fashionable that you can use in a nuclear power plant is that the the uranium 235 lifetime is is quite a bit shorter than 238 so it's mostly decayed away from the time it was formed when the earth was formed but uh uranium-238 has a much longer lifetime it also decays but much more slowly and so there's more of it left in the early Earth uh I think you know there were natural nuclear reactors there's a famous One in West Africa it perked away with uh and went critical uh several billion years ago and it gradually used up most of the u-235 but long ago when there was more of it it's much harder to make a natural reactor to today because there's not much YouTube 35 left in natural uranium ore but most of the dating is is based on radioactive decay yeah and so you're a physicist so you should know this and you know generally when talking to uh I like to call them carbon hysterics people who are driven into Hysteria by atmospheric concentration of CO2 they'll generally tell you well this is just basic physics and you don't understand physics you don't have a PhD in physics so you don't know and curiously enough when somebody who's World expert at the top of this field in physics says this these things suddenly physics is irrelevant for climate and I and I've seen you attacked repeatedly because you're not a climate scientist you're just a physicist as they say which is curious because you know if they're talking to a physicist then you're just a physicist if they're talking to somebody else then they pull up the physics card and say oh well you're not a genius physicist so what do you know about this but as a physicist what is your estimation of the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature do you think it is driven by carbon dioxide that carbon side drives the temperature do you think it is the temperature that drives the carbon dioxide well certainly in the eye stage Cycles it's pretty clear that it's temperature driving carbon dioxide because if you look at the ice cores from Antarctica you can you know measure the carbon dioxide in the air bubbles that were trapped in the ice and it goes up and down with the ice ages so there is a lot less carbon dioxide at the glacial Maxima like we had 20 000 25 000 years ago then there is today and that's been happening for a million years or so you that's about the maximum that you could use the ice cores but every time an interglacial comes uh carbon dioxide goes up but it the temperature changes first you know so the uh the cause is clearly the change in temperature temperature goes up carbon dioxide goes up in the ice cores temperature goes down and you know a few centuries later carbon dioxide goes down so the the it's a cause effect relationship for sure but it's temperature causing changes in CO2 at least for the last million years now the carbon dioxide going into the air today is probably mostly from Human emissions you know there's no evidence of this kind of increase in the ice core however it it as I said when we began carbon dioxide hardly makes a difference to radiation transfer support you know the the heart of this is how does radiation get in and out of the Earth We're heated by the Sun and we're cool by thermal radiation going out and the effect of carbon dioxide is only on the outgoing thermal radiation it is not very big and even if you have no clouds and you know half of the Earth is covered with clouds Princeton's been covered with clouds for the last three days even if there are no clouds where carbon dioxide has the maximum effect it's only a one percent effect for doubling carbon dioxide that's a really small effect yes and if you put in clouds that means it's only half as effective you know because there are lots of clouds of CO2 hardly matters at all so my guess is that you know it would be very hard for CO2 if you double it to cause more than one degree of one degree Celsius of warming and it's probably less than that but I I think that there there has been some warming over the last couple centuries we've had pretty good thermometer records I think most of that is from the recovery of the from the little ice age you know the little Ice Age ended about 1800 and it was much colder for several centuries during the little ice age and now we're slowly warming up you can see that for example from the record of glacial Retreats the Retreats really began in around 1800 1790 they were already shrinking and that was long before any CO2 was going into the air and so that was clearly some kind of a natural recovery exactly what it was being driven by is still hotly contested nobody's quite sure may have something to do with the sun I mean I would imagine that you know a giant ball of plasma that is many many thousands of times the size of the Earth is going to have a significant effect on the temperature of the Earth yeah just you know I'm no physicist I'm no climate scientist but I mean it'll be hard to convince me otherwise and it seems to me completely backwards that people uh begin with the assumption that this tiny little Trace gas is as I like to call it the control knob and and this is really I think the powerful image that once you think about it like why should CO2 be a control knob for the Earth's temperature it really doesn't make sense the the sun makes a lot more sense and small variations in the radiation that we get from the Sun are likely to impact temperature much larger I um on this question I was extremely interested when the corona lockdowns happened two years ago when Aviation was shut down car driving was shut down a lot of Industry she was shut down we significantly reduced our CO2 emissions for a few months in 2020. and I think what I find interesting I found a lot of things interesting but I think the first thing is there was absolutely no curiosity among most climate scientists to look at this example of this experiment that we've been afforded because of the coronavirus lockdowns where here we are we've reduced CO2 emissions by a significant amount I've not seen attempts to quantify how much CO2 has been reduced and I've not seen any attempt to try and extrapolate the effect of that reduction in CO2 to The Climate I have not seen anybody go and propose a thesis saying all right I mean I think this this is what would have this is what an honest scientific inquiry would have looked like I think you know March 2020 the world gets shut down uh if I were somebody who believed in the hypothesis that CO2 is the control knob for the Earth's temperature I'd make testable predictions and say based on our understanding of climate I would say that if we reduce our CO2 emissions by say 50 over the next three months we're going to get this much reduction in temperature or that much increase in temperature or rises in sea levels or increases in the rainfall or droughts or whatever it is you know make testable predictions and then see whether those relationships held up and yet we saw very little of that we saw very little testable hypothesis because that even though that was an excellent opportunity to test something like this so in my mind that would suggest that the impact of CO2 Emissions on temperature humans CO2 Emissions on temperature is likely inconsequential and insignificant because if we could shut down an enormous amount of the world's CO2 and I don't have an estimate for how much but I would guess it must be at least 30 percent you know when airplanes were grounded and cars were locked up that must cause uh some effect you know if if this really was the control let me just say uh sorry I don't think it was as much as 30 percent I I should have checked you know but my memory is that it was about six percent you know I mean I may be wrong about that that's easy to check but it was not a very big change was something that that small you know the the measurements are pretty noisy one of the problems is you know there's this huge uh winter summer cycle and when they say CO2 in the air increased by two and a half parts per million last uh last year what they don't tell you is well yes it increased by 20 parts per million and then it decreased by 17 and a half or something like that so they're these enormous upbound cycles due to the the summer drawdown of CO2 you know during the northern summer you know everything is green and it sucks CO2 out of the air at an enormous rate so CO2 really drops every year goes down very fast much much faster than this very slow rise that we're observing and then you know when winter comes and fall then CO2 levels start shooting up again because respiration continues you know the soil microlisms of fungi and stuff are still emitting CO2 and animals and so uh it's very with this big oscillation due to uh life uh it's hard to see the six percent change in human emissions uh that I I think is approximately what happened during covid so what I found interesting is first of all I don't think there was I haven't seen estimates of how much we reduced our emissions but I did look at estimates of the maunalao ulwa observatory which looks at uh CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere so first of all you would have expected to see an impact on the temperatures of the Earth but I think what was even more surprising even for me was that I would expect to see an impact on atmospheric concentrations of CO2 because of the reduction in our emissions and yet you look at the trend and this is from my latest book the Fiat standard you look at the trends here I can see the screen right that I'm sharing yeah yes I see it very clearly those are the oscillation summer winter oscillations I mentioned yeah so the summer winter oscillations are going exactly I mean it's imperceptible if I if I were to hide the x-axis and I told you to show me where it's 2020 here I don't think you could uh pick out which one of these is 2020. and if you look at the long-term Trend here in figure 12 again same thing it's just it's increasing and with the annual uh seasonal oscillation taking place it doesn't look like human emissions are even driving CO2 concentrations are they well I I don't know what's driving it because if you look at the ice core records there's never been anything like this in the past 2000 years you know where the records are pretty good for example they're they're pretty well documented medieval warm period when the north settled Greenland and you know even visited North America and it was obviously warmer at that time Greenland was warmer they had Farms there they raised things like barley that won't grow there today but there's no record in the ice core of any big increases of CO2 and it was probably at least as warm as today back then maybe warmer the other point I would make is if you look at this rate that you see here if I if I look at it on this slide yes in 2021 it's uh 415 parts per million and it at 2016 it was uh 405 so that's 10 parts per million in about five years so 10 divided by 5 was about two parts per million per year right so you're you have data showing that CO2 is increasing at two parts per million per year well if you do decrease that by about six percent because of covid then it would be increasing by what is that about uh 1.9 or 1.8 something like that parts per million per year so that would be quite hard to see on this graph I see yeah but I guess I I guess the counter argument here would be that I mean if the people who Panic about the climate do get their way we can't really do much more than what covet did like I mean that was massively devastating to the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide and we're still paying the bill today you know all this inflation that's happening all over the world obviously cannot be separated from all that so this has been uh you know even to just do six percent reduction in CO2 was a massive massive humanitarian cost you know we've got all these diseases that are increasing and because you know cancer rates and malaria and tuberculosis and all these diseases are a lot of progress was made in fighting those diseases and a lot of it was reversed over the last couple of years because of these lockdowns and that barely made a dent in the weather in CO2 concentrations and even in our CO2 emissions so I think the the case for you know remaking the world economy because of taking some precaution about the fact that you know maybe the atmospheric concentration and the uh of CO2 is going to ruin us all I think is entirely flimsy but I take your point yeah yeah I can I completely agree with you that the policies that are being urged on Humanity by the uh climate Fanatics are suicidal you know I mean it's really a suicide pact and we shouldn't do it you know it's just it's crazy and there is no scientific reason that we should be doing it I mean if anything the the one thing you can say clearly about more CO2 is that the Earth is getting greener you know that's absolutely clear from satellite images of the earth that's clear from agricultural yields and so a big part of our current food supply is from more CO2 if we had the same CO2 they had in 1800 we wouldn't be producing enough wheat and corn to feed the world so we should be very grateful for the increases in CO2 and more increases will bring even more benefits from better growth of crops better growth of forests you know more abundancy life yeah you are part of the CO2 Coalition and I was I I have a PhD from Columbia University in sustainable development and during the time when I was doing that PhD I was a card carrying member of climate hysteria Squad and for me you know 302 at that time was just this evil that was going to suffocate us and I remember the first time that I came across your website and I thought to myself wow I mean it was outrageous it was insane like those people are talking about the poison that is destroying our Earth as if it is a good thing it's it's absolutely jarring and shocking initially when you come to it but then I remembered you know my school studies of photosynthesis and yeah CO2 is plant food it's it's one of the least controversial scientific statements you could make it's a that's what plants eat and so now that's you know until today they put CO2 in greenhouses in order to make plants grow faster that's right that's right and you know there are several reasons that CO2 benefits plants some of them are kind of subtle that you wouldn't at first expect so the green of the earth which is very clear from satellites is most pronounced in arid region so you see desert edges shrinking you see Western U.S getting greener you know the deserty parts of India getting greener and that's because with more CO2 plants are more resistant to Drought we talked about stomata early earlier in the show and I pointed out that if you put more CO2 in the air plants grow leaves with fewer holes in them and they therefore they lose less water you know right for every CO2 molecule that diffuses into a leaf and is turned into sugar with photosynthesis you lose 100 water molecules anything that allows the plant to cut water losses is a big deal you know today a typical plant requires about 100 grams of water to make a gram of sugar that's because of these losses in the leaves you shouldn't need that much you should meet much less than that if it were Starkey event the whole thing it's really amazing that people it's I I keep saying it it's very much like belief in witches you know because it doesn't compute you know there's no scientific basis to demonization of CO2 yeah it's absolutely mind-blowing for me I think maybe the Smoking Gun you know because uh because like when you're trying to discuss these issues you you're not confronted with a coherent theory that says this is what happens and here's the evidence because if you could make a coherent scientific theory you'd be able to make coherent predictions from it so you'd be able to say all right here's what's going on this is how much CO2 we're putting out and if things continue this is what we're going to see next year and in five years and in 10 years and in 20 years and of course they don't make these predictions they make all these models and the models have all these scenarios that basically control contain every possible temperature record imaginable and therefore essentially they're unfalsifiable so you always have this ever shifting set of arguments that oh it's going to cause the oceans to acidifying that's going to kill all the fish or it's going to cause the sea levels to rise it's going to cause more flooding but also more droughts but also more rain but also less rain but more snow more extremes more hurricanes less hurricanes or fewer hurricanes I should say but I think for me the like the The Smoking Gun is the one that you mentioned which is there were farms in Greenland there were Farms above the Arctic tree line today so now it's very clear there's a point I'm not sure at which lateral line it is somewhere around the Arctic there's a line above which trees don't grow it's just too cold trees don't grow but if you dig there and people have dog there they have found repaints of trees they have the found remains of farms so once upon a time these places had plants growing in them so Earth was warm enough to support plants growing at that point which suggests significantly higher temperatures than what we have today I think arguably more than just one degree Celsius warmer right wouldn't you agree oh yes if you go back to the eocene you know there were forests growing around the Arctic Circle you can still see remains of them on Ellesmere Island in fact the dominant tree was The Dawn Redwood and there are areas in Ellsbury Island where there are entire forests of sort of quasi-fossilized dawn redwoods that you can still make a campfire out of them and it's kind of mind-blowing to think that you would be sitting there burning up wood that was produced 80 million years ago but people do that you know you're cold enough I guess but uh you know that that of course is extremely interesting you know science geophysics you know why is it that we've stopped studying these fascinating things and important things in order to focus on demonizing co2 and driving people into poverty and it's it's the spoiling the landscape with windmills and solar panels is it's just astonishing that they've gotten away with this yeah I'm looking here there's uh elsemere Island fight for us this isn't none of it in the north of Canada and of course that's Don redwoods that you're looking at yeah and like of course you know the article doesn't want to get uh the people the guy who wrote the article doesn't want to get canceled and so he says a rare mummified Forest couldn't offer us could offers us good offers so he's got his ground we're all messed up so I tend to notice people make grammar mistakes when they're fitting and so a rare mummified Forest could offers a glimpse into how our environment has been changed by humans of course because it's all our fault you know everything is our fault but really I mean this is this is a place where you can't imagine trees having grown anytime in the last couple of hundred years so these are very very old you know maybe maybe it was humans who cut them down at some point but the idea that they couldn't see it this was I mean this was before prime age really had taken home this was pre-prime much less for human yeah and I mean even even if we were to even if we were to you know say all right well all this carbon dating stuff is suspect and even if it was humans would burn them down humans are powerless to stop plants back from growing back I think and that's the that's the key thing the idea that pre-industrialization we were affecting the weather up to the point where we could stop plants from growing in the north of Canada I think is a bridge too far for even the most anti-carbon dioxide uh fanatic to uh contemplate well I hope I hope so I never say never you know it's mind-boggling for me um if if thousands or millions of years ago we had those trees there and you know Earth survived enough for us to come out of this you know whatever was going on back then was it did not stop us from being here today being able to have this conversation and have all of these incredible technologies that we've built seems to me like anything that we can do with industrialization is going to pale in comparison because it's I mean it's gonna take a lot of even by the most fanatic exaggerated estimate of the impact of CO2 on temperature we're gonna need to burn a lot of fuel and oil and gas in order to get to the point where we can bring forests back to none of it in the north of Canada what did you say yeah that's true uh nobody really knows why it was so much warmer than but it was certainly not due to CO2 it clearly had something to do with different circulation patterns in the ocean and in the atmosphere it's too bad that you can't get money to study that because that's much more important and more interesting than this nonsense about CO2 which is uh you know it's a trivial thing except for the good things which are increasing plant productivity but it really is not having any effect on climate to speak of and it can't you know for very basic physics reasons you know you can I know this better than most I I know about radiation transfer a lot better than most climate scientists do you know yeah no I I would I would agree and I think you know the other good thing about carbon dioxide which isn't mentioned so yes it does green the world but of course also it does keep us warm and allow us to survive the winter and allow us to have electricity and then to have houses that can withstand the storms and build all these amazing technologies that have made our lives so much better I think of course the the the the the biggest glaring error here is this the idea that CO2 only has downsides you know it's boiling the oceans it's acidifying the oceans it's increasing global temperatures making the Earth uninhabitable so you exaggerate the downsides and on top of that I mean I'm not saying you when they exaggerate the downsides ignore the positives of Greening but I think most importantly they ignore the positives on human economic flourishing I mean our life without mass emissions of CO2 would be a lot poorer and I think of course it's it it's always striking to me that none of the people that are very very angry about the emissions of CO2 are willing to live a life that reduces their CO2 emissions I mean they want you to do it they want to pass laws that ban it they want to pass taxes they want to be in charge they want to get to centrally plan they want to get to force you to drive an electric car or force you to use this and that or the other thing instead of that you know use all these unworkable inferior Technologies instead of the more reliable things that we have but they still want to fly in their airplanes they still want to use computers that are impossible without massive amounts of cold there learning and massive amounts of industrial processing and all of that needs to be ignored and we want to only focus on the massively exaggerated idea that CO2 is driving temperature in some kind of crisis yeah you're right Dave let me go back to one of the things you mentioned which was ocean acidification and uh again the people who talk about this haven't got a clue of what acidification is or what CO2 does in the ocean but yeah approximately 50 times more CO2 is in the oceans than in the atmosphere and and we should be grateful for that because it's the CO2 that has turned the oceans from basically drain cleaner you know ocean is essentially a sodium hydroxide solution it's extremely alkaline it's about the same alkalinity as household amonga you know pH without CO2 would be about 11.3 you know which is extremely caustic the only thing that makes the oceans livable is the enormous amount of CO2 that's dissolved in them and we you know life depends on that without the CO2 the oceans would be uninhabitable so there are many good things that CO2 does and and yet all we hear is you know you know Carbon pollution you know it's it's absurd it's really absurd I know and and and and this is yet another one of these fields of research in which a lot of money has been plowed in and a lot of you know preconceived notions have been validated by supposedly scientific studies and upon closer inspection recently you know it became pretty clear that a lot of this evidence is pretty shoddy so these two scientists have looked into uh this is an article from science.org these two scientists went and tried to replicate some of the worst results about ocean acidification and they found that basically this has been massively exaggerated and this is a very interesting article and it's just it's a very common thing that you find in all of these Sciences in in all of these things like there's a there's a conclusion that once that they want to arrive at and the conclusion is Crisis the conclusion is things are bad things are going to be really bad and the only way for you to atone for your sins is to basically give me money more money to study things and more money to control your life and do it and it's you know at a certain point you can't ignore the pattern that you see with all of those things but did you agree I agree yeah it's really uh disappointing that the educated people actually seem to be yeah in more shape uh with respect to these superstitions and the ordinary people you know my taxi driver and my barber I have a lot more sense about climate and climate change than my academic colleagues you know and especially people who work outside you know farmers and folks like that you know they live with the client the real climate not something on a computer screen and they know perfectly well that every year is different and uh summer warmer summer colder some you get more rain some you get less to the uh normal person that that is second nature but to the the Highly Educated Elite you know who's gone to prep schools and to the best ivy league institutions and has never wrote a you know hold a row of corn it's just beyond them they can't grasp yeah yeah and and there's this tendency and temptation to need to find a smart justification for anything you know I've got a degree from this University that means I can explain everything so oh it's rained a lot this year but let me tell you why it rained a lot this year well no it's always going to you know we always measure rain and we're gonna get an average and we're gonna get some years in which it's below average some years and which is above average so I'm just going to be massive outliers on the one side uh other years is going to be massive Outlaws on the other side in in any natural phenomena you're going to get this kind of variation and some phenomena you're going to get extreme variations at some certain points this temptation that we need to find a justification for it is behind a lot of this but I don't think it's the only thing that's really driving all of this so I'm curious now like I think I'm very curious about your experience and your impression about why is this group thing so dominant in modern Academia why is it that so many professors who really should know better continue to do this I mean this is something I've speculated about and I've written about extensively and I analyze it from the economic perspective but I'm curious to hear your thoughts well I don't think it's a new phenomenon I think academics have always played by group think I recently looked up the witch hysteria in Germany and it started in the uh 1400s just before the Protestant Revolution Reformation I guess I should say you know the uh entire faculty of theology at cologne signed this uh this preface to the malius malikaram you know the Hammer of the witches saying that the witches are really the an existential threat to civilization you know just like climate today and and it was unanimous every single one of these people and they complained that there were all these silly people out there who wondered whether there really were such things as witches you know and even had the nerve to preach from the pulpit that you shouldn't be uh hanging witches you know that this was not a good thing they denied the science of witches the science of witches yeah it was a science yeah they they had journals they had you know important papers and you know when when we had the witch trials in Salem in in Massachusetts 1690 that was a lot later than you know the Germans so we should have learned something in those centuries but we didn't and every one of the judges had a Harvard degree every one of them and you know Cotton Mather was busy selling a book you know on how to detect and hang witches you know during the trial he made a lot of money wow so this is not new you know Academia has blood on its hands and it always has yeah and I mean it's really the biggest example of not learning from history to imagine that we've learned all of these lessons from history and that somehow we are all so very different from our ancestors who are around doing all this stuff over 100 years ago I mean at the end of the day all of the people that are alive today came from all the people that were alive back then so genetically we're not very different you know the people who were hanging witches uh they made children who today are among us and so we're not much better than them I'm sure you know we've invented a lot of technology I think I'm a big fan of technological Improvement and I think you know particularly hydrocarbon fuels have absolutely transformed our lives right and allowed us to live in a way that most of our ancestors can't imagine you know the the number of things that we take for granted like being able to stay warm in the winter is is astounding but that has not changed us you know we've hundreds of years of invention and Innovation and capitalism allowed us to develop this technology and popularize it and make billions of people worldwide comfortably survive the winter but that hasn't changed our inner wiring we're still the same group of people that would hang witches and that would go crazy over all kinds of hysterias we're not better than that and you don't need to posit some kind of giant evil conspiracy to get to the point of well why do all of those people believe that and this is this is another one of the things when you're trying to argue with people who believe the Earth is ending you know the chicken littles of climate there's like many of them don't even understand the science don't even want to understand the science they don't care about it and they'll just tell you so how do you explain that all of those people are wrong well I don't have to ask them you know the idea that just because the mob is going along chanting something then you know they can't all be wrong you know 100 out of 100 mob members agree that witches need to be hung so where is your uh what is your counter argument how do you explain all of them being wrong and the answer is I don't I can't I don't have to it's not up to me to explain why they're wrong it's up to them to explain why they're out there in a mob calling for lynching the technologies that make our life possible no you're right size and it's it is kind of discouraging you would hope that with better education that we wouldn't have this kind of problem you know but actually as we've discussed education seems to make it worse actually it doesn't make it better so I think the key word is better education I'm not sure education is getting better yeah well maybe uh I don't know what you do about it I you know going back to Salem many of the common people in Salem were Against The Witch Trials you know when they were hanging a particularly popular preacher you know they uh threatened to actually Lynch the hangman instead of the the alleged wish but you know for example he said let him say the Lord's Prayer you know if he can say the Lord's Prayer which it can't do that and and of course this poor guy said the Lord's Prayer perfectly and then Cotton Mather the guy selling the book on how to hang witches rode up on his White Horse and you know waved his sword to threaten the crowd and said hang him hang him it's the devil speaking so they hung him all right but but it would be it was driven from the top it was driven by the educated people and it was the common people who had the good sense and the humanity to object well I did not know about the Harvard role in the Salem Witch Trials I'm uh I mean I'm I'm the biggest anti-fan of Harvard there is I think there is no more damning indictment of somebody than saying that they're associated with Harvard generally it is the worst Market of quality and I think you know their track record with economics the economists that come out of Harvard are the absolute worst the nutritionists that come out of Harvard I think are the absolute worst and I think uh you could make the same case for many many scientists and so now I can add Salem which trials to the long list of distinctions that this incredible institution has missed out upon the world well there are Exceptions there are many very uh wonderful people who've come out of Harvard but a lot of bad ones too and that's true of every Universe certainly true of my University here at Princeton what good people came out of Harvard can you name one I can't um I think in the hard Sciences uh for example people I even knew you know I I really admired you know the physicist pound you know who embedded magnetic resonance or you know uh so I think the further you get away from policy the more Academia has to be proud of you know I'm a little unnerved about that given what happened during the covid you know episode but but in general the scientists at Harvard have been very good and they've had some spectacular astronomers for example at Harvard Lyman you know for whom you know Lyman Alpha radiation is named uh so they they can be proud of their their science so what is your assessment of Science in general in the modern University because here let me tell you uh how I come at this I was doing my PhD in sustainable development which was I mean we studied climate and we studied Natural Sciences but primarily the course was in economics and so my area of focus was economics and during my time there I became pretty disillusioned with the way that economics taught and I came to the conclusion that a lot of it is not very good it's just really then later on um I looked at nutrition critically and I came to the conclusion that what they tell us about food is horrible and it's primarily driven by industrial producers and by inflationary monetary policy which is where the economics comes in and that you know as inflation goes up prices of food go up and the way to fight inflation is for government to tell people hey you don't need to eat meat and all the nutritious things that make you strong and healthy here try some of this cheap Industrial instance that it's actually good for you so I think a lot of nutrition science is driven by the propaganda but the need for propaganda to tell people to eat Industrial Waste you know with climate I've come to also be very skeptical of a lot of the climate scientists because again this chicken littleism and then with covid I've come to completely distrust the field of epidemiology which I believe is also another form of pseudoscience because you know these people come up with graphs and numbers and think that diseases come pre-programmed as if we're playing a game of SimCity and so you know you you're gonna have to kill this many people for the disease to go through the society and that's not how it works health is an individual thing if a society is all healthy people you know covid would have very little success killing many of them if everybody's metabolically unhealthy covet is going to kill a lot these kind of things are ignored in epidemiology where they like to look at an aggregate from a macro perspective and that you find it in macroeconomics you find it in epidemiology you find it in nutrition and you find it in many of these sciences and climate and I think what drives it is the need for policy it's it's driven from a policy Maker's perspective and I think this is just a way to corrupt scientific inquiry when you come at it from the question of what should the policy maker do because the answer almost always is the policy maker shouldn't be doing anything and therefore if you need to find something for them to do you're going to try and torture the data and torture the theories until you can come up with something well I think yeah you're absolutely right you know there's a nice uh story about that where some you know sat trap in ancient Persia died and he went to heaven and uh Zeus said well what did you do when you were on Earth and uh the SAT trap said well actually I you know I I really didn't like working very much I had this nice cushy job and I had my assistant you know sign all the papers and take care of all the business well what did you do well I ate and I slept and I really didn't do anything and Zeus said great you know come into heaven and you know Mercury said what are you talking about father Zeus now how could you do that and Zeus says just think of the damage he could have done with all that power if he isn't serious so uh you know people can talk a lot of harm if they're trying to you know do a job but when there's no work really to do so they make work and it actually causes more harm than good I agree but what is what is your assessment of the hard Sciences do you think that they are getting into the same kind of problems I I'm no physicist I don't claim expertise in physics but maybe I'm prejudiced I think so far physics is doing okay you know they're addressing fascinating problems you know to my mind the most exciting one is the the missing matter what is it that holds the galaxies together Dark Energy Dark Matter so there are wonderful problems out there and and the best and the brightest are working on problems like that fortunately they don't have very much to do with policy so you know policy makers could hardly care you know what dark matter is and so I think the further scientific disciplines are from uh potential policy the healthier they will be and pure mathematics for example is pretty far from any policy and so I would say the I would say the the most basic parts of the of science are still okay but those that overlap with policy are in deep trouble because they're uh they've been sort of hijacked by people with agendas you know they're really not interested in scientific truth they're interested in getting agenda support you know with so-called science and so science gets invented to support this or that you know sometimes maybe it's worth supporting but many times it's not it's just you know wasting people's time and money freedom yeah yeah well what are your thoughts then on the ipcc that's about as policy based science as it gets what do you think of this as an organization and what do you think of their reports well I think some of the science especially in the early ipcc reports was very good you know if you read the scientific sections it's honest and it quite modest about planes of accuracy and uh reliability they uh were quite clear that many things were very uncertain in fact the first two or three reports said there's no evidence actually that humans have anything to do with the climate but then after uh a few years it was hijacked by the same you know policy zealots and then the quality began to go down I think every year they come out with a new reward and every year it brings less credit to the scientific parts of ipcc but it certainly started out well there were some good stuff in the early reports the scientific Parts again I stressed I'm not talking about the policy yeah and so currently I mean do you think their conclusions are justified by the data in terms of and and of course here it's very difficult because the the reports comprise many many many studies and I think you know the more people dig in the more they realize that as you go from laboratory to press release the sensationalism goes up and the rigor goes down right well ipcc has a problem you know they at least their leadership thinks that they have to maintain this crisis atmosphere you know that the world is coming to an end I think a number of the percent participants you know scientific participants are honest enough to sort of know that that's not true but they're afraid that they'll lose their jobs if they speak up the problem is that you know it's really not warming nearly fast enough yeah yeah I'm sure you know that that you know maybe it's warming at a tenth of a degree per decade but that's a third or or so of what has been predicted you know so the models are clearly uh just completely off they're running much much too hot and nobody knows how much of the warming that we're observing is due to CO2 as we discussed earlier probably some good fraction of it is just natural recovery from the little Ice Age which is still going on you know that doesn't happen immediately so I I think they know they're in trouble and I think you know the the smarter ones are hoping that they will retire and be uh indemnified against it you know prosecution for fraud you know before it becomes obvious that it was that it was a scam and they could keep juggling this for just another you know 10 years that they'll be safely retired yeah but I mean I I think they're now at the point where they need to start worrying about the fact that their hysteria might end up costing them electricity and the warmth this winter I mean we're at a world we're in a world now where Europe is really staring down the barrel of a gun that is the next winter sure of course you know the geopolitics of the situation and the destruction of the Nord stream pipeline are obviously a huge part of it but they are not the cause of Europe's problem the cause of Europe's problem is the Reliance on Russian gas and Reliance on Nordstrom which was driven by Decades of really CO2 hysteria it was driven by the idea that we are going to move away from reliable on 24-hour energy sources to use these unreliable sources that have been consuming mind-boggling sums of money I mean it's truly astounding Germany alone has spent about 500 billion dollars on wind farms which is just astonishing in terms of subsidies just the subsidies that they've paid for this is about 500 billion dollars which is enough to build roughly um gas capacity for Germany twice over like if it was 500 billion dollars you could you know you could get 80 million people in Germany and you could give them all gas plants that give them gas out of twice uh you know you or you could do it once and then with the rest of the money buy the gas or excavate the gas I mean if you think about it and I I don't support government Central planning I don't think this would be a good idea but I mean the government that can blow 500 billion dollars on wind farms could have blown it on gas fields and gas plants and then today nothing happening with Russia and Ukraine would affect German consumers you know they'd have their own gas Fields they'd have their own gas pipes they'd have their own gas plants and they'd have the cleanest source of fossil fuel out there and they'd have 24-hour electricity and they'd be warm in the winter and instead they're facing an absolute Calamity and I think it's it's gotten to the point now where people need to really I think wake up because up until a few years ago you know I'd been I I'd grown skeptical about this since I finished my PhD and I but I just was not very interested in it because I thought you know who cares a bunch of people like Al Gore are going to get rich off of this t-boon Pickens is going to make money from his biofuels and windmill stuff a bunch of uh smart entrepreneurs are going to capitalize on this make a lot of money from subsidies and all right who cares you know a lot of people are making a lot of money from all kinds of different things but only in the last two years or so did it become clear to me that it's not just that they're paying these people some money it's that they're dismantling the reliable infrastructure that is the basics basic building block of our civilization they're basically taking the solid foundation on which all of our civilization rests everything that we've built over the last 500 500 years all of the Technologies of the last 500 years have come from burning coal oil and gas and if you vilify these because of some insane hysterical fear of these gases we're not we can't keep all of these extremely Advanced products that are built on top of it you know we can't have laptops and um smartphones if we don't have massive coal gas and oil plants there's just no way around it and this is the dangerous thing about it this is why I think we you know this is why I've been emboldened to speak about this even though I get a lot of abuse about it and I get a lot of oh stay in your lane and what do you understand and um but I don't care you know I've I used to live in Lebanon and I saw a grid fail in Lebanon I I saw the grid get worse and worse and worse until it got to the point where it became unlivable and I left Lebanon because of that and at this point uh it's the reason I'm obsessed with this topic is a very selfish perspective I'd like my children to find a place in this world where they can grow up where they can have 24-hour electricity and not have to spend every day of their life worrying about electricity because I've lived that and I know just how absolutely destructive it is for your productivity for your happiness for your security to have to wake up every morning and think about where your electricity is going to come from and what time is it going to come and how to structure your life around that electricity that way of living versus the way of living where you just always know that any switch you flick is going to give you what you asked of it is just an enormous difference and if anybody listening who doesn't appreciate this difference I hope you never have to experience it unless of course you're calling for the dismantling of hydrocarbon infrastructure in which case I hope you do because maybe that'll be the wake-up call that you need well you know you're very touching on an important Point here which is that these uh crazy things often have to have a crisis to end something a little bit similar happened with say the uh eugenic movement which was very popular in the late 1800s early 1900s and Great Britain and in the United States other parts of the world at least in the United States you know gets found a whole generation of eugenics experts they were all frauds you know it was all nonsense but they had journals they had scientific meetings every little town had a Eugenics club and women would go there every Thursday and ring their hands about the the ruination of the good old Anglo-Saxon race you know and how all these dumb you know foreigners were coming in low IQ Eastern Europeans or Chinese and Japanese and it was just complete fraud complete fraud but everybody bought into it Alexander Graham Bell was a supporter of the presidents of Harvard and Princeton and Stanford supported Eugenics and although it was and there were many people like you back then who said look this is nonsense you know not none of the alleged science is true you you can see it's obviously wrong but it it didn't make any difference so it was not cured by uh sweet reason it was cured by the Nazis taking it over and then taking it to the extreme and so after that horrendous experience Eugenics finally had to uh own up to the fact that it was mostly nonsense and uh but it's a terrible way to end a uh to in a sort of a fanatic movement in humanity that it it has to end in a crisis like that but this may be necessary for the climate nonsense that some country or maybe Western Europe maybe California maybe Australia will have to do everything the Fanatics demand and then the world will have to witness what happens it's looking like it's going to be Germany again it's looking like it's going to be the famed efficiency of the Germans that's going to take these insane ideas to their logical conclusion yeah um they have pursued insane the industrialization with the same efficiency with which they have pursued their industrialization I mean German efficiencies world renowned and dismantling their efficient productive infrastructure you know they've gone to the point of dismounting nuclear weapons as well sorry nuclear uh plants as well and now I mean they have 500 billion half a trillion dollars worth of windmills which are basically silent and producing nothing for many many parts of the year and they don't just dismantle these uh reliable plants they Dynamite them they blow them up so you you can't go back and use them again yeah and I think I mean I I hope it doesn't get become a humanitarian crisis but it certainly looks like it it certainly looks like it's going to be a very very ugly winter and I mean I don't know uh yeah I mean obviously a lot of people die every winter from the cold this is just always the reality um thousands of people or I think it's I think it's about four million people every year who die from the cold it's just always the case cold is no joke and so Germany's cold of course is also extremely strong so this winter if it is a harsh winter nice it it could be absolutely horrific and I I wonder if that's going to be the kind of wake-up call because I I can see a shift in uh in people's Consciousness on this and there was a time in which you know you couldn't get invited to dinner parties if you said uh you thought wind energy was silly now it's becoming more and more common that a lot of people are saying you know would have been nice if we weren't so reliant on the wind blowing in order to have electricity now that we want to stand up to Russian invasion or so on so people are beginning to realize yeah the sun doesn't shine 24 7 and the wind doesn't blow 24 7 and that renders all these solar panels and windmills essentially Superfluous because you need to build reliable capacity that matches demand 24 7 and can meet the peak demand which can happen you know you could get Peak demand at a time when solar and wind are contributing zero so you need to build a capacity with reliable energy sources and that means that everything that you're spending on unreliable energy sources is just an extra cost it's not saving anything uh one argument I thought was the redeeming argument for the institution is that well at least when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining you're reducing the amount of fuel that your nuclear or coal or gas plants are consuming but it turns out that that is probably not true because the management of these plants apparently and what is becoming obvious now for engineers in places like Britain and Germany and Australia is that if you just ran a gas plant independently without having to hook it into all these pre-industrial Technologies is of sun and wind then you can manage the load and you can manage the operation of the plant much more efficiently than if you try and do it while you know basically being at the mercy of the Gods of the weather or so the sun is blowing all right let's turn down the Gas turbines or sorry the sun is shining turn down the Gas turbines the wind is blowing turn down the cast iron oh the wind stopped let's turn up the gas like that kind of inefficiency in managing these enormous reliable power plants makes it much more expensive to manage them and also reduces the life expectancy so um it's arguably not even saving you on fuel it's just all extra costs and degradation of our industrial capacity and our ability to provide a 24-hour grid which is something that the majority of the industrialized world had basically conquered by what the 60s that's true one of the reasons that for example a a hybrid car gets good fuel efficiency is because they run the gasoline engine at the maximum efficiency and and charge the battery and so they don't have startup and stop inefficiencies that when you're ramping up an engine or ramping down an engine engines run fast at a certain power level and if you're constantly uh turning them on and off the efficiency goes way down so you may be right that it there's actually no savings and I I don't know the numbers but but they're certainly not as much savings as you would think very much so yeah and I agree you've also done work on the ozone layer and the 1987 Montreal protocol on preventing ozone depletion what are your thoughts on that well that was sort of the uh why not we started the practice session you know for the climate hysteria was the ozone hysteria and that's when Al Gore got his start and uh and they always plan to go after carbon dioxide next they they admitted that at that time I was the director of energy research at Department of energy and we were funding a lot of that work and I I knew that you know what was being said in the Press was not what our researchers were finding for example the big worry about ozone was that it were uh removed from the upper atmosphere there would be more ultraviolet be reaching the surface it would cause more skin cancer and the problem with that argument was that measurements didn't show any decrease in UVB you know over most of the United States and any increase I should say in fact most places it showed decreases and for whatever the reason and the second was there was no correlation you could find between malignant skin cancer you know melanomas and UVB you know you would get melanova's on the soles of your feet you know where it was never exposed to ultraviolet so I was certainly in favor of uh uh doing something that would prevent damage but I I didn't see the evidence at the time and so I was I I would make these comments that where is the scientific evidence for all of this hysteria you're talking about I don't see it you know and I'm funding the work so I know so of course that that really irritated Al Gore and so when he won the election he couldn't wait to fire me and I was grateful to be fired I was able to go back to Princeton and do some honest research again [Laughter] uh yeah it's a generally a thankless task to be working yeah well you know the ozone hole is still there around Antarctica it probably had almost nothing to do with freon you know who nobody quite knows how it works even to this day yeah I think that we just as we were saying earlier I think the more educated you are the harder it is to just have the humility to say yeah well I I we don't understand everything in this enormous enormous planet on which we live yeah people really want to have the idea that our planet is like our home but it isn't you know we built the home from scratch before this home was built it was just an empty plot of land and then somebody turned it into a home and every single thing in that home was put there by somebody who's a human being like us so it's possible for us to understand it well the Earth is not like that there it was there before we were born likely before all of our ancestors were born and maybe we just don't have uh clear instructions Manual of how to handle those things maybe we just can't control it well we could we can control many things you know and we've done that's what's brought modern civilization we've learned how to make heat engines you know to provide the electricity that you mentioned and we've learned how to give good health care you know so that you know half the population doesn't die before the age of three and uh so you know knowledge really is power but pseudo knowledge is just the opposite and so so that's the problem is that you know I think there's this uh this uh Alexander Pope had this nice verse you know a little learning is a dangerous thing you know and it really is a dangerous thing you know you you learn things that aren't true and it's hard to dissuade you once you think you've learned that yeah especially when it becomes an identity as it is for many many people yeah tomato has a question for you she wants to ask you what do you think are the biggest kinds of pollution that bother you what are the real pollution problems out there if we say if the ozone and CO2 are not such calamities are there actual pollution problems that you lose sleep over well certainly you know if you go to Los Angeles you know the pollution is a lot better than it used to be but just the pollution from driving automobiles used to put lots of oxides of nitrogen in the air and you know volatile hydrocarbons in the air and so you could hardly see from one end of the the street to the other that's much better than it used to be because of catalytic converters and better control of emissions so that's the kind of pollution that we should be attacking cold plants are similar you know called when I was a kid I was a kid in Scotland and we ran Scotland all coal at that time and it was really filthy you know you go to school in the morning and by the time you came home you were just black the collar of your shirt was black you know from all the soot and the coal and people would you know get lung problems from breathing the Smoky air that's all gone now so that's real pollution so there we've done a wonderful job getting rid of real pollution they don't have peace to fogs in London anymore but that used to be very common so we we should focus on real pollution and uh get rid of that and uh not waste money on things that aren't pollutants at all in fact which are good for for the world yeah and I think you know the the the controversial thing here is that the way that people got rid of coal was not to dismantle coal plants and go back to using windmills and sunshine the way they did that was after after they used coal and got a lot more productive they could afford to move to natural gas and nuclear plants and that's the real energy transition that the world should have been focusing on in the last 50 years this is what I think markets would have achieved in the last 50 years the poorest places in the world I mean you may not like coal and of course yeah I agree with you it is a serious issue but realistically the realistic alternative to Coal for most people is not some Star Trek Immaculate existence where nothing gets burned but everything moves around magically the realistic alternative to call is poverty and the way out of coal is you know get rich with coal and then you can buy natural gas and nuclear plants which are much cleaner you could make quite good coal plants today that have almost no pollutants I mean I visited not long ago a Ultra super critical plant cold plant and Texarkana Arkansas it's the most modern plant in the U.S and we haven't built any fence but it was a September day and it was beautiful and blue sky and as we were driving toward the plant you know I thought oh the plant must be shut down because there was nothing coming out of the stack you couldn't see anything not even steam it was dry so there was no condensation from the uh Stacks or from the cooling towers yeah but when we got there it was running full blast it was subverting you know U.S coal from Wyoming and they showed us the pollution controls and they start by getting rid of the oxides of nitrogen you know because when you burn coal properly it's very very high temperature so you fuse oxygen and nitrogen and some of that comes out so they bleed in a little bit of anhydrous ammonia to clean out the oxides of nitrogen convert it all to N2 yes just ordinary nitrogen and then they clean out any residual sulfur with a lime bath and then they have big bag houses where they clean out the very last particles of fly ash so by the time it comes out the top of the stack you can't see anything all that's in it is water vapor and CO2 you can't get rid of those but they are both good for the world you know they're both completely natural they we breed both of them out every breath that we take you know people don't seem to realize that we're based on carbon you know everyone have raised out about two pounds of CO2 a day that's a lot of CO2 you know multiplied by eight billion people you know so it really worries me when you demonize something that comes from people does that mean you have to get rid of people it's it's a common meme that's become popular on the internet you are the carbon they want to reduce yeah um well some of them do you know some of them are quite honest about it they say you know the Earth can handle eight billion people we have to go down to less than a billion you know and so which seven out of eight of us has to commit suicide or you know it's it's a scary philosophy it absolutely is and what's really scary about it is that um you know if it wasn't for these insane philosophies we'd argue to be a lot richer and we'd be able to afford a much better quality of life for all eight billion people I mean I I think of all of the money that has been wasted on all of these renewable energy sources over the last 50 years in terms of subsidies and Investments and all the things that have been mandated for people to take part imagine if that stuff didn't exist at all and then just think about if all of that money was instead spent on modernizing and improving coal gas and nuclear power plants it's not unreasonable to expect that the entire planet would today have very cheap reliable 24 7 electricity I think it's just it's such a I wouldn't say trivial but it's such a straightforward problem and it increases people's productivity so much if you just you know build a small little gas plant and then suddenly everybody has got electricity and then their productivity goes up enormously the ability to survive winter goes up enormously the ability of premature babies to make it increases enormously all of that really doesn't require a lot of investment coal plants and gas plants are ridiculously cheap when compared to wind and solar and all those things so imagine if we hadn't wasted all that money on that imagine just how much better the quality of life would be so ironically people look at the impoverishment of you know we've had these Technologies for more than a century now we've had power plants for almost a century maybe and we have billions of people who don't have access to one of those things and then you look at that poverty which is because they don't have access to that technology and they think ah the Earth can't fit all of us and then the solution clearly is we need to get rid of all of us or most of us yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know if they want to control population they it's very clear that that's easy to do all you do is make people prosperous and then you know women don't have as many children and you have to kind of bribe them to to sustain the population you know they don't want to have a bunch of kids you know it's uh it's a lot of trouble and well all countries you know United States would be losing population if it weren't for immigration you know because people don't have enough children to uh sustain the population and that's true of most of Western Europe it's true of Russia you know population growth there's a feature of poverty so if you want rational populations then you want to make people prosperous and you can't make them prosperous without letting them have fossil fuels so yeah there's just no way of escaping that and our next seminar we're hosting Alex Epstein who wrote a book called fossil future and the moral case for fossil fuels which really very powerfully makes that case and I think he's he's absolutely correct on it yeah absolutely now Nathan has a question for you on coal plants okay yeah you already covered that so I'm going to change the question too are you uh are you I by the way I've read a lot of your work over the years it's it's really good to cross paths thank you much thank you Nathan are you aware of any kind of analysis regarding distribution what forty in uh in California with the idea that they're going to have all electric cars assuming that somehow is a good idea how big a wire would it take to feed electricity into LA to charge those cars that has to be the distribution problem I never hear anybody talk about it as if all of these tanker trucks just magically appeared one day the energy distribution is a big problem no it is a huge problem and people just refuse to come to terms with that that the California grid today cannot possibly you know service all electric vehicles in California can't be done and the cost to bring it up you know to standard to do that is just enormous just the last summer for example people were forbidden to charge the few electric cards they had you know because the grid already was overloaded and uh this is this is with uh just one or two percent electric cars but they were already a problem so to make them all electric it's just crazy you know you can't do it they will learn you know by bitter experiences as one of these crises that we were talking about earlier so in some ways I I'm delighted that California has done this I wish they would do more you know the crazier they are the quicker we'll get to the end of this yeah feed them all the Rope we can exactly yeah you know uh what's the kitty's name his name is Samson oh my wife walked by and appreciate she doesn't live off to it very well he's a very cowardly cat well Professor hatford this has been absolutely fascinating and eye-opening I thank you so much for all the work you've done for the courage of standing up for the courage of speaking up for using your position and your title to speak the truth when it would have been so much easier and more lucrative for you to go along with the witch lynching mob it's really a pleasure and an honor to be talking to you and I thank you so much for uh joining us and for everything you do well thank you Saif and you keep spreading the truth too we need you thank you sir I appreciate it bye-bye have a good day bye-bye [Music] [Music]

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Keywords: Saifedean Ammous, Bitcoin, Crypto, Latest Interview, Bitcoin Standard, Fiat Standard, Saifedean, Ammous, William Happer, climate, Climate change saifedean, Climate physics, Bitcoin climate change

Id: 5Uf_AbyG6ho

Length: 83min 59sec (5039 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022