Climate Science: What Does it Say? | Dr. Richard Lindzen | EP 320

so the Hebrews created history as we know it don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest ethical Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question while 97 of scientists agree that climate change is real which is different than saying that global warming is Real by the way but 97 percent of scientists agree and so and now we're hearing from Dr Richard lindsen and he doesn't agree but 97 percent of scientists do so why the hell should we listen to Dr lindsen there are some issues where I think you could say there was a hundred percent agreement for instance if you were to say CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding it will probably create some warming I don't think too many people would disagree I think the only thing would be how much and many people would think it would be negligible but no one would disagree with that given this telephone game where you can say something perfectly innocent and the politicians can interpret it as saying oh so you agree that we'll have warming and that warming however small you know they'll assume is the end of the world well yeah this agreement but it's not agreement with what they're ultimately claiming that it's an existential threat [Music] hello everyone I'm going to continue today my inquiry into the fraught realm let's say of of climate science the so-called settled climate science I'm talking today to Dr Richard lindsen he's an accomplished Professor atmospheric physicist and meteorologist having authored over 200 scientific papers and contributed to Landmark theories in the realm of ozone photochemistry atmospheric tides and most recently climate stability holding a rare view in opposition to mainstream science or perhaps not so rare lindsen disagrees on the role of water vapor in current climate change models and argues that alarmism is widespread aided by political consensus not unlike the once popular research on Eugenics Dr Richard lindsen is a dynamical meteorologist he has contributed to the development of theories for the Hadley circulation hydrodynamic instability Theory internal gravity waves atmospheric tides and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the stratosphere his current research is focused on climate sensitivity the role of cirrus clouds in climate and the determination of the tropics to pull temperature difference his academic degrees are all from Harvard University he is the recipient of various Awards and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences the American geophysical Union the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the advancement of science between 83 and 2013 he was the Alfred P Sloan professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT he assumed Emeritus status as of July of 2013 prior to 83 he held professorships at the University of Chicago and Harvard University he's also been a distinguished visiting scientist at the jet propulsion laboratory as well as a visiting professor at the Hebrew University Tel Aviv University the ecole normal Superior the University of Paris and Kyushu University the first thing we're gonna determine before we dive into the topic at hand is why it might be reasonable and important to listen to Dr lindsen so we're going to go through his academic background and uh then we'll proceed to the to the main issue so where you you did your undergraduate degree at Harvard yeah if I if that's right in physics from 1960 let's start from there okay yeah I graduated from Harvard uh in physics 1960s so it was a long time ago I realized at that point that I really enjoyed classical physics and actually modern physics seemed in some ways intimidating so I continued in graduate work in Applied Mathematics now Harvard was different from other places in applied math places like NYU were very heavy into the theoretical aspects of Applied math Harvard applied math with solving problems with applied math and they're heavily into problems in meteorology and other things and so I ended up doing a thesis that was really atmospheric physics it was the interaction of fluid motions and chemistry and radiative transfer mostly in the stratosphere and there were a lot of good problems I enjoyed it the one problem with it was there was very little experience with data and so I went for a postdoctoral study period at the University of Washington and there was a superb data analyst uh dick Reed who is on the faculty there he's now deceased uh and after that I went to Norway for a year and there was a very able and Famous Dynamic meteorologists there aren't Eliason and that was also a pleasure and during that time I began working on some other problems ranging from tides in the atmosphere to some problem called the quasi-biennial oscillation uh you may not realize it but the wind over the equator at about 15 kilometers roughly plus or minus 10. uh goes from east to west for one year turns around goes the other way for another year the average period is actually about 26 months and that had been a puzzle and um we managed to find a solution to that puzzle as to how that worked probably be too complicated to explain it involves you know random waves generated by the cumulus clouds and the Tropics interacting with the flow and forming something that essentially would be called a relaxation oscillator and that's actually held up pretty well for almost 50 years or 60 years so as theories go that did well there was also a problem with Tides I mean people familiar with tides in the ocean know that they're primarily 12 hour lunar tides and they're lunar Tides because the moon although much less massive than the sun is so close that its perturbation to the gravitational potential is greater than that of the Sun but then it was observed that in the pressure at the surface in the Earth the tides were also primarily semi-diurnal that is say 12 hours but solar and so that was a bit of a puzzle because that had to be thermal and uh Lord Kelvin in the 19th century was asking you know given that the 24-hour component was much stronger why was it 12 hours and he suggested the atmosphere was resonant at 12 hours and then actually dominated the literature until the late 50s president meaning what meaning you know let's say you have a oh a violin or something he's stroking you get a certain note that's because it's resonant at that note it right displays that vibrates yeah and so people had figured out you know how it might be resonant and so on but after World War II when one had Rockets one realized the atmosphere was not the way it had to be to be resonant and we figured out why the 24-hour got trapped and so that was kind of fun as problems like that that make in some ways atmospheric science meteorology geology geophysics kind of fun it's they're great Fields so so you like the you like the physics on you liked physics a little bit more on the concrete side a little bit more data driven a little bit more down to earth than the theoretical realm and then so you said you were at U Washington to do a postdoc and then you went to Norway what happened after that and then they went to the National Center for atmospheric research and I was the staff scientist there and uh there was a sort of reason for it it was slightly cynical um some of my classmates had gone into Academia and I was watching it what a horror show being an assistant professor was you had insecurity you had a heavy teaching load you didn't have time to do the research so I decided that I would stay at a research center until I was off for tenure I was after a couple of years offered a 10-year post at the University of Chicago [Music] and um that was a very nice experience I loved Chicago [Music] and but my wife was a little bit insecure about the crime situation on the south side of Chicago and uh when Harvard made an offer of a chair we accepted it I left Chicago and we came to Harvard and uh I spent about 10 years there as a was I think eventually I was surprised the Gordon McKay Professor then it was some other chair but uh I had a close colleague at MIT Jewel Charney who was a preeminent Dynamic meteorologist but also a very interesting guy good friend and he died and that has offered his chair at MIT and I took when was that that had to be uh the early 80s okay so I should just point out for everyone who's watching and listening that uh this is a pretty what would you call it Stellar academic track so first of all an undergraduate at Harvard and then um applied PhD work at the post-doc level in a variety of different places including research institutions but the fact that Dr lindsen was offered tenure at uchicago a tenured position to begin with that's not the normal uh mode of making an entry way into Academia usually you start as an assistant professor and so that's untenured and it's very rare to be offered a first-time job as a tenured professor was that associate level or full professional that was associate I wasn't promoted until a few years later right and then okay so from the University of Chicago then you were offered a Harvard chair and I want to point out to everyone who's watching and listening again that that's very rare So at Harvard the the hiring streams are really broken into two segments and so you have faculty members who are hired as assistant professors so that's the most junior level of Professor and those positions are not tenured at the Ivy Leagues generally speaking and so what the Ivy Leagues do is bring in promising young people at the assistant level but turn them over and that gives lots of people a chance to work at the Ivy Leagues and it gives the students a chance to be in contact with Dynamic young researchers let's say and that but the second hiring stream and the more important one is the senior professors and that's usually at associate or full Professor level and what Harvard did when I was there that was in the 90s was and I am sure the practice still uh still continues and is characteristic of IVs in general is they look all over the world for the people who are doing the top research in their areas at a relatively senior level and then make them an offer see if they can entice them to come to Harvard and so that doesn't happen to very many people it's very very rare occurrence it's not that huge university Harvard and there aren't that many professorships so to be offered a chair there is uh well it's a mark of I would say Universal esteem devoted directed towards a given Professor within the confines of their research and they have to have made quite a splash on the research front for that to happen and then to move from Harvard to MIT well the same thing is the case there because well Harvard and MIT battle it out for priority let's say for the most prestigious and high qual highest quality University in the U.S and possibly in the world could have an argument about that but to move from Harvard to MIT is is well that's another indication of a stellar academic career so you went to MIT in the 1980s yeah and uh you then you you were there until you retired yeah until uh I retired formally in 2013. but you know they've been good to me I have an office and you know some assistance occasionally and of course one of the things is you you no longer have students well that's a bit of a drawback of occasionally however have colleagues and even you know at the end of it for reasons that are obvious I had almost no funding uh but there were some postdocs who were paid who paid their way from South Korea so that was helpful men is it time to stop mindless scrolling time to finally gain that higher quality of life you know you're missing out on if this sounds familiar then on January 9th join thousands of men all over the world to embark on a 90-day journey together in search of a better life it's called Exodus 90 and it was built to help men enjoy the freedom of becoming who they were truly made to be Exodus 90 guides you in removing the attachments that are holding you back from a better life and it actually works independent research shows that Exodus 90 men report considerable shifts after the first 90 days including stronger satisfaction rates in their marriages more meaningful prayer lives and dramatic decreases in time spent on their phones for the past seven years Exodus has helped more than 60 thousand men build a road map for living with virtue in a culture that offers far too many paths to self-destruction is it time for your Exodus we start January 9th find resources to prepare for Exodus at exodus90.com Jordan that's exodus90.com Jordan so so did you have a preference for Harvard or MIT in terms of the students you encountered not really I mean the students I encountered changed over time more than they changed with place uh when I came to Harvard the students in my area were I would say in some ways coming from math and physics mostly they were the Overflow and there were lots of kids studying math and physics so they were good and you know very good in fact and that was sort of true when I came to MIT but by the 90s things changed a little bit um first of all good students were not entering physics and math at the level that they had once had did the best students often were going into Finance things like that right right and so there was no overflow and I think there was a slight change in the nature of students uh they were not as theoretical they were more model oriented and so on uh there was also a change at MIT which was not something we wanted which is it was getting harder and harder to find people working with data and so the students were getting less experience with actual data but those are changes I mean compared to current changes they probably were minor I mean at the moment uh I just find it strange there's so much emphasis on racism in the neurosciences and so on I'm I'm sort of glad I'm not teaching at this point yeah yeah it's that that one-trick pony that ideological insistence that something approximating critical race Theory should dominate every single discipline and and it gives people who really have no background whatsoever in these fields the opportunity to dominate and it's it's really quite an appalling thing to see yeah we'll see one other thing too which is the uh vast increase in both numbers power and importance of Administrators yes yes definitely yeah I mean yeah well you know it's I I I think in some ways we live inside a giant whale carcass that's walking on the beach and well really it's it's a good biological metaphor and there's there's plenty of food for everyone for a very short period of time and the administrative overload in the university is something remarkable to behold especially because it's been built on the backs of students and their student loan their student loan oh yeah but it's like indentured servitude I would say it's it's more than that um it's you know you now have administrators certainly outnumbering faculty and in many places outnumbering faculty and students um and they need money but they do not do the functions that the university gets paid for teaching research and so on and so we have overhead on the grants and that has become critically important um the more overhead the better the administration likes you so you know if you have a big Laboratory you'll have more overhead than someone who does theory and if if you're interested well when I was there we were paying about 50 percent in overhead costs yeah remember correctly for a given Grant so scientists spent about a third of their time in the United States it's one of the reasons I was actually happy to come back to Canada as the scientists I knew in the U.S were spending one third of their time writing proposal taking a shot at about a five percent chance at getting a large Grant and 50 percent of that went to overhead yeah it was quite the it was quite the waste of time for the scientific Community because that meant you know the brightest people um in in our community were spending 30 30 percent of their time at least writing grants that had a pretty low probability of success yeah instead of and then you know the well and you know of course that the problem with writing grounds is that they you tend to have to study trendy topics and you also can't be very daring you have to take the next obvious step in some real sense and only in the improved Direction and so that whole granting system to me looked like looked like something approximating the death of exploratory science well that actually also evolved over time when I entered Academia the National Science Foundation actually had very few staff and they were eager to give out money there wasn't that much demand for it uh right but as the administration grew there was also I mean the administration plays a large role in the behavior of departments uh young faculty today I mean are sunk if they don't get grants oh yeah and um when we get to climate you don't get grants if you question the current narrative so so let okay so let let's delve into that a bit when you were at MIT and and and at Harvard how many how many papers have you published approximately between your colleagues 250 or so okay so for those of you who are watching and listening and correct me if you think I'm making an error in proposition here so when I was uh working as a faculty member we kind of had a rule of thumb in the psychology department which was that if a student prepared three publishable papers that were sequentially linked added an introduction to that in the conclusion we would basically accept that as a thesis and so the rough equivalence was three published papers equals a PhD thesis and you've published 250 papers so in some real sense that's equivalent to 80 phds now what do you think of that for a light and logic not much but to be honest okay so well I'm trying to give everyone well I'm trying to give everyone watching and listening yeah since well if you don't really know what it means to have a publication record like that well I mean because so that's what I'm trying to elucidate yeah I think it's also a matter that has changed with time I mean people like well Jill Charney who I mentioned who is the leading figure in Dynamic meteorology probably published 60 papers aren't Eliason who is also a terrific influence something that order the pressures to publish have increased and so people's behavior is different also publication has become a very different issue [Applause] um you probably know that before World War II peer review was very rare and if I have students read papers from the 19th century or the early 20th century they're quite surprised to read them why because they're informal their Communications they're not assertions of Truth they are looking for truth uh and um you know after the war for a variety of reasons peer review entered largely because there was too much demand for publication may even have been a shortage of paper but for instance the quarterly Journal of the royal Meteorological Society in the UK had a wonderful statement of what the reviewer was supposed to do and it said you can only reject a paper for two reasons one is an overt mathematical error or lack of originality the paper then would be discussed at the monthly meeting and the discussion would be included with the paper there is no essential thought that peer review I mean peer review the public has been made to think that this is the certification of the paper that it is somehow proven right now it's fact right right yeah and it's nothing of the sort it is to see if the stuff is interesting and it's not overtly wrong mathematically and not uh plagiarized uh on the other hand it's become something more um I mentioned you know I had two papers that appeared in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that dealt with climate and my objections to the current narrative in various ways and they got published they got reviewed but in both cases the editor was fired immediately and oh yeah oh that's cute that was when well when did that happen one was uh 2000 uh one was 1991 or two and the other one was so you're on this early oh yeah well you know this issue actually began in the 60s right and um it was clear there was a lot of hunting around for some environmental issue that would give people power on the energy set over the energy sector and so you know you had Earth Day in the early 60s but then you had global cooling and the villain there was that was the 70s yeah well it was 60s and 70s and continued to the 70s and the notion there is you wanted to get rid of coal-fired plants because they were polluting and creating sulfates that were reflecting light and causing global cooling he also had acid rain at that time yep and again get rid of the energy sector and both of those turn out to be Duds and the This Global mean temperature metric whatever it is started increasing the 70s so they said well this won't go and for a number of reasons CO2 came into the issue one of the reasons was the international geophysical year began a measurement program for CO2 at monologue Observatory Hawaii and this was uh Charles Keeling and it was promoted by a man called Roger Ravel who was director at Scripps which is an oceanographic institution in California anyway they noticed CO2 has been increasing and the evidence is it's been increasing since the industrial era began but serious levels or at least measurable we're being reached in the 50s 60s where it was perhaps significant in terms of heating and why did they start measuring it well curiosity yeah okay okay so so that was just that was they were just curious to begin with yeah I mean it's an interesting chemical it plays a role in the I mean photosynthesis it's vital we have you know like 40 000 parts per million in our breath so you know it's an interesting substance and part of the reason it's interesting is of course that it has infrared absorption and so it plays a role in what is called the greenhouse effect okay so they found it and the question then was uh what are the implications but more than that if you are interested in controlling the energy sector is the fact that no matter how clean you made the burning of fossil fuels you would inevitably be left with the product of clean burning which was CO2 I see I see so this was one you couldn't get rid of it uh pollutant I see I see so not a police fossil fuel energy became they were never going to get rid of carbon dioxide just like that was a good now what why do you think there was attempts to you you talked about control of the energy sector why why bring that into it well I mean your guess is as good as mine but it obviously is at the heart of Industrial Development it's the heart of the prosperity of the West you had all these malthusian movements Paul Ehrlich John holdren zero population growth um and you know you see now I mean a kind of antipathy to the working middle class I you know you begin to feel there were people who resented the fact that ordinary people were aspiring to live decently have a car own a house and for some reason I think that's warm yeah right um you know have a dishwasher and I don't know why but there is almost an antipathy to this fear off right with Black Rifle coffee Black Rifle has all the best Brewing gear thermoses mugs and apparel designed for folks who love country and coffee Black Rifle sources the most exotic Rose from around the globe he is roasted here in the U.S by veteran-led teams of coffee experts every purchase you make with Black Rifle helps support veteran and first responder causes go to Black riflecoffee.com and use promo code Jordan for 10 off coffee Coffee Gear and apparel or join the Black Rifle coffee club for automatic deliveries to your door on your schedule save 10 with promo code Jordan that's black riflecoffee.com promo code Jordan Black Rifle coffee supporting veterans and America's coffee foreign I was talking to Alex Epstein recently he wrote a book called fossil fuel oh yeah he uh yeah he attempted to lay out some of the you might think theological or metaphysical presuppositions underlying this and you know your comment on Envy is an interesting one that you know there's some antipathy towards having ordinary people thrive which is a pretty nasty form of antipathy his point was that the male two so there's I guess there were two one on the melthusian front and one on the more quasi-religious front is that there's an idea that the only acceptable natural landscape in some real sense is one that's been completely Untouched by human beings and so if that's your presupposition to begin with then anything that has to do with industry is going to be let's say persona non grata and then if you combine that with this malthusian notion which we could go into a little bit so the malthusian notion for everyone watching and listening is it's based on something like a petri dish model so a petri dish is an enclosed plastic container that has a medium in it often agar which is a kind of gelatin that you can grow microorganisms on and if you throw a microorganism in there it'll start to multiply until it eats up all of the agar and then it'll all die and so there's this idea that's in some sense a biological idea that populations left to their own devices will multiply until they devour all their resources and then they will perish on mass and the malthusian predictions of population collapse that started to emerge in the 60s were based on this petri dish model in some real sense and the problem with that model is that it isn't obvious that single-celled organisms are a good metaphor for human beings because we're capable of extremely radical adaptation and transformation whereas single-celled organisms just basically run out something like an algorithmic program even though they're quite complex and so the notion that human populations are destined to a malthusian end is not what would you call it it is not it cannot it is not a canonical biological fact let's put it that way but it's certainly driving a lot of this sort of thing we're talking about yeah I mean it's a little bit tricky in a sense what motivates people it's clear that at the top they have no interest in restricting their own consumption um it's also very much I mean you know when you try and figure out what's the right population I guess in some sense you could say there must be some limit but you know you look at India in my lifetime I mean uh before independence and even shortly after its population was what under 200 million and famine was common and today it's 1.3 billion and they're food exporters right right yeah I just saw a chart the other day too that showed that over about the last 10 years uh a fair bit of Farmland has been taken taken out of production and some of that's reverted to the Wild and yet despite there be less Farmland being used now the the amount of food that the world is producing is still increasing at a pretty damn rapid rate and so it isn't obvious at all what the upper bound is for population capacity oh yeah I mean uh you know agriculture has become far more efficient and you know this leads to this peculiar emphasize emphasis on uh uh food that has not used fertilizer and so on uh you know which yeah we're not at that point yet that would lead to starvation without ammonia it's four billion people would die without ammonia fertilizer that's the estimates at the moment yeah I mean so I everything about this is is sort of nuts uh Alex Epstein who you mentioned is you know pointed this out but it it's kind of obvious I've noted this I mean you could uh do everything you know bury the Europe very uh the US Canada get rid of all their emissions period all dead and buried and it would make very little difference to the growth of CO2 since most of the world uh is not this stupid as to commit suicide and so if you really believe the cataclysmic claims which have no scientific basis but let's say they're true you're doing nothing to stop it on the contrary you're impoverishing your societies and making them less resilient because if you think natural disasters are coming where would you rather be today Haiti or in Chicago or New York or Los Angeles well it's also the case it what's also the case that I don't I don't see any evidence at all because you could make a case I arguably if you believe the carbon dioxide climate catastrophe narrative you could make a case that it's ethically required to impoverish people if you could demonstrate that that impoverishment actually produced uh let's say a decrease in carbon output but that certainly isn't what's happened in Germany since Germany's gone madly Green in fact there are energy their energy production is much less efficient than it was 10 years ago and it's five times as expensive and it pollutes far more yeah and so my sense is that and I think the data bear this out too is that if you provided people with cheap clean energy on a world basis and eradicated absolute poverty or at least ameliorated to the degree that was possible then people start caring about the long term and they start working for environmental preservation of course at a local level and that's a far more effective way of taking care of the planet so not only do you impoverish people you impoverished people and make the planet worse and as far as I can tell that's just essentially unforgivable so why do you think so two things we left uh we left something hanging you said two editors got fired one in 1992 when was the second one who got fired for published after that you wrote 2001. it was immediate 2001. okay and so now what what when when you started to object to the narrative what narrative were you objecting to and what grounds this is vaccine 92 what narrative were you objecting and what grounds were you objective you're touching on something that took me a while to understand um you know gerbils famously said you know if you tell a big enough lie and repeat it often enough it'll become the truth there's been a lot of that in this but there are aspects of establishing the narrative I.E what makes something the truth that I hadn't appreciated so the narrative was the climate is determined by a greenhouse effect and adding CO2 to it increases it causes warming and moreover the natural greenhouse substances besides CO2 water vapor clouds upper level clouds will amplify whatever man does now that immediately goes against Le chatelier's principle which says if you perturb a system and it is capable internally of counteracting it it will and our system is and you think that applies okay so that's that's a very germane issue because well but let me even if please go ahead let me finish because okay so that was a little bit odd you began wondering where did these feedbacks come from and uh immediately people including myself started uh looking into the feedbacks and seeing whether there were any negative ones or how did it work but underlying it and this is what I learned if you want to get a narrative established The crucial thing is to Pepper it with errors questionable things so that the critics will seize on that and not question the basic narrative the basic narrative in this sense was that climate is controlled by the greenhouse effect in point of fact the earth's climate system which has many regions but two distinct different regions are the tropics roughly the minus 30 to 30 degrees latitude and the extra Tropics outside of 30 degrees plus or minus they have very different Dynamics in the tropics The crucial thing for the Earth by the way and this is a technicality and much harder to convey than saying that greenhouse gases are a blanket or that 97 percent of scientists agree this is actually a technical issue the Earth rotates now people are aware of that we have day and night but there is something called the Coriolis effect when you're on a rotating system it gives rise to the appearance of forces that change the winds relative to the rotation and the only component of the rotation is the component that is perpendicular to the surface so at the pole the rotation vector is perpendicular to the surface at the equator it's parallel to the surface it's zero and this gives you phenomenally different Dynamics so where you don't have a vertical component to the rotation Vector motions do what they do in the laboratory in small scales if you have a temperature difference it acts to wipe it out and so if you look at the tropics the temperatures at any surface are relatively flat they don't vary much with latitude on the other hand you go to the middle attitudes extra Tropics there the temperature varies a lot between the tropics and the pole we know that I mean temperatures are cold at high latitudes and if you look at changes in climate nearest history what they consist in is a Tropics that stays relatively constant and what changes is the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole during the Ice Age it was about 40 degrees Centigrade today it's about it was about 60. today it's about 40 during 50 million years ago something called the eocene was about 20. and so that's all a function of what's going on outside the tropics within the tropics the greenhouse effect is significant but what determines the temperature change between the tropics and the pole has very little to do with the greenhouse effect it is a dynamic phenomenon based on the fact that if you have a temperature difference with latitude it generates instabilities these instabilities take the form of the cyclonic and anti-cyclonic patterns that you see on the weather map now the tropics are very different I mean you know even a casual look at a weather map the systems that bring us weather travel from west to east at latitudes outside the traffic tropics within the tropics they travel from east to west the prevailing winds are opposite in the two sections and where saying that what changes due to the greenhouse effect however you look at it is Amplified at the poles that is not true there's no physical basis for that statement all they do is determine the starting point for where the temperature changes in mid-latitudes and that's determined mainly by hydrodynamics okay that's complicated to explain to someone and yet and yet it's the basis for claiming that these seemingly large small numbers you know they're saying if Global mean temperature goes up one and a half degrees it's the end that's based on it getting much bigger at high latitudes and determining that but all one and a half degrees at the equator would do or in the greenhouse part of the Earth is change the temperature Everywhere by one and a half degrees which for most of us is less than the temperature change between breakfast and lunch and the thought that this is the end of the world it's a little bit all right so let's let's play devil's advocate here first and so let me lay out the narrative and correct me if I've if I've got it wrong so first of all the world at the moment is making a big deal out of climate and associating climate change with the greenhouse effect the trapping of heat and they're associating we're all associating the greenhouse effect with an increase in carbon dioxide and at least initially we were associating that increase in climate in carbon dioxide with with global warming and then we've added the proposition that well not only will there be warming say of up to a degree and a half or two degrees by the end of the century uh and and maybe there's some variation in those predictions but we're also looking at a system that's characterized by a variety of positive feedback loops and those the danger here is that a one and a half degree increase might not be catastrophic but that that might trigger a sequence of cataclysmic events we hear sometimes about the melting of the Greenland ice ice cap for example the rapid rise in sea level that would occur as a consequence the increase of 10 temperatures out the pools the release of methane as a consequence let's say of the permafrost thawing and then a runaway greenhouse effect because of that and you evinced some skepticism well about the whole narrative but also more particularly and perhaps more importantly you don't sound like you're a big fan of the idea of runaway positive feedback loops oh well there are a lot of things enmeshed in what you've said even the one and a half degree depends on the positive feedbacks otherwise CO2 would be even less significant much less significant so those you know you assume that water vapor increases and amplifies it but the whole picture is one-dimensional so you know it's you'd have to know the area where water vapor is important and it goes through a mess of things and we know now that that probably isn't occurring even people who support the narrative so you keep the water vapor isn't amplifying carbon dioxide effects uh if it is it has to be considered as part of an infrared feedback and nobody is detected that that is actually positive okay okay well I I heard that I read that the punitive contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming is less than the margin of error for measurement of the effect of water vapor yeah do you know if that's that's true that's really sad if that's that's that's really sad if that's true it is true if you want to mention if you want to measure it rather than hypothesize it then what you're saying is true it's been hypothesized in other words so we're we're planning on spending two trillion dollars to remediate a problem whose magnitude is so small that it could easily be hidden within another measurement error on the water vapor front I think so but I mean that's really quite something um no I mean it's caught the fancy of the political world I mean I'll give you an example of it you know we're falling into the Trap I mentioned you know going along with the narrative because it has so many weaknesses uh ignores the fact that the whole picture of the greenhouse is misconceived okay well let's not go too far down that rabbit hole because I'd like to stay focused on on the critique of the major narrative yeah no I mean you know I'm quite willing to talk about the other problems yeah but the fact that you don't have this polar amplification you know that it's going to be bigger at high latitudes it may be but it's not due to the greenhouse it's due to processes and the extra Tropics where the greenhouse is secondary by a long shot there there's one example of what you're saying and it helps I think understand why this issue gets so distorted um in one of the International Panel on climate change you know this un body uh reports I think the third report somewhere in the early 2000s where I was the lead author but that we can get to that later in any case uh they have this thousand pages that deals with the science has no index is totally unreadable and then they have a summary for policy makers which isn't really due to the scientists and they can manipulate the text because that comes out six months before the text of which it's a summary but you know they know people aren't even going to read that so you you have the Thousand Pages they're not going to read then you have 20 Pages they're not going to read and so you have the press release and the press releases the iconic statement and that's what gets the headlines so the iconic statement was they now are I forget how that's how certain that uh most of the warming since 1960 is due to man okay uh in truth that doesn't mean much it was about a half degree it was most consistent with the climate being relatively insensitive it was basically a statement there's not much of a problem here but they didn't say that they just said most of the warming since 1960 is due to man all of a sudden what is most mean does does most mean 95 or 51 percent could mean 51 percent yeah okay even if it meant a hundred percent it wouldn't matter it was small yeah got it but how did Senators McCain and Lieberman respond to that they come out immediately with statement this is the Smoking Gun we must do something so as long as the scientists can make innocent remarks and be assured that politicians will convert them into alarm and increase funding why are they going to complain and so you have this Insidious uh interaction where scientists and you know there's another guy Bill Steve coonan who's written this book and I know Steve well and you know the point is he could use the documents that are cited on behalf of alarm [Music] to say look nobody here is saying it's the problem that the environmentalists and the politicians are saying where did this come from and the answer is it came well Bjorn lomberg has done the same thing I mean he accepts the ipcc predictions essentially with some criticism but says look well if they're right this is straight from the horse's mouth let's say with regard to the U.N even if they're correct that'll mean two things the first is we'll be slightly less Rich than we would have been a hundred years right now because economic growth is so high and we won't even notice that in some real sense but even if it's slightly bigger than we predict we're so good at adapting and you can see like the curves for example in terms of number of people who are dying from natural disasters each year which has declined precipitously over 100 years we're so good at adapting that the probability that we can just adapt to this is a hundred percent now that of course me that assumes that there are none of these runaway positive feedback loop effects but my problem with that on the scientific front was well how the hell do you predict a runaway positive feedback loop you can't predict that as far as I can tell by the way the feedbacks are not runaways that they're using they just amplify you'd have to get a much higher level of feedback to be a runaway system The Tipping Point is a different argument and I find that kind of nutty because tipping points in the climate system are virtually unheard of and there's a good reason for it they're usually characteristic of systems that have what I would call few degrees of freedom so friends so it's saying if you want to make a transition from one state to another you don't have many places to go so it has to take a leap all right oh I see what you mean so so a system that's constrained in its in its modes of possibility yeah tip because there's only a couple of states exactly but a complex system but a system like ours oh that's very good has an infinite number of degrees of freedom essentially and it can go smoothly through anything okay has that been has that proposition been Quantified like do people I've never heard that before right it's it makes a lot of sense to me that you know a system that flips would flip because it could be frozen or liquid yeah in the case of water but but a system that's complex and and highly entropic because of that has many many ways of dispensing looks like a formal argument yeah I haven't seen it explicitly expressed but I'm pretty sure there's something in the literature about that well it it makes sense if a system has a multiple ways of multiple ways of dispersing with increased energy input yeah then it's not going to yeah I mean the probability that it's going to do something dramatic has got to be proportionate in some sense to the number of options today yeah I mean look you know the number as I was saying if you want to Pepper something with the craziness this issue has left to speak of on that count I mean one of the ones I like is this metric for climate which is a very peculiar metric you know some Global temperature yeah what is it Global mean what is it how do you get it where is it I mean how do you take the temperature let's walk into that well some well some of that okay so some of that is a consequence of many many weather stations distributed on the physical surface of the Earth but the problem with those is that many of them were built in places where Urban where Urban encroachment has expanded over a hundred years and so that's a huge problem on the measurement from yeah but that's sophisticated how do you average Mount Everest with the Dead Sea well I'm curious about that how how is that done like to think of the earth as having one temperature you so you're making the case there that the mean is the crucial variable right that's really what it was well it's saying that uh but it's hard to tell how you get it they don't get it by the way by averaging what they do okay well how else can you get it okay what they do is take each station [Music] take a 30-year average I forget it's you know like 1950 to 1980 or something and look at the deviation of the temperature from that average and they average the anomalies the deviation okay so you know let's say it went up three degrees at one station from the 30-year mean went up two and one and so on they average those numbers instead of the temperature itself okay why and who's they the British Met Office Noah NASA so on everyone producing a temperature record is doing that okay maybe it makes sense you know because you don't want an average Mount Everest in the Dead Sea but maybe the changes in temperature at those places you could average and get an average temperature change okay so you do that and they show you the graph but they never show you the data points and if you show the data points and this is a guy at Lawrence Livermore laboratory you did this around 1990 he died in 92. he showed the data points and whereas This Global mean temperature record is changing a degree a degree and a half over a century a century and a half the data points are scattered over 20 degrees right right and they're densely scattered huge error not Ira it's just huge range just scatter and if you chose any given period of time any moment there are almost as many stations cooling is warming even though the trend is slightly warming because it's slight and so when you see somebody at a given location saying this is a cold day how come it's they say it's warming well the data says it could almost be as likely to cool as warm except there's a slight bias and uh it's you know when you look at the media if there's an extreme at any given place they say it's climate right the data you know it doesn't suggest that okay so so part of the problem here is that we have a a single measure which is this average change of temperature now that's become uh that's become the standard for assessing something like Global planetary Health oh yeah now our entire industrial Enterprise is being bent to serve that particular master so what do you think's wrong with the average mean temperature as a univariate variable I mean you talked about scatter so that's a problem but but the other one problem with it is and it explains why for instance textbooks on climate from the 40s through the 60s didn't discuss this metric they discussed the fact that the Earth had many climate regimes dozens [Music] and they wanted to know what accounted for the different regimes of climate on the Earth something called carbon classification this metric became popular with global cooling global warming and so on because you wanted to have something singular that showed one or the other I think they were capitalized also on the fact that as a British physicist and novelist CP snow realized many years ago that we have two cultures well I think we have more than that maybe we have no cultures but if you're not a scientist it is amazing how enumerate and illiterate you can be right so or even if you are a scientist yeah but there's there's a different kind of ignorance specialization and so on but most people looking at a graph can't read a graph right and so you know if you look at the financial page people you know see the same graph if it went up 10 points and went up a hundred points and went up 200 points all they see is it went up and they rescale and they show you that because if they only show you something that is objective some days it wouldn't look like it's doing anything and so what what would you re what would you regard as the major drivers of look okay let's go back even a step further do you think that we have any existential real existential concerns on the climate front not for the next five thousand years okay okay so so we probably don't have to worry about that for at least four thousand I I think so and and we would see it I mean it's you know we had these massive ice ages and and every roughly 100 000 years and the glacial part of it is longer than the interglacial that we're in now so yeah I mean but we're talking about scales of thousands of years for that that's a major change and uh it was understood by a Serbian astronomer in the 1930s early 40s that this was largely due to the orbital variations of the earth which produce changes in solar radiation incident on the Earth in summer in the Arctic of a hundred watts per meter squared remember with CO2 you're talking about two watts per meter squared three Watts for me one and a half between the ice age is 100. and why summer in the Arctic because you always have snow in the winter in the Arctic the question is how much of it survives the summer if it's cold during the summer the snow lasts and builds up on a new base each year and over thousands of years becomes a cup you know a kilometer or two of iso for you uh on the other hand of the Summers the warm the snow doesn't last and you don't build your ice okay so so the main drivers of that kind of that was so up a little bit cataclysmic change that's orbital and so and those are you said a hundred watts per square meter right essentially and and now you're you're pointing out that the putative effect of of carbon dioxide warming is something like two watts per meter that order and that's going to produce a a comparatively small perturbation nothing of the order of magnitude that's associated say with glaciation or the lock thereof yeah I mean and also not an amount that'll produce positive feedback loops you know producing positive feedback loops I think is a kind of funny phrasing the feedback loops are intrinsic to the system and the question is do we have positive feedback loops and I don't think so not really serious ones and yet they're assumed in order to get a big bang out of the CO2 yeah okay so what on What basis are they assumed because you already made the case no degrees of freedom so like what's going on here scientifically how can that story be put forward with any degree of credibility by saying it's credible I mean that's what we're doing I mean you know in other words Suki minabi uh did some papers in the early 70s where he assumed essentially one dimensionality for the system no clouds no nothing and uh he said if I assume relative humidity remains fixed and I have no clouds or I don't let clouds change then because of something called the clausius club iron relation the warmer it gets the more moisture the atmosphere can hold and if the relative humidity is fixed you'll have more moisture okay and he showed you could get an amplification a doubling of the effect of CO2 from that it just happens to only apply in the tropics and it is not the clouds are not fixed they are also changing and counteracting in I think much of what's Happening due to the water vapor and changing the area over which the water vapor acts so it's a much more complicated affair and the measurements from satellites are suggesting that the whole shebang when put together is not producing the feedback that you needed to double the effect you've expressed a lot of skepticism about computer models now when the average person reads that a computer model makes a given prediction especially if it's reported in a peer-reviewed paper they're inclined to presume that that means two things it means data and it means fact but I'm very skeptical of computer models because you have to make all sorts of assumptions and the devil's in the details with something as complex as climate so on what grounds have you gone after the climate models well you know actually I I have a use for the models um there's no way that models can accurately well there is a way maybe simulate fluids I mean you know the trouble is our atmosphere our ocean have motions on every scale they have motions on the scale of your fingernail they have motions on the scale of the planet they all have an impact that small-scale turbulence in the boundary layer the clouds which have a scale of a kilometer or so the weather patterns that have scales of thousands of kilometers and you're modeling them on a computer even today's massive computers can't resolve a centimeter that would be incredible so they have to assume what the small scale turbulence does they have to assume what the clouds do they have to assume what you know all sorts of things are doing and even then there are some systems where you can prove mathematically that as you reduce the mesh size of which you're approximating things because you're you're not doing it continuously you have to just make points that it converges to the right answer but no one has ever done that for fluid dynamics we don't know if it even converges so you have to in these models put in you know often you'll run a model and it goes Haywire you throw in damping to prevent it from going haywire the damping has no physical basis it's just to keep the model from blowing up you're doing all these things and you're hopeful that it may still have some insight now I said right I actually am not against models so for instance if you do theory for a phenomenon in the atmosphere you usually do what's called order of magnitude analysis what that means is you take the full equations and you try to estimate how big and small the terms are and you're trying to see if these terms are small can I approximate the system with a simpler system and can I test it in this way and you learn a lot from that almost everything we know came from that sort of analysis not for models but once in a while if things get complicated I'd like to look at a model and see whether there were things possibly going on in the model that might go on in nature that I hadn't thought about and so the models can be useful promoters of more thinking about possibilities sure of course of course of course that's very different than assuming that they're valid models of what's going to happen of course climate and so okay I have two questions on that front is like is it hard to um approximate fluid dynamics regardless of mesh size because a fluid system has so many degrees of freedom it's very hard to do I mean nobody would pretend let's say you have a gurgling Brook with pebbles and so on it's doing all sorts of things nobody's going to predict the Eddie for let's say a mile I mean that would be hopeless you might make a statistical forecast on certain things and you might get useful information and you might be able to make an approximation that tells you how the roughness of the surface affected the flow rate and so on but it and you know all you do is scale that up many orders of magnitude and you have the Earth's atmosphere and those little Eddies that you couldn't track are now your weather systems and so on you still have trouble tracking them well so so part of the issue here is that the we're dealing with temperature changes that are of relatively small magnitude compared to the potential range of temperature change and what that means is that for that degree of accuracy and prediction let's say you need an accuracy of one to three degrees over a hundred years you have to have an unbelievably finely tuned model at an extremely high level of resolution and then with the difficulties in modeling fluid dynamics it isn't even obvious that you could do it in principle I think that's probably true um you know you you can restrict as I say you damp the models you keep them from blowing up you do all sorts of things and uh you know for instance with the greenhouse picture I've been critical of it because I think it only really is useful in the tropics but it is useful if I'm comparing Venus and Mars and Mercury for them you know the gross idea of the greenhouse does tell you why they're different but you know the changes in the earth's climate involve miniscule temperature changes compared to the temperature differences between the planets right right right right well then we have the additional problem on the political front that so imagine you have an unstable climate model or an inaccurate climate model at the scale of resolution we're discussing and then you put on top of that an economic model and the the economic model uses the climate model as an axiom and then it tries to predict out 100 years which like I I just don't see that as going anywhere at all because you can't predict Economic Development with any degree of accuracy over a hundred year period if you could do that you'd have all the money in the world almost immediately if you could generate a model that accurate you simply can't do it no so if you stack a bad economic model on a flawed climate model you really do have a tower of well and they don't even do that I mean the economic models that people like Nord house and so on use just take that metric for climate and a sign right but they assume it's accurate and they assume that you can put a monetary value on it yeah and then you know tune the I mean you know model there are various kinds of models that do these things but uh I I don't know what to say I mean I don't think any longer that is the models that are driving the perception I think it is the pure repetition all you know and this was understood from the beginning in 1980 yeah eight when Jim Hansen gave testimony to the Senate uh about finding that there was global warming and uh Newsweek Newsweek had a cover and the cover showed the Earth on fire and had the label all scientists agree right right now you know you had all sorts of funny problems at that time like most weather men disagreed and the American Meteorological Society decided they needed re-education I mean the March through the institutions was pretty effective and we could talk about that I mean that's been well I'd like well let's talk about this because I was going to push back at you again Playing devil's Advocates so we hear all the time this this idea that while 97 percent of scientists agreed that climate change is real which is different than saying that global warming is Real by the way but 97 percent of scientists agree and so and now we're hearing from Dr Richard lindsen and he doesn't agree but 97 percent of scientists do so why the hell should we listen to Dr lindsen and so let's start with the 97 percent of scientists agree claim well yeah I mean there are a couple of aspects to it there are some studies like one by a man called cook that were just bogus they you know ended up looking at 50 papers specially selected and found you know this percentage and this was taken apart the Wall Street Journal by uh Spencer and best and it was nonsense but there are some issues where I think you could say there was a hundred percent agreement so for instance if you were to say CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding it will probably create some warming I don't think too many people would disagree I think the only thing would be how much and many people would think it would be negligible but no one would disagree with that and so given this telephone game where you can say something perfectly innocent and the politicians can interpret it as saying oh so you agree that we'll have warming and that warming however small you know they'll assume is the end of the world well yeah this agreement but right it's not agreement with what they're ultimately claiming that it's an existential threat I think if you've posed it that way you know you would for instance notice that the un's ipcc into governmental panel on climate change never in its working group one which is the only part dealing with science speaks of an existential threat just right right while laurenburg has been telling people that constantly yeah you know he's with with his attempts to shed some light some intelligent light on this issue he keeps saying well look I'm willing to accept the ipcc forecast even though he has some problems with the forecast he said look I'll give you that but the negative consequences that are often assumed are simply not realistic you know even there I mean you know in the part I participated in we said that you know the models cannot handle water vapor and clouds and thus there is no basis for our assertions about the feedbacks that was in there and it was interesting because I mean the whole procedure is a little bit nutty I was responsible with two other people for three pages for this we traveled around the world twice or three times I mean the meetings and you had uh quote thousands of the world's leading climate scientists which is a field that probably had a few dozen at you know early in my career and suddenly when you piled in the money you know in the U.S I think the increase with Clinton Gore was maybe a factor of 15. you suddenly had thousands of quote climate scientists now no one in my department claimed they were a climate scientist in 1990 because no nobody met you know I didn't know everything about you know paleo climate I didn't know how you assessed ice cores I knew Dynamics I knew radiation other people knew other things right right but it's not a it's not a field of specialization climate science right I mean it is the definitive interdisciplinary thing and nobody has mastered all the disciplines trouble is when you increase the funding 15 and the condition for funding was supporting the narrative that you then could get lots of people all of them calling themselves climate scientists and most of whom have not familiarized themselves with the physics and the chemistry and so on so you have this idiocy of impacts so you know you know you've seen it you know global warming and obesity global warming and diabetes I mean uh you know anyone can get a piece of the action we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new documentary logos and literacy I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world the pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion probably 80 percent of Scripps memorization today exists only because of what is sung amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the price of Johann gubberg science and religion are opposing forces in the world but historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that well what happened to you on the funding front when you started to well let's say swim against the tide to some degree although really what you were doing was just pursuing your research for a while I would say in the 90s I continued to get money from this National Science Foundation but never for climate I was working on hydrodynamic instability other things that were pure meteorological and but by the 90s late 90s I was known well enough for my skepticism of climate that people were rejecting it saying you know he'll use some of this money for that um NASA also was pretty open in the 90s and so for instance my work on feedbacks my colleagues were from NASA and it was okay but by the end there was a NASA administrator who was skeptical of climate and they got rid of him and they got sticked up the department of energy was actually trying to keep balanced funding and then the government just clamped down on them and uh so so that that also means that so that's very interesting too because it means that not only does the narrative spin itself up to chase the funding but any elements that would run contrary oh yeah alternative just vanish oh yeah I mean at MIT for instance uh we had a celebration of the work of two distinguished faculty members who had died some years ago this Jewel Charney and Ed Lawrence chaos theory and so on and you know because of my closeness to Jewel they asked me to speak on that and and the administration from MIT decided no given his position on climate and that we have a climate initiative we can't do that the department was quite okay they found someone else to do that talk and I gave another talk and so be it but the administration was upset with that you know it again I mean now what's really important it's really appalling to hear of that sort of thing happening at MIT I mean I'm always hoping that the engineers and the stem types will have enough what would you say clout and political conviction to push back against this hyper administrative uh invasion of the of the technical technical schools and The Universities at MIT you have to think things are very very sad that's very very sad your State of Affairs Hope Springs Eternal but you know we just went through the issue of Dorian Abbott I don't know if you heard about it yeah oh yes yes he was going to give a talk on exoplanets pretty I mean you know he's keeping away from this issue in a way exoplanets is easy but on the other hand he had written a piece with someone from Stanford uh for Newsweek in which he said you know they really didn't think diversity equity and inclusion was that great they preferred maintaining meritocracy while having school choice for children including poor children black children so that they could be qualified for equity instead of it being good kind of trap and so mit's Administration decided that this was not consistent with mit's values yeah yeah and you know a statement and you know then it got the point who speaks for our values and yeah well that is the question all right and you know this is very much the case with almost every University every professional society and you probably know this you know the people in these The Faculty the people in professional societies are busy they they like their work they're doing things they like and so you often choose one person to be executive director or so on and they're happy not to have to do it or to be president of the University or a dean uh not everyone wants to do it they'd rather do their science yeah research and research yeah well that's a big problem because it leaves the administrative Avenue opening and they can speak for you and speak of our values without ever polling you that's true in the professional societies it's true of the National Academy in the U.S uh there are a handful of people who can speak for the organization and the organization is full of people who would rather do their work and happy to leave them that power yeah yeah so have you what's been your experience with cancellation you said it got harder and harder for you to get grants so that's that's that that run a lab at MIT it also makes it almost impossible to publish as I say editors get fired if you get published the more common thing is among the peer reviewers they insist that they be Gatekeepers so you'll send in a paper and a lot of people have had exactly this experience um at first it was pretty crude so one of the papers I published in the early 90s I had submitted to science pointing out questions about climate and they sent it back without review saying there's no interest in this oh yeah right oh yes but then no interest right and then they got a little bit more I don't know if I'd call it sophisticated uh you would send it to a journal and uh they would reject it immediately of some good and it came that wasn't very effective because you send it to another Journal so what happened is you typically and again this is a common experience you send it to a journal they take about six seven months to review and they send back a review that says accept it with major revision and so you spend six months making major revisions if you pay attention to them send it back they take another six seven months and reject it that got them first time yet for a year or you know so that you're not sending it to other journals uh well it's also a very good way of wasting the time oh yeah who might be actually trying to conduct research right so you know all these things happen and uh even with my students you know I I couldn't tell them you know to oppose global warming it would ruin their careers they couldn't even get a perfect or well well with was being associated with you eventually was that enough to make it difficult for your students to get a job no I don't think so oh well that's good that's good uh you know I would have expected that to have happened no it I hadn't seen it happen but you know I think most of my students I think all of them pretty much have steered clear of climate there are other things you can work on just like with Dorian I mean you know uh he doesn't want to get in trouble with climbing pick an area which isn't climate the only difficulty with it is uh funding and balance can give preference to climate on the other hand they've induced so many people to support climate alarm that they probably don't have enough money to support all of the people who want to go feed at the trough well the other problem of course is is that the very people who are hell-bent on pursuing their actual research that's where all the real scientists are and so now if we're in a situation where the real scientists and those would be the ones who want to do their research are refusing to have anything to do with so-called climate science then what happens is that we're deprived of the very expert voices that we would need to bring some sense and stability to the overarching narrative upon which so many of our economic decisions are made now so that just doesn't seem like a very good State of Affairs it's not a good State of Affairs but it's desired by the people who want this state of affairs right right well so let me let me recapitulate because we're running out of time on on this section so we talked about we talked about your career um and where you worked MIT and at Harvard primarily on the academic front we talked about the fundamental um climate narrative which is that well climate's a major concern uh it's changing primarily because the greenhouse effect that's a consequence of carbon dioxide most of that's warming there are a variety of potential runaway positive feedback loops involved um you're not convinced of any of those propositions that climate should be our major concern that the greenhouse effect as popularly conceptualized is an existential catastrophe that carbon dioxide is a contributor again of existential proportions or that the positive feedback loops that are often put before us are likely to manifest themselves in fact you think that the climate system has enough degrees of freedom to be relatively immune to large-scale perturbations yes is that a decent summary yeah I mean I'd modify it a little bit uh you know I think feedbacks and tipping points are slightly different and you're conflating them I don't think this system has tipping points uh it has feedback okay well that's the critical issues but they're not running away feedback loops in it yes okay so it's the tip okay I'll make sure that I use that technology from here on in and then we talked about the well we tried to investigate some of the reasons why this more apocalyptic narrative has gained a foothold we talked about the malthusians we talked about the the um the political tilt of the funding regime we talked a little bit more implicitly about the fact that more apocalyptic and doom saying prognostications tend to attract a lot more attention and so that's a big problem constant repetition and the fact that children I mean you know Al Gore no it was John Kerry who made this statement I mean it was just astounding I think it was in a talk in Indonesia he said something to the effect that we all know how difficult physics and chemistry can be but climate is easy enough for any child to understand right right which showed you the level of his understanding well yeah but also the impact is we're starting to teach kindergarten children climate yeah but you don't teach them terrifying them yeah right your world is coming to an end in 10 years unless your parents stop eating meat or you know God knows what right or driving their vehicle or hitting their house or Grandma warm or recharging their electric car well that all right so so so let me let me offer a set of propositions to the listeners and and stop me or clarify what I'm saying if I get it wrong so there are lots of drivers of climate variation the big drivers have to do with oscillations in planetary orbit or other comparative effect of or or other factors yeah there are so many factors that would impact it uh there are ocean currents uh you know for instance again it's a technical term but the surface of the Earth is not isolated you know it's not in equilibrium with space it has the oceans underneath it ocean circulations have time scales up to a thousand years and they're constantly bringing fluid up and taking fluid away from the surface and that fluid is carrying Heat and so the system is never quite an equilibrium it varies on its own until we understand these systems perfectly well we don't necessarily have a good theory for the fact that you know there was a medieval warm period there was evidence of a warm period you know 2 000 years ago all sorts of things there were things oddly enough I mean let's say at the beginning of the 19th century in New England every town had a learned Society and they had their proceedings and you would look at these old documents of Ordinary People well ordinary educated people at that time discussing whether Rome when they had Vineyards and so on and so on was warmer than it is at their time they're still in little ice age and they were wondering if it was just reportage or there was something really different had climate changed they were doing sophisticated thinking about it which is virtually disappeared from our world we also talked about the 97 percent of scientists fallacy and you pointed out that 97 of scientists likely agree that carbon dioxide plays a role in greenhouse warming phenomenon yeah but that doesn't mean that 97 percent of scientists believe that there are tipping points built into the climate and that we're going to slide off the edge of an abyss within the next hundred years oh no those are very different claims no and and it's you know as I say I mean I was speaking at a group I think uh doctors for disaster preparedness and they'd give me some recognition and I decided that I would point out who opposed this narrative during the early 90s or the 90s and it was leading figures in the field uh and Bill Nye the science man on TV or something was saying that you know uh these are just old people who they'll die soon and we'll we won't have these objections and there was some truth to that I mean you had directors of major Labs directors of the MOX plunk people who are heading the European medium range weather forecasting which is a premier group all of them objecting to it uh presidents of the National Academy and so on but starting in the 90s with the Takeover of major funding institutions and so on um you weren't going to get many younger people right right okay so if we close this off and maybe we could do this if you if you maybe you could take 30 seconds or get a lot of relatively young people watching this YouTube channel and you know they're worried because they've been fed a non-ending diet of apocalyptic catastrophe and oppressive patriarchy since they were like three and so if you wanted to address them directly and say what you wanted to say about what we can expect over the next 50 years let's say because that's kind of not a bad lifespan uh Viewpoint or 75 years what what what do you think what should we be contemplating on the climate front much the same as we've seen you'll see variations they've always occurred there will be places like the gulf coast of the US which had been a citrus country in the 40s and now it's too cold for citrus other things will change things always change a bit there may be you know several inches of sea level rise uh but not a lot more there's no evidence it'll be much more um you'll still have a situation where if you live in New England Mark Twain's remark you know wait a minute and the weather will change will still be true um and you know that's life that's why you have overcoats and gloves and uh swimsuits and there would be nothing special it's not cataclysmic uh you're not going to be uh inundated with hungry uh polar bears fleeing the Arctic you're not going to have uh cities underwater um and you know get on with your life but the question is if your teacher insists on your saying the world is coming to an end or you won't get promoted I'm not sure what I should tell them well I've told I've told my students my whole life said never you don't don't falsify your words because the thing is you know I'll tell you an experiment a psychological experiment that's quite interesting it might even be valid so imagine you bring people in to the lab young people and you give them a political attitudes questionnaire regarding their views on a particular topic maybe abortion maybe climate whatever some topic that's you know relatively contentious then you have them sit down and write a 500 word essay arguing against their position now they know they're doing this in a lab then you bring them in a week later and you give them the same political attitudes questionnaire you find that their attitudes have shifted substantially and significantly towards the direction of their writing and so the problem is you can't falsify the word your words without falsifying your thinkings yeah because your your words construct your perceptions and so if you kowtow to the teacher's ideology we found this too when we were looking at what predicted politically correct beliefs so the trait agreeableness did being female did um having a lower verbal IQ did but another major predictor was whether or not you'd taken any courses at all that were explicitly politically corrected their orientation so you have to be very careful about kowtowing to the ideology because you can't get away with it you'll you'll falsify your own psyche if you falsify your words you know I think I agree with what you're saying but 1984 [Music] you know was a fairly good example of how Society can break that down yeah and so you've maintained your ground you've maintained your ground how come age in other words you know it's the business that for scientists of an older generation up to mine pretty much maybe a little further uh we could develop our reputations our work product over a Freer time [Music] yeah the other thing is theoreticians don't need as much money as experimenters and so I needed money just to support students I didn't need equipment I didn't need very much of anything else right right um but it was mainly that people were advanced in their career if you were a director of a lab and so on if you were near retirement you could speak freely the more sad were the weatherman the people the media forecasters and so on who had a love of meteorology in many cases were very knowledgeable and uh objected to this by and large I would go on a train ride or something and meteorologists from the media would see me in there and say thank you for that but the media have been firing people who don't attribute every weather event to climate right and the meteorologists know this is nonsense but they just you know are being pressured immensely and we were lucky our jobs were not at issue we had tenure and so on yeah uh but younger people don't have that luxury yeah while I'm being canceled is no fun I mean I've known like 200 people who've been counseled and it's about equivalent to a major illness it's no joke so all right sir well look for everybody who's been watching and listening on YouTube thank you very much for your time and attention and Dr lindsen thank you very much for your calm and dispassionate and kind I would say analysis of the current situation and for agreeing to speak to me today and to to uh for be providing all the people who are watching and listening with the fruits of your Decades of Labor and for I'm going to talk to Dr lindsen for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform by the way probably on a more biographical front I'm interested in how his career developed hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,221,357

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 7LVSrTZDopM

Length: 109min 52sec (6592 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2023