The Mark Steyn Show Climate Change Forum

[Music] [Applause] hey welcome along to our show for today we are before a live audience of Mark Steyn cruisers from the United States the United Kingdom Canada Australia India New Zealand a few places outside the Commonwealth such as the Czech Republic and we are right here in Glacier Bay then yeah there's not a glacier in sight the last the last one was so humiliated at the thought of being in the presence of our panel that it melted and just swept out into the Pacific it is already drowned Tuvalu that's gone you don't have to wait till the Year 2200 it's gone so it's it's it's a desert outside the window it's like the Sunni triangle there just a vast sandy wasteland there's a couple of skulls a vulture wondering what is going to come along it's it's amazing the climate change is is barreling out of control that is what we are here to talk about the National Park Service in fact came onto the ship and the park rangers were peddling the usual alarmist line there was politicized as every other government agency is these days and they declined to actually stick around to hear these three gentlemen although I do believe they have called the National Park Service SWAT team so if you hear the doors being kicked down just duck and let them get a nice clean short we have with us the two guys who slew Slade Slade slew the most influential scientific graph of the 21st century governments from New Zealand to Canada I mailed it to all their citizens and among the people they made the mistake of mailing it to were Ross McKittrick and Steve McIntyre and Lawson Ross and Steve actually took a serious look at the science behind dr. Michael Mann's hockey stick graph and found it rather curious to put it mildly doctor I should full disclosure dr. Mann has been suing me in the District of Columbia Superior Court for seven years now I can't wait for the rise of the oceans to just rise up and watch the District of Columbia Court system far out to see Biggers and we also have with us the man who runs the number one climate website in the world Anthony watts of what's up with that you know the funny thing Antony is with climate change it's it sort of is it's the opposite of the hockey stick graft it seems to kind of go up and down and up and down ebb and flow ebb and flow and I thought the hysteria had gone away for a bit and then Alexandria Ocasio Cortes comes along with her green new deal and and with respect to our Indian cruisers here foresees a grand bovine genocide in which all the sacred cows of the new religion again be slaughtered and and it gets taken seriously and presidential candidates at least feel they can't ridicule it are we back in one of those climate change moments again well I think perhaps we are you know the funny thing about Alexandria is that she believes things that are patently untrue and and does not blink an eye when someone brings it out in front of her just the other day you may have seen this she said that we wouldn't be having all these problems with the Hurricanes with people getting gas if people just had electric cars well golly I seem to recall that power goes out when hurricane you know power goes out in New Hampshire if there's like a stiff breeze so I wouldn't want to be recharging the electric car in in some of those states so you so it never but but it again in the bigger picture it seems to me that this thing sort of peaked in the early years of this century people are still deferring to it but but my sense is that it's a kind of pseudo urgency and and they're not really taking it most of it seems to me to be their catering to their base their base is very we have to do something anything and so they are coming up with schemes and schemes upon scheme to try to cater to their bays to make them you know appease so that they will get votes but almost every one of these schemes that they come up with whether it's it's electric cars or more windmills or solar or whatever has some kind of a downside the bottom line is is that our society has not succeeded based on this tiny little bit of renewable energy and it cannot it cannot ever we can't ever completely replace fossil fuels with these things that are only right now generating a you know a couple of percentage points of electricity or whatever it's just not possible yet they don't want to see this reality and that's the quandary of it all what what do you say Steve to this this thing you must have heard there's a million times that and in fact the Park Rangers up on deck yes yeah that the Power Rangers were doing it today that the the science is settled there's a 97% consensus 97 97 percent of the world's geniuses cannot be wrong and and and people like you shouldn't even be permitted on the BBC or CNN or CDC or ABC or any of them to put any kind of contrary view one of the things to keep in perspective about the so called cost of climate changes right now if you add up all the disasters that are related to weather they count for about 0.3 percent of GNP at of that point 3 that's all the Hurricanes all the floods all those droughts and that that percentage of GNP has been declining over the past hundred years so things are not getting worse at the same time listening to climate scientist this is the worst of all possible periods in the in all of human civilization and yet world poverty is at unprecedented low levels people in India they're a huge huge middle class developed in India in China in Southeast Asia so despite all the so if climate change was really going to bite us hard if two times co2 was going to be biting us hard it would already be biting us hard somewhere and 0.3 percent of GNP isn't and that point three percent is all weather-related events how much of that is attributable to climate change is only a fraction about maybe ten percent of that so to turn your economy upside down for the to economize on extreme weather events is a odd calculus indeed well Steve has laid out various rational indicators there and yet the funny thing is in a sense the argument is impervious to that people people would say to Steve well you're not a you're not a climatologist so what you say doesn't matter but when Alexandra Cassio Cortez says the world is going to end in 12 years people think that is some kind of scientific consensus in a way we are in we're in a metaphysical world here rather than a scientific one aren't we yeah and one of the odd things I find is the discussion is always going on in a couple of different planes so in the academic world there are actually serious discussions about this kind of point that economists who look at renewable energy for instance even the ones who are much more alarmed about climate change than me still don't like these policies because they cost far more than any benefits that can be attributed to them even if you take the other side's argument at face value and on the science side there are a lot of serious debates on on the kinds of issues Steve and I talked about and lots of others but all of that happens on a plane that nobody sees and that doesn't really ever penetrate to the public consciousness all we hear about in the public consciousness is what Greta Thun Berg has to say this week and it's sort of that level of craziness and beyond and you know AO sees 12 year prediction of the or Prince Charles as six months to the end of the world he actually says ago I think he in fairness Al Gore said ten years and and the Prince of Wales actually calculated it more finely and said I think it was eight years and seven months which which which ended I think I think the deadline was three years ago so you get this the craziness level but then what's odd is the people who do know better who should say something are intimidated into not saying anything the one exception no and this one swallow doesn't make a spring but the head of the World Meteorological Organization just last week made a speech where he began to warn people that the extry ISM on the alarma side has gone too far and scientists need to actually speak out against it and okay it's a to little and far far too late but this the situation where in private all these politicians know the craziness is making it impossible to talk about the issue rationally and the scientists and other people and so they just let it go unfortunately they've they've hatched a monster that they can't control now yeah you you mentioned Greta foon Berg who is the latest manifestation of the movement and you know in fairness we were having a laugh at Al Gore and Prince Charles's expense and that's always good and I encourage all of you to do with either of them but but Greta Thumba Abby did fairness one is the heir to the throne and the other is a former vice president better Thune Berg is a aged whatever she is a 13 year old nine year old 11 year old Swedish schoolgirl who travels around the world being formed on by prime ministers and presidents as the cabbie she's if you take the idea that climate alarmism is a religion that the idea of this like talismanic schoolgirl that no one dare criticize is in fact that the become the new perfect face of the movement I mean it is at a certain point it's it's teetering on the brink of self parody isn't it Anthony I think it's already past the point of self parody I mean if people are stumbling all over themselves to come up with even greater and more dire announcements in a way that they think it's going to captivate people and and people that generally don't think for themselves well they get frightened by these things this schoolgirl that she's moved goth she's quite frightened of the things that the adults have told her and that's why she feels compelled to do these things in my view some of the things that the adults are telling children these days have urges on child abuse well let's let's actually look at what that boils down to Steve as far as most of us understood it until Michael Mann came along there was a medieval warm period in which in places where one certainly would not dare to drink any local wine now in in parts of northern England they had they had vineyards the University of East Anglia where they have that climate Research Institute that all the Climategate females came from they had vineyards there I would be in favor of demolishing the climate Research Institute and actually growing a little chateau nerf do Michael Mann or something there instead and then the Medieval Warm Period ended and we went to the Little Ice Age and then we came out of the Little Ice Age which is what basically enabled the settlement of Canada because Canada is a is a country where it's winter for ten months of the year it would be winter for eleven and a half months of the year if we hadn't come out of the Little Ice Age there wouldn't be a Canada and then we had these like little thirty-year warming trends 30 year cooling trends basically through the 20th century is there anything in that to get alarmed over not yet not right now I don't I view the Medieval Warm Period as part of a much longer decline from about ten thousand years ago what the and Glacier Bay where we are is an interesting location for thinking about periods like the Medieval Warm Period and the early Holocene and the big Ice Age when the Captain Vancouver arrived at Glacier Bay in 1799 the there was a glacier that went all the way out to the ocean so that all these hundred kilometers that we've cruised up today was full of a glacier and and people and that has retreated about 200 or sorry but a hundred kilometers in the last two hundred years so that that's been going on before SUVs were invented and and and but but what people also lose track of is that for the twelve thousand years before that there was no lacier going out to the ocean there was a glacier but it hadn't gone that far so in the Medieval Warm Period there was a outwash plain in front of a base year that was about 40 kilometres up fjord and there were the Tlingit had settlements there and then the gray seer advanced bulldozed all the gravels and not 40 kilometres out to the ocean and then what it would treated we have the scenic inlets that we have today there were similar scenic inlets ten thousand years ago eight thousand years ago there were forests growing and part of it so there have been lots of changes over any scale akan you think about and dramatic changes so that when people nowadays that look at the changes in the 20th century they are not so large compared to past periods and the Medieval Warm Period was better for human civilization the Roman Warm Period better yet Holocene Warm Period better yet nine and and and just to pick pick up on that Ross the argument of these National Park guys is to respond to things I will see was just about saying yes that's all very well but it defies logic to think that we could have had the Industrial Revolution and to think that the people in this room today who a hundred years ago would all have had horse and buggy and now have these big gas guzzling vehicles could not it's impossible for them not to had an impact on the climate and their position therefore is that you don't get distracted by historical trends or anything it's it's impossible to believe that what's happened since the Industrial Revolution could not have impacted the climate yeah and it's a giant leap from saying conceivably likely humans have an impact on their environment to humans drive the whole process with no natural variability in the system very everything that Steve described is obviously natural variability which to this day isn't all that well understood and then you have superimposed on that whatever influence humans have which as soon as people start trying to study it that's actually statistics so the when Steve and I were working on the hockey stick stuff our training is in statistics so people were saying you guys shouldn't be talking about this because you're not climatologist and then among themselves in the Climategate emails the climatologists are saying well we don't actually know much statistics so it's really hard to follow what right what they're doing and that that appears all through this literature climatology is a lot like economics in the sense that it's the analysis of data yeah so this this question of trying to figure out what's the the human component in it is a very difficult one and what I object to people like the Park Rangers just being completely confident they've got all figured out everything prior to 1980 was mother nature everything after that is us and it's all bad yeah and it would be fine if it was mother nature melting glaciers that's just the wonderful pageantry of the earth but if it was us then it's it's a crisis the United States is an interesting country because it's the one country in the world where you can choose any of the Earth's climates to live in you can live in the tropics or the Arctic you can live in the desert rainforest anywhere you want and if you look and see where people in the US are moving to they're leaving the cold parts of the country and they're moving to the warm wet coastal regions where occasionally they extreme weather and they're calling that such a great they're paying big money to do yeah yeah so they're exposing themselves to the worst-case climate model scenario no and calling it a great benefit yeah a couple of a couple of fellas called mr. and mrs. Obama did that they they just I think they spent forty million dollars on property that's supposed to be underwater air in the next ten years I don't I don't understand it's it is as you say everybody moves in America you move from the cold parts the warm parts you can't do that in Canada because there aren't any warm parts but but you but you raise actually when you talk about statistics you you guys know statistics and yet you were hammered by the climate guys for applying your skill in statistics to the hockey stick and I wondered Anthony when you get right down to it people say unless you're a climatologist or a nine-year-old Swedish schoolgirl you've got no right to talk about this issue at all what actually is a climatologist because when I look at this hockey stick which is assembled from tree rings and temperature records and ice cause Michael Mann doesn't go out and collect tree tree tree tree rings in the gaspé Peninsula in Quebec he's relying on some guy who went out and found some tree rings there 30 years earlier or whatever what what actually this this scientific purity that attaches to the term climatologist if it isn't actually the processing of data and statistics what is it that a climatologist does well surprisingly there is no degree program at any University for a degree in climatology at least there couldn't used to be in fact the leading people dr. Mann for example did not have a degree in climatology he got a degree in meteorology and mathematics and it's the same thing for dr. james hansen who ran NASA who originally started the whole scare back in 1988 he was in an astrophysics and so forth and mathematics these folks don't have degrees in climatology so then when they say well you're not a climatologist you can't talk about it well neither are they they don't have a piece of paper that says that but the the I know the state climatologist of California very well the former one James Goodrich and he is a man who pours over numbers that's his entire life really and he looks at rainfall and he looks at temperature he looks for trends basically he's a lot like a stockbroker he's looking for trends in data and he's using mathematical tools to pull out those trends and figure out what not happened in the future that's basically what a climatologist does and most of these climatologist as you point out don't actually get out of the office and do their own work they're looking at numbers that have been gathered by other people and that brings us into the temperature record I'm not just a guy that runs a website I have actually done research on my own like these two fellows one of the things I did was looked at the temperature record for the United States I looked at over 1200 stations in the u.s. kilometer logical network historical climatological network and what I found based on these standards published by NOAA 90% of them did not meet their own standards for siting meaning they were too close to buildings or air-conditioner exhaust or runways right things like that speaking of which how many people here have flown through O'Hare Airport okay on your luggage tags it says Ord and you think that stands for O'Hare right it does not it stands for Orchard field that's what it was back in the dawn of aviation right it was a grass field and there were orchards on either side they measured the temperature there then because they had to for aviation and they still do today but what's changed is now Chicago here is a megaplex of concrete and asphalt and jet exhaust and the temperature is much higher and you talked earlier about well you think all of these things that we've done this man to change our society has had a fat hat in effect well there it is yep right there yeah yeah and and their reaction to that Steve and this is going on all over all over the world they're doing it not just in the United States in the UK in Australia is they took the temperature when it was an orchard at O'Hare in in 1909 and they take it again mm oh no no it's an International Airport and instead of thinking well maybe there's a difference between being having a thermometer in the middle of an orchard and a thermometer in the middle of runway six they they think that there's got to be a problem with the there's a problem with the orchard temperature that it isn't cold enough so they're actually revising the past to make the past appear colder than it was in relation to the present I'm going to pass this one to Ross who's much more interested in temperature data than I am I've mostly been have been interested in the proxy data and the tree-ring okay and those things okay you take that one Ross it's a real problem if you want to look up a temperature record for instance I looked up Juneau Airport before coming here just to see what you'll see online looks like an upward sloping line but if you look really closely this is in the NASA website there's a very faint line behind it and so I printed it used a pen to trace it over that faint line is what's called the unadjusted data and it goes up and down but it's basically flat yeah the line they want you to see is called the adjusted data yeah and that's the one that as you say they've they decided that prior to 1950 or so nobody knew how to read a thermometer property so they're now maybe those adjustments are all valid but you have to take their say so for it and I don't like this situation where the data is coming from people who say we're gonna keep the actual data hidden we're just going to show you the data after we've adjusted it and trust us that the adjustments are valid this question of well how do you know your adjustments are valid that was one of the first ones that I got into back before the hockey stick days I would did a couple of papers with Pat Michaels where we just tested these spatial patterns of trends to see whether they correlate with things they're not supposed to correlate with like population growth and GDP growth and and they do they strongly correlate with these indicators of economic activity and for the most part like we published these in climate journals we got the IPCC to report on it and summarize it but the people who work with the data in the end they can just ignore it they they like the answers the data gives them as as they have it and they don't really have an incentive to dig into this question but I think it's a big question is Anthony points out that's just for the US but it's even worse in other countries around the world all through the third world where the only thermometers are at airports yeah I think there's big data quality problems that make it hard to study this well let me ask you something more basic than ROS is from a scientific point is adjusted data on this scale is adjusted data a thing is it is it actually a legitimate activity it well sure it will you suggested data in economics you know quarterly adjusted seasonally adjusted as long as you know what the adjustment is long as it's transparent and it's well what do you talk about seasonal adjustment there that economists will do for employment figures which I think would mean that for example in the summer you might have a lot of seasonal agricultural labor that you wouldn't have in the depths of winter so if you if you you would think that that just meant your economy was booming generally and it doesn't it's a specific seasonal thing well what are these adjustments about can I let me respond to because I think the term adjustments that gets a too negative connotation in many cases I'll give you things we're adjustments are useful and important there's a very popular long-term graph of oxygen-18 data in Greenland which shows very level sort of is interpreted as temperature and shows very level temperatures for ten thousand years about eight years ago a scientist named Venter observed that the elevation of the the Greenland ice sheet had decreased several hundred meters over that period and that needed to be taken into account in interpreting the oxygen-18 data as temperature so he looked at other benchmarks where glaciers hadn't gone the hadn't changed elevation and used the and from that determined that there had been a very considerable decline in oxygen-18 temperatures over the Holocene for 4° five degrees in the past ten thousand years so it gives a very different understanding of the period and one that is more scientifically informative than the data that is not adjusted for elevation change well but we know that that the difference there is that we're adjusting for elevation change which is which is something which is something one can grasp and take into account and and relate to the overall trend line what are we adjusting for when at NOAA or the Meteorological Office in the UK or in Australia what are they adjusting for when they're doing all this adjusting which only seems to come one way aunt in it they're adjusting for changes in the data and we get this viewpoint that science says pristine you know the climate scientist pure but the reality is is that it is not the data that's being gathered temperature data at the surface is being done in a rather haphazard way and has been for over a hundred years in 1892 the United States weather bureau was formed by an act of Congress and their main mission back then was to forecast for agriculture because we were essentially mostly an agrarian society back then and so they set up weather stations all over the United States and that was then copied throughout the world and it was called the Cooperative Observer network and back then they had to put things on paper because they didn't have cell phones or you know computers or whatever so every month they would record everything on a sheet of paper the high and low temperature is how much rainfall there was how many days were overcast that sort of thing and they would send it into the National Climatic Data Center the problem is is that human observers make mistakes and so sometimes they would transpose 60 and make it a 90 or something like that so they would look for those kinds of things and fix those kinds of things that's a valid adjustment but then there were things like well the observer would retire and they would move the station a perfect example of that is in Lampasas Texas we had an observer that was out at a farm who was recording temperature and this was an official climate station being used to come up with the national average by the way and everything was going along fine with this one observer but when he retired they moved it to a radio station downtown and Lampasas Texas it was on the concrete and asphalt right next to any of the the highway and the the temperature spike went like this over a period of a few months and that got into the climate data and so they try to adjust that and so all these adjustments are trying to fix these perceived problems and real problems in the data the problem is is that this the temperature data we have for the last hundred years is really messy it's not pristine it's not pure and it does require some adjustment to try to fix it the problem is almost every adjustment that's being made by the government scientist causes the trend to increase we never see one that causes the trend to decrease and in fact they take out some stations that are considered too cold crater lake Oregon for example it was removed from the database well it's too cold why I'm not joking I'm not hooking but here's the here's the real wood because wood for most of us who have watched this thing at a distance what happened was around the turn of the century there were a lot of very confident climate models that were issued by the professionals and those climate models were fairly scary we now are approaching the end of the second decade of the 21st century and those models largely did not pan out and and to some of us it seems that the the climate establishment is trying to align reality with the model so because the model is a is a dud the model is a bus but if we take the actual temperature record in the other indicators we can we can force the planet to align with with our model of it is are we dealing with serious high-level scientific corruption Ross well one of the sort of picking up on Anthony's point when you know you're working with really messy data what you should be is just very cautious and humble about the conclusions you draw and that gets lost when these graphs are drawn and when they announced this year is the warmest year ever and they're talking about you know hundredths of a degree difference in a data set that's as Anthony point out it's topless ly noisy ironically though even if you just take the data at face value the surface data and the satellite and weather balloon data and compare it to what the models say should be happening that's another issue that opens up that the models run hot compared to the data John Christie who state climatologist in Alabama he and I did a paper last year we we picked a level of the tropical atmosphere where the models all say greenhouse gases should have a really strong effect much stronger than at the surface this is where it should just be glowing red and very vivid based on greenhouse gases and it's a level that's monitored by weather balloons and it's not affected by all these problems at the surface so we've got good measurements of it so how do the models and data match up there we have a hundred and twenty runs from all the different models every single run over the 50 year time span that we had available every single run from every model overstated the warming and a two-thirds of the case the difference was statistically significant sorry we wrote this up for a journal one of the referees admitted he was astonished that the gap was that bad and we published it we didn't really know how the modeling community would react actually I kind of figured how they would react which was just ignore like yeah no interest in this whatsoever but we look at that and think it obvious that this suite of models runs too hot they're overstating the effect on on the climate unless they have some really good explanation about why this discrepancy could hold but again that is if we just say all right we have messy data which is use anyway and even on that plane we run into this problem of the models are running hot and ironically the next generation of models that will come up for the next IPCC report they're running even hotter than the current generation model they have a higher climate sensitivity value and and on that score when there's a discussion in science magazine about there's some of the modelers themselves are starting to get a little bit nervous that this could look this is starting to look kind of fishy that they don't know why their models are running that hot but it's kind of going in the wrong direction for them it's it's been going on for a long time now and you would have thought if there was without wishing to impugn anyone's integrity that someone would actually with inside the group as it were inside the group think would be wanting to do this I know Steve you don't like the ideological component to this that has come along you said to me I don't know I hope I'm not giving anything away be you you said to me you were at you're an engineer by profession and you described yourself to me as a you were a fairly conventional Trudeau peon liberal until the hockey stick caught your eye in which point you immediately moved into the category of right-wing madmen how how did how did how did how did this feel become having been on the receiving end of it how did it become so partisan that's it that's an interesting question well I guess the academic community start off by being very partisan the so and they have adopted the a campaign I think of not trying to persuade their opponents but to deprecate their opponents and and elect essentially I suppose adopt the Constantine strategy of converting the emperor of Rome and thereby converting the Roman Empire to Christianity rather than actually the any of the citizens so they would perceive their if they get Obama or an Obama 2.0 as president and installed them in that's their strategy rather than to persuade people my own take on that is that if climate is a big problem then it would take a consensus of the entire society to implement the vast scale of changes required so that it's important to persuade the most rational right-wing people of the problem and they've chosen not to do that I think that's a mistake that's a mistake why they don't do it I don't know there was this there was there was a little glimmer of a trend a few years ago at one point everything was very sharply divided there's an interesting paper that's joke well not interesting actually is completely uninteresting but it's a it's a revealing paper which attempts to track the media footprint of what they call climate scientists and and then the other group were the deniers and that's always the way it's been presented the scientists and the denies but there was this interesting period a few years ago when other groups came there were younger scientists like a twenty years younger than Michael Mann and Phil Jones & Co who were known as Luke warmers and who were more open to alternative theories on this what's what's what's become of all that I would say that the Climategate emails interrupted the any possibility of rational discussion the the climate science community rather than engaging in any introspection as to the bad attitudes and bad conduct that was displayed in the Climategate emails chose to whitewash the scientists that were in the emails and to blame their critics and so and since then the fatwa against against skeptics skeptics of even the mildest element in the Canon like how you calculate principal components are is much more strictly enforced than it was prior to Climategate and I think that the failure of the various inquiries to actually inquire contributed to that so rather than resolving any of those issues they made them worse yeah that's that's it was an interesting and revealing reaction in itself and today I mean Michael Mann in his various lawsuits always claims to have been pronounced innocent by whatever it is 8 9 12 15 different inquiries by Parliament's and go and bodies and all the rest of it and yet when you look at when you look at them those bodies themselves actually seem to regard their job as being to protect the official narrative of climate rather than to investigate any wrongdoing that's true these societies they they're very small at quickest and there's a lot of ego involved climate science has a huge amount of ego in the top echelons of some of these people and their ability to accept criticism you would think as a scientist would be there but they will only accept criticism from peers they consider equals and sometimes not even then in the Climategate emails some of Michael Mann's peers were criticizing him saying some of this data you're using really isn't appropriate and doesn't really say what it's supposed to be saying or what you think it's saying and yet he wouldn't even listen to them and so yeah there's a lot of ego involved in climate science not only about I'm right and you're wrong but there's also a lot of we're saving the world so just shut up and do what we tell you yeah yeah that that's that's that's actually central to - because you've got hair basically a scientific narrative that is bolstered by officialdom by governments and actually by transnational institutions the hockey-stick benefited from the fact that it was basically the United Nations favorite scientific graph Ross do you think that that that the imprimatur of officialdom has some has actually corrupted what these guys are doing yeah I think well it's had two contrasting effects on the one hand it doesn't really help them that they've got all these celebrities and UN officials and people flying constantly around the world to Land's tell you to stop flying and using fossil fuels and then they take off again to their night prince harry did that four times by private plane in 11 days he flies in to tell you not to catch a cheap tourist flight to Florida and then he flies out again but that issue of the imprimatur of IPCC but also the scientific societies I think that's a source of a lot of the problem for them I got into an online debate once with the head of the American Meteorological Society they were proposing to put out a statement on climate change and in the comments section of a blog Rajat pookie senior used to run I written a little piece there saying in the economic societies that I belong to the American Economic Association Canadian economics Association it's in the Constitution they will never issue position statements right and specifically they point out this is to preserve the intellectual freedom of their members yeah and so I said you guys shouldn't be issuing these position statements because you're now creating a class system in your organization there are the people that well there's the ones that get to write the statement and then they're the ones that agree with it but then you might have half of your membership disagree with the statement but they're now going to be driven into a kind of second-class citizenship and silence so I and I also said if you really insist on putting this out take a survey of your members and let us see how many actually agree with it so the president of the Society it was a bit baffled by this but he said no I think the public expects of us to issue statements to you know let them see what it is that we know when avail themselves of our wisdom and and he wasn't receptive to that but to me that's exactly what's happened now these scientific societies have put out statements that I'm sure don't command universal assent within their organizations but they won't survey their members but for people like judith curry as you've seen who step up and say i actually disagree with some of what said here and i I don't I think we need to debate this more she is instantly relegated to second-class citizenship and eventually drummed out of the field I think that's been very toxic for their profession yeah tonight I won't step in here with an anecdote or incident that illustrates rather force how the interaction of an official agency the IPCC with scientists occurred to affect how a message was portrayed and this this occurred in the Climategate emails and in one of the hockey stick graphs that your concerns right prettier since what did the fame and there was a famous famous email where Phil Jones talks to Mike man about using a Mike's nature trick to hide the decline and many of you have probably heard this phrase it was on national television it was even on June John Stewart the what the decline was is that there were three temperature reconstructions that they were show it wanted to show in this graph one one of the man's went up and another one of them Keith Griffis went down in the last part of the 20th century and one of and they presented this graph with one graph with one reconstruction going up and one reconstruction going down and the chief authors of IPCC looked at this and I thought well this really doesn't this isn't going to scare anybody or this you know they're they're right they're not going to think that these reconstructions already good so they so one of the road to bad it is the authors and says well this Griffo reconstruction rather dilutes the message doesn't it at a man so men agreed saying well yes of course it does and he said in fact I would really want to be I'm the last person that would want to quote give fodder to the skeptics so what they did in the final so man then said well we and man and griffa caucus I guess off outside the emails and developed a solution what they did was they chopped off 50 years of data that went down and published the graph with the Griffen a series ending in nineteen 1940 or 1950 tucked the endpoint under a barrage of other grass and then the final graph went up and everything went up so the one that went down was mysteriously disappeared so this this audio so what what I thought would have attracted controversy was the role of senior officials yeah in getting the scientists to produce a graph that suited their message yep but there was absolute radio silence on that topic no and that's actually very interesting when when the the phrase you use diluting the message that doesn't actually seem to have a lot to do with scientific research but the back and forth in the emails about diluting the message and stuff is very revealing we're going to take some questions from our audience I believe we I think we have Aaron and Enoch downstairs with the microphones and Laurie upstairs let's start have you got a question we've got a question up in the gallery from the cheap seats Laurie you've got to got any questions up there Wow this is a complicated trendline Laurie's been going up and down up and down it's way more it's way more sophisticated than the hockey stick that that trend lines yep Russ touched on that the first tonight he talked about craziness level that doesn't get reached reached by the people who have something to say and I want to relate that to the CNN marathon where the it's easy to want to dismiss the Democrat candidates as ridiculous I don't think we should dismiss them I think they've got their finger on something they have identified an issue which I think they are convinced can get them the White House and the reason for that is that as you have all pointed out we get bombarded on a daily basis by the message and that's the only one they hear now the Trump administration is doing great things by rolling back some of the measures at the EPA but they should be concerned about the upcoming election and unless the message that is being heard in schools universities churches national parks is challenged all the people are going to vote to save the nation so at the planet this morning after what we heard which was really painful there was a woman behind me who said to her husband you know the sad thing is that when our grandchildren get to be our age they won't see this because it won't exist anymore right the people are going to vote along those lines so my question to you is there were a few proposals which I think we're going to address this there was one about the blue team red team it was scuttled there was one about a commission that was going to be led by William hopper with people like Judy scurry and Richard Linson and Roy Spencer and so on what has happened to that commission that says will happen had the pleasure of sitting next to at some god-awful Senate hearing in the United States a couple of years back and then was pointed to this governmental body by by President Trump is it does actually any of that make a difference or are we now has climate alarmism in effect become the environment itself the environment in which we raise our young people and we talk about we we done jokes about the Democrats but if there were a Green Party in the United States it might be like green parties all over the continent they get elected to Parliament in places like Germany there they're very strong in that sense is the political argument lost Ross well a few things there so we'll Harper was appointed to the National Security Council by President Trump and it was a base from which he could try to get a group together to do an investigative report of some of the government's own climate research and it appears that countervailing forces within the White House itself scuttled it and and the the advisory group around the president were evenly split and so nothing has happened and another issue is the what's called the endangerment finding which is the basis for the EPA to regulate co2 emissions early in the new administration people were really pushing Pruitt to begin a process of reversing the endangerment finding and they they chickened out from that so in that sense the the artillery or the the ammunition that they could have had to push back against some of the regulatory agenda they they haven't been able to come up with it the the gentleman though makes a good point that I I suspect people don't quite realize how pervasive climate alarmism is a school system or maybe you do maybe you hear from your kids and grandchildren in popular culture it's really all the way through and so to the point that it has become almost a default position for a lot of people and it still runs up against the barrier that when people say ok you win we have a climate crisis what do you want me to do yeah and then well I want you to give up all your fossil fuels and quit your job and have nothing and so when they announced the policy plan that's where they they still run into trouble but I I do think that there is a going to be a great deal of difficulty rebalancing this discussion on a broad scale just because of how pervasive alarmism but that is that's a bit like cheap grace I always feel I mean it's easy too in a way it's easier to save the planet then save your rotten dysfunctional school district or your rotten little town where where all the factories of clothes it's a to say okay I'm sorry I can't save my school district or my town or my County because I'm too busy saving the planet well what are you doing to save the planet well I went to a rock concert where Leonardo DiCaprio introduced sting singing something about the rainforest I mean that's is there any is that's the easiest kind of activism on the planet isn't it let's uh let's have a question from down here and I think Aaron maybe the lady at the back there if you can get get get over there hello I'm one of those beleaguered Canadians and we are facing an election in which we have a prime minister who's eviscerated our economy and we are trying to fight back from a conservative point of view but we're not getting anywhere and even mentioning the fact that we want to talk about the issue gets us practically hung drawn and quartered in the public square so as anybody got any ideas on how one might push back or is there any inkling anywhere of any successful ways to counter these because the consequences are incredibly serious we might never done of us maybe on this trip next year because we may be all beat impoverished and riding horses around the city well well Justin Trudeau is incredibly anti Alberta ante oil sands and he all that but it is it is interesting Anthony the that there is a line that politicians cross at their peril Monsieur Mac Hall thought he could do say the sort of things that young Justin does and he found himself with all these Sheila's own in the street protesting every weekend down in Australia the Labour Party thought it was cruising to victory on fanatical climate ISM and got the shock of its life and a totally unexpected election loss at least in part two it's where it seems to be that when it goes from just prostrating yourself before the climate gods in general to actually saying okay now you're gonna have to pay this much more in taxes when it becomes something concrete people say people check out of it they do and in there was a poll that was conducted by the UN on their website over the past several years and it talked about the major problems that the population of the world saw you know and they wanted them to be ranked and climate change came in almost dead last it really did and that was the UN but you know you talk about people prostate in this this god of climate ISM what's really going on in a lot of cases with a scientist and with the politician is something called noble cause corruption they believe that they're saving the planet and therefore the the end justifies the means and so we'll get there by inflating the models we'll get there by creating scary scenarios we'll get there by scaring schoolchildren and making them think that they have no future and that's what's been going on and it's all because of noble cause corruption and it's a very very sad thing and it's a it's something that has poisoned a good portion of our youth today let's take a question from over there you know there's a man frantically waving his arm we may have to call security if he waves it any more frantically yes sirs thank you for taking my question I'm Tom Stevens my dissertation in 1972 was on climate effects on the greenhouse tomato production right okay so I don't know nothing about climatology I'm not an academic but there's such a thing is I quit the American Association for the Advancement of science when they came out in about 1991 said official policy for the a trip last was there is climate change man's causing it okay I sent him a letter I used to be a contributor not a paid mom not $200 a year but I gave you five hundred dollars extra up until that point the problem is we have grants that are distributed by peer review and if you don't talk the party line you ain't gonna get no grant so there's a big part of the problem my opinion but I have watched and observed and seen and that if you cut out all these grants for all these highly skilled intelligent folks because if you do not write a grant that says oh god man we're gonna be dead in 17 minutes you're not gonna get a grant so I call them grant prostitutes clean it up from Dudley hor e there is there is well I've always get it because people always say whenever you're not whenever you say anything that isn't peer-reviewed it has no value in the in the scientific debate and even when you do have things that have been peer-reviewed as all three of you have done it doesn't count because for some reason it's not the right kind of peer review or you're the kind of guys that that have no peers so no no peers can be found to review you I I look at this system and it seems command it seems Kurupt and completely preposterous am I wrong Steve I think your big sort of over eloquent look most both scientific journals work nobody is peer review in biochemistry journals and lots of fights between one biochemist and another biochemist and there they get mad at their peer reviewers and yet the discipline continues to grow and flourish I think the unique thing and climate science is that it's a bit of a mix between there's a certain hard science element to it but there's also a element of sociology or Gender Studies to it and and and so there's a qualitative element to it that lends itself to to bias and so it's hard to and they also always have their eye on being cited in the next IPCC report window and which is a political document so we have an entire large industry generating more and more alarmist articles of and and every topic within the industry has to genuflect towards the climate change I once read an article that was written by a Chinese scientist in 1973 in the period of Chairman Mao and at the end of it he closed with a pair oration that his work had been inspired by the teachings of Chairman Mao and was otherwise I mean the rest of it was a sober sober article and I mean you you have that in the private sciences you can have some article on the mating habits of beetles and it ends up being with the peroration to climate change at the end right I think you can still so you can sort of see past what is the Chairman Mao type genuflect Shinto the actual article so if you if you discount those little flourishes which they are obligated to put in the great leader or for the great climate change alarmists the underlying science can still be quite sound yeah okay you'd agree with that and Anthony well you know science for the most part has done tremendous things for us we live in a fantastic world debating you think of what the world was like 100 years ago trips like this what we're doing right this moment would not have been possible or easily done anyway but I think really what's happened with science in general has without line by President Eisenhower during his farewell address in 1961 he talked about then and everybody's probably heard this the military industrial complex be worried about that because of the budgetary things associated with that and them and all of the power they were accumulating but what most people don't know is that in the very next paragraph after he talked about the military-industrial complex he talked about the fact that there was a danger of science become becoming beholden to funding and that's what's happening today all of the science that we're getting about climate change is coming from the government and the government doles out the money and unless there's a problem unless we've got a future problem that we have to solve the money does it come that's really in a nutshell what's going on here where the the science has become very very beholden to grants let's have another question from the gallery Laurie we've got one some serious arm flapping going on up here take off you look like you're about to fly down and join us give it a go Laurie's beetling over thanks to the opportunity to put my solution to the problem and this is something that the mark Stein Club could start and this would be a worldwide petition I envisage it in Australia but I'm not sure quite how it would work elsewhere and this is an opt-out petition so I envisage in Australia we'd have a million online signatures to opt out of any of my tax going to subsidize wind or solar power at all forever so what you do is you we all sign up to this petition we petition the government and demand that our taxes don't go to fund this and then on our tax return we have a little box to tick if you tick the box then you get let out of all of these subsidy costs if you don't tick the box then they're lumbered on your tax so I think number one that would be attractive to people to sign up to a number two I think that it would actually have a might have a benefit yeah I I'll ask the guys what they think about that because because we're dealing here with the core realities of of political activism which is that the people who were for something generally tend to be more motivated than the people who are against it Ross so that the people who are in favor of all the climate alarmism well you saw it that you saw it at the g7 with the exception of President Trump it doesn't really matter where the pole the governments are conservative or socialist or whatever they're all in favor of signing up to they all they all went to the ocean warming workshop except president except President Trump he sat that out he went and strolled the nude beaches of Biarritz or whatever which is a far more useful way to to spend your time but that that's the difference isn't it the people who want this stuff are more energized and the people who think it's a lot of hooey yeah the specific suggestion wouldn't work in Ontario where I come from because they very cleverly built the subsidy system right into the electricity price so they can say well we're not actually subsidizing it it's just you pay this surcharge on your electricity price to cover it it's it is odd the number of countries including Canada but also the US where there's a big investment in wind and solar even in places where and imagine people ever voted for it like it's one of these there must be a PowerPoint presentation out there that's the most incredibly persuasive presentation in the world because they go and that everyone from the governor of Texas to Frau Merkel went for it and and they start investing in these things even though everyone who works in the field will tell them you'll be subsidizing it forever they'll break down much quicker than theirs they're saying this will wreck your electricity system because it's unstable and intermittent and you won't even reduce emissions because you have to now build all these natural gas plants to run backup and yet it's this unstoppable force around the world so no matter where you go you see the wind turbines up all over the place um and I guess like the well so many other things I I see it all happening I just don't remember when we voted for it and and how we vote against it so I'm not the person to ask because I don't understand how where it all arose from I'm glad that the wind solar point was brought up because that was something that wasn't we did we didn't touch on before and yet is one of the very fundamental planks of the climate summit activist movement was that is that nuclear is bad and wind and solar are good and yet wind and the the limitations of wind and solar - they can't power more than a micro fraction of a modern society the only technology that has any potential is a large footprint no carbon source of energy is nuclear and until the and the climate science community has by and large been anti-nuclear activists and it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense in terms of their their their supposed concern about the both temperature change because if at that point you'd sort of say okay well we'll eat whatever objections we had to nuclear and adopt that say you know as a solution and I think on the climate skeptic side there's a large number of skeptics who don't particularly believe that the prospects are that bad but are not so confident that they're right that they would say okay if we're doing something saying ya know like nuclear we're well we'll we're okay with that but the climate science community has been leaders in the anti-nuclear movement and for that I think they deserve far more shame or blame if it is a big problem than any of the skeptics well what what a what about something like California where they they talk about mandating solar panels on all new home construction that's that that is doing nothing other than advertising your moral virtue it does nothing for energy generation does it the entire thing is virtue signaling yeah but but that way at least you'll have sort of a billboard above your house that is signaling virtue yeah product perhaps they could have some neon trim with with the solar panel yeah yeah that's that's bad citrus and and one thing when you when you add the wind turbines everybody seems to know they're useless but they don't seem able just to stop them there there was this rather poignant story I think somewhere up in northern Scotland where the Royal ornithological society had all gathered to watch the return of this extremely rare bird to scottish shores i don't know why you're laughing this is tragic the poor little fellow has a bit seen in scotland for generations comes tweeting along fly straight into the wind turbine and is in two million pieces all over the ornithologists binoculars and and no matter no matter what happens nobody actually says look this stuff is useless it kills a ton of things it leeches into the ground why are we still doing this well it's about political will and it back to something I said earlier about people trying to appease their base you know in California wind and solar is a big deal I I have solar on my home I also have an electric car the electric car is dead and sitting in the driveway but the solar panels are still working and I will tell you that the only reason I got solar panels was not because I was saving the earth by producing less carbon dioxide or bending that the political will of the people at Sacramento I got it because it was the only way I could hedge against price increases on electricity in the summer in California they have these tiered pricing structures and if you are a naughty boy and you use your air conditioning too much you can be paying up to 80 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity unless you have a solar panel and then you're forgiven so I'm not kidding so yeah I just want to be sure I had the stab back because that's like so to get you to buy the solar panel they they impose punitive rates on electricity that's right and that way the soul everyone can say well there's been a 27 percent growth in solar panel sales in the last three years and it's just you trying to avoid having your plug pulled by the state of California because you've maxed out your electricity allowance let's not keep the power on that they will charge you to the point where you're having to finance your own electricity bill yeah yeah and and it's one other thing to note about solar panels they have unexpect lifetime of about 20 to 25 years depending on manufacturer at some point in the not-too-distant future there are going to be millions of solar panels that are no longer producing what they were supposed to be producing because they've aged and they're going to have to be disposed of they don't have a solution for that and what's interesting is those California the new California law that says you got to have them on your roof whether you'll be able to just let them run if you've got like a 50 year mortgage and your solar panel dies after 20 years whether it'll be enough to have a useless solar panel stuck up on your roof for another 30 years that'll still be enough to quite I mean because so a lot of this is such pointless virtue signaling that's have one final question from down here Erin from I think the lady over there's that wall over there yeah just just there thing yeah what I find scary is now in the schools they give you a bad mark in science if you don't go along with the climate change story so then you don't get into the original the elite university so in the future the scientists they're gonna have to all go along with us if they want to get into if they want to get into the university or the enrich program whatever so it's it's a really it's reminds me of communism you know you have to go along with the Marxist lemon ISM to be able to go to university yeah I again I guess that I guess we've already seen that in one of the one of the interesting things since I've been in this lawsuit with Michael Mann is often the pushback from the consensus figures is that if we say oh well this scientist says this and this scientist say that they say oh well he's just an emeritus professor he was he was fine back when he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1967 but he's basically semi-retired now so who cares what he thinks and at the same time they were then this younger group of scientists just starting out who hadn't yet been intimidated into the consensus and again would say occasionally dissident things but there was this kind of big blocker people from from 30 to 70 in which there was a kind of serious consensus enforcement and that's what all the 97% rubbish is about it's basically to tell you you're a weirdo if you if you disagree with us and this is there any this seems basically unscientific Ross it doesn't it the idea of an enforce the idea that a consensus a scientific theory is correct according to whether 17 or 12 people advanced it and and it gets more correct the more people who advance it and eventually it becomes inviolable correct that doesn't actually seem that seems something new in science it has happened before but the stories don't usually have a happy ending for instance in nutrition and Diet issues where you have a essentially an obesity epidemic because the scientific community had a rock-solid consensus that just happened to be exactly the opposite of what they should have been advising people on it does raise Stephen mentioned a Maoist scientist and this whole feeling of Maoism about the the school system that kids are in a kind of ongoing reeducation camp even before they got their education there in reeducation camp its reaction without education which is which is like taking it to the next level it's I got into I published an op-ed a few months ago on the extreme weather issue and a lot of it was just reporting what was in IP CC reports and those mainstream reports that over and over draw reached a conclusion that there aren't really trends in extreme weather and and these big events when you look at long time series today is not except and got a lot of positive feedback but also a lot of negative feedback and while the negative feedback was pouring in a friend of mine who grew up in Eastern Europe came to talk to me and and he said that when I was growing up the political correctness in the Soviet Union was really bad like everybody was afraid to talk about it but then he added but people think that the Soviets imposed it on us they didn't we imposed it on ourselves he said we just stopped being willing to talk and and challenge what we were being heard and we knew that at that point we were imposing it on ourselves so it was his way of saying keep writing what you're writing know and I think the same message goes for everyone here if you let it no one's going to impose it on you unless you impose it on yourself yeah yeah that's that's a fine point and and an excellent one on which to end these three gentlemen in their different ways of all refused to succumb to that and none of them sought the notoriety they found themselves with among the big climate enforces and all of them have withstood an amazing barrage from the 97% consensus and forces that that I think most of us would have a real difficulty withstanding as you know and Anthony gets attacked every day of the week by people he's he's the soul of geniality the idea that he yet if you were to read the the climate consensus website it's all about how he's he's spewing his hatred on this he's spewing his denialism he's he's a complete non spera and and there's a slight trend but it's a bear in the in the scheme of things it's only it's not a dramatic hockey stick spew straight up into the stratosphere just a very slight dribble that's consistent with previous records so these three guys are actually three of the of the bravest people in a field in which for many discretion has become not just the better part of valor but necessary to survive without being attacked and pilloried so we owe these three men a great debt wallstreet Eric Steve McIntyre Anthony watts three three quarters of us were part of a book called climate changed the facts which became a well it became a big environmental vessel used to give me a laugh to look at the Amazon environmental bestsellers and our little book would be number one on there and Michael Mann's book on his hockey stick was in a big hit position number 73 so we had a great we had a great time doing that so 3/4 of us will be signing the book I think somewhere that away immediately after the show Steve wasn't part of the book he said you know he could survive a lot of things but he wasn't gonna be associated with the three of us so he sold so he said no way but the rest of us will be back there citing that book a little later I hope right after the show and I hope you'll want to come along if you don't yet have a copy and and and pick it up that's it from us add we will see you next time thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Mark Steyn

Views: 240,054

Keywords: The Mark Steyn Show, Hockey Stick, Climate change, Michael E Mann, Mark Steyn, Ross McKitrick, Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat

Id: FHUHsBnpCj8

Length: 84min 57sec (5097 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019