#2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

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Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here.

I really appreciate it.

Our pleasure.

My pleasure.

And if you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your

resume, like what you do?

I mean, just a brief version of your

credentials.

I'm Dick Lindson

and my whole life has been in academia.

Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard

and I did spend a couple of years

at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado.

Part of that was because at Harvard I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations.

So I went to Seattle for someone who did.

And then I got my first academic position at Chicago

and stayed there about three, four years, moved on to Harvard, spent about ten years there.

and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013.

I've always enjoyed it.

I mean, the field of atmospheric sciences,

when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable.

So you could look at phenomena.

One of them that I worked on was the so-called quasi-biennial cycle.

Turns out the wind above the equator, about 16 kilometers, 20 kilometers, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year, and so on.

And, you know, we worked out why that happened.

And there were other things like that.

So it was a very enjoyable period

until global warming.

And, sir, would you tell everybody what your credentials are, what you do, where you're from?

I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton.

And

like

Dick, I'm a science nerd.

But I was actually born in India under the British Raj.

My father was an Army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American.

And

that was before World War II.

So when I came to America as a small child, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project.

So

I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge.

And that's probably why I went into physics.

I thought, this looks like an interesting way to make a living.

And if I can do it, I'll do it.

And I have.

And I've

done a number of things.

I've spent a lot of time at universities, at Columbia, at Princeton.

I also served for a couple years in Washington as director of energy research

under President Bush Sr.

And I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here.

I first became suspicious when I was director of energy research.

I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers' money and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing.

And there was one exception, that was the

people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful.

You know, we work for Senator Gore, we don't work for you.

And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research.

I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be glad to take my money.

That's interesting.

So Senator Gore has been involved in this whole climate thing for quite a long time then.

Oh, yes, very long.

When he was a senator, before he was vice president.

That's right.

And when he made that movie, Inconvenient Truth, what year was that again, Jamie?

It was like

98 or something?

Yeah.

Something like that?

Yeah.

99.

That.

2006.

What is it?

2006.

Oh, really?

With that off?

Wow.

Okay.

So 2006.

So when he made that film,

he,

there was always, when I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nimoy had a television show called In Search of.

Remember that show?

Sure.

And on that show, he warned of an oncoming ice age.

Right.

Do you remember that?

And I remember being a kid and freaking out like, oh, my God, Spock is telling us the world's going to freeze.

This is terrifying.

And then somewhere along the line, it became global warming.

And initially, in the 80s, it was kind of funny.

People were saying, well, hairspray, the more you use it, you could play golf deep into November.

That was the ozone season.

That was the ozone.

Yes.

But it was also part part of global warming.

They were worried about global warming, but they were worried about the ozone hole.

It wasn't CO2 as much back then.

CO2 seems to have really significantly become a part of the Zeitgeist after this Al Gore film.

No.

No?

No, it was before.

No, it was a study, in terms of academic study, for sure, but in terms of people panicking, when did CO2

panicking?

I have no idea.

But

no, no, what happened was

there was,

I would say with the first Earth Day, 1970, there was a real change in the environmental movement.

It began to focus much more strongly on the energy sector and much less on saving the whales.

And there was a big difference.

I mean, the energy sector involved trillions of dollars.

The whales, not so much.

And at that time, it was cooling, this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much.

But, you know, you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something.

And it was cooling from the 1930s.

1930s were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the 70s.

And that's why they were saying, well, you know, this is going to lead to an ice age.

And they focused on that for a while.

And then in the 70s, and at that time, well, what do you say?

You know, if you're worried about an ice age,

they said, well, it'll be the sulfates emitted by coal burning, because that reflects light, and the less light that we get, the colder we'll get.

But then the temperature stopped cooling in the 70s and started warming.

And that's when they said, well, you have to warm, now scare people with warming and you can't use the sulfates anymore.

But the

scientist called

Suki Minabe

showed that even though CO two doesn't do much in the way of warming, doubling it will only give you a half degree or so.

But if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little, you added water vapor, which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you had doubled the impact of CO2, which now gives you a degree, which still isn't a heck of a lot, but still it was saying you could increase it.

And that's when people started saying, well, now we better find CO2.

It's increased because of industrialization and so on.

And that began the demonization of CO2.

Do you think there's just always people that are going to point to anything like this that's difficult to define and use it to their advantage?

Oh, yeah.

And this was a particular case.

You you wanted to deal you know, the energy sector is trillions of dollars.

Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, r replace fossil fuels, it's big bucks.

And one of the odd things I think in politics, I don't see it studied much, Congress can actually give away trillions trillions of dollars.

If you look at the McKinsey report on,

you know,

eliminating CO2, net zero,

they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.

Well,

if you're giving out that much,

You don't need that much of your politician.

All you need is millions for your campaigning.

And all you're asking are the recipients of people who are getting the money that you are giving them.

A half percent, a quarter percent, you're golden.

So that's much better than giving out $100,000 and having all of it.

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Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge.

There's no room for any rational debate, and if you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier,

which is like being an anti-vaxxer or fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing you could be called.

Now, that's a very interesting phenomenon.

I mean, as looking at it, on the one hand, you're told the science is settled.

Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder.

I mean, you went to college, how many climate scientists did you know?

I mean,

but on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports,

they're pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2, and we don't understand them at all.

So here you have the biggest phenomena we don't understand at all, but the science is settled.

Who knows what that means?

Aaron Powell, well, it's also this is very bizarre dynamic of the Earth's temperature itself, which has never been static.

No.

How would it remain static?

That would involve a hugely reactive system.

It doesn't make any sense.

But everyone seems to be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the Earth is warming.

We have to act now.

You say everyone.

No, I'm not going to say everyone.

A lot of politicians.

A lot of politicians are very attractive to this because it gives them power.

and it's hard to define and you can argue and if you argue against it you're a bad person

well you you do all that but uh you know

we spend part of a year in france my wife is french you know ordinary people once you get to the countryside don't take this all that seriously right

uh here too i suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.

Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians' decisions where they have to.

Oh, in the UK, they were getting rid of cows, they were forcing people to kill people.

They were paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills.

Right.

Right.

I mean, it makes people poorer.

It's making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it.

And that involves billions of people.

No, I mean, it's doing phenomenal damage and pain.

but

you know, I think for politicians and for many people who are well off,

they need something that gives meaning to their life, and saving the planet seems sufficiently

grandiose for their ambitions.

How are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity?

Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are cheaper.

At least the experience in the UK is when you switch to, quote, renewables, it tripled the price of electricity.

Right, but what I'm talking about is like third world countries, parts of the world that are undeveloped.

They can't afford it.

That's all it is, that they can't afford it.

But they also

to if they didn't follow these net zero policies, what kind of plants are we talking about?

Are we talking about coal plants?

Coal, anything, whatever is available.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, so.

So you think even though coal does pollute the environment and it releases particulates, right?

It's not an issue, right?

How shall I put it?

You know, it's always a matter of cost.

We have a plant, I think, in Alabama that has basically as clean as any other plant that burns coal.

You can clean it.

You can scrub it.

You can get rid of almost everything except CO2.

Okay, so the particulates aren't as big of an issue as they used to be in the past?

They're more efficient.

Okay.

So stopping so this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world that do not have electricity.

And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants in

and not bringing these people into the first world.

Well and there are of course the alternative natural gas and so on which are available in places.

You know there are places where you have y you're lucky, like in Norway or Canada, you know, Quebec, where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean.

But

there's a problem with politicians.

I remember once being in D.C.

and some Republican politicians came and said, you know what we just did?

We banned incandescent light bulbs.

They said, wasn't that a great thing?

I said, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today.

What's the point?

Because at the time, what was replacing it?

Compact fluorescents, which were awful.

All they had to do was wait and do nothing, and LEDs would come along, and people would say, okay, I prefer that.

Instead,

they feel they have to do something.

And they would switch the fluorescents, which turned out to be terrible for people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So incandescents aren't bad for you?

They were simply less efficient.

than the, you know, in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light.

I mean, LEDs are phenomenal that way.

Right.

They're the best.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's interesting when they have these decisions that they make like that that do turn out to be negative ultimately, and that yet people still allow them to make silly decisions that don't seem to be making sense.

Yeah, I think there's an old cliché.

Money is the root of all evil.

Yeah, that's what I was going to get to.

This is the disturbing thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting, especially a lot of very polite, educated people that have followed the narrative that you follow if you're a good person and if you're a person who trusts science, and that is that we have a serious problem, we have to address it now, or there will be no America for our grandchildren.

This is the thing that we keep saying.

You mentioned a tough thing there, the business trusts science.

Yes.

It's not a great idea because that isn't science is not a source of authority.

It's a methodology.

It's based on challenge.

Right.

Where did this narrative come from, then?

Trust the science.

The success of science.

In other words, this is a relatively new way to approach the world.

I mean, a few hundred years.

And the notion is, and I think it's been stated many times,

you test things, and if they fail to predict correctly, they're wrong so you find out what's wrong with them you don't fudge them you don't change the rules

it's

led to immense improvements in life

development of all sorts of things

and so it has a good reputation

Politicians have less of a reputation, so they wish to co-opt the reputation of science.

Yes, that's a very good point because try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid.

You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing.

Cell phone technology, nuclear power, so many things that people go, that's incredible that they did that.

Well, that's also...

confusing technology with science.

The result of science.

You're right.

Absolutely.

Yeah, which is also an issue, right?

And when you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science.

You mentioned Gore at the beginning.

Yes.

You know, with that thing, he was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together.

And it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2.

Yeah, Greg Braden was on the podcast recently.

He was explaining there have been times where the CO2 was much higher in the atmosphere, but the temperature was colder.

Oh, yeah.

So it's not like we can point to, like, look at the dinosaurs.

We don't want to live the way the dinosaurs live.

Look how much CO2 they had.

And then the other really inconvenient thing with CO2 is that the earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time.

I mean, I think we'll speak to that.

But I mean,

essentially, the increased amount of CO2 in the industrial era has added greatly

to the arable land.

And in fact, there's a funny story.

Do you know the name E.O.

Wilson?

Have you ever heard that name?

I do.

I have heard it, but I don't know where it is.

He wrote a he was a biologist at Harvard.

He wrote about sociobiology.

His specialty were ants and bees and things, social insects.

And he was giving a talk

and

it came up for reasons that were not obvious to me.

He was talking about the population of humanoids.

And he was mentioning that you go back,

you know, a few hundred thousand

years

and

you began the first humanoids and they got to about a few million.

But then during the last glacial maximum,

the numbers

went down to tens of thousands.

There's a complete wipeout of humans.

So I asked him afterwards, I said,

do you think this could have anything to do with the fact that CO2 is so low that there was no food?

And his response was to turn around and walk away.

That's an inconvenient truth, sir.

It's just, to me, it's very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance of that we have settled this, that the science is settled, from so many people and both the left and in academia and even on the right.

There's a lot of people on the right that believe that.

Yeah, I know.

And it should be the first thing that makes you suspicious.

Yeah.

Right.

There's a consensus.

Yeah.

I mean, this is not how science is done.

Something that's never static.

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The weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been, you know, from core samples over a long period of time, it's this crazy wave.

And, like, no one was controlling it back then.

And we're supposed to believe that we can control it now, that we can do something about it.

There's something else about it, which I find funny, and you might have some insight into it.

People pay no attention to the actual numbers.

Yeah.

I mean, we're not talking about big changes.

You know, in other words,

you know, for the temperature of the globe as a whole,

between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees,

but that was because most of the Earth was not affected, much of the Earth anyway, very much.

But, you know, somebody says one degree, a half degree,

what's his name?

Gutierrez at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for it.

Doesn't anyone ask a half degree?

I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9 a.m.

and 10 a.m.

It does seem crazy.

It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.

And what I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier.

How much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that's called Save the World Climate, some crazy like that, where everybody goes along.

They call it the Inflation Reduction Act.

Oh, even better.

Who doesn't want to reduce inflation?

And then, next thing you know, there's windmills killing whales and all kinds of nonsense.

But

the point being,

it is a fascinating science.

Like, the science itself is fascinating.

Oh, yeah.

You get rid of the ideology and you stop attaching

this thing versus, you know, you're either pro-science or anti-science.

Just look at the actual data of it.

It's absolutely fascinating.

And these minute changes, the fact that the precession of the equinoxes where the

earth wobbles, like the whole thing is nuts.

Like the whole temperature, and it has to stay relatively stable in order to keep us alive in terms of can't go too low, can't go too high.

We're in this Goldilocks zone.

The interesting thing is during the ice ages,

we almost get wiped out.

It got really close, right?

And what's interesting about that is, as far as temperature goes,

okay, yeah, the poles have gotten much colder.

You have ice covering Illinois, two kilometers of ice.

That's uninhabitable.

But you get south of 30 degrees latitude, not very different from today in terms of temperature.

And so you would think you had 100,000 years, people would sort of migrate to an area where it was now pleasant.

Trouble was, without CO2, which went down to about 180,

there wasn't enough food for the people.

Oh, so there wasn't enough plant life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Get down to 160, 150, all life would die.

There would be not enough food for anything.

What's it at now, like 240?

No, we're now 400, 400.

400.

Yeah.

400.

430 maybe today, yeah.

Okay.

When you first started discussing this, and when you first started g getting interested in this, how much pushback did you get?

Interesting question.

Actually

quite a lot, but I mean it took very funny forms.

So for instance,

in

let's see, nineteen eighty-nine, for instance,

I sent a paper to Science magazine questioning whether this was something to worry about.

And they sent it back immediately, saying there was no interest.

So I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it and published it.

And the editor was immediately fired.

Wow.

About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the iris effect, that clouds, which were greenhouse effect at the upper levels,

contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling, as a negative feedback.

And we got the paper, put it, got reviewed, it was published.

Again, the editor was fired immediately.

But the the new editor came on immediately and said, he's inviting papers to criticize it.

And suddenly there were tons of papers criticizing it, looking for anything that differed from what we did,

including one that found a difference that actually

made the CO2 even less important, but it was different, so he thought he could pass it through it.

No, it's insane.

And even now, there's something called gatekeepers.

I don't know, are you familiar with the

release of emails from East Anglia?

No, I'm not.

Okay.

This is 20 years ago or something almost.

Somebody, anonymous,

released the emails.

from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm, and they were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on.

And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on.

And that was all public.

And it had no impact at all.

That sounds like that should be illegal.

Yeah.

Well, you know, the whole business with

how should I put it?

peer review,

it is not ancient.

Before World War II,

very few journals had peer review.

And in fact, when I have students look at old journals from the 19th century, one of the big surprises is they are less formal than today's papers.

They are literally discussions among scientists about their results, their questions, their uncertainties, and so on.

There's real communication.

Today, I mean, there's much more formality in the papers.

There's also, in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll or a study.

How often are papers referred to?

And it turns out the average paper is referred to once.

Wow.

I mean, so you have these things.

Papers are written to satisfy the funding agency.

Nobody seems to pay attention to them.

How did you get involved in this?

Well, I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy, and that's what really sucked me into it.

I had never paid much attention to climate science before.

But I was spending a lot of money, the taxpayers' money, on it, and so I thought I ought to learn a little bit about it.

And

I already mentioned mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not appreciate my

questioning.

They were very strange because almost any other science, when they got a call from Washington, come in and tell us what you're doing, they were just delighted to come and make a case about how important their work was.

But the climate scientists were completely different.

Did anybody engage with you?

Yeah, they had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn't come.

And so

they would come, you know, and be very sullen, and they wouldn't answer questions.

And, you know, you can't have a seminar without asking questions.

That's how you learn.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So they would come to try to get funding from you, and they wouldn't answer questions.

That's right.

That sounds crazy.

That sounds like people that don't think they have to convince you that what they're doing is important.

So they're entitled to that money.

Aaron Powell, that's right.

Well, you know, I was working for President Bush Sr., and when Carter and Gore won won the election, you know, Gore couldn't wait to fire me, you know, at the behest of all of his protégés.

Clinton and Gore.

Clinton and Gore, yeah, that's right.

So he,

you know, Washington, fortunately, it's very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire because you can't find them in the org chart.

So it took him two or three months to find me.

But they finally did fire me.

I was glad to be fired.

I wanted wanted to go back to do research.

I was tired of being a bureaucrat, so I'm grateful in some sense for that.

Now, your colleagues that you that weren't working with you, like other scientists,

were they reluctant to discuss this kind of information with you guys when when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?

Well, you know, my field i is actually hard physics.

You know, I'm I'm a nuclear physics trained and I've done a lot of work with lasers.

And these are things you you can measure.

They don't have much political influence.

A lot of them have a military significance.

And in fact, the reason I was brought to Washington is because I invented

an important part of the Star Wars Defense

Initiative, which I can say about later.

But

I had never really paid any close attention to science until then.

But I was...

Climate science.

Climate science, I should say, yes.

So once I had this experience in Washington, I started looking into it a little bit, but I didn't have time to look a lot because my own research was going still at Princeton, and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company, and so,

you know, forming the company and getting it going and funded used up most of my time.

I didn't have time to look at climate.

But eventually that was behind me, and I invited Dick to come give a seminar at a colloquium at Princeton, and that's really when I began to get very interested in it.

And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science.

You know, it

completely politicized.

If you can't ask a question, you know, that's a bad, bad sign.

And

if you have 100% consensus determining the truth, that's an even worse sign because,

you know, the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation.

And that wasn't true of

the climate science community.

You know, they would predict all these things, and none of them ever happened, and there was no consequence.

You know, one failure after another, and nothing ever happened.

The funding kept pouring in.

Now, is this behind the scenes, is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists?

Do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue that that causes?

Or do they just accept it?

Well, I think

speaking as a physicist, I don't know how it is in other fields, and from Princeton, I think most of my colleagues recognize that

there's a lot of nonsense there, but they're afraid to speak up

because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money.

Dick mentioned that the love of money is the root of all evil, and in universities, for example, at Princeton we have enormous new building program.

It's funded to a large extent from overhead, from climate grants, you know.

And you're talking about, you know,

not small change, you know, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, for construction.

So it's like, you know, this famous drama of this Norwegian playwright, Enemy of the People, Ibsen.

And

the point of the drama was there was this resort town in Norway where you would come and you would

be treated at the spa.

You'd drink the water and go home healthy.

Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid.

A local doctor said, you know, we're killing people, we're not curing them.

And he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city.

So it's that syndrome.

It's an ancient human problem.

So it's always been there.

And it's there in spades with climate.

It's part of it.

Another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue.

I mean, in the U.S., and I think that's in a way fortunate, it's almost a right versus left issue.

And as a result,

you have people

universities are almost entirely on the left.

And so it's

something they support.

You know, the money end of it is sort of funny.

I mean, I have the feeling at MIT

that our president,

Sally Kornbluth,

probably spends her time worrying about how she can use climate money to support the music department.

I don't know.

So when they get funding for climate, they can allocate it as they wish?

Well, you know, it is fungible.

Okay.

You'll get this huge overhead, you know, 50%, 60% of your grant goes to the administration and not to your research.

You know, they can do what they like with the organization.

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And if they take

a step outside of the narrative and say, I think we need to re-examine what's going on with CO2 in the atmosphere, and it seems there's a politicalization of this subject, and that's bad for science, that's bad for education, it's bad for everything.

Let's take a step back.

They would immediately lose so much money.

Well, the main thing it's bad for is for overhead income to the university.

Exactly.

Some administrators.

By the way, I mean, this is something that the press didn't deal with very much.

Trump was cutting the overhead.

He was saying that he didn't want to have that included in grants.

I don't think the public realized how significant that was, for better or for worse.

Yeah.

Well, I think most people have no idea where grants go.

They don't even think about it.

No, I mean

the amount of money that's involved.

Yeah, when I was active, if I got a grant,

I'm a theoretician, so I didn't need laboratory work.

It mainly was for support of students.

And so, but then 50% of it went to the administration.

Yeah, it's like a lot of charities, almost.

Yeah.

A lot of money goes to overhead.

A lot of money goes to executives.

A lot of money goes to the administration on grants.

And some of it is reasonable.

Sure.

But it's also you're kind of attached to keeping that money flowing in.

And there's a gigantic incentive to not rock the boat and not discuss it the same way you would discuss nuclear science.

Right.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And the attraction, I mean, if you're an administrator, if you're a president of a university,

that often overrides everything else, you know, that you're raising money.

I remember years ago, I started college at Rensselaer,

and I made the mistake of mentioning to someone that I appreciated the fact they never bothered me.

I transferred out after my sophomore year.

So it began bothering me.

And I realized the president of Rensselaer was making over a million and a half dollars.

This is years ago, probably making much more now.

And the fundraiser came back to me and said, do you know how much money she raises?

And I said, oh, so she's on commission.

Right.

Yeah.

That is kind of what's going on.

It gets real weird when you bring that kind of stuff up.

And people get very reluctant to have these discussions.

They don't want to rock the boat.

I've talked to a lot of friends in academia and they say people pull you aside like in quiet corners to discuss how this is kind of bullshit.

But there's also the alumni.

I find this with Harvard especially.

A lot of the people who graduate from Harvard really love the place.

For better or for worse.

And they will do anything to protect it.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Especially since to stick your neck out, there's not a whole lot of benefit.

Unless you're writing a book about how ridiculous current climate change models are.

A lot of people did at first.

In half, a lot of politicians wrote books saying this is a hoax.

And they managed to ride that out, I mean, by just keeping on demanding that it be accepted.

It's interesting.

It is interesting.

It's because it's universally accepted on the left.

Any discussion at all about I've had conversations with people and I say,

why do you think that?

Like, what do you know about climate change?

And almost none of them have any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they've been, what Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie, which is so far off.

He thought we were all going to be dead today.

It's very little change between 2006 and today.

I mean, as I mentioned before, I think for some people,

its importance is it gives, quote, meaning to their life.

Yes.

It becomes a part of an ideology, and it's a very cult-like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things, unfortunately.

What do you think are the major factors?

You talked about water vapor, CO2,

there's methane.

There's a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the earth moving in any direction, correct?

Yeah.

Let me back off that a little because

one of the things that

is sort of strange is the narrative itself deals with

global temperature.

Not clear what that is.

I mean,

some average over the whole globe.

How do you take it?

What do you do with it?

But more than that,

what is climate?

And, you know, there is a definition.

It's an arbitrary definition.

and it's that

it's time variation on time scales longer than 30 years.

It's pretty arbitrary,

but it distinguishes it from weather, which is changes from day to day or week to week, etc.

Right, so if they can see a rise in temperature over 30 years, they start getting concerned.

They start calling it climate.

Okay, now you can take data from every station

and filter it it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years.

That's called a low-pass filter.

And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe.

And it turns out very poorly

because most climate change by that definition is regional.

So for instance,

in this area, let's say the

states like Louisiana, Alabama, Gulf states,

they had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming.

Nobody paid much attention to it, because that's normal.

Different areas do different things.

You have reasons why it's local.

I mean, if you're near a coast, near a body of water, the circulations in the ocean are are bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time, on time scales ranging from a few years for El Nino ENSO, to a thousand years.

And so this has nothing to do with the global average.

The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets.

And so you'd look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot, so that was useful.

But for looking at the Earth's climate, I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device.

That makes sense.

How much of a factor does the sun play?

Obviously, a lot.

It heats us up, but like the changing arguments.

You know, that's something there's argument about.

I think,

you know, for instance, a man called Milankovich

in around 1940

made a convincing argument, and I think now it's correct, that orbital variations

created a change in insulation, incoming sunlight, in the Arctic in summer, and that controlled the ice ages.

And the thinking was pretty simple.

He was saying that, you know, every winter is cold.

Every winter has snow.

But what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle.

And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier.

Takes thousands of years, but eventually it's big.

And

in recent years, for instance, there have been young people who have

shown that that works.

It's interesting, there was even a national program called CLIMAP

to study this.

It's around 1990 or so.

And

they found something peculiar.

They found that there were peaks in

the orbital variables.

that were found in the data for ice volume,

but that the time series were not lining up right.

The young people looking at this said, you're looking at the wrong thing.

If you're looking at the insulation, you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume, not just the ice volume.

And then the correlations were excellent.

So this was a theory, Milankovitch, that I think has been reasonably sustained.

But

the people doing this got no credit, nothing, because, you know,

early in my career, these people would have been rewarded.

Now, it didn't contribute to global warming.

Nobody pays attention to it.

Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with.

But you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue.

The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it.

It's all CO2.

CO2 is the control knob.

Don't confuse me with other possibilities.

But nobody is quite sure about the sun.

We have not got good records of the sun for a long time, so we're stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago.

And

one of the proxies is

when the sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10.

These stick around for long, you know, thousands of years or longer.

And you can from that infer how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago.

And they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant.

It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, you know, this radioactivity that's produced changes from year to year.

If you don't take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon-14 dating, you know, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon-14 in it, and you get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today, because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies.

There's a pretty good historical record of that.

So it's clear the sun is always changing

and over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, and that's particularly noticeable near the Arctic, you know, in high latitudes in the north.

For example, my father's home in Scotland, I was a kid, I would walk up into the hills south of Edinburgh and you could see these farms from the year 1000 where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today.

It's too cold today, but it was clearly warm enough in the year 1000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland.

So what caused those, it was not people burning oil and coal, you know.

And so I think the best guess as to what it was, it's some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days, because they do correlate with the carbon-14.

That's absolutely fascinating.

Now, when we have estimates like, say, of

the Jurassic or

any dinosaur age,

is there enough of an understanding of the differences in temperatures back then that we know whether or not they ever experienced ice ages?

Oh, yeah.

So we can go back 65, 100 million years?

You can go up 500 million years.

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Evidence of ice ages, absolutely.

They come at all.

There always been.

There's always been an ice age and a warming.

And they don't correlate very well with CO2.

You can also estimate the past CO2 levels, and they don't correlate with ice ages.

What's special about the recent ice ages is they're pretty periodic.

So for 700,000 years, almost every 100,000 years, you have a cycle.

Wow.

If you go back further than that,

you begin seeing that fall apart.

And for about 3 million years, 40,000 years is the dominant period.

And then you go back further than that, and you don't have ice ages for a long time.

Wow.

Yeah, it's very poorly understood, I would say.

And

so, and there's also no way to track it.

Like, there's no way to tell what's going to happen to the sun.

They have some sort of an understanding that there's increased activity.

It's not clear that solar activity was the issue.

Could have been many factors.

Well, you know,

how should I put it?

With the ice ages,

as I say, orbital theory was the main thing.

The fact that you have

various factors determining the orbit of the Earth versus the Sun and so on

give you periodic changes in the incoming radiation as a function of geography in the Earth.

Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said that

he correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi-periodic, really only began three million years or so ago, and and at first they were oscillating a lot faster than today.

And that was approximately the time that the Isthmus of Panama closed.

So one of the suspicions is that when the Panama Isthmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat in things like the Gulf Stream.

For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe.

And that was about the time that these fluctuating ice ages began.

Wow.

But, you know, we've set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years by this manic focus on CO2.

If your theory doesn't have CO2 in it, forget it.

You know, you won't get funding.

And so the true answer, I mean, to me, you know, there was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was phlogiston.

There was this magic subject, you know, non-existent.

But everyone had to believe in phlogiston.

And it turned out it was nonsense.

It wasn't there at all.

But you couldn't get anyone to support you unless you believed in phlogiston.

So I call this the phlogiston era of climate science, where phlogiston is CO2.

Well, this is what confused me.

You gentlemen are academics.

You're obviously very intelligent people.

There's other very intelligent people that are involved in academia.

How this problem get solved?

How do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?

Well, I think stopping the funding for

this massive funding for climate would help because it's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds.

If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you will be elected to societies, you will win prizes.

And you will be shunned again if you don't.

That's right.

So I think, for example, if some administration in Washington wants to slow this down and get some sanity, they should cut the funding or they should at least open up the funding to alternate theories of what is controlling climate.

Because the theory that the control knob is CO2 doesn't work.

It's completely clear it doesn't work.

And it just seems so insane that if we move in the same direction and we, as you say,

if it really is holding back climate science by 50 years,

that's a travesty.

Well, you know, Dick would have made a lot more progress, and his colleagues would have made a lot more progress if they hadn't been forced to deal with this CO2 cult.

And

we might understand climate today without.

There are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general.

You know,

one of them is numbers.

I I mean,

it isn't having more people work on something.

You want to have an environment where

there's freedom.

I often think, I mean, Will is familiar with this, there's a photograph from 1929

of all the world's physicists at a Salvay conference.

This is a golden age of physics.

If you quintupled the number of people working on physics, would you have improved the situation?

I doubt it.

And so, you know, I think freedom is much more important than just

piling on

things.

Yeah.

You have that.

Great.

There they are.

Not quite.

It's not the same.

But at the Salvay conference, absolutely.

Now, the 1929 had the Curies.

Well, Pierre might be there.

Sorry.

It's okay.

Either way, I guess we can.

Yeah.

But I mean,

I wondered at times, you know, when you had

the

Soviet competition with the US and

they were the first ones into space.

And we suddenly began a program to get more and more kids to get into STEM.

That has its downside.

First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much.

And the second thing is with peer review, I mean, peer review is new.

I mean, it wasn't that common before World War II.

But people have pointed out it has its virtues.

But,

you know, you can see

the Royal Meteorological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions.

And the instructions were, you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify or if it's plagiarized.

It's repeating something that already exists.

And that was pretty fair

because

how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not, or so on?

That's asking too much of that.

But today,

peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity.

If you're not going with the flow,

you can get rejected.

And that's

a lot of things structurally need to be, I think, rethought a little bit.

The physicists have done pretty well with Archive,

where they have a publication vehicle using the Internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what's up on it.

But all sorts of things like that need to happen.

I mean, what Will is saying is is true, I'm sure.

I science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this.

Well, it just seems like it's bad for any kind of science.

And that open, free discussion and debating ideas based on their merit and what data you have.

That's what it's supposed to be about.

It's not supposed to be attached to an ideology.

And I just don't understand how it got this far and how it can be separated.

So when did it really become a problem where ideology started invading into certain segments of science?

Well, it's happened many times in the past, Joe.

Climate is only the most recent.

So it's just a natural thing that happens.

Well, for example, there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe where

The claim was that

the great gene pool of the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low-key Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen.

It was all completely nonsense, but they had

learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that, and you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being great

eugenicists, you know, protecting the American genome.

And it was all nonsense.

It was just complete bullshit.

And yet,

and the the only thing that stopped it really was

the Nazis because they took it over with a vengeance.

They were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and Britain.

And they took it to its

absurd

extreme.

They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America, a man called Laughlin.

But

no, I mean,

what Will is saying, I mean, it had had a practical consequence, by the way.

It actually led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924,

which held that America was going to restrict

immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century.

So there would be a quota for England and Scotland, which was fine, a little bit less for Germany, almost nothing for Eastern Europe, almost nothing for Italy, and so on.

And that was used

in the run-up to World War II

to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

Wow.

And it was only changed in 1960.

So essentially, you were keeping out Jews, Eastern Europeans, Chinese until then because of eugenics in 1924.

Phew.

The average person that's not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals where they're trying to figure out how the world works.

When you hear stories like that, you hear that kind of stuff, and you're just like, oh, this has always been a problem.

You're dealing with people.

Human beings.

That's the problem.

That's getting to the problem.

Yeah, Joe says this famous quote by Immanuel Kant,

you know, from the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made.

That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.

What could have been done to protect the scientific process from this sort of an ideological invasion, or at least shelter it somewhat to make sure that something like eugenics doesn't ever get pushed or climates or anything that's just not logical and doesn't fit with the data.

Well, the trouble is,

you know, when something like eugenics comes around,

the population is told that this is science.

Right.

And

how are they going to say no?

I mean, you had

various famous laboratories devoted to this.

It wasn't a fringe thing.

And so I don't know how you would distinguish it at that time from science.

Today, there are books on it, and you have the correspondence of biologists who are saying, well, it's a little bit dicey, but they're saying it's bringing it to the fore of public attention, so maybe that's a good thing.

Well, it just makes you shudder to think, like, what happens if the Nazis didn't take over Germany and eugenics continued to progress in America?

That's terrifying.

Within where we would be today.

Right, right.

We'd have been a much poorer country because so many

leading Americans, you know, creative, productive people have immigrated, you know, fairly recently.

They also probably would have led to some horrific actions in order to enact this.

Yeah, I mean, when you put things in the hands of politicians,

there is a disconnect.

I mean, the business with light bulbs I mentioned, it wasn't malice,

it was ignorance.

And you combine ignorance with power, and you often get nonsense.

And the narrative that you're doing something good for everybody.

Dick has often made the point, which I agree with, that

politicians and sort of society leaders are the worst in situations like this.

The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable.

So, for example, I'd like to tease Dick because he's a Harvard grad about the Salem witch trials, but they were orchestrated by people from Harvard.

It was not the common people.

Have you ever read into that at all?

Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory?

Well,

does it make sense?

I don't know.

Most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way.

And, you know, they had these visions of

the person they were accused

consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of obscene things.

And that was accepted as testimony.

It was called spectral evidence.

And so

when finally the trials were stopped, it wasn't for the right reason, which is that there's no such thing as witches.

You know, they were stopped because spectral evidence, you know, was

shaky.

It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point, so it was getting very dangerous.

You know, but one of them was selling a book on how to detect witches, Cotton Mather.

Well, I've read that as well about the printing press.

When the printing press was first devised, a lot of people were like, oh, we're going to get so much knowledge.

No, a lot of the early books were like how to detect witches.

Right.

That's right.

Malius Malachicorum, you know, the hammer of the evildoers.

That was the first book on witches.

What I'd read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost and that they believed this late frost might have contributed to ergot growth.

Because apparently

that does happen a lot when the plants grow and then they freeze and then they get mold on them and that mold could contain ergot and that has LSD-like properties, properties, which totally makes sense if they're eating LSD-laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch.

But either way.

Yeah,

it took.

I think that's a kinder explanation of what happened.

I'm less generous.

Well, you know more about the behind the scenes.

Yeah.

No, but I mean, people, I think what Will is saying is

there are people who always want to have a chance to do in their neighbor.

Yes, sure.

And if you could say your neighbor's a witch, what better way?

We can't have witches in our neighborhood.

Let's burn them or drown them at the time, right?

That's what they did to people.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's one of the parts of Orwell's 1984 that many people forget, but a big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate.

And so people seem to have this need for hatred.

You know, you have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or somebody.

And so if you're hating CO2, at least that's better than hating your neighbor.

Well, if you're on Twitter, you're using up a lot more than two minutes of hate.

Well, you know, but even with political figures, I'm always surprised.

I mean, it seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear

probably does not mean well.

Yeah.

And yet we continually fall.

Over and over again.

Yeah, all of them.

And, you know, other countries do the same pattern.

Oh, yeah.

That's what's dark.

It just seems like we're terrified of being terrified.

And we want safety.

And we want someone who comes along and scares the shit out of us and vows to protect us.

Yep.

Yeah.

And children do this all the time.

Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself.

Well, there is also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world.

But

when you have an just everything scares the shit out of everybody.

Everything is the end of the world.

And climate being one of the key ones that I hear all the time with young people.

In fact, there were some recent surveys that were done.

You know about these, like the things that give young people the most anxiety.

And climate is at the very top of that list.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really strange to think that this is

causing young people not to want to have children, not to want to continue, to have no hope for the future.

This is bizarre.

And just to live in constant fear of one day.

But meanwhile, is anybody paying attention to all these rich people buying shoreline property?

Like, do you think they're stupid?

Do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumbass because he's buying these giant mansions right on the ocean?

Like, do you really think the water...

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He's going to raise that much?

As I put it, I mean, you know,

even the people who are pushing it at MIT, I mean, buy houses on the shores.

Obama did.

He got that beautiful house and Martha's Vineyard.

It's like if you've looked at the timelines, I'm sure you have like a time-lapse video of the shoreline from like 1980 all the way up to 2025.

It doesn't move.

I mean, it goes a little bit in Malibu, and there's a lot of.

They go back much further than that.

Yes.

I think, Joe, it's true.

Sea level is rising.

It's different at different shores because the land is also rising and sinking.

But it's not very much, and it hasn't accelerated.

There's no evidence that CO2 has made any difference.

It started rising roughly 1800 at the end of the little ice age, and it's not

changing very much.

And wasn't there like an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that has increased recently?

That's right.

Well,

I mean, that's always variable.

Right, but when that happens, how come that doesn't hit the news?

If the ice goes away, then it's going to hit the news.

Oh, my God, look at this.

We lost a chunk the size of Manhattan, and everybody freaks out.

Well, we were supposed to be ice-free 20 years ago.

Yes.

Yeah.

No, you know.

How girl was just off by a little bit.

He's just off.

Give him some decades to be vindicated.

That is the point that I think

people have made.

A test usually means if you fail it, you've you've done something wrong.

Yes.

Only in theology does it mean that you change the goals.

Right.

Right.

Especially when you invented the theology.

Because climate is very much like a religion.

Or at least the adherence to it is very religious-like, or I should say cult-like.

Right.

Because it's not like there's a higher power.

Everyone's just terrified, and you have to change everything you do now.

Because you're guilty.

And it used to be that the sign of virtue was to have an electric car.

And then every

my favorite thing is going up behind Teslas now, and they have bumper stickers that say, I bought this before Elon went crazy.

So now they don't, I mean, it's just everyone is trying to figure out what they're supposed to do in order to still be accepted by their group.

And the climate one is one that if you bring it up with people, it's almost like you're talking about witches.

Like they want to get out of there.

Like if you actually looked at

it's a religious thing or a cult-like thing.

Absolutely.

And they don't really, it's not like they've studied it a lot.

And yeah, it's really interesting.

And this is why I think that we've got to reduce CO2.

And you have like this informed discussion with someone.

You go, oh, okay.

So when did you start reading about this?

What book was that?

Where, you know, did you see this?

And you see that?

And okay.

And now you're having an informed discussion.

But that's not what it's like.

It's like you bring it up and they're like, oh, God.

Climate change is settled.

Climate change is settled.

Okay.

you don't believe it.

Even Bernie, when I had him on, when he was talking about climate change is a real problem, it's a giant problem.

And we started showing the Washington Post thing that says that we're in a global cooling period and it's raised up sometime over the last hundred.

But if you look at like the peaks and valleys, the main thing is like this has never been static.

And I said to Bernie, I'm like, there's a lot of money in this, Bernie.

Like, you've got to admit this.

Like, this isn't something that we have to act on now to save each other.

It might be something that we're being fucked with.

And that's what it seems like to me.

It's like.

Well, the question is, why does he find it so enthusiastic?

Why is he so enthusiastic?

Wonderful for funding.

I think he's overall a very good person.

I really do.

And I think he would have been a fascinating president.

But I think there are too many things to concentrate on in the world.

And if you really want to do a deep dive into the actual science of climate and CO2's impact on climate and what actually causes us to get warmer or colder, that's a lot of work.

It's a lot of work.

And I don't know if the Senator of Vermont has enough time to do that work and to really do it objectively or to talk to someone like you, to have an informed conversation with someone who's studied it for decades and go, okay, there's a lot more to this than I thought.

And why does it fit in this same damn pattern where people get attached to an idea because that idea is attached to their ideology?

But you're hitting on a problem, and I think Will knows this as well.

A lot of this stuff is actually tough material.

Yes.

I mean, for instance,

you know, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole,

that's actually handled in a third-year graduate course.

You know, it deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject.

And it's a real problem in a field.

It's true throughout science,

where you're trusting people

to behave, I think, decently,

but that material itself

is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone.

And how you deal with it, how you approximate it, I mean, the same is true with nuclear power, with other things.

These are technical issues, they're not trivial,

and you're asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions.

It's a tough issue.

It involves a certain amount of trust, and what we're describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.

Yeah, there's this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loves so much, trust but verify.

And it's hard to verify, you know, if you're an average citizen something about climate.

Right.

That's what's so frustrating about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated.

When they're like, climate change is a giant issue.

Like there's so many times I've seen

very fun YouTube

videos where they catch people at these protests and some joker just starts interviewing them and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for.

It's fascinating.

You left the house.

Like you had nothing better to do.

You don't know why you're protesting, but you're there and you got a sign and you still don't even understand it.

That's how powerful this thing has become in our society.

And the fact that they've been so

that the Powers that Be or whoever is involved has been so successful with pushing this narrative that it's one of the number one anxieties that young people have about the future in a place where we may very well be involved in wars.

But the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency.

How dare you?

Right.

There you go.

But you notice how quickly she changed.

She flipped up.

Now it's Palestine.

You got to mix it up.

People get bored with the climate.

You got to, you listen, you want to be someone that's in the news?

You got to keep moving.

You got to keep it moving.

You know, you stop doing rap music, start acting.

You got to keep it moving.

And that's, you know, she's an entertainer.

Well, she had a very unfortunate experience with that blockade in Israel.

So maybe she's out of the business now, but I doubt it.

But when you're taking a 16-year-old kid and having her as the face of climate change, and as you said, this is something insanely difficult to digest for the average person.

You know she doesn't have this data at her fingertips.

Aaron Powell, it's not just digest.

I mean, it's

how many people can solve partial differential equations?

I mean, this is one of the complaints I have,

which is sort of odd.

People blame this on models.

And

what the models are doing is they're taking the equations of fluid mechanics, something called the Navier-Stokes equation,

and they're doing it by dividing it into discrete intervals and seeing how things change with distance and time and so on.

And

one of the things that

we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution.

But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on.

At any rate, so they do this, and they do I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can.

And

they get answers that will often be wrong.

But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe.

Kunin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3%

reduction in

national product or gross domestic product by 2100.

That's not a great deal.

It's not the end of the earth.

You're already much richer than you are today.

So what's the panic?

And

it's true.

The models don't give you anything to be that panicked over.

So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models.

So, you know, it's

it's a confusing situation.

I mean the models have a use.

They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is.

You can use them to see what interacts with what and then study it further.

Joe, let me just say a little more about what Dick commented on, the Navier-Stokes equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans.

And

it really is a very hard

mathematical problem to solve because they're not only partial differential equations, they're what are called nonlinear partial differential equations.

And so there's a joke about Werner Heisenberg, who was the inventor of quantum mechanics, a very bright guy, and he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II.

And so he was captured by the Americans and the British, and

because of this activity, he was forbidden to work on nuclear physics

later, you know, after the victory.

And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics, on solving the Navier-Stokes equation.

And he was, as I said, a tremendously talented physicist,

but he found it very hard.

He didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations.

And so one of his students supposedly said to him, well, you know, Professor Heisenberg,

they say that if you've been a good

physicist when you die and you go to heaven, that

the Almighty allows you to ask two questions, and he will answer any question you ask.

And what will you ask him?

And Heisenberg supposedly said, well,

I will ask him why general relativity

and

why turbulence.

Turbulence is the Navier-Stokes equation.

He says, and I think he will be able to answer the first one.

That's funny.

That's funny.

And

this is what's, you know, the best assumption or the best measurements of what's controlling the temperature on Earth.

Well, you know

they're asking you to have great confidence in a calculation involving this miserable equation that is so hard to solve,

at least very far into the future.

You can solve it for a short time, but it's very hard to go much further.

One of Dick's colleagues at MIT,

a man named Lorentz,

why don't you tell him about Lorentz?

Well, no.

Lorentz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable.

Whether that's true or not is still an open question, but has a lot of those characteristics and detail.

I mean, you know, for instance, it wouldn't be a surprise if you're looking at a bubbling brook and you have all those little eddies and so on.

You know

are you actually able to track the whole thing accurately?

Probably not.

How accurately would you have to do it if you scaled it up to climate?

Who knows?

Yeah, the typical

description of this theory was that it's as though a butterfly flapping its wings in the Gulf of Alaska causes hurricanes two years later in

Florida.

Yeah, that one's funny.

Yeah.

People repeat that, and they're like, no, that's not how it works at all.

I don't think it works.

I know, of course, it's funny what people like to do.

What I think he meant was rather simpler than that.

You know,

the hurricane is likely to occur.

The flipping of a butterfly's wings might have actually changed it from one day to another.

It would have an influence downstream.

Everything has an influence.

Everything is tied in together.

Now, when we

make models based on incorrect data about like CO2 levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like.

At what point in time, do you think another country needs to screw up the same way Nazi Germany ran with eugenics and it ruined eugenics in the United States, where they're like, oh my God, this is a horrific idea.

Do you think something like that has to happen in another country where they have to take this climate change green energy thing to its full end?

You think so?

I think that's how it will end, yes.

I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country.

Because Germany has shut off a couple of their nuclear power plants, correct?

Right.

All of their nuclear power plants.

Oh, God.

And they did it all for green energy?

That makes no sense.

Well, I think they did it because of the Fukushima thing, and because the Green Party is so powerful in Germany.

And they not only

turned off their plants, and not nuclear and coal as well, but they blew a lot of them up.

You know, you see these pictures of the plants, you know, being blown up by dynamite just to make sure that nobody restarts them.

So they're fanatics.

Oh, my God.

They're real fanatics, yeah.

That's so crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

And so at some point, some country like Germany, they'll lose all their jobs.

All the industry will move.

There will be no jobs.

People will all be on welfare.

There's no money to pay them.

And at that point,

someone will realize, you know, we've taken a wrong turn here.

I can't believe they blew their plants up.

That is nuts.

And what are they replacing with right now?

You have Russian gas.

Windmills.

Windmills?

Yeah.

You're right.

They're importing fossil fuels.

And importing electricity from France, which still has a large nuclear power base.

But how is Germany so smart and so dumb at the same time?

Because they have tremendous engineers.

They make some of the best automobiles ever.

They're making them in Hungary.

Oh.

But that's

a profound question: is how is it that this country of poets and philosophers had the Nazis

had the Nazis, exactly.

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few German theologians who had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany.

He was invited to come to the U.S., but he said, I'm going to stay with my people.

And he was eventually hung

by the Nazis.

He didn't survive.

But he had this theory that it was

stupidity.

And it's a very interesting theory.

If you look on the internet, you can read about Von Hoefer's theory of stupidity.

But

his view was that all of these

Nazi supporters, they didn't really believe in it all.

They were just dumb.

You know, it's hard for me.

When I first read about this, I couldn't believe it.

But the more I look at it, I think that every nation has a problem that most of us are pretty stupid.

There's a large percentage of us that will believe almost anything.

And we could point point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now

that people wholeheartedly believe in.

They make zero sense.

They could go with that.

And you would go, okay,

some part of this has to be attributed to low intelligence.

So like, what percentage of people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves?

It's not a small number.

Maybe it's 10.

Maybe it's 20.

Whatever percentage.

It's enough where it's a giant problem.

That's one thing, but also intelligence itself is a complex issue.

There are people who, like us, may be idiot savants.

There are things that we can do very well and other things we don't.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you know, math departments are famous that way.

Well, I think it's a sign of almost any great person at anything.

There's usually areas in their life where they're just completely lacking, whether it's hygiene or relationships or whatever.

They're obsessed by what they do, and that's why they're great at what they do.

You know, look, there are great writers who can't do arithmetic.

Right.

I don't know, you know, where you put them in that category.

Right.

Well, and there's great physical athletes that they have an intelligence of moving their body in a way that they understand things at a much higher level than anybody else that does whatever their athletic pursuit is.

They probably wouldn't do that well on an ACT test.

It doesn't mean that they're not intelligent.

It's just it's a different kind of intelligence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

that makes the world a more interesting place by and large.

It really does.

But what's scary is when you count on the people that are supposed to be the people that are obsessed and studying this one thing, like this climate change emergency that we're supposed to be under, and then you find out, oh, wait a minute, this is not.

This isn't like an exact science.

Oh, we started with Gore.

Right.

And Gore, you know, flunked out of Harvard.

Did he?

Yeah.

And his father, who was a senator, got him back in.

I was teaching there at the time.

Oh, really?

Interesting.

And the person he attributes his awareness of CO2 to, Roger Revelle, was teaching a sort of science for poets course, and he got a D- in it.

Has he made the most money off of this?

Because he's made a lot of money off of Craig.

He's made a few hundred million.

I don't know.

These days,

small change.

Still,

there's a very clear motivation to keep that graph going.

You know, it's especially now with social media.

There's so many people that, like we were talking about Greta Thurnberg, I mean, I don't know what her motivations are, but I do know that there's a lot of people out there that have large social media platforms that all they want to do is connect themselves to something that people are talking about all the time.

And there's a lot of money in that.

And there's

a lot of power in wielding that influence.

And to do so, then just hop on any bandwagon that comes along and not really know what you're talking about,

it's a real problem that we have in society today.

And it's in a way a new problem given social media.

Yeah, yeah.

The social media aspect of it is a new problem.

Another new problem is AI and fakes.

Like you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles.

And it's just like

it takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today.

And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything,

especially climate change.

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You could scare the shit out of somebody very quickly with a nice video, and it doesn't even have to be real.

Well, that was the reason for extreme weather being chosen.

I mean, it's interesting for quite a few years, the climate issue was temperature.

And you'll have noticed the last 15, 20 years,

it's extreme weather.

Right.

And

that

shows that, you know, it was fake

because

it's trivial.

I mean, if you looked it up,

the average

month,

there are four or five

extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred year events.

So each of them makes for a good video.

And you have four or five a month, and they each only oneness in a hundred years and people aren't putting it together that you know once in a hundred year events occurring four or five times a month

but you know you always have a picture of a flood subplace or a rise or this or that and those are used to scare people it's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers

right it's extreme weather events i keep that's what i keep hearing the hurricanes are getting stronger yeah they're getting more frequent and they repeat that and I don't think that's necessarily true.

No, no.

For years, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN,

was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related.

The last one, they had to say something, because the politicians control what's in the IPCC.

But even with that, they were saying no.

And that had nothing to do with the public relations.

Said, to hell with it, even if there's no relation, we'll say there is, because that gives us visuals.

God.

Now, when people like Bill Gates are talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the Earth and protect us from the sun's rays, like, where is all that coming from?

Especially if, like, you would imagine even

Wills said it comes from dumbness.

I'm sure, but even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms.

Like, hey, a few people can't make a decision that will literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all.

Why?

Because you're made Microsoft?

Like, why do you get to do this?

That seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on.

And they would have to be really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.

Well,

I have to hope that most of the world agrees with you and me and that Bill Gates will never be permitted to do something like that.

The fear is that someone would let him, though.

The fear is that a country would let him.

You get the right politicians in place and the right fear-mongering in place, and you let them try.

Or you let somebody try.

And these people that do try get large grants, and they're making a lot of money to do this.

And that's what scares the shit out of me, that this could be a way that people could

try something out on the whole world that could be catastrophic.

Well, just technically,

it would be extremely difficult because the amount of material you have to get up to the stratosphere to mimic a large stratovolcano.

You know, even Bill Gates probably can't afford that, and I'm not sure the U.S.

Treasurer could either.

So it's just theoretical at this point?

I think, you know,

it's an interesting thing.

You're pointing that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeur based on the fact that he's fabulously wealthy.

Yeah.

But as a practical matter,

that particular approach probably

is not going to be as dangerous as you think.

It won't work.

It won't work.

Yeah.

Well, it's just the idea that someone would even propose something like that based on what you gentlemen have discussed so far today.

No, your point is right.

I mean, you have people who have the means to

try things,

and

they're getting a free ride on this.

Yes, that's the thing.

They're getting a lot of money to implement these changes.

That's why these green new deals and these green energy initiatives and all these green things.

People have to understand why are you hearing about this all the time?

Because it's a PR campaign.

It's a PR campaign for a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money.

That's what this is all about.

And the more you get on board, the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff.

And the more money these companies make.

And the whole thing is about money.

Much of it is money.

They're not really worried about you.

That's what you have to understand.

If they ever say that they're worried about your future for the betterment of our people, we have to make sure that everybody's okay.

We've got to protect the climate.

They don't care.

That's not real.

What they really want to do is make sure a lot of money comes in.

And if a lot of money coming in is dependent upon them scaring the shit out of you, that's what they lean towards.

And you know, money and its transferability and fungibility, its influence, its feedbacks, it's

yeah, but that's always been true.

Yes.

Joel,

let me bring up another

targeted group, and that is farmers and ranchers, you know, because of

their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming.

Just a couple years ago, I was invited to come down to Paraguay by

some farmers there who were worried about the upcoming climate talks in the Persian Gulf.

And the European bankers were demanding that

Paraguay turn most of its ranch land back into forest, you know, to save the planet.

And otherwise they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay.

and so the

ranchers were worried that they're going to be put out of business and their families put out of business and

so I was there for a week and I talked to the president and luckily it turned out they had a very sensible president and

he didn't need me

to recognize that was nonsense and

but he was I think grateful to have someone with a science background confirm his suspicion that it was all nonsense.

So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers, you know, to go to hell.

And they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay.

So there were no consequences and the ranchers did not suffer.

But, you know, everybody's under the gun.

But there were consequences in Ireland.

Yes.

They had to kill half their cattle, which is nonsense.

Total nonsense and insane.

And if you pay attention to what regenerative farmers will tell you, is that like if you do it correctly,

it's actually carbon neutral.

At least carbon neutral.

At least carbon neutral and possibly contribute.

The whole thing is nature.

This is how it's all set up.

Animals eat grass, they poop manure, manure fertilizes the plants.

It's all real simple.

It's been around forever.

And this idea that all of a sudden cow farts and burps are a giant issue and they're going to kill us all.

We need to kill all the cows.

Like, who are you?

Like, who's saying this?

And how'd you get to talk?

Like, this is, how'd you get to kill half their cows?

Like, you should go to jail.

They should go to jail.

You're so stupid.

You're criminally stupid.

You killed their cows.

But when it comes to attractive drugs, power is one of the worst.

Oh, it might be the worst.

Yeah, it might be the worst.

And it's if people can get people to do their bidding, they often love to do it.

Even if it's preposterous, like getting you to kill half your cows so that you have a

less high methane count you're releasing from your organization.

I mean, you know, Will has worked on this and others.

But, you know, the methane thing

is an example of enumeracy.

In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane

has

more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO2.

And so

cutting back methane will have a big effect.

But there's so little methane in the atmosphere that he got rid of all of it.

It would have almost no effect compared to CO2.

And, you know, somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

Yeah, simple arithmetic.

They just can't do simple arithmetic.

It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in social media.

It's really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants.

It seems very coordinated and actually kind of impressive that they've managed to silence questioning scientists and really put the fear of God into people that read things and don't agree with it.

It began right at the beginning of the issue.

As I was mentioning, I mean, already by 1989,

Science Magazine was

let me.

In fact, one of the ironies with Science Magazine, which is, you know, important magazine, it had an editor who was Marcia McNutt, who actually had an op-ed appear in Science Magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this.

Wow.

And you know what her award was?

She became president of the National Academy of Science.

She was a good girl.

Yeah.

Follow the rules.

But you know, Dick's point about forbidding questioning, it's just unbelievable.

When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia, and the grand old man there was

Robbie I.I.

Robbie.

And

Robbie

came from an

Eastern European Jewish family, and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education.

And so he would always tell me, you know, when I would go home from school every day, my mother wouldn't ask me, what did you learn today in school, Izzy?

She called him Izzy, Isidore.

And he would

tell her, and then she would say, and did you ask a good question today?

So he said she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question, which would meant that the wheels were turning in his head, than whether he had memorized something.

And I always took that to heart.

I think that was a very wise mother.

And

he turned out very well as a result.

Do you think there's more uniformity in thinking in academia now with the pressure of social media and the pressure of these echo chambers that people find themselves?

Of course, yeah.

That's terrible.

Because you'd have thought with the Internet, one of the things is the Internet is going to be a a balanced resource of information.

You're going to have the answers to any questions you want, and we'll be able to sort out what's true and what's not true.

Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science.

That's right.

No, I mean, the Internet,

not surprisingly, was an unpredictable phenomenon.

Yes.

Completely.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, you saw it, but

you're seeing it yourself.

I mean,

you have media, they were looking for 100,000 subscribers.

With the internet, you're dealing with millions, and that's considered small in some cases.

Yeah, there's people like Mr.

Beast,

some

fun guy on YouTube that I think he has, what does he have, 100 and how many million subscribers does he have?

Something insane.

Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before.

Yeah.

Nobody saw it coming.

Did it on his own.

Yeah, it's a weird time.

And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media, which is also disturbing.

Which is also deserved.

Right.

Also deserved.

That's a problem as well.

And when you see mainstream media

also going along with all these climate change ideologies and

all these different things that are attached to the narrative that you're not allowed to deviate from, it's just,

it gets very frustrating.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure about this, but my recollection was as a kid in New York

that you had newspapers like the New York Times that were always sort of center-right, left,

but you had others, the Journal American and so on,

and they differed in

their coverage, but on the whole, they covered the same news.

If something happened, it would appear in both.

I realize in retrospect that wasn't always true.

But today, I have the feeling that if I look at the Post in New York or the New York Times, I'm looking at two different worlds.

And there's something wrong with that.

Very.

Yeah, something very wrong with it.

And

I don't know what the answer is to how to solve it or if those things need to just go away and independent media needs to replace them.

But

you're seeing a massive dissolving of trust in these

main.

Like when I was a kid, I used to deliver the New York Times.

And I delivered the Boston Globe, but I delivered the New York Times as well because it was prestigious.

I thought it was cool to deliver the New York Times.

And it was a long route.

It was a lot longer than my Boston.

Did you have to deliver it on Sunday as well?

Yes, I did.

Yes, I did.

But fortunately, the ads didn't work, so they didn't get a big, thick ad chunk like you do with the Boston Globe, because it's like local ads.

But the point being is that, like, it was it was the paper of record.

And now today, it's just another blog.

It's just like it's an ideologically captured online blog that's very left-leaning.

I think people have pointed out uh the correct reason for that.

The end of the classified ads.

Yeah.

They used to have to satisfy the people

paying for ads.

Now

they have to satisfy their readers.

And so the readers only want to hear one thing.

Yeah, it's a real problem.

It's a real problem.

But I guess just like all things that happen, there'll be some sort of a course correction or some new players will enter in.

It was, you know, it would be fine if the newspapers took different positions but covered the same items.

Right, right, right.

And here

I will say, and maybe there's a bias in this, if I listen to MSNBC,

there are whole areas of what's going on that I will hear nothing about.

Fox may cover things differently, but they are less guilty of leaving stuff out.

They may take a different view of it, but you'll hear about it.

That certain media now are not even mentioning things that they don't want you to know about is a little bit disturbing.

It is.

It is.

But again, it gives rise to independent media, gives rise to the very good independent journalists that exist today.

But the thing is, the average person is not going to find them.

They don't know where to look.

Well, this is an opportunity to put in a good word for Al Gore since since he was an inventor of the Internet.

Yeah, he did kind of take credit for part of that, right?

Right, yeah.

What did he say exactly?

I think he said I had a hand in that or something like that.

I did too.

I bought a computer once.

I had a hand in that.

I played a part of the economy of the Internet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I think it's these kind of conversations with people like yourself that uh will help.

Because the more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that also question it, and we get a kind of understanding of this pattern that does go back to like we were talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history.

You go, there's times where you're on the wrong side of things, you don't realize it because you've been lied to, and you've been, you know, these politicians are not.

But it's also the abuse of science

is too much of a temptation for politicians.

I mean,

science it's hard to say, but uh, you know, if there are a way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority,

it's a methodology.

And that if you are

using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology,

you're anti-science.

Whether that helps or not, maybe people don't care.

But I think people do, but they're scared to deviate again from the narrative.

Like, how do you think, do you think it's possible to get in people's heads, hey, we have to, at the academic level especially, separate ideology from truth.

And you can't attach believing in something that is like so firmly a part of being a progressive person or being a conservative person that you're unwilling to look at the data and look at facts.

That has to be shunned, right?

So how does that go about?

I think you're hitting on something important.

You can't do it every place.

But with the funding agencies,

the government is in a position to say funding agencies

must take an open view of certain subjects, or all subjects for that matter,

and not lay down rules that you cannot question.

Yeah, let me add to that.

I think one of the great strengths of American science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington.

But, you know, you could get funding from the National Science Foundation or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research or from some other or organization.

And they all competed with each other and they didn't like each other very much.

And so if you couldn't get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the Army or some other place.

So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the

vitality of science and technology in a country.

And people used to talk, we need an office of science.

I thought that was a terrible idea, you know, to that means one-point failure.

You know, there was someone in a position to throttle

some important.

The Department of Energy tried to do both sides for a long time.

They held out longer than other departments.

But eventually, for some reason, they were all forced into the same box.

Money starts talking, baby.

Yeah, money starts talking.

It's a lot of money.

Department of Energy, wasn't that the department where

from the time Trump won the election to Biden leading office, they gave out something like $93 billion in loans.

I think it was EPA or maybe it was no, loans could have must have been energy.

It must have been energy like more than had been given out in the last 15 years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm sure all was smart, well-spent money that we definitely couldn't get by without spending.

It's kind of funny.

It's pathetic, yeah.

It is kind of pathetic, but it's also kind of funny, like how

in this day of transparency, you know, there's so much information that's available today.

So easy to find things out, that they would try to pull something like that off and then do it successfully, right in front of everybody's face.

Well, having spent time in, you know, Department of Energy headquarters,

it doesn't surprise me.

I believe you.

How difficult has this been for you gentlemen to like debate this stuff and to bring it up with people and have conversations?

Have you experienced a lot of resistance?

Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting how it evolved.

I think in the 90s

there was still a certain openness

about it.

And,

you know, if there were a conference, people on both sides would be invited and so on.

Somehow, by the 21st century,

it came down hard.

There was absolutely nothing open anymore.

But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, which is a good university,

and he gave a good colloquium, the next day, a Nobel Prize winner from my department walked in and said, What son of a bitch invited Lindsay to give this talk?

I said, well, I'm the son of a bitch.

Get out of my office.

Oh, wow.

And did you have to, did you try to engage with him at all about why you were upset?

Why he was upset, rather?

No.

Just it wasn't even worth it?

It wasn't worth it.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's just hard to believe, as someone who's outside of academia, it's hard to believe there's closed-minded people at universities.

The point was, he didn't know the first thing about that issue.

Not a thing.

But he was very left-wing.

Yeah, that's the point.

That's the point.

No, this was the political polarization.

But it's it's also, there's no deviation.

There's no people like, eh, you know, everybody's either one side or the other, all in or not.

And if you're not, you get cast out of the kingdom.

It's very weird.

It's just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities.

If someone come up to you and say, I think it's worse in universities.

Wow.

How did that get started?

Like, when did so it was it the same thing as like the climate was it with everything like somewhere around the 21st century like when Yeah.

I'll take something that was much less publicized.

The

what was the program

with your

device?

Oh, the

Star Wars.

The Sodium Guide Star.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, universities

treated that as something you could not discuss,

the notion that you wanted to have a defense against nuclear.

Really?

Yeah, what Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because

early

in the

Star Wars era

we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles, and so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high power lasers.

And so during a classified summer study in 1982,

there were some people from the Air Force, some generals and technical people, and talked about the problem is if you even have a beautiful blue clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward Austin, by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target.

And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers, but the inverse problem of a star does the same thing.

When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point, you get lots of speckles.

And so astronomers knew how to solve that.

You know, the problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere.

They're little warm patches and cool patches.

And so

what you can do is you reflect the incoming star light from a anti-wrinkled mirror.

And so it comes in wrinkled, it bounces, it's nice and flat, then it focuses and you get a point.

And you could do the same thing when you're trying to shoot an incoming missile.

You pre-wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile.

So it's called adaptive optics.

And the mirror is called a rubber mirror.

It's a mirror that you can adjust.

But to do that,

you need to know how to adjust the mirror.

So you have to have some information to how do I wrinkle it, push here, pull there, et cetera.

And the way the astronomers did it was they used a very bright star in the sky.

And then for nearby stars, you could use the bright star to correct your mirror for all the neighboring stars.

But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars.

And so unless the Russians attacked us from the during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies, we couldn't do anything with our lasers.

Oh, wow.

So I said, well, I know how to fix this.

All you need to do is make an artificial star wherever you like, because there's a layer of sodium at 100 kilometers, and we now have lasers that will excite that.

And so you can make a yellow star that's plenty bright enough to use that light to adjust the mirror wherever you like.

And nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during that.

This was a top-secret meeting.

When you say make a star, do you mean like a satellite star?

Like a small star?

source of light shining down through the atmosphere.

Most of the problem is fairly close to the ground, the first kilometer or two up.

And what would this be made out of?

Sodium.

So if you go to 100 kilometers, the Earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system, and so we're constantly burning up little micrometeorites, and they're all loaded with sodium atoms, and so they get released into the upper atmosphere, and they stay there and make a layer that's about 10 kilometers thick.

And not many people know about that.

I happened to know about it.

And I knew you could use it, you know, for this method.

That's why I got called to Washington was making it.

It was a highly secret invention for 10 years.

Wow.

That's

when the Soviet Union collapsed, then

this was declassified thanks to the effort of a Livermore.

friend and colleague, Claire Max, a woman physicist, astronomer.

But she finally persuaded the Department of Defense to declassify it.

So if you go to any big telescope now around the world, it has one of these sodium lasers pointing up at the sky at night.

You'll see this bright yellow beam going up.

Oh, wow.

Right there.

Oh, there it is.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah,

that's, and so the point where they're coming, this is actually green light.

And so for the sodium, most of them are yellow for sodium, but that's the basic idea.

And so this was a difficult thing to discuss in academia?

Well, I couldn't discuss it.

It was highly classified, so I couldn't even mention it until about 1995, I think,

94 or 95, when it was declassified.

But I'd invented it, you know, 12 years earlier.

But, you know, the point was,

in academia, you could not discuss

working for defense of the country.

That was

somehow immoral, defending the country.

I wasn't trying to attack Russia.

I was trying to defend ourselves.

Right.

Yeah, that's a ridiculous position to take.

We don't need defense against missiles.

They're hard to defend against, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

Exactly.

I mean,

at MIT, you had all sorts of people saying, you know, you shouldn't try.

It's silly.

It's impossible, and so on.

What was the point of that?

I mean, you have a problem, you try and solve it.

Yeah, it seems like that's what science is supposed to be for.

Now, it's, you know, if you probe,

I think, into these issues, you realize that climate is an extreme case,

but

politics interfacing science is not new.

Well, it just seems like human behavior.

Human behavior and anything else.

It's like the same patterns.

You'll find them in big businesses.

You find them in a lot of different, you find them in almost all communities and groups of human beings.

There's people that get into control and they force certain narratives.

And

the fact that that happens with the highest levels of academia and with science, though,

is really confusing to people like myself that are counting on everybody like you to get it right.

Don't.

We're as much

part of the crooked timber of mankind as anyone else.

Such a great quote.

No, I mean, you know, I've often mentioned, I mean, my family, you know, emigrated here from Germany in 1938.

But

when Hitler came to power in 1933,

every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood

before Hitler even asked.

So universities are not

bastions of independent thinking.

What could be done to make them more so?

You know, the Canadians did something that I thought had potential.

Every

faculty member

especially junior faculty, immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for.

And so

in that system,

every one of their faculty could function as a research scientist.

You know, students were paid for otherwise.

And there at least one link in the chain of influence was broken.

You had an open system there.

Even there, though,

other pressures came to bear.

But it seemed like a good idea.

Or at least a better idea.

Yeah.

But again,

unfortunately, it just seems like that just pattern of human behavior just pops its ugly head up over and over and over again.

Yep.

You know, Joe,

that just came up.

You know, it's worth going back to the founding of this country because if you read the things like the Federalist Papers, which was the theory of our government, what comes through loud and clear was that our founders believed that humans were extremely corrupt and

not very reliable.

And given that,

how do you make a system that will function, even with that?

And that's what they tried to do.

You know, that was the whole reason for the balance of power and all the things that are in there.

And so, you know, it was partially successful.

It certainly worked better than other systems for a lot of time.

Better than all the other ones.

Yeah.

But it's amazingly astute.

Yeah.

Fabulous papers.

I mean, they've held up well.

Yeah.

Anything else to add before we wrap this up, gentlemen?

Is there anything else you think people should know?

Well, trust but verify.

Yeah, I mean, how shall I put it, destroying the world is not an easy thing to do.

It shouldn't be the top of your list of worries.

Yeah.

You mean destroying the world with climate change?

Yeah.

It's not really what it is.

And it's very overmagnified.

Absolutely.

I mean, how should I put it?

Its origins were almost entirely political.

I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all.

You know,

we're discussing, discussing, you know, can it happen?

Is it warming?

Is it cooling?

Is extreme weather increasing?

It's amazing to me that politicians can put forward

a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.

I wonder how it would have worked if it wasn't for an inconvenient truth, if that movie hadn't been made.

Because sometimes people need something like that in that sort of a form for it to really take hold as an idea.

You may be right.

I mean,

something was needed to make it catch on.

It had been around for

quite a few years

without catching on quite that way.

Yeah.

But there's also the confluence, you know, the UN really got interested in it.

You had the World Meteorological Organization, all of them saw something they could gain in it.

And so it began to seem almost overwhelming.

But it did, you know, it reached the right people.

I mean, the funding agencies, the NSF got taken over almost immediately.

NASA took about ten years.

Department of Energy took ten years, but

they worked on it.

It's kind of stunning.

At least from the outside, you know, from my my perspective, it's kind of stunning.

It's stunning how successful it is.

And again, like I said, if you're in polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up, well, we've got to do something about climate change.

Yeah.

You scope.

Like the record skips.

Like, how much do you know?

Right.

It turns out very little, most people.

And then it turns out, according to you, it's almost impossible to figure out anyway.

The actual case.

I don't know.

I mean, the notion that there's a crisis has taken hold.

Right.

Even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis.

And the the main movie that started off that crisis from 2006 is entirely wrong.

All of its predictions.

And what's supporting it now is the extreme weather, which is a fake.

But it provides

visuals.

Yeah.

It's very hard for people to swallow, but I encourage them to look at the data of hurricanes historically.

And you realize, like, oh, pretty stable.

It's up and down and

all over the place, but it's not any worse now than it has been been before.

Oh.

I mean, growing up in the Bronx

in the 40s,

every autumn there were hunger hurricanes.

You could wake up in the morning and the streets were lined with the trees that had been blown down.

Interestingly enough, that has not recurred in New York for about 30 years, 40, 50 years.

I think the last one I remember when I lived in Boston was Gloria.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They don't get hit by hurricanes anymore.

If they did, they'd freak out.

Climate change.

But then 1938 was a gigantic hurricane.

And I was born in a town on a lake in Massachusetts called Lake Chagagagagma.

Chagagogshabunagoguma.

That's a real name?

Yes, that's a real name.

Whoa.

But at any rate, in that lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of 1938 just the most of them.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

But that also killed a lot of people because we didn't have the information of it coming.

Right.

And I'm sure buildings weren't really designed to withstand those either.

No, I mean,

how shall I put it?

I'm glad it came then, not now, I suppose.

If it came now, it would be proof.

Right.

Actually, the worst hurricane on record on the East Coast was the last year of the American Revolution, and it had a big impact on winning the war.

What happened was this enormous hurricane, mostly in the Caribbean, but it wiped out the British fleet.

It wiped out the French fleet.

There was nothing left, you know.

Really?

It was just a tremendous hurricane.

And so

the reason it affected the war was

the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet, so that when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be

rescued, you know, with all of the partisans coming after him,

he

didn't worry about the French.

And so

But the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane.

They had had 12 months, and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake.

And when Cornwallis got there, he was trapped because the British couldn't come in to rescue him, you know, from Rhode Island or wherever they were.

And so he had no choice.

He had to surrender.

Wow.

That was the end of the war.

And we can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly.

As well as the French.

The French and the French.

God bless the French.

What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of like recent years?

34, 35.

1930.

What was it like then?

It was in the peak of the Dust Bowl, and it was, I don't know, several degrees warmer than now.

I don't know the exact figure, but you can look at the records, they're pretty clear.

Yeah.

You're not going to see gigantic numbers, but

again,

that global metric is a little bit confusing.

Locally,

it was a huge effect.

But globally, yeah,

what you're saying completely makes sense.

It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature unless you're studying other planets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What matters is where people live,

what's the temperature there.

Yeah.

Well,

listen and gentlemen, I really appreciate your bravery in talking about this stuff and sharing all this information.

It's very

enlightening.

It helps.

These kind of conversations, they move the needle.

They really do.

So I really appreciate you guys.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Bye-bye, everybody.