#0046 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

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Speaker 4 On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2397 with guests Richard Lindzen and William Happer from the SEAL 2 Coalition. The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Speaker 4 Welcome back to the show. This is a show where two podcasters with 131 hours of Joe Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

Speaker 4 It's a show for anyone who's curious about Joe Rogan and his guests and what claims they make, as well as just anybody who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence. I'm Michael Marshall.

Speaker 4 I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello. And today we're going to be covering Joe's October 2025 interview with Richard Lindsay and William Happer, who are from the CO2 Coalition.

Speaker 4 So, Cecil, how did Joe introduce Richard and William in the show notes?

Speaker 4 It says, Richard Lindzen, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Speaker 4 William Happer, PhD, is professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University. Doctors Lindzen and Happer are recognized for questioning prevailing assumptions about climate change and energy policy.

Speaker 4 Okay, so two two highly credentialed guys talking about climate change here. Is there anything else we should know that isn't in the show notes? Sure, yeah.
Well, Dr.

Speaker 4 William Happer is the co-founder and chair of the CO2 Coalition. Emphasis on coal in coalition there.

Speaker 4 If you aren't familiar, the CO2 Coalition's purpose is educating thought leaders, policymakers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide and fossil fuels to our lives and economy.

Speaker 4 In 2014, Happer said that the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of poor Jews under Hitler. Yikes.
Dr.

Speaker 4 Richard Linson has received thousands of dollars in payments from the fossil fuel industry. He made this public in disclosures when he testified in court.

Speaker 4 He is a former distinguished fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, an institute that has gotten over $100,000 from ExxonMobil.

Speaker 4 This is a quote from Wikipedia, quote, Linzen has been called a contrarian in relation to climate change and other issues.

Speaker 4 The characterization of Lindzen as a contrarian has been reinforced by his reports that he claims that lung cancer has only been weakly linked to smoking, end quote. Wow.
Okay.

Speaker 4 So what did they talk about to Joe Rogan? Well, of course they came in to talk about climate change, mostly.

Speaker 4 Some discussion on science and peer review, money and science harvard the government they talked about greta thunberg and how it's possible that witches in salem were just the natural consequence of a massive acid trip right okay well it sounds like we're lucky they didn't talk about smoking and its links to cancer by the sounds of things um So our main event this week, it's going to be all about climate change.

Speaker 4 That's the bulk of the conversation and really what they're there to talk about. So that's what you're going to cover in the main event.

Speaker 4 But before we get to that, we've got to say a thank you to our Area 51 all Access Pass patrons. Those are definitely an AI overall.
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Speaker 4 So you can check all that out at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan. Now it's time for our main event.

Speaker 4 It's time.

Speaker 4 A huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast. That was Dan Dreyer announcing our main event.

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Speaker 4 You can send that to noroganpod at gmail.com, as well as how you want to be credited on the show.

Speaker 4 And as I say, this main event is going to be all about climate change. So I want to say up front, we found a really helpful bunch of resources when we were doing some

Speaker 4 research for this show.

Speaker 4 The links are going to be in the show notes, but a special shout out to Skeptical Science, who've got some really excellent explainers around climate change talking points that we found particularly valuable.

Speaker 4 And also a huge thanks to Glenn at the National Center for Science Education, who got in touch and offered us his help in doing some of the fact-checking. So check out the NCSE.

Speaker 4 They do absolutely brilliant work. Yeah, big thanks to them.
All right, so we're going to start this early on in the show, five minutes in.

Speaker 4 They get their niceties out of the way, and then they start talking about

Speaker 4 climate change. And specifically, when did people start to panic about CO2?

Speaker 5 CO2 seems to have really significantly become a part of the Zeitgeist after this Al Gore film.

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 4 No?

Speaker 6 No, it was before

Speaker 6 study.

Speaker 5 In terms of academic study, for sure, but in terms of people panicking, when did CO2

Speaker 6 panicking, I have no idea.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 6 what happened was

Speaker 6 there was,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And there was a big difference. I mean, the energy sector involved trillions of dollars.
The whales, not so much.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 So, okay, first of all, we've got to look at the way Jaw is framing this here, because he's pretty uninformed about what he's talking about, I'd argue.

Speaker 4 But what he's doing is he shifts it away from academic concerns or scientific concerns, legitimate concerns, to frame it as panicking, which is a very dismissive and loaded term.

Speaker 4 And it's also completely irrelevant to the science. Whether someone is panicking or not says nothing about whether the science on climate change is true or not.

Speaker 4 But what he wants to do is he wants to be able to frame climate change as nothing more than another moral panic and essentially a cash grab.

Speaker 4 And these two guys, Dick and Will, they're going to be helping him do that. This is a great observation by you, Marsh.
And

Speaker 4 I picked up on this and started following this thread throughout most of this episode. And pay attention because I'm going to try to point point out more moral language that he uses throughout.

Speaker 4 So this isn't just one time he does this. This is multiple times that this is the start of it, but Joe will do that throughout the episode.

Speaker 4 Also, he very rarely looks at this from the other perspective. I don't think the entire time I've been listening to him, he's mentioned at all the fossil fuel industry.

Speaker 4 as a cash grab to try to suppress the data, even though the Royal Society, which is United Kingdom's National Academy of Sciences for us Americans, they said, quote, ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9 million.

Speaker 4 I think it was, I think they chose pounds, not dollars, but 2.9 million to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change, end quote. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 And so the other thing we're seeing here is about the change in temperatures. And we're talking about the quote he says, you can focus on a degree, half a degree.

Speaker 4 He's talking about how small those differences are. But the thing is, a small change in temperatures can make like a really significant difference.

Speaker 4 There is a reason that we aim to limit global warming as an overall average to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Speaker 4 It's not a large number, but as a global effect, like once you average it out across the globe, that can be quite large. Here's a quote from Skeptical Science on this.

Speaker 4 Seemingly small changes in the Earth's

Speaker 4 average global temperature represent a tremendous amount of heat energy and can cause large changes in the climate, such as extreme weather events.

Speaker 4 The last ice age was only about five degrees Celsius cooler than the recent relatively warm period, for example. So the difference between us right now and an ice age is only about five degrees.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 It goes on to say, if we cause a around two degrees Celsius warming, sometimes some scientists think that feedback such as melting a permafrost will release more greenhouse gases and that might kick in.

Speaker 4 Ice and sediment cores suggest that we haven't been this warm for at least 600,000 years. So we're not sure, but this could trigger a lot more warming.

Speaker 4 So six degrees Celsius, the actual best estimate for the eventual global warming from current CO2 trends, that sounds pretty small.

Speaker 4 But again, the problem is that average heat isn't evenly distributed around the country.

Speaker 4 When we came out of the last ice age, the temperature in the northern countries rose by more than it did at the equator.

Speaker 4 So when you average over the entire world, it turns out to have only been six degrees Celsius global warming.

Speaker 4 But for people in northern Europe and Canada, it's the difference between walking around in a t-shirt and walking around with a mile of ice over your head. That's right.

Speaker 4 Difference that six degrees can really make.

Speaker 4 Okay, so they're continuing on. We're not skipping any tape.
He brought up at the last time, you know, they were talking about very specifically global warming, but then he brings up global cooling.

Speaker 4 And so Joe kind of asks, Was it always warming?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And they focused on that for a while. And then in the 70s, and at that time, well, what do you say?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But the scientist called

Speaker 6 Suki Minabe showed that even though CO2 doesn't do much in the way of warming, doubling it will only give you a half degree or so.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 So this is going to pick up from a talking point that Joe has actually used several times on the show that we've found, which was: didn't there used to be a massive worry that there was going to be an ice age?

Speaker 4 Wasn't global cooling the big worry before they discovered global warming? And this is brought up to sort of essentially say that the science has changed or the scientific opinion has changed.

Speaker 4 I found a study here. I will link it in the show notes.
This is a study from 2008 called The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus.

Speaker 4 Here's a quote from that study: An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s, the climate change science community was predicting global cooling and an imminent ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming.

Speaker 4 But a review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated the scientists' thinking as being one of the most important factors forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.

Speaker 4 And there's even a graph which looks at 68 scientific studies on the global cooling literature from 1965 through to 1979 in this period where they talk about their expecting the temperatures to cool.

Speaker 4 And we actually found that 62%

Speaker 4 of those studies at the time suggested that warming was the bigger issue, and only 10% predicted cooling. So there was not this consensus that the planet was actually cooling.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I want to touch on what Marsh said at the beginning here. This is a tactic that Joe uses a lot.
And I think it's pretty obvious why he uses it.

Speaker 4 He uses it to make it seem like scientists don't know what they're talking about and they're wrong with predictions. We hear this all the time.

Speaker 4 Whenever anybody wants to discredit science as a whole, they will say, well, am I supposed to drink alcohol this week or is alcohol bad for me? Should I not drink milk or is milk bad for me?

Speaker 4 You know, these scientists can't decide on what's right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad. And they do it so that they can essentially just reinforce the status quo.

Speaker 4 Because if they make it seem like everything's crazy, you might as well just stick with what you have.

Speaker 4 And so that's why very specifically, these two scientists immediately catch on to that and say, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they used to think that.
Sure. They used to think that sort of thing.

Speaker 4 And they've changed their minds on it because they don't actually know what's happening. All right.
So again, we're going to start talking about money. So follow the money in this next one.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. And this was a particular case.

Speaker 6 You wanted to deal you know, the energy sector is trillions of dollars. Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels, it's big bucks.

Speaker 6 And one of the odd things I think in politics, I don't see it studied much, Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars. If you look at the McKinsey report on

Speaker 6 eliminating CO two, 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So that's much better than giving out 100,000 and having all of it back.

Speaker 4 So, this is picking up perfectly on the point you were making, Cecil, about kind of the money that's going on here. Pretty clearly, Dick is happy to accept that the fossil fuel.

Speaker 4 Sorry, I call him Dick because his friend will call him Dick. I'm not calling him.

Speaker 4 He is nicknamed Dick as he goes, just to be absolutely clear.

Speaker 4 But Dick's pretty happy to accept that the fossil fuel industry is worth a very large amount and things like that.

Speaker 4 But he's not happy to accept the idea that they might have been spending some of that money to muddy the water on climate change or to try and promote climate change misinformation, despite them coming from an institution that is in part being funded by some of those fossil fuel companies.

Speaker 4 Here's a quote to a bit of research I found from the Yale Climate Connections website, pointing out that the fossil fuel industry spent $219 million to elect the new U.S.

Speaker 4 government in the last election cycle. So they invested a fifth of almost a quarter of a billion dollars into

Speaker 4 getting politicians in. That was a lobbying effort.
That is very specifically, you know, elect these politicians so they can continue acting in our interest.

Speaker 4 So that seems pretty clear that the oil industry has been very happy to spend money to get the politicians to do what they want or get the politicians that they want.

Speaker 4 Instead, what Dick's talking about is some unspecified other lobby group who doesn't yet have the money to begin with, but they're going to bribe the politicians with money they don't have yet in order to get money that they will use to have bribed the politicians.

Speaker 4 And then assuming to do that, they also have to be like bribing all of the other scientific experts in the field as well. Because it's not just the

Speaker 4 politicians out there who are saying that climate change is real. It's all of the scientists.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, there might be that maybe there are trillions of dollars worth of investments in renewables and things out there.

Speaker 4 But the people who are going to be receiving that money in the future aren't the ones currently trying to lobby and appoint politicians to positions of power.

Speaker 4 You put all your climate change in one big basket. All right.

Speaker 4 Now they're talking about whether or not this is settled science.

Speaker 5 Well, it's also this is a very bizarre dynamic of the Earth's temperature itself, which has never been static. No.

Speaker 6 How would it remain static? That would involve a hugely reactive system.

Speaker 5 It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 5 But everyone seems to be buying this narrative that science is settled and the Earth is warming. We have to act now.

Speaker 6 You say everyone.

Speaker 4 No, I'm not going to say everyone.

Speaker 5 A lot of politicians.

Speaker 6 A lot of politicians are very attractive to this because it gives them power.

Speaker 5 Right. And it's hard to define.

Speaker 5 And if you argue against it, you're a bad person.

Speaker 4 Well, you do all that.

Speaker 6 But, 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.

Speaker 6 Here, too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.

Speaker 4 Here's another way in which Joe spins it to morality. He says, if you argue against it, you're a bad person.

Speaker 4 And it feels to me like Joe, you know, there's a couple things that Joe really focuses on and digs his heels in and spends a lot of his time and a lot of his podcast air time dealing with confirmation bias around those things.

Speaker 4 It's trans people, it's vaccines, it's COVID, and it's climate change. And I think a lot of those things,

Speaker 4 I think he might maybe be taking some damage in some way by people saying what you're doing is immoral.

Speaker 4 By promoting these positions, these are, that's actually an immoral stance. You're hurting people.

Speaker 4 And I think Joe more than looking like an intellectual fool, I don't think he cares about that at all because we've seen him talk about, you know, some really strange things on his show and not flinch from it.

Speaker 4 I think he does care that people think he's a bad person. And I think that there is a push from Joe often to try to be like, I'm not a bad person.
And here's how I'm not a bad person.

Speaker 4 I'm going to show you this contrarian person. And that makes me a good person.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, that's really interesting. It's something I'd not thought about.
And it

Speaker 4 is also, if Joe Rogan is reachable on climate change, and he may well be reachable because we've seen in 2018 he was very much on the side of science.

Speaker 4 The way to get him, the way to reach him is maybe to start with that, to start with, you're not a bad person if you have questions here,

Speaker 4 but we need to kind of come to answers that are backed by science by being able to illustrate that this isn't a moral judgment, that

Speaker 4 you can be a very good and moral person, but have some concerns over here, and then start to address those concerns, but acknowledge his moral good first.

Speaker 4 This is something that reminds me of something you said on our show on a cognitive dissonance years ago.

Speaker 4 You came on and you were talking about anti-vaxxers and you said, I think anti-vaxxers care about children as much as I do. And you said that and you said, I like to tell them that.

Speaker 4 And this reminds me of that too, where you're not starting out with a salvo of you're immoral. You're saying, look, I think we both care about the world.
I think we both care about kids.

Speaker 4 I think we both care about trans people, whatever it is. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like, and then you can, and then that, that conversation moves in a different place than if you're just sort of on the attack. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely.
You separate the morality

Speaker 4 out of it by acknowledging where you think their moral values currently are and kind of like making clear that this isn't a moral attack on them.

Speaker 4 And then you can start to debate the kind of the actual science itself.

Speaker 4 I think you're right to bring up morale there. I think that's a really interesting point.

Speaker 4 The thing we're seeing here is this kind of dichotomy of the politicians, the ones who are bought by big renewables versus the people who are common sense and very smart.

Speaker 4 That's what Dick is talking about in terms of the ordinary people are more skeptic, have more skepticism.

Speaker 4 They've got more education, but it's the politicians who are very attracted to these ideas for biobig renewables they're the ones who believe it but maybe if the average person was less likely to believe in climate change it might be because climate deniers keep appearing on the world's most popular podcast in order to spread climate misinformation maybe that is kind of uh

Speaker 4 affecting things here yeah also he mentions france specifically i think france is actually a pretty bad example um i looked up some stats around france about the climate change denialism in france or the acceptance of climate climate change in France.

Speaker 4 In 2018, there was a survey which found that 82% of French people say they're concerned or alarmed about climate change, which is actually higher than the EU average of 78% for that same question.

Speaker 4 67% of French people think that climate change is already a threat, which is higher than the EU average of 59%.

Speaker 4 And 46%

Speaker 4 think it's mostly caused by human activities, which is a little below the EU average of 52%.

Speaker 4 But pretty clearly, 82% of people in France are concerned about climate change. That is pretty widespread acceptance of climate change.
That was 2018 data.

Speaker 4 More recently, data published in 2023 shows that that has risen to 87% who consider climate change to be important, 85% who are concerned about it, 72% think that climate change and environmental degradation will be harmful to them, and 88% to future generations.

Speaker 4 So climate change denialism in France is nowhere near as high as Dick wants to make it out to be here.

Speaker 4 That is all higher, in fact, than in the UK, where I live. So 68% of people in the UK believe that the world's climate is changing as a result of human activity.

Speaker 4 And only 17% think that the world's climate is changing, but not because of human activity, which to be clear is Joe Rogan's position.

Speaker 4 The climate changes all the time, but we're not doing anything about it.

Speaker 4 His position is only shared by 17% of Brits, whereas nearly 70% of British people recognize that the climate change is happening due to human activity.

Speaker 4 So it isn't the politicians versus the average person. The average person is pretty clearly on board with what's happening in terms of the climate.

Speaker 4 And even in the United States, I mean, two-thirds of the people support prioritizing the development of renewables. And a majority of Americans think climate change is a major threat.

Speaker 4 The Republicans, however, do not think that. Only 23% of them think it's a major threat.
So perhaps this has to do more with the company that he keeps and not the sentiment of a large group of people.

Speaker 4 You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like if you're just talking to the same group of people over and over, maybe they all don't think climate change is real, but maybe it's the group of people that you're talking to constantly that all hold the same idea.

Speaker 4 Now they're going to be talking about how to combat climate change in the UK, which is a very interesting conversation. Very short.

Speaker 5 Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians' decisions where they have to.

Speaker 5 Oh, in the UK, they were getting rid of cows, they were forcing people to kill people.

Speaker 6 They were paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills.

Speaker 4 Right. Right.

Speaker 6 And it makes people poorer.

Speaker 4 Okay, so I don't know what he means by we're getting rid of cows, we're forcing people to kill cows.

Speaker 4 I like the idea of getting rid of cows, where it's just like there's a wet work guy, he's got his gun, he's leaning over a fence, he's maybe got a ghillie suit on. I don't know.

Speaker 4 I mean, I am yet to be forced to get rid of cows or to kill any cows. Maybe the knock is going to come to my door in time.
Maybe I will say

Speaker 4 I was in Scotland just the other weekend. I saw plenty of cows.
I didn't see an awful lot of dead cows.

Speaker 4 What I think he's referring to is there is a suggestion of reducing livestock numbers in order to try and

Speaker 4 mitigate climate change. That is a suggestion put forward by the Independent Climate Change Committee, which is independent from the government.

Speaker 4 But that amounts to going from 45 million cows and sheep down to around 38 million by 2030. So

Speaker 4 it's not about getting rid, like killing cows and stopping having cows. It's going down by about, what, 7 million? So about a reduction of 20%

Speaker 4 in the next five years. And also, that's just advice from an independent body.
It's not policy. Nobody is forcing anyone to kill cows here.
And then Dick brings up electricity bills.

Speaker 4 You know, they're paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills, which is true. Electricity prices in the UK have leapt pretty substantially.

Speaker 4 It's a major kind of crisis here or a major kind of political issue here. But it's not because of climate change mitigation policies.

Speaker 4 It's because Russia invaded Ukraine and that had had a huge effect on supply and

Speaker 4 destabilizing the gas and oil market because a huge amount of oil flowing into Europe was coming from Russia. And when you turn that pipeline off due to sanctions and war, there's a shortage of gas.

Speaker 4 We also had a lower than expected amount of stockpiling under the previous government. So we didn't have the reserves in place to deal with the kind of the economic instability.

Speaker 4 It's also worth pointing out that that gas and electricity market, that's a market that has massively suffered due to privatization.

Speaker 4 It used to be a more centralized market, then it was decentralized, it was put into public, into private ownership,

Speaker 4 and a lot of smaller suppliers entered the market without a great deal of reserves of cash that would allow them to weather economic storms.

Speaker 4 And a lot of those suppliers went bust and all of their customers were then bailed out by the taxpayer. So these are the reasons that our electricity prices are so high.

Speaker 4 It's got nothing at all to do with climate change.

Speaker 4 Well, and if you get a chance to blame the cost increases on renewables and government mandates, then you conveniently point no blame whatsoever at the fossil fuel industry for raising prices. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think that's it. And you mentioned renewables.

Speaker 4 Well, actually, one of the things that's even mitigating the prices going even higher, so the fact that the prices would be higher than they currently are, the thing that's suppressing those prices a little bit is the contribution of renewable energy sources to our energy mix here in the UK.

Speaker 4 So since the start of 2025, gas accounted for 29.9% of our energy usage compared to 31% came from wind and 6.6% from solar and 13% of nuclear.

Speaker 4 So actually in terms of electricity generation in the UK, wind outstrips gas. So is that really a sign that our electricity prices are going up because of renewables?

Speaker 4 All that wind power was coming from the turbines that were already built. That wasn't costing us more.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 4 Next clips about coal.

Speaker 6 It tripled the price of electricity.

Speaker 5 Right, but what I'm talking about is like third world countries, parts of the world that are undeveloped.

Speaker 4 They can't afford it.

Speaker 5 And that's all it is. They can't afford it.
And but they also,

Speaker 5 if they didn't follow these net zero policies, what kind of plants are we talking about?

Speaker 4 Are we talking about coal plants? Coal, anything, whatever is available.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, you know, so.

Speaker 5 So you think even though coal does pollute the environment and it releases particulates, right?

Speaker 4 It's not an issue.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 You can get rid of almost everything except CO2.

Speaker 5 Okay. So the particulates aren't as big of an issue as they used to be in the past? Is that what it is? They're more efficient.
Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 5 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

Speaker 4 so what dick is putting forward here is the idea of clean coal it's not much of an issue aside from the co2 all the particulates and things not an issue when you put it through scrubbing technology in order to make clean coal um clean coal unfortunately is not a technology that's particularly going to be uh effective it's not a technology that's anywhere near as effective as people make out.

Speaker 4 Here's an article from Reuters explaining that refined coal shows few signs of reducing nitrous oxide emissions as lawmakers intended, according to regulatory documents, a Reuters analysis of EPA emissions data and interviews with PowerPoint plant owners, scientists, and state environmental regulators.

Speaker 4 So essentially, what this is saying is that while clean coal sounds great, actually all the coal plants that actually have these kind of scrubbing technologies are getting nowhere near the amount of benefits, nowhere near the amount of reductions in particulate matter as the technology promised us they would have.

Speaker 4 It's just another myth in order for us to stop doing the things that we should be doing to reduce CO2 emissions, things like that. It's a SOP to try and stop us changing our tactics.

Speaker 4 But even if that was true, even if clean coal is great, it doesn't say anything about what they should be doing in other parts of the world the world.

Speaker 4 If clean coal worked brilliantly in America, that says nothing about where they what they should be doing in other parts of the world.

Speaker 4 Also, if other parts of the world that couldn't afford renewable energy plants wanted to be doing

Speaker 4 coal plants, that says nothing about what America should be doing. It says nothing about what the UK should be doing.

Speaker 4 Maybe there are parts of the world in the developing world where using coal plants is the best available way of getting them electricity.

Speaker 4 That doesn't mean we should turn off our wind turbines in the UK. We should still be pivoting as much as we can towards CO2 reduction technologies and renewable energy.

Speaker 4 And following up on that, there's this idea that Joe and

Speaker 4 these professors seem to be pushing is that very specifically, people in other parts of the world are being forced. There's sort of an enforcement of this net zero, but that's not true.

Speaker 4 There's no specific requirements on how much these countries to cut emissions.

Speaker 4 National plans can

Speaker 4 vary greatly in scope and ambition, largely reflecting each country's capabilities and its development and contributions to emissions over time.

Speaker 4 So it's not necessarily the same for a country that's across the world as it is for America, as it is for China, as it is for the UK, et cetera, et cetera. They make it seem like there's this mandate.

Speaker 4 There's this, you know, there's these countries that are going to sort of these big climate protection bullies are going to come in and bully people into different policies.

Speaker 4 I couldn't find evidences of that, but I could find evidence of the opposite. Here's a quote from a New York Times article.

Speaker 4 Now, this is in reference to the United States pressuring other countries based on climate change stuff. So here's the quote.

Speaker 4 Quote, an ambassador from Asia was told that if he voted in favor of a plan, which was to enforce the or to follow the Paris Agreements, his country's sailors would no longer be allowed to disembark in American ports.

Speaker 4 Caribbean diplomats were told that they could be blacklisted from entering the United States.

Speaker 4 And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, personally called officials in several countries to threaten financial penalties and other punishments if they continued to support the agreement to cut ship pollution.

Speaker 4 End quote. So the United States did the opposite, right? So what Joe is saying is, oh, we're over bullying people into renewables.
That's not true. They're doing the exact opposite.

Speaker 4 They're saying, if you sign on to these things that say we want to cut ship pollution, then the United States is going to, we're going to blacklist you.

Speaker 4 going to, we're going to try to hurt you in some way.

Speaker 4 And I want to bring back this idea here that he talks about, because the way he makes it seem is that, you know, if climate change is real, you're hurting people that can't sort of meet the standard.

Speaker 4 It costs them more. And you.
When you're hurting those people in the other parts of the world that don't have as much as us, you're the immoral one. You're doing something that's immoral.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I don't think that plays out in the data, but I just want, you know, like I think that there is something to be said about every time falling back on these moral arguments about what, what we should and shouldn't be doing morally rather than sort of what the science is based on this sort of thing.

Speaker 4 Is there real, is it, and what the data is, are we actually doing these things to the different countries all across the world?

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 And I think that moral argument, again, it's really, really interesting and very good to point out, not least because if we aren't having a conversation about what should be done in America, I don't think Joe is having a conversation about what should be done in the rest of the world.

Speaker 4 That rest of the world argument only comes up as a way of justifying not taking action in America. So only that morality only works as a way of not doing something else.

Speaker 4 It's never proactively for the people that he's talking about. Great point.

Speaker 4 While we're talking about other countries, I was actually surprised that Joe didn't bring up China. We've heard him talk about climate change an awful lot.

Speaker 4 He normally argues, well, it's pointless people in America or Europe doing anything about climate change because China are not going to play ball.

Speaker 4 China is still going to pump out so many coal plants, so much CO2, that anything we do is not going to have an effect because China will not stop producing CO2. So it's all futile.

Speaker 4 That's an argument he makes quite often. Except China are making huge strides in reducing their CO2.
There was a report that was actually released just this week at the time of recording.

Speaker 4 Here's the Guardian report that I'm going to quote from.

Speaker 4 China's carbon dioxide emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, analysis reveals, adding evidence to the hope that the world's biggest polluter has managed to hit its target of peak CO2 emissions well ahead of schedule.

Speaker 4 Rapid increase in the deployment of solar and wind power generation, which grew by 46% and 11% respectively in the third quarter of this year, meant that the country's energy sector emissions remained flat, even as the demand for electricity increased.

Speaker 4 So it isn't the case that China are doing nothing and it's futile for us to do anything. China's actually now starting to really turn around their CO2 emissions and head towards

Speaker 4 the net zero that we're looking for. All right, we're going to take a short break.
We'll be back right after this.

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Speaker 4 Okay, welcome back. Let's jump right back in.
So now we're going to talk about,

Speaker 4 you know, Joe's shown this to many people. He's going to talk about his favorite graph and how there's been big changes in climate over time.

Speaker 5 You know, 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.

Speaker 5 And like, no one was controlling it back then. And we're supposed to believe that we can control it now.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, we're not talking about big changes. You know, in other words,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But, you know, somebody says one degree, a half degree, what's his name? Cucheras at the UN says the next half degree, and we're done for.

Speaker 6 I mean, doesn't anyone ask a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between, you know, 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Speaker 5 It does seem crazy. It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people.

Speaker 4 So, what they're talking about here is going up another 1.5 degrees Celsius from where we are now.

Speaker 4 So, if where we are now was a baseline of how it's always been, or even slightly below the average, that might not seem anywhere near as bad. It would still be quite a lot, but it's not as bad.

Speaker 4 But where we are right now is already 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than it was in 1920. And we can actually show a graph of the global average temperatures between 1850 and 2024.

Speaker 4 And it's pretty clear that from the 80s onward, we are going quite steeply up. So another leap on top of that will be quite a catastrophic extra leap.

Speaker 4 It's not about a couple of degrees before breakfast. It's some serious warming we're talking about here.
Yeah. And I think that comment is very purposefully.

Speaker 4 You know, I think this person's smarter than that. I think they're very purposefully trying to confuse climate and weather, right? You're talking about what you're doing between 9 and 10 a.m.

Speaker 4 That has nothing to do with climate, right? That has everything to do with the moment that you're in and the space that you're in.

Speaker 4 And he's saying a deal with that, that half degree between 9 and 10 in the morning, that is not the same thing as a global temperature that's a half degree. That's a huge deal.

Speaker 4 I mean, just ask, like, there's been so many moments in the last 10 years where there's been, you know, the hottest on record here and then you know the the hottest uh temperature of the water and how that water is now churning that those those storms out and more frequency and larger power and we've seen this time and time and time again and they keep on they they keep on just basically saying no it's not happening like they're gaslighting us into thinking this thing isn't happening now now look these guys marsh they're from the co2 the coalition so they don't just want you know less people to worry less about CO2.

Speaker 4 They kind of want more CO2. So here's them talking about what happens if we have too little CO2.

Speaker 6 The interesting thing is during the ice ages, we almost get wiped out.

Speaker 4 It got really close, right?

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 But you get south of 30 degrees latitude, not very different from today in terms of temperature.

Speaker 6 And so you would think you had 100,000 years, people would sort of migrate to an area where it was now pleasant.

Speaker 6 Trouble was, without CO2, which went down to about 180, there wasn't enough food for the people.

Speaker 5 Oh, so there wasn't enough plant life. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Get down to 160, 150, all life would die. There would be not enough food for anything.

Speaker 5 What's it at now? Like 240?

Speaker 6 No, we're now 400.

Speaker 4 400. Yeah.

Speaker 15 400.

Speaker 15 430 maybe today. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Okay. We'll be at 465 by this afternoon.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Between 9 and 10, we raised another sort of 10 of CO2.

Speaker 4 Okay, they talk about in the ice age, you know, south of 30 degrees latitude and north of the equivalent of that in the southern hemisphere, that was the equivalent temperature of America right now, is what they're kind of arguing.

Speaker 4 So like even in Ice Age, they're saying, you know, it can be really icy far north, but when you get around that equatorial band, people can move down there and it's not as bad.

Speaker 4 That might well be true.

Speaker 4 So, the question we should then be asking is, what happens to those ice age temperature places when it continues to get hotter in that band as it becomes that was the band that was habitable during the ice age?

Speaker 4 As the rest of the planet gets hotter,

Speaker 4 what happens to those places? Great point. They get hotter and hotter.
They get inhospitable, uninhabitable.

Speaker 4 And then the question we have to ask is are we therefore going to be totally okay with the inevitable mass migration from mexico and india and most of africa into the parts of the world north of that uh of that region because people can no longer live there and i'm guessing the answer for these guys is no they're not okay with that they're not okay right now with migrants coming into america from mexico or here in the uk people coming from you sort of africa and places like that um so yeah that's the real issue Parts of the world will still be habitable.

Speaker 4 It's just the uninhabitable parts will have to see people mass migrate out of them. And that's where the instability is really going to cause the people who don't live in those uninhabitable zones.

Speaker 4 And then I love that they talk about how much CO2 we need and how much CO2 is kind of a bad amount. And Joe estimates how much CO2 we're on, and it's 240, and he's off by almost half.

Speaker 4 So there is so much more CO2 in the atmosphere than Joe can estimate. And these guys are just sort of like, no,

Speaker 4 it's way higher higher than that, but don't think too hard about it.

Speaker 4 You know, I found an interesting article while I was looking because I was wondering, you know, is

Speaker 4 too low a CO2 bad? And what I found was the opposite might be true. So this article is from, you know, I found a bunch of these.

Speaker 4 They were all basically referring to the same study, which happened in 2018. This one's from the New York Times.

Speaker 4 Basically, they exposed rice fields to more CO2. And what they found was that the

Speaker 4 most of the 18 varieties, this is a quote from this article, quote, most of the 18 varieties that were grown and harvested significantly, contained significantly less protein, iron, zinc, and rice that is grown today.

Speaker 4 All the rice varieties saw dramatic declines in vitamins B1,

Speaker 4 B2, B5, B9,

Speaker 4 though they all contained higher levels of vitamin E, end quote.

Speaker 4 So they very specifically when they tried to reproduce higher levels that we expect to have in the future on some of these rice fields, they found the rice to be less nutritious.

Speaker 4 So he's saying it's bad if we have it. You can't live at that.
We might not be able to live the other way too.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and no, that makes perfect sense because sure plants do sort of inhale, they bring in CO2 and they emit oxygen. That's kind of how that works.

Speaker 4 But the plants that are around us now, the plants that we eat are the ones that have evolved in the atmospheres and environments that we have or have been cultivated by us and they've been cultivated in the atmospheres that they have that we're in right now so when you do massively ramp up the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you can't guarantee that those plants are still going to grow the same way react the same way be as nutritious they they weren't cultivated to grow in those spaces you also don't know which plants are going to flourish more than others and what that's going to do to the environment, whether one particular plant flourishing is going to have less space, less nutrition for the plants that we really need, or what the effect on algae blooms is going to be, and then what that's going to have, what effect that's going to have on the broader ecosystem.

Speaker 4 So it's not as straightforward as saying more CO2 equals good for plants, because this is a really complex ecosystem.

Speaker 4 And the weird thing is, they're normally pretty happy to tell us how complicated this whole picture is. They're going to have an entire toolbox about how complicated this all is.

Speaker 4 But when it comes to arguments, whether complexity is working against them, they go to a nice, simple CO2 is good because it's plant food. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 4 Look, there might be other causes to this sort of thing, Marsh. Maybe it's the sun.

Speaker 5 Obviously, a lot. It heats us up, but like the changing.

Speaker 6 You know, that's something there's argument about.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And the thinking was pretty simple.

Speaker 6 He was saying that, you know, every winter is cold. Every winter has snow.

Speaker 6 But what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is, determines whether that that snow melts or not before the next cycle.

Speaker 6 And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier.

Speaker 6 Takes thousands of years, but eventually it's big. And

Speaker 6 in recent years, for instance, there have been young people who have shown that that works.

Speaker 4 So Joe is trying to tie in the idea that climate change is actually driven by solar variation. That's why he kind of asked that question at the start there.
How much of a factor does the sun play?

Speaker 4 Because a lot of climate change deniers will say that what's happening isn't to do with CO2. It's not to do with our emissions.
It's just the sun. The sun changes.
It varies over time.

Speaker 4 Here's a quote I found on the research on this from Skeptical Science.

Speaker 4 They pointed out that from the early 1970s until today, the solar radiation reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere has in fact shown a very slight decline.

Speaker 4 So a lot of people who are saying, well, it's only getting warmer because the sun is getting stronger, that is not the case.

Speaker 4 They go on to say through that same period, global temperatures have have continued to increase. The two data records, incoming solar energy and global temperature, have diverged.

Speaker 4 That means they've gone in opposite directions. If incoming solar energy has decreased while the Earth continues to warm up, the sun cannot be the control knob of that warming.

Speaker 4 You know, what's interesting to me is that there's always this,

Speaker 4 let's find another point, even if that point doesn't fit necessarily into the full argument that we're making.

Speaker 4 If you're saying that climate change isn't real, and you're saying that the reason why climate is changing is because it's always changed or whatever,

Speaker 4 sometimes they say that, but then sometimes they'll just be like, well, climate doesn't change. Or they'll say things like, well, we are affecting it, but we're not doing too much.

Speaker 4 Or we are affecting it, but China's going to go right, you know, China's just going to blow right past us if we don't

Speaker 4 make our coal plants. They're just going to, they're going to monopolize the market on energy or something, and then we're going to be left behind.

Speaker 4 So we can't let that happen, even if it is ruining the environment. We've got to look at this in a different sort of strategic light.
And I think that there's never one thing that they settle on.

Speaker 4 And this sun piece is another one of those that's coming in because they spent a lot of time talking about other things that, you know, it's not a big deal. It's not this, it's not that.

Speaker 4 And now they're like, well, maybe it is something and the sun is doing it. So they just keep on trying to shove and move these goalposts.

Speaker 4 They have different goalposts for different things and they keep shoving them. They are just shoving every goalpost they can in every different direction.
Yeah, exactly. I think that's kind of

Speaker 4 a great observation because it's kind of explains how,

Speaker 4 or it illustrates that this isn't a coherent scientific worldview.

Speaker 4 This isn't a goal for the evidence first worldview because essentially they will often argue, and Joe will argue at various points in this conversation and other conversations, the temperature isn't increasing and it's good that it's increasing.

Speaker 4 And if it is increasing, it's caused by the sun anyway.

Speaker 4 So like

Speaker 4 those are different versions of uh of the world yeah i love that you put it in us in one single sentence marsh nicely done

Speaker 4 all right okay now they're gonna talk about funding studies

Speaker 5 you know what 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 does this problem get solved like how do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?

Speaker 15 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I think stopping the funding for

Speaker 15 this massive funding for climate would help because it's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds.

Speaker 15 If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you'll be elected to societies, you'll win prizes.

Speaker 5 And you'll be shunned again if you don't.

Speaker 15 That's right.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Because the theory that the control knob is CO2 doesn't work. It's completely clear it doesn't work.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, it's saying there's money to be made. It's saying there's money to be made in climate change here.
And that is a big problem. Just saying, how do we stop this problem?

Speaker 4 The problem of how much money there is to be made in climate change. There's even more money to be made in lying about the climate in order to ensure that fossil fuel companies keep making profits.

Speaker 4 But that incentive is never raised in this conversation.

Speaker 4 And I wonder why that doesn't come up, the idea that fossil fuel companies might have a finger, might have a motivation towards keeping the money rolling in for them.

Speaker 4 The other thing I think is really interesting here is Dick is saying, and if, for example, some administration in Washington, like, oh, you know, hypothetically, if some administration in Washington, I can't think of who I might mean by that, but just a random thought or throw ahead.

Speaker 4 Someone in Washington who might be in like an administrative position if they wanted to do anything.

Speaker 4 This is such a clear wink to anyone in the Trump administration who might or might not be listening to or watching George Shaw here to do something about it. It's like a funding Fiji board.

Speaker 4 It's got there. Is anyone from Washington listening right now?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's exactly that because we know full well that Joe has influence in those kind of circles because of who he has on the show.

Speaker 4 And it reminds me so much of when Mark Andrierson was on Joe's Shaw and he was there to try and lay groundwork for the removal of protections of from financial exploitation of customers, of the public.

Speaker 4 Here, it feels like they're trying to lay the ground for Joe's fans to accept some extreme policy decisions. And they're telling even the Trump administration here, which ones to bring in.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 he makes it seem like there's no other research to finding out what might be causing global warming, saying, oh, they're just spending all this money on CO2, but we need to turn the CO2 knob off.

Speaker 4 It's like, well, if that's the case, then how do we know that methane also hurts the environment? How do we know that if that's the case?

Speaker 4 And then I found a graph that said that there's a bunch of different gases, greenhouse gases that cause this.

Speaker 4 The fluorinated gases, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide obviously is a large part of it, but the other ones contribute almost a quarter of greenhouse gases are contributed by this other stuff.

Speaker 4 How would we even know that if we don't fund it, right? Like they make it seem like that funding doesn't exist or that people aren't out there trying to find other reasons for this.

Speaker 4 There's plenty of people out there with plenty of studies. You just don't like the answers of the ones you're getting back.
That's the problem. All right.

Speaker 4 Now we're going to talk about another symptom of climate change, rising water.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 6 I mean, it goes a little bit in Malibu, and there's a lot of they go back much further than that.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think, Joe, it's true sea level is rising. It's different at different shores because the land is also rising and sinking,

Speaker 15 but it's not very much, and it hasn't accelerated.

Speaker 15 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

Speaker 15 changing very much.

Speaker 4 I love that Joe's version of this to begin with is sea level isn't rising at all. There's actually no change to the shorelines.
You can see, well, a little bit in Malibu, but not very much.

Speaker 4 And even they can't defend that particular shoreline. That shoreline has already gone in terms of argument.

Speaker 4 They have to retreat to a more conservative position of, okay, yes, we know that it's rising, but it's not very much.

Speaker 4 And it's taken a long time, and it's nothing to do with CO2 and all these other kind of denialist positions.

Speaker 4 But Joe hasn't got that memo yet and is still using an older, older version of the playbook, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Their version isn't true either. Here's a report, a report published in Nature.

Speaker 4 This is called, it's a study called The State of the World's Beaches. It was published in 2018.
I'm going to quote from it here.

Speaker 4 The application of an automated shoreline detection method to the sandy shores, sandy shorelines, resulted in a global data set of shoreline

Speaker 4 change rates for the 33-year period from 1984 to 2016.

Speaker 4 Analysis of the satellite-derived shoreline data indicates that 24% of the world's sandy beaches are eroding at rates exceeding 0.5 meters per year.

Speaker 4 28% are accreting, so they're getting further out, and 48% are stable. So a quarter of them are receding.

Speaker 4 28% are going in the opposite direction, but there's change here. It goes on to say the majority of these sandy shorelines in marine protected areas are eroding, raising cause for serious concern.

Speaker 4 Here's another report from NOAA. This is the Climate Change Global Sea Level Report published on August 22nd, 2023.

Speaker 4 Quote: Global mean sea level has risen about eight to nine inches or 21 to 24 centimeters since 1880.

Speaker 4 The rising water level is mostly due to a combination of meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets and thermal expansion of seawater as it warms.

Speaker 4 In 2023, global mean sea level was 101.4 millimeters or 4 inches above 1993 levels, making it the highest annual average in the satellite record, which is from 1993 to present.

Speaker 4 In some ocean basins, sea level has risen as much as six to eight inches since the start of the satellite record in 1993. So it has been rising.

Speaker 4 We've seen significant rise and we've seen in particular a significant rise in the last 20, 30 years.

Speaker 4 All right. They're going to start talking about ice in this next clip.

Speaker 5 And wasn't there like an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that's that's increased recently?

Speaker 15 That's right. Well,

Speaker 6 I mean, that's always variable.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 We lost a chunk the size of Manhattan, and everybody freaks out.

Speaker 6 Well, we were supposed to be ice-free 20 years ago.

Speaker 4 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 6 No, you know.

Speaker 4 However, it was just off by a little bit.

Speaker 5 He's just give him some decades to be vindicated.

Speaker 4 So again, we see Joel bringing out an argument. Actually, there's more ice than ever before, but nobody's talking about it.
And these guys can't stand by that climate change denialist argument either.

Speaker 4 They say, well, it's always variable, which is to say that it's maybe not at its maximum right now. And then they go on to say

Speaker 4 that, well, we were supposed to be ice-free 20 years ago. So the very fact that there's any ice at all these days proves the climate change believers.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. So again,

Speaker 4 Joe is doing an older version of the argument, which is there's more ice than ever.

Speaker 4 Even they recognize the data does not support that at all. And they've got to regress to these more conservative positions on climate change.

Speaker 4 Again, I'm going to pull up a couple of reports here. This is this report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center from March 27, 2025, headlined, Arctic sea ice sets a record low maximum in 2025.

Speaker 4 Here's a quote. On March 22nd, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year at 14.33 million square kilometers, the lowest in the 47-year satellite record.

Speaker 4 This year's maximum extent is 1.31 million square kilometers below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 million square kilometers.

Speaker 4 And it's 80,000 square kilometers below the previous lowest maximum that occurred in 2017.

Speaker 4 So there isn't a record. There's there is a record amount of ice.
It's just a record low amount of ice. And maybe Joe's just misread the headline there.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I think, like, you know, it's pretty easy to predict their positions here. If even if they're like, let's just presume that in 10 years there's no ice.

Speaker 4 They'll say, well, there's always been fluctuations in how much ice we have. I mean, you can sort of already guess exactly how they're going to react to this.

Speaker 4 One of the things they bring up in this clip, Marsh, is they talk about Al Gore. And in this episode, they talk about Al Gore a lot.
We cut a lot of that out.

Speaker 4 There was a lot of going after Al Gore because he made a lot of money off of a movie and how he was sort of this pioneer in the climate change field and in this particular clip they mentioned they say al go was off by that a little bit he said it was we were supposed to be ice-free 20 years ago as near as i can tell now i didn't research the movie i didn't watch the movie and sort of skim through and see what it said but i did find an article that looked at the movie claims 10 years after so this is 2016.

Speaker 4 They look back 10 years after. Now, what's funny is if you read this article, some of the things that they were saying hadn't happened yet are starting to happen, which is really interesting.
Like the

Speaker 4 more and...

Speaker 4 uh more frequency and more dangerous storms is happening now was not happening as much then but is happening now and one of the things that they that they predicted at least according this article they said that that prediction said that that it's between 50 and 70 years from the time the movie came out that there would be no ice during the summer in the arctic so we still have a while to go to see if that prediction is true or not.

Speaker 4 We don't know whether that prediction is true. What we are seeing is that it's trending that way.
And the things that I saw said that perhaps there won't be any

Speaker 4 ice up there at around 2050, which would be right in the, actually a little early. 2052 would be early for their predictions.
We're going to start talking about extreme weather in this next one.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 that shows that, you know, it was fake because

Speaker 6 it's trivial. I mean, if we looked it up,

Speaker 6 the average

Speaker 6 month, there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month. that are once in a hundred year events.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 5 Right. It's extreme weather events.

Speaker 5 That's what I I keep hearing. The hurricanes are getting stronger.
They're getting more frequent. And they repeat that, and I don't think that's necessarily true.

Speaker 4 No, no.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 The last one, they had to say something because the politicians control what's in the IPCC.

Speaker 6 But even with that, they were saying no. And that had nothing to do with the public relations.
So to hell with it, even if there's no relation, we'll say there is, because that gives us visuals.

Speaker 6 God.

Speaker 4 So now we're talking about the extreme weather events here.

Speaker 4 We are seeing a huge amount of extreme weather changes. This is from the World Meteorological Organization.

Speaker 4 They've got an entire section of their website all about extreme weather because of how common this is.

Speaker 4 What they're saying is natural climate variability, including El Niño phenomenon, can result in extreme weather and climate impacts, but climate change is leading to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of weather and climate extremes.

Speaker 4 They say, for example,

Speaker 4 as the air warms, it can hold more water vapor, around 7% at 1 degree Celsius, which increase the intensity of heavy rainfall events.

Speaker 4 More frequent and more intense weather events, such as severe heat waves and heavy precipitation, lead to increased impacts on more vulnerable populations.

Speaker 4 Additionally, human influence has likely increased the chance of compound extreme events since the 1950s, including increases in the frequency of concurrent heat waves and droughts.

Speaker 4 So it might be that we would have a bad drought now and then, now we're more likely to get a bad drought followed by a bad drought, followed by a bad drought, which obviously has a much worse effect.

Speaker 4 It goes on to say the number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years, driven by climate change, more extreme weather, and improved reporting.

Speaker 4 So improved reporting is actually one of the things there. We just know about some of the disasters more often, but it's not the main cause of why the numbers have gone up.

Speaker 4 It says improved early warnings and disaster management has decreased the number of deaths almost threefold in that time. So,

Speaker 4 it is getting worse. The reason it isn't looking as bad as it actually is is because we're better at dealing with disasters.

Speaker 4 If we weren't better at dealing with disasters, if we're dealing with them just as much as we did 50 years ago, we'd be in some really serious hot water right now. Yeah, really interesting, Marsh.

Speaker 4 All right, next up, they're talking about methane.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And so cutting back methane will have a big effect. But there's so little methane in the atmosphere that you got rid of all of it, it would have almost no effect compared to CO2.

Speaker 6 And, you know, somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

Speaker 15 Yeah, simple arithmetic. They just can't do simple arithmetic.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 One thing I'll point out, I think that's the first time we've heard Will's voice in the main event here. He says so little.

Speaker 4 In fact, we'll talk about it later in the show as to how little he actually says, but it's Dick doing all of the running here, and Will just occasionally drops in the odd thing here and there.

Speaker 4 They're laughing about how people can't do the simple arithmetic around how much methane there is in the atmosphere. Look, methane is very bad for the atmosphere.

Speaker 4 It is also just less abundant than CO2. But their argument is that methane isn't as bad as CO2 here.
That's what they're arguing. Oh, they say like methane, you know,

Speaker 4 methane isn't anywhere near sort of as bad as all of that. Their argument is that CO2 wasn't bad.
So where are they on this here?

Speaker 4 So this is a report from the International Energy Agency who said methane is responsible for around 30% of the current rise in global temperature. Just be clear, 30% isn't nothing.

Speaker 4 That's about a third of the problems we're having is methane. That's not what comes across from how Dick was talking about it.

Speaker 4 And if there's so little methane in the atmosphere, it would have no effect. It would have 30% effect is what it would have here.

Speaker 4 The International Energy Agency go on to say two key characteristics determine the impact of different greenhouse gases on the climate, the length of time they remain in the atmosphere and their ability to absorb energy.

Speaker 4 Methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime than carbon dioxide, around 12 years for methane compared with centuries for CO2.

Speaker 4 But methane absorbs much more more energy while it's in the atmosphere.

Speaker 4 It says the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is currently around two and a half times greater than its pre-industrial levels. So that is a real problem there.
Methane's a massive issue.

Speaker 4 This is the EU's energy sector here. This is their website, that report.
After carbon dioxide, methane is the second greatest contributor to climate change.

Speaker 4 In fact, methane's ability to trap heat in the atmosphere is even stronger than that of carbon dioxide.

Speaker 4 Over a 100-year time scale, methane's global warming potential is 29.88 times that of carbon dioxide. And over a 20-year time scale, it's 82.5 times worse.

Speaker 4 So methane, it doesn't need a lot of it to do a huge amount of damage. So yeah, there's not a lot of methane in the atmosphere, but what is there is doing a massive amount of damage.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and what's interesting is earlier in this episode, they were moving the goalpost on scientific studies by saying, well, if they would just study what all these other gases might be contributing, maybe we could really find out what's happening.

Speaker 4 And then there are studies that talk about methane, but they literally just say, well, methane's not a big deal.

Speaker 4 So they were going to, look, it doesn't matter if they had the studies about the other gases. They were going to dismiss them out of hand anyway, which is what they did here.
All right.

Speaker 4 So this is the last clip in the main event. This is talking about what the warmest years have been on Earth that we have recorded.

Speaker 5 What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of like recent years?

Speaker 15 34, 35. 1930.

Speaker 4 What was it like then?

Speaker 15 It was in the peak of the Dust Bowl, and it was, I don't know, several degrees warmer than I don't know the exact figure, but you can look at the records. They're pretty clear.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 6 You're not going to see gigantic numbers, but again, that global metric is a little bit confusing. Locally, it was a huge effect.

Speaker 6 But globally, yeah,

Speaker 5 what you're saying completely makes sense. It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature once you're studying other planets.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5 What matters is where people live,

Speaker 5 what's the temperature there.

Speaker 4 Okay, so we're talking about temperatures, the warmest years here. The warmest year on historical record was 1934, 1935.
That isn't true globally. That is true.

Speaker 4 It was the warmest in continental America, continental United States. That's it, but it is not the warmest year on record.

Speaker 4 That's certainly how they're making it out to sound like it is, because they've cherry-picked that one particular data.

Speaker 4 In fact, this is the World Meteorological Organization again. They've confirmed that 2024 was actually the warmest year on record based on six different international data sets.

Speaker 4 In fact, going beyond that, the past 10 years have all been in the top 10 warmest years on record. Wow.
Which is an extraordinary streak of record-breaking temperatures.

Speaker 4 The report goes on and says the past 10 years of 2015 to 2024 are the 10 warmest years on record. They go on to say that 2024 saw exceptional land and sea surface temperatures and ocean heat.

Speaker 4 So while 1934 may have been the hottest year on continental United States, it isn't anywhere near the hottest year on record

Speaker 4 in terms of globally that the last 10 years have been the 10 hottest years on record. We're going to take a quick break and then move on to our toolbox section.
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Speaker 5 How are you doing? Like, and now he's got a new tool in his toolbox.

Speaker 4 All right. So, for the toolbox section,

Speaker 4 we're talking about how things are so complex, Marsh, it's just so hard to understand.

Speaker 4 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 So, this is something I've noticed that they do throughout this conversation to say that, well, actually, when you think about the global global system, how can we really know what's going on?

Speaker 4 It's also incredibly complicated. The science is very difficult.

Speaker 4 A lot of people don't understand the science and they're trying to weigh in and say that climate change is happening, but they don't know exactly every bit of the picture.

Speaker 4 And until you know everything, you know nothing. And that's essentially used to try and shut down any amount of understanding of what's really happening.

Speaker 4 So it's kind of the appeal to complexity that it's all too complex for us to possibly understand, but it's also being used as gatekeeping, of keeping away only certain people are able to contribute to this conversation.

Speaker 4 Unless you have a deep, deep wealth of knowledge of the physics of a global ecosystem, you can't be in this conversation is what they're trying to do.

Speaker 4 And they're trying to limit the amount of people who can actually care about this. All right.
So this is the first clip.

Speaker 4 This is talking about whether or not we can have a rational debate about this stuff.

Speaker 5 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, all, you are now a climate change denier.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Which is like being an anti-vaxxer or, you know, fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing you could be called.

Speaker 6 Now, that's a very interesting phenomenon. I mean, as looking at it, on the one hand, you're told the science is settled.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So here you have the biggest phenomena we don't understand at all, but the science is settled.

Speaker 4 Who knows what that means?

Speaker 4 So it's interesting. Joe is talking about we can't have a rational debate.
Joe doesn't want a rational debate on climate change. Joe's had a rational debate on climate change.

Speaker 4 We saw him have it with Candace Owens.

Speaker 4 What What Joe wants now is the ability to put forward denialist arguments and also the reassurance that nothing bad is happening. It's actually all going to be okay.

Speaker 4 None of the scary things are going to happen. We're all going to be fine.
That's what Joe really wants, not rational debate. And there's also another piece here where Joe says.

Speaker 4 You can be called an anti-vaxxer or a fill in the blank or whatever horrible thing you will be called.

Speaker 4 And I feel too, like this is one of those moments we can look back and say, I think Joe took some damage from people when he put somebody on.

Speaker 4 And this is him digging his heels in and saying, I'm going to have on some Mavericks and I can navigate this misinformation out in the world.

Speaker 4 In fact, he's the one who's spreading all the misinformation from these Mavericks out into the world. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 4 And he says about, you know, oh, they say there's this,

Speaker 4 that it's settled, that all the world's leading climate scientists agree. I'll actually just point out the climate, the consensus among experts on climate change is now more than 99%.

Speaker 4 It was often said about 93%, 97%. It's now more than 99%.

Speaker 4 There was a paper put out in 2021 by actually a friend of mine, a guy who used to run the Leicester Skeptics in the Pub, published a paper which analyzed all of the scientific literature currently on climate change and found that it's more than 99% of experts in this field now agree with the scientific consensus.

Speaker 4 So there's a pretty strong consensus right there.

Speaker 4 And what Dick is there to say is, well, thousands of climate scientists think this. Do you know any climate scientists? Did you go to college with any climate scientists?

Speaker 4 Is he suggesting that if you didn't personally know climate scientists at university, they don't exist? They're not real?

Speaker 4 Like, I find it incredibly hard to accept that that is a good faith argument, that he genuinely believes that.

Speaker 4 And it's not just you to try and try and dissuade people from believing the scientific consensus. Yeah, right.

Speaker 4 But his argument in terms of the complexity here is, well, clouds have such a water vapor and clouds have such a massive impact on that.

Speaker 4 And we can't understand clouds at all so how are we gonna be able to understand that you know the biggest phenomenon out there and we don't understand it at all and yet the science is settled unless we know everything about clouds we can't know anything about sci about climate change and that just isn't the case at all we know in fact uh quite a lot about the impact of clouds on climate change there's a a report from the ipcc which talks about clouds entire chapter dedicated to this kind of area they point out that greater atmospheric water vapor content particularly in the upper troposphere results in enhanced absorption of long wave and shortwave radiation, which reduced outgoing radiation.

Speaker 4 So the more clouds there were in those areas of the troposphere, the more that the heat was kept in, and that was a positive feedback.

Speaker 4 It goes on to say the net effect of change in clouds in response to global warming is to amplify human-induced warming.

Speaker 4 That is, the net cloud feedback is positive, and we've got a high confidence of that.

Speaker 4 An assessment of the low-altitude cloud feedback over the subtropical oceans, which previously was the major source of uncertainty in the amount of cloud feedback, has been improved owing to a combination of climate change model simulations, satellite observations, and explicit simulations of clouds, which lead to a strong evidence that this type of cloud amplifies global warming.

Speaker 4 While he's saying we don't fully understand clouds, he's actually outdated on that.

Speaker 4 Climate scientists, the ones he doesn't believe are real, the thousands he believe don't exist in colleges, have spent a lot of time understanding the impact of clouds and have a much better understanding.

Speaker 4 But he's trying to say, until you know everything, we just don't know, man. The science can't be settled until we know everything.

Speaker 4 And this next bit here is talking about differential equations.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And one of the things that

Speaker 6 we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution.

Speaker 6 But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on.

Speaker 6 At any rate, 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

Speaker 6 they get answers that will often be wrong. But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe.

Speaker 6 Kuhnin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3%

Speaker 6 reduction in

Speaker 6 national product or gross domestic product by twenty one hundred. 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 what's the panic?

Speaker 6 And it's true. The models don't give you anything to be that panicked over.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 So, you know,

Speaker 6 it's a confusing situation.

Speaker 4 It's such a confusing situation, all this talk of models and things. I mean, how is anybody supposed to follow this? It's best you don't follow this.
It's best you just take our word for it here.

Speaker 4 He starts off to talk about differential equations. You don't have to have worked on the differential equations within climate science to believe the consensus on climate change.

Speaker 4 You know, there are 99% of all scientists who've worked in this field agree that this is a genuine thing that's happening.

Speaker 4 You don't have to be doing complex quadratic equations or differential equations in order to accept that they know what they're talking about.

Speaker 4 It's just here to say, this is all way too complex for you to worry your pretty little head about it. Just take no action at all.

Speaker 4 Until we know, until you can personally prove for sure that this is really happening, you should take no action at all.

Speaker 4 And by coincidence, we should just carry on doing what we've been doing, which is buying a lot of oil. But people don't think that way about any other part of their lives.

Speaker 4 When it comes to expertise, they don't think that way at all.

Speaker 4 Have you got a degree in dentistry? No. So how can you be sure that brushing your teeth is good for you? Maybe you should stop brushing your teeth.

Speaker 4 Can you explain how the operating system of your laptop works? No. In that case, don't use a computer.
You shouldn't touch a computer until you can actually program Windows 11 by yourself.

Speaker 4 Nobody's life works this way. We defer to consensus and experts all the time.
We'd never get anything done otherwise. And he's also trying to sort of say that the climate models aren't good.

Speaker 4 They don't actually do what they don't predict any particular damaging futures for us.

Speaker 4 It's worth pointing out that climate models that we're using have actually been found to be pretty reliable in predicting climate trends by putting past data in and seeing what it predicts is happening, comparing that with what's happening right now.

Speaker 4 And if it was able to tell us what was happening now based on past data, there's a reasonable assumption that it's able to put in today's data and tell us what's likely to happen in the future.

Speaker 4 That's just good, good use of models. It's interesting to hear him

Speaker 4 talk about how complex something is and how it's so hard to understand, et cetera, et cetera. And then

Speaker 4 within what seems to be probably an equally complicated system, he'll have RFK on who will say something like, yeah.

Speaker 4 And then I sat down and I read like five different studies on vaccines and now I know more than doctors. And there's like this, it's this weird when it's like, it doesn't, he, there's no consistency.

Speaker 4 Just, you know, either it's complex or it's not. I mean, genuinely, I think that probably the human body might even be more complex in some ways.

Speaker 4 And he'll just believe somebody who says, yeah, I just have it all figured out. So he doesn't have any, there's no discernment when it comes to any of this stuff.

Speaker 4 He just believes whoever's sitting in front of him. And these people in particular, they don't want you to think too deeply about this stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the complexity is important only to the degree to which it agrees with what he wants to believe. Yeah.
You don't have to worry about complexity if you agree with your organ.

Speaker 4 If you disagree with him, well, it's all too complex for anyone to have a clue what's really happening. Yeah.
And this next clip is another example that's too complex for most people.

Speaker 6 You're hitting on a problem, and I think Will knows this as well. A lot of this stuff is actually tough material.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 6 I mean, for instance,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 You know, it deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject. And it's a real problem in a field.

Speaker 6 It's true throughout science, where you're trusting people to behave, I think, decently,

Speaker 6 but that material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone. And how you deal with it, how you approximate it.

Speaker 6 The same is true with nuclear power, with other things.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 It involves a certain amount of trust. And what we're describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.

Speaker 15 Yeah, there's this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loves so much, trust but verify. Yes.
And it's hard to verify, you know, if you're an average citizen

Speaker 15 something about climate.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 I mean, they're talking about trust being violated while they're here to try and violate trust. That's what they're trying to do, trying to undermine that trust as much as possible.

Speaker 4 You know, they're saying here that

Speaker 4 the way to determine how temperature happens in the tropics, it's handled in a third-year graduate course. It's not much for most people can't understand that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but the people who are proving what's happening in those areas have done more than a third year graduate course. They've dedicated their lives to it.

Speaker 4 And he is right that their findings aren't necessarily fully accessible to the general public because of how complicated the science actually is. But that's why we have like consensus.

Speaker 4 That's why we can trust consensus.

Speaker 4 And as I say, 99% of people who do find the material accessible and do understand it because they've done more more than their third year graduate course on it do agree climate change is happening.

Speaker 4 So that's why that's where the trust should be coming in. And he's here to undermine that trust.

Speaker 4 And it's, it's all this, this idea of painting this is too complex to possibly understand is just a clever attempt to dissuade people from even feeling like they're allowed to look into it.

Speaker 4 It's too tough for you. It's too complex.
You wouldn't understand it. Trust me.
Just trust me. It's not for the likes of you.
So just carry on as you were, buy oil, essentially.

Speaker 4 All right, here's the last clip in the toolbox section. This is talking about chaos.

Speaker 15 One of Dick's colleagues at MIT, a man named Lorenz,

Speaker 15 why don't you tell him about Lorentz?

Speaker 4 Well, no.

Speaker 6 Lorentz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable.

Speaker 6 Whether that's true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics and detail.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 15 Yeah, the typical

Speaker 15 description of this theory was that it's as though a butterfly flapping its wings in in the Gulf of Alaska causes hurricanes two years later in

Speaker 4 Florida.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that one's funny. Yeah.

Speaker 5 People repeat that and they're like, no, that's not how it works at all.

Speaker 4 I don't think it works. I know, of course not, but it's funny what it is.
Well,

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 wouldn't, it would have an influence downstream.

Speaker 5 Everything has an influence. Everything is tied in together.

Speaker 4 So, okay, you don't need to know the direction and the trajectory of every little eddy in the stream to know which way the water's flowing. You don't need to be able to predict

Speaker 4 chaos.

Speaker 4 It's all being deployed to make it seem like you have to know every single detail of every single part of it before you can say anything at all about the big picture. But that isn't true.

Speaker 4 If I drop a glass, I don't have to be able to accurately predict where every bit of shard of that glass is going to end up in order to be confident enough to say, when I drop the glass, it'll smash when it hits the ground.

Speaker 4 I can predict it's going to smash. I don't need to know where every little bit of it is going to end up to be able to make that prediction.
So that's what they're trying to do here.

Speaker 4 What is interesting though, Marsh, is that they're only trying to do it one way. So they'll say things like, you know,

Speaker 4 you can't know about this stuff, whether or not it's true.

Speaker 4 But then throughout the most of the episode, episode they keep saying it's not happening Well, you're like well if you can't know can you know the other way too?

Speaker 4 It seems like there is just another thing they're stacking up against the door so they can keep it closed Yeah, I completely agree that said

Speaker 4 I'm surprised that Joe didn't suggest that we can stop all hurricanes if we could just find that one darn butterfly and just stop it once and for all before it kills again.

Speaker 4 We could just spray for butterflies. Is there any way we could maybe build a wall? It's through a butterfly sanctuary.
I don't know. Maybe we could do that.
We'll figure it out.

Speaker 15 Let's wrap it up with that.

Speaker 6 Thank you, sir.

Speaker 5 Appreciate you very much. You're a beautiful person.

Speaker 4 All right. Marsh, we're at the end.

Speaker 4 Something good.

Speaker 4 It was hard. I think there's a couple of parts in the conversation that we didn't cover.

Speaker 4 We might cover them in the gloves off, where Joe brings up stuff around like Salem witches, and they point out that actually we don't need to go to fanciful explanations about hallucinations to cover it it's just people can be really shitty to each other especially on math so that some of that stuff was pretty grounded um and I think the other good thing is there's two of them here only one of them is doing all the talking so like it could have been twice as bad

Speaker 4 potentially it could have been

Speaker 4 much yeah but yeah in terms of straight out climate misinformation, this is about as this is as bad as I've I think I've ever seen in terms of climate misinformation misinformation, in terms of how much it is, the confidence it's delivered.

Speaker 4 And it really does illustrate how far Joe has come.

Speaker 4 So if I want to try and fish around for something good, this is this provides an absolutely perfect point of comparison for the Joe Rogan in the past who would accept scientific consensus was something that we needed a very good argument to overcome.

Speaker 4 We can actually sort of put that up against there and say, look how far this guy has come in those time. Yeah.
And look at where he stands now for sure.

Speaker 4 Look at where, you know, like you can absolutely say that he is a climate change denialist, even though that wording gives him some damage.

Speaker 4 I guess my something good is they didn't seem like they were outward racists. So that's a nice change of pace.
It feels like we've been sort of running into things like that recently.

Speaker 4 And there's a couple of moments where they kind of push back against that sort of thing. They're certainly talking about Nazis and how Nazis are bad.
So that's good.

Speaker 4 I mean, like, that seems like a, that seems like a plus. I don't know.
That, that is true. Although there is, I think you're you're right.

Speaker 4 And I had that kind of in, we might cover some of that in the gloves off. There is a point where they talk about Nazis.

Speaker 4 Well, they talk about German energy policy and how smart Germans are, and then immediately start talking about Nazis. It's like, guys, they do.
That was a while ago. They do.
They do.

Speaker 4 Germany isn't all Nazis. Like, Germany's not Nazis these days.
Come on, man. Yeah.
You're living in the past. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So that's it for the show this week.

Speaker 4 Remember that you can access more than half an hour of bonus material every week, including this week, for as little as a dollar an episode episode, by subscribing at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

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Speaker 4 Meanwhile, you can hear more from Cecil at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed. And you can hear more from me at Skeptics with a K and the Skeptic podcast.

Speaker 4 And we'll be back next week for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

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