Transcript of #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

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Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Our pleasure.

My pleasure. If you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your resume, like what you do? Just a brief version of your credentials.

I'm Dick Lindsay, and my whole life has been in academia. Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard, and I did spend a couple of years at the University of Washington and in Norway, and in Boulder, Colorado. Then part of that was because at Harvard, I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no who dealt with observations. So I went to Seattle for someone who did. And then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there about three, four years. Moved on to Harvard, spent about 10 years there, and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013. I've always enjoyed it. I mean, the field of atmospheric sciences, when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable. So you could look at phenomena. One of them that I worked on was the so-called quasi-biannial cycle. Turns out the wind above the equator, about 16 km, 20 km, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next and so on. We worked out why that happened, and there were other things like that.

It was a very enjoyable period until global warming.

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

I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton. And like Dick, I'm a science nerd, but I was actually born in India under the British Raj. My father was an army officer, Indian army, Scottish, and my mother was American. And that was before World War II. So when I came to America as a small child, My mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. Wow. I remember the war days at Oak Ridge, and that's probably why I went into physics. I thought this looks like interesting way to make a living. And if I can do it, I'll do it, and I have. And I've done a number of things. I spent a lot of time at universities at Columbia, at Princeton. I also serve for a couple of years in Washington as Director of Energy Research. Research under President Bush Senior. And I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here. I first became suspicious when I was Director of energy research. I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers money, and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing.

And there was one exception. That was the people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful. We work for Senator Gore. We don't work for you. And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research. I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be glad to take my money. That's interesting.

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

Oh, yes, very long.

When he was a senator, before he was vice president. That's right. And when he made that movie, An Inconvenient Truth, what year was that again? Jamie, was it '98 or something? Yeah. Something like '99? Yeah. What is it? Oh, really? Were that off? Wow. Okay. So 2006. So when he made that film, there was always... When I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nemoy had a television show called In Search Of. Remember that show? Sure. And on that show, he warned of an oncoming ice age. Do you remember that? And I remember being a kid and freaking out like, oh, my God, Spock is telling us the world's going to freeze. This is terrifying. And then somewhere along the line, it became global warming. And initially in the '80s, it was funny. People were saying, well, hairspray, the more you use it, you could play golf deep in a November.

That was the ozone. Yes, it was the ozone.

But it was also part of global warming. A little bit. They were worried about global warming, but they were worried about the ozone hole. It wasn't CO₂ as much back then. Co₂ seems to have really significantly become a part of the zeitgeist after this Al Gore film.

No.

No?

No, it was before.

No, it was- It was a study in terms of academic study, for sure. But in terms of people panicking, when did CO₂- Look, panicking, I have no idea.

But No, what happened was there was, I would say, with the first Earth Day, 1970, there was a real change in the environmental movement. It began to focus much more strongly on the energy sector and much less on saving the whales. And there was a big difference. I mean, the energy sector involved trillions of dollars. The whales, not so much. At that time, it was cooling this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much. But you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something. And it was cooling from the 1930s. 1930s were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the '70s. And that's why they were saying, Well, this is going to lead to an ice age. And they focused on that for a while. And then in the '70s, and at that time, well, what do you say? If you're worried about an ice age, they said, well, it will be the sulfate emitted by coal burning because that reflects light. And the less light that we get, the colder we'll get. But then the temperature stopped cooling in the '70s and started warming. And that's when they said, Well, you have to warm now scare people with warming, and you can't use the sulfates anymore.

But the scientist called Sook Yee Manabi 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. But if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little, you added water vapor, which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you would double the impact of CO₂, which now gives you a degree, which still isn't a heck of a lot, but still it was saying you could increase it. And that's when people started saying, Well, now we better find CO₂. It's increased because of industrialization and so on. And that began the demonization of CO₂.

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

Oh, yeah. And this was a particular case. You wanted to deal... The energy sector is trillions of dollars. Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels. It's big bucks. And one of the odd things, I think, in politics, I don't see it studied much, Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars. If you look at the McKinsey report on eliminating CO₂ net zero, they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Well, if you're giving out that much, you don't need that much of your politician. All you need is millions for your campaigning. And all you're asking are the recipients of people who are getting the money that you are giving them a half %, a quarter %, you're golden. So that's much better than giving out 100,000 and having all of it back.

Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge. There's no room for any rational debate. And if you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier, which is like being an anti-vaxxer or fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing be called.

Now, that's a very interesting phenomenon. I was looking at it. On the one hand, you're told the science is settled. Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree Which often makes you wonder, you went to college, how many climate scientists did you know? But on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports, they're pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO₂, and we don't understand them at all. So we have the biggest phenomena we don't understand at all, but the science has settled. Who knows what that means?

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

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

It doesn't make any sense. But everyone seems to be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the Earth is warming. We have to act now.

You say everyone.

No, I don't say everyone. A lot of politicians.

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

It's hard to define. You can And if you argue against it, you're a bad person.

That's a good one. You do all that. But we spend part of a year in France. My wife is French. Ordinary people, once you get to the countryside, don't take this all that seriously. Here, too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.

Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians' decisions where they have to... In the UK, they were getting rid of cows. They were forcing people to kill cows.

They're paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills. It makes people poorer. It's making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it. That involves billions of people. No, I mean, it's doing phenomenal damage and pain. But I think for politicians and for many people who are well off, they need something that gives meaning to their life. And saving the planet seems sufficiently grandiose.

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

Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheaper. At least the experience in the UK is when you switch to, quote, renewables. It tripled the price of electricity.

Right, but what I'm talking about is like third world countries, parts of the world that are undeveloped. They can't afford it. That's all it is. They can't afford it. But they also, if they didn't follow these net zero policies, what plants are we talking about? We're talking about coal plants.

Coal, anything. Whatever is available.

Yeah.

I mean, essentially Even though coal does pollute the environment and it releases particulates, right?

That's an issue, right?

How shall I put it? It's always a matter of cost. We have a plant, I think in Alabama that has basically Basically, as clean as any other plant that burns coal. You can clean it, you can scrub it, you can get rid of almost everything except CO₂.

Okay, so the particulates aren't as big of an issue as it used to be in the past. Is that what it is? I agree. They're more efficient? Okay. Yeah. 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. I think not bringing these people into the first world.

And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on, which are available in places. There are places where you're lucky, like in Norway or Canada, you know, Quebec, where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean. But there's a problem with politicians. I remember once being in DC, and some Republican politicians came and said, You know what we just did? We banned incandescent light bulbs. I said, Wasn't that a great thing? I said, That's the stupidest thing I've heard today. What's the point? Because at the time, what was replacing it? Compact fluorescence. Which were awful. All they had to do was wait and do nothing, and LEDs would come along, and people would say, Okay, I prefer that. Instead, they feel they have to do something.

And they would switch the fluorescence, which turned out to be It's terrible for people. So incandescence aren't bad for you?

They were simply less efficient than in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light. I mean, LEDs are phenomenal That's the right way.

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

Yeah, I think there's an old cliché, money is the root of all evil.

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

This is the thing that we You mentioned a tough thing there, the business trusts science. It's not a great idea because that isn't... Science is not a source of authority. It's a methodology. It's based on challenge.

Where does this narrative come from then? Trust the science.

The success of science. In other words, this is a relatively new way to approach the I mean, a few hundred years. And the notion is, and I think it's been stated many times, you test things, and if they fail to predict correctly, they're wrong. So you find out what's wrong with them. You don't fudge them. You don't change the rules. It's led to immense improvements in life, development of all sorts of things. And so it has a good reputation. Politicians have less of a reputation, so they wish to co-opt the reputation of science.

Yes, that's a very good point because try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid. You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing. Cell phone technology, nuclear power, so many things that people go, that's incredible that they did that.

Well, that's also confusing technology with science.

The result of science. Absolutely. Which is also an issue, right? And when you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science.

You mentioned Gore at the beginning. Yes. With that thing, he was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO₂ and temperature going together. It never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO₂.

Yeah, Greg Braden was on the podcast recently. He was explaining there have been times where the CO₂ was much higher in the atmosphere, but the temperature was colder. Oh, yeah. So it's not like we can point to, look at the dinosaurs. We don't want to live the way the dinosaurs live. Look how much CO₂ they had. And then the other really inconvenient thing with CO₂ is that the Earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time.

I think we'll speak to that. But I mean, essentially the increased amount amount of CO₂ in the industrial era has added greatly to the Arable land. And in fact, there's a funny story. Do you know the name E. O. Wilson? Have you ever heard that name?

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

He was a biologist at Harvard. He wrote about socio-biology. His specialty were ants and bees and things, social insects. And he He was giving a talk and it came up for reasons that were not obvious to me. He was talking about the population of humanoids. He was mentioning that you go back a few hundred thousand years and you began the first humanoids, and they got to about a few million But then during the last glacial maximum, the numbers went down to tens of thousands. There's a complete wipeout of humans. So I asked him afterwards, I said, Do you think this could have anything to do with the fact that CO₂ is so low that there was no food? And his response was to turn around and walk away. That's an inconvenient truth, sir.

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

Yeah, I know. And it should be the first thing that makes you suspicious.

Yeah, right. There's a consensus.

Yeah. I mean, this is not how science is done.

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It's this crazy wave, and no one was controlling it back then. We're supposed to believe that we can control it now, that we can do something about it now.

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. We're not talking about big changes. In other words, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees, but that was because Most of the Earth was not affected, much of the Earth anyway, very much. But somebody says one degree, a half degree. What's his name? Gucheres at the UN says, The next half degree and we're done for. Doesn't anyone ask? I have to agree. I mean, I deal with that between 9: 00 AM and 10: 00 AM.

It does seem crazy. It's just that fear of my new change that they try to put into people. I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier, how much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that's called Save the World Climate, some crazy like that where everyone goes along.

They call it the Inflation Reduction Act.

Oh, even better. Who doesn't want to reduce inflation? Then next thing you know, there's windmills killing whales and all kinds of nonsense. But the point being, it is a fascinating science. The science itself is fascinating. Oh, yeah. You get rid of the ideology and you stop attaching this thing. You're either pro-science or anti-science. Just look at the actual data of it. It's absolutely fascinating. And these minute changes, the fact that the procession of the equinoxes or the Earth wobbles, the whole thing is nuts. The whole temperature. And it has to stay relatively stable in order to keep us alive in terms of, can't go too low, can't go too high. We're in this goldilocks zone.

The interesting thing is during the ice ages, we almost get wiped out. Got really close, right? And what's interesting about that is as far as temperature goes, Okay, yeah, the poles have gotten much colder. You have ice covering Illinois, 2 kilometers of ice. That's uninhabitable. But you get south of 30 degrees latitude, not very different from today in terms of temperature. And so you would think you had 100,000 years, people would migrate to an area where it was now pleasant. Trouble was without CO₂ Two, which went down to about 180, there wasn't enough food for the people.

So there wasn't enough plant life. Yeah. Yeah.

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

What's it at now? Like, 240?

No, we're now 400 something. Four hundred? Yeah.

410. 430 maybe today. Yeah. Okay.

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

Interesting question. Actually, quite a lot, but it took very funny forms. For instance, in 1989, for instance, I sent a paper to Science magazine questioning whether this is something to worry about. And they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest. I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Mediological Society, and they reviewed it and published it, and the editor was immediately fired. Wow. About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the iris effect that clouds, which were greenhouse effect at the upper levels, contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling as a negative feedback. And we got the paper, put it, got reviewed, was published. Again, the editor was fired immediately, but the new editor came on immediately and said, he's inviting papers to criticize it. And suddenly there were tons of papers criticizing it, looking for anything that differed from what we did, including one that found a difference that actually made the CO₂ even less important, but it was different. So he thought he could pass it through. No, it's insane. And even now There's something called gatekeepers. I don't know.

Are you familiar with the release of emails from East Anglia? No, I'm not. Okay. This is 20 years ago or something, almost. Somebody anonymous, released the emails from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm, and they were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on. And they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on. And that was all public. And it had no impact at all.

That sounds like that should be illegal.

Yeah. Well, the whole business with... How should I put it? Peer review. It is not ancient. Before World War II, very few journals had peer review. And in fact, when I have students look at old journals from the 19th century, one of the big surprises is they are less formal than today's papers. They are literally discussions among scientists about their results, their questions, their uncertainties, and so on. It's real communication. Today, there's much more formality in the papers. There's also in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll or or a study, how often are papers referred to? It turns out the average paper is referred to once.

Wow.

I mean, so you have these things. Papers are written to satisfy the funding agency see. Nobody seems to pay attention to them.

How did you get involved in this?

Well, I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy, and that's what really sucked me into it. I had I've never paid much attention to climate science before, but I was spending a lot of money, the taxpayers money on it. And so I thought I'd have to learn a little bit about it. And I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not appreciate my questioning. They were very strange because almost any other science, when they got a call from Washington, come in and tell us what you're doing, they were just delighted to come and make a case about how important their work was. But the sciences were completely different.

Did anybody engage with you?

Yeah, they had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn't come. They would come and be very sullen, and they wouldn't answer questions. And you can't have a seminar without asking questions. That's how you learn.

So they would come to try to get funding from you, and they wouldn't answer questions? That's right. That sounds crazy. That sounds like people that don't think they have to to convince you that what they're doing is important. So they're entitled to that money.

Well, that's right. Well, I was working for President Bush senior, and when Carter and Gore won the election, Gore couldn't wait to fire me at the behest of all of his protosheets.

You mean Clinton and Gore.

Clinton and Gore. That's right. So Washington, fortunately, it's very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire because you can't find them in the org chart. So it took them two or three months to find me. But they finally did fire me. I was glad to be fired. I wanted to go back to do research. I was tired of being a bureaucrat, so I'm grateful in some sense for that.

Now, your colleagues that weren't working with you, like other scientists, were they reluctant to discuss this information with you guys when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?

Well, my field is actually hard physics. I'm a nuclear physics trained and I've done a lot of work with lasers. And these are things you can measure. They don't have much political influence. A lot of them have a military significance. In fact, the reason I was brought to Washington is because I invented an important part of the Star Wars defense initiative, which I can say about later. But I had never really paid any close attention to science until then. But I was- Climate science. Climate science, I should say, yes. So once I had this experience in Washington, I started looking to it a little bit, but I didn't have time to look a lot because my own research was going still at Princeton, and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company. Forming the company me and getting it going and funded used up most of my time. I didn't have time to look at climate. But eventually that was behind me and I invited Dick to come give a seminar at a colloquium at Princeton. That's really when I began to get very interested in it. And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science.

It completely politicized. If you can't ask a question, that's a bad, bad sign. And if you have 100% consensus determining the truth. That's an even worse sign because the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation. And that wasn't true of the climate science community. They would predict all these things, and none of them ever happened. And there was no consequence. One failure after another. Nothing ever happened. The funding kept pouring in.

Now, is this behind the scenes? Is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists? Do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue that that causes, or do they just accept it for the most part?

Well, I think speaking as a physicist, I don't know how it is in other fields. And from Princeton, I think most of my colleagues recognize that there's a lot of nonsense there, but they're afraid to speak up because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money. Dick mentioned that the love of money is the root of all evil in universities. For It sounds like at Princeton, we have enormous new building program. It's funded to a large extent from overhead from climate grants. And you're talking about not small change. You're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars for construction. So it's like this famous drama of this Norwegian playwright, enemy of the people, Ibsen. And the point of the drama was there was this resort town in our way where you would come and you would be treated at the spa. You drink the water and go home healthy. Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid. A local doctor said, We're killing people. We're not curing them. And he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city. So it's that syndrome.

It's an ancient human problem. So it's always been there, and it's there in spades with climate.

It's part of it. Another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue. I mean, in the US, and I think that's in a way fortunate, it's almost a right versus left issue. And as a result, you have people... Universities are almost entirely on the left, and so it's something they support. The money end of it is funny. I have the feeling at MIT that our President, Sally Cornbluth, probably spends her time worrying about how she can use climate money to support the music department. I don't know.

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

It is fun Okay.

You get this huge overhead, 50 %, 60 % of your grant goes to the administration and not to your research. They can do what they like with the overhead.

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That's bad for science. That's bad for education. It's bad for everything. Let's take a step back. They would immediately lose so much money.

The main thing it's bad for is for overhead income to the university. Exactly. From an administrator's point of view.

By the way, this is something that the press didn't deal with very much. Trump was cutting the overhead. He was saying that he didn't want to have that included in grants. I don't think the public realized how significant that was for better or for worse.

Yeah. I think most people have no idea where grants go. They don't even think about it. No, I mean- The amount of money that's involved.

Yeah. When I was active, if I got a grant, I'm a theoretician, so I didn't need laboratory work. It mainly was for supportive students. And But then 50% of it went to the administration.

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

Yeah.

A lot of money goes to overhead. A lot of money goes to executives. A lot of money goes to administration on grants.

And some of it is reasonable.

Sure. But it's also you're attached to keeping that money flowing in. And there's a gigantic incentive to not rock the boat and not discuss it the same way you would discuss nuclear science. Right. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And the attraction, I mean, if you're an administrator, if you're a president of a university, that often overrides everything else. You're raising money. I remember years ago, I started college at Rensler, and I made the mistake of mentioning someone that I appreciated the fact they never bothered me. I transferred out after my sophomore year, so it began bothering me. And I realized the President of Rensler was making over a million and a half dollars. This was years ago, probably making much more now. And the fundraiser came back to me and said, Do you know how much money she raises? And I said, Oh, so she's on commission. Right.

Yeah. That is what's going on. That It gets real weird when you bring that stuff up and people get very reluctant to have these discussions. They don't want to rock the boat. I've talked to a lot of friends in academia, and they say people pull you aside in quiet corners to discuss how this is bullshit.

But there's also the alumni. I find this with Harvard, especially. A lot of the people who graduate from Harvard really love the place. For better or for worse, and they will do anything to protect it.

That makes sense. Especially since to stick your neck out, there's not a whole lot of benefit unless you're writing a book about how ridiculous current climate change models are.

A lot of people did it first in half. A lot of politicians wrote books saying, this is a hoax. And they managed to ride that out. I mean, by just keeping on demanding that be accepted. It's interesting.

It is interesting because it's universally accepted on the left. Any discussion at all. I've had conversations with people and I say, why do you think that? What do you know about climate change? And Almost none of them have any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they've been, what Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie, which is so far off. He thought we were all going to be dead. To today. There's very little change between 2006 and today.

As I mentioned before, I think for some people, its importance is it gives, quote, meaning to their life.

Yes. It becomes a part of an ideology, and it's very cult-like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things, unfortunately. What do you think are the major factors? You talked about water vapor, CO₂, there's methane. There's a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the Earth moving in any direction, correct?

Yeah. Let me back off that a little because one of the things that is strange is the narrative itself deals with global temperature. Not clear what that is. I mean, some average over the whole globe, how do you What do you do with it? But more than that, what is climate? And there is a definition. It's an arbitrary definition. And it's that it It's time variation on time scales longer than 30 years. It's pretty arbitrary, but it distinguishes it from weather, which is changes from day to day or week to week.

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

They start calling it climate. Okay, now you can take data from every station and filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years. That's called a low pass filter. And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe? It It turns out very poorly because most climate change, by that definition, is regional. So for instance, in this area, let's say the states like Louisiana, Alabama, Gulf States. They had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming. Nobody paid much attention to it because that's normal. Different areas do different things. You have reasons why it's local. I mean, if you're near a Coast, near a body of water, the circulations in the ocean are bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time on time scales ranging from a few years for El Niño, Enzo, to a thousand years. And so this has nothing to do with the global average. The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets. And so you'd look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot, so it was useful.

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

That makes sense. How much of a factor does the sun play? Obviously, a lot. It heats us up, but like... Yeah. The changing?

That's something there's argument about. I think, for instance, a man called Milankowitch, around 1940, made a convincing argument, and I think now it's correct, that orbital variations created a change in insulation, incoming sunlight in the Arctic in summer, and that controlled the ice ages. And the thinking was pretty simple. He was saying that every winter is cold. Every winter has snow. But what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle. And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier. Takes thousands of years, but eventually it's big. And in recent years, for instance, there have been young people who have shown that that works. It's interesting, there was even a national program called Climap to study this, it's around 1990 or so. And they found something peculiar. They found that there were peaks in the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume, but that the time series were not lining up right. The young people looking at this said, you're looking at the wrong thing. If you're looking at the insulation, you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume, not just the ice volume.

And then the correlations were excellent. So this was a theory, Milankowitch, that I think has been reasonably sustained. But the people doing this got no credit, nothing, because early in my career, these people would have been rewarded. Now, it didn't contribute to global warming. Nobody pays attention to it.

Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with. But you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue. The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it. It's all CO₂. Co₂ is the control. No, don't confuse me with other possibilities. But nobody is quite sure about the We have not got good records of the sun for a long time, so we're stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. One of the proxies is when the sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10. These stick around for long, thousands of years or longer You can, from that infer, how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. They don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant. It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, this radioactivity that's produced changes from year to year. If you don't take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon-14 dating, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon-14 in it and you get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today.

Because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies. There's a a very good historical record of that. So it's clear the sun is always changing. And over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, and that's particularly noticeable near the Arctic and high latitudes in the north. For example, my father's home in Scotland. I was a kid, I would walk up into the hill south of Edinburgh, and you could see these farms from the year 1000, where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today. It's too cold today, but it was clearly warming up in the year 2000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland. So what caused those? It was not people burning oil and coal. And so I think the best guess as to what it was, it's some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days because they do correlate with the carbon 14.

That's absolutely fascinating. Now, when we have estimates, say, of the Jurassic or any dinosaur age, was there Is there enough of an understanding of the differences in temperature back then that we know whether or not they ever experienced ice ages? Oh, yeah. So we can go back 65, 100 million years.

You can go 500 million years.

500 million years and be pretty accurate.

Evidence of ice ages. Absolutely. They've come and on.

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

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

What's special about the recent ice ages is is they're pretty periodic. So for 700,000 years, almost every 100,000 years, you have a cycle. Wow. If you go back further than that, you begin seeing that fall apart. And for about 3 million years, 40,000 years is the dominant period. And then you go back further than that and you don't have ice ages for a long time.

Wow.

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

And there's also no way to track it. There's no way to tell what's going to happen to the sun. They have some an understanding there's increased activity.

With these, it's not clear that solar activity was the issue.

Could have been many factors.

Well, how should I put it? With the ice ages, as I say, orbital theory was the main thing. The fact that you have various factors determining the orbit of the Earth versus the sun and so on, give you periodic changes in the incoming radiation as a function of geography in the Earth.

Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said that he correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi-periotic, really only began 3 million years or so ago. At first, they were oscillating a lot faster than today. That was approximately the time that the Istmus of Panama closed. So one of the suspicions is that when the Panama Istmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat and things like the Gulf Stream. For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe. That was about the time that these fluctuating ice ages began. But we've set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years, by this manic focus on CO₂. If your theory doesn't have CO₂ in it, forget it. You won't get funding. And so the true answer, to me, there was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was a flogistun. There was this magic subject, nonexistent. But everyone to believe in flojistan. It turned out it was nonsense.

It wasn't there at all. But you couldn't get anyone to support you unless you believed in Phlegestine. So I call this Phlegestine era of climate science, where Phlegestine is CO₂.

Well, this is what confused me. You gentlemen are academics. You're obviously very intelligent people. There's other very intelligent people that are involved in academia. How does this problem get solved? How do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?

Well, I think stopping this massive funding for climate would help because it's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds. If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you'll be elected to societies, you'll win prizes.

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

That's right. I think, for example, if administration in Washington wants to slow this down and get some sanity, they should cut the funding or they should at least open up the funding to alternate theories of what is controlling climate because The theory that the control knob is CO₂ doesn't work. It's completely clear it doesn't work.

It just seems so insane that if we move in the same direction, and as you say, if it really is holding back climate science by 50 years, that's travesty.

Well, Dick would have made a lot more progress, and his colleagues would have made a lot more progress if they hadn't been forced to deal with this CO₂ cult. We might understand climate today without that.

There are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general. One of them is numbers. I mean, it isn't Not having more people work on something. You want to have an environment where there's freedom. Often think, I mean, Will is familiar with this. There's a photograph from 1929 of all the world's physicists at a Salvé conference. This is a golden age of physics. If you quintupled the number of people working on physics, would you have improved the situation? I doubt it. And so I think freedom is much more important than just piling on. Here's the photo. Yeah. You have that. Great. There they are. Not quite. It's not the same.

But that's a Solvay conference. Absolutely.

Now, the 1929 had Curies.

Well, Pierre might be there.

It's okay. Either way, I guess. Yeah.

But I mean, I wondered at times when you had the Soviet competition with the US, and they were the first ones into space, and we suddenly began a program program to get more and more kids to get into stem. That has its downside. First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much. And the second thing is with peer review. Peer review is new. It wasn't that common before World War II. But people have pointed out it has its virtues. But you can see the Royal Mediological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions. And the instructions were you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify or if it's plagiarized. It's repeating something that already exists. And that was pretty fair because how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not or so on? That's asking too much of that. But today, peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity. If you're not going with the flow, you can get rejected. And that's A lot of things structurally need to be, I think, rethought a little bit.

The physicists have done pretty well with Archive, where they have a publication vehicle using the Internet that bypass passes, reviews, lets people read it and see what's up on it. But all sorts of things like that need to happen. I mean, what Will is saying is true, I'm sure. I mean, science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this.

It just seems like it's bad for any science. And that open, free discussion and debating ideas based on their merit and what data you have. That's what it's supposed to be about. It's not supposed to be attached to an ideology. And I just don't understand how it got this far and how it can be separated. So when did it really become a problem where ideology started invading into certain segments of science?

It's happened many times in the past, Joe. Climate was only the most recent.

So it's just a natural thing that happens.

Well, for example, there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe, where the claim was that the great gene pool of the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low Q Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chana man. It was all completely nonsense, but they had learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that, and you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being great eugenicist, protecting the American genome, and it was all nonsense. It was just complete bullshit. And the only thing that stopped it really was the Nazis, because they took it over with a vengeance. They were big fans of the eugenic movement in America and Britain, and they took it to its absurd extreme.

They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America, a man called Loughlin. Oh, my goodness. No, I mean, what Will is saying, it had a practical consequence, by the way. It actually led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which held that America was going to restrict immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century. So there would be a quota for England and Scotland, which was fine, a little bit less for Germany, almost nothing for Eastern Europe, almost nothing for Italy and so on. And that was used in the run-up to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

Wow.

And it was only changed in 1960. So essentially, you were keeping out Jews, Eastern Europeans, Chinese until then because of eugenics in 1924.

The average person that's not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals or they're trying to figure out how the world works. When you hear stories like that, you hear that stuff, and you're just like, Oh, this has always been a problem.

You're dealing with people. Human beings.

That's the problem, right? That's getting to the problem.

Joe says this famous quote by Immanuel Kant, from the crooked timber of mankind. No straight thing was ever made. That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.

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

Well, the trouble is When something like eugenics comes around, the population is told that this is science.

Right.

And how are they going to say no? I mean, you had various famous laboratories devoted to this. It wasn't a fringe thing.

Right.

And So I don't know how you distinguish it at that time from science. Today, there are books on it. You have the correspondence of biologists who are saying, well, it's a little bit dicey, but they're saying it's bringing it to the fore of public attention. So maybe that's a good thing.

Well, it just makes you shatter to think, what happens if the Nazis didn't take over Germany and eugenics continued to progress in America. That's terrifying. To think of where we would be today. Right.

We'd have been a much poorer country because so many leading Americans, creative, productive people have immigrated fairly recently.

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

When you put things in the hands of politicians, There is a disconnect. I mean, the business with light bulbs I mentioned. It wasn't malice, it was ignorance. And you combine ignorance with power, and you often get nonsense.

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

Yeah. Dick has often made the point, which I agree with, that politicians and society leaders are the worst in situations like this. So ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable. So for example, I like to tease Dick because he's a Harvard grad about the Salem witch trials, but they were orchestrated by people from Harvard. It was not the common people.

Have you ever read into that at all?

Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory?

Well... Does it make sense to you? I don't know. Most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way. They had these visions of the person they were accused, consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of seen things. That was accepted as testimony. It was called spectral evidence. When finally the trials were stopped, it wasn't for the right reason, which is that there's no such thing as witches. They were stopped because spectral evidence was shaky. It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point, so it was getting very dangerous. But one of them was selling a book on how to detect witches, Cotton Master.

Why I read that as well about the printing press. When the printing press was first devised, a lot of people were like, Oh, we're going to get so much knowledge. No, a lot of the early books were like, How to Detect witches.

Right. That's right. Malleus Maleficurum, the Hammer of the Evildoers. That was the first book on witches.

What I'd read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost and that they believe this late frost might have contributed to ergot growth because apparently that does happen a lot when the plants grow and then they freeze and then they get mold on them, and that mold could contain ergot, and that has LSD-like properties, which totally makes sense. If they're eating LSD-laced bread and they thought Everybody was a witch.

But either way, it took-I think that's a kinder explanation of what happened. I'm less generous.

Well, you know more about the behind the scenes.

People, I think what Will is saying is there are people who always want to have a chance to do in their neighbor.

Yes, sure. If you could say your neighbor's a witch, what a better way. We can't have witches in our neighborhood. Let's burn them or drown them at the time, right? That's what they did for people. Yeah.

That's one of the parts of Orwell's 1984 that many people forget. But a big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate. And so people seem to have this need for hatred. You have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or somebody. And so if you're hating CO₂, at least that's better than hating your neighbor.

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

But even with political figures, I'm always surprised. I mean, it seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear probably does not mean well. And yet we continually fall for it. Over and over again.

Yeah, all of them. And other countries do the same pattern. Oh, yeah. That's what's dark. It just seems like we're terrified of being terrified, and we want safety, and we want someone comes along and scares shit out of us and vows to protect us. Yeah.

Children do this all the time. Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself.

Well, there is also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world. But when you have just everything scares the shit out of everybody. Everything is the end of the world and climate being one of the key ones that I hear all the time with young people. In fact, there were some recent surveys that were done. If you know about these, the things that give young people the most anxiety, and climate is at the very top of that list.

Yeah. I mean, it's really strange to think that this is causing young people not to want to have children, not to want to continue, to have no hope for the future. This is bizarre.

And just to live in constant fear of one day. But meanwhile, is anybody paying attention to all these rich people buying shoreline property? Do you think they're stupid? Do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumb ass because he's buying these giant mansions right on the ocean? Do you really think the water is going to raise that much?

How should I put it? I mean, even the people who are pushing it at MIT, buy houses on the shore. Of course.

Obama did. He got that beautiful house and Martha's Vineyard. If you've looked at the timelines, I'm sure you have a time-lapse video of the shoreline from 1980 all the way up to 2025. It doesn't move. I mean, it goes a little bit Malibu.

They go back much further than that.

I think, Joe, it's true. The sea level is rising. It's different at different shores because the land is also rising or sinking, but it's not very much, and it hasn't accelerated. There's no evidence that CO₂ has made any difference. It started rising roughly 1800 at the end of the little ice age, and it's not changing very much.

And then wasn't Isn't there an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that's increased recently?

That's right.

I mean, that's always variable.

Right. But when that happens, how come that doesn't hit the news? If the ice goes away, then it's going to hit the news. Oh, my God, look at this. We lost a chunk the size of Manhattan, and everybody freaks out.

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

Yeah.

No.

Alcro was just off by a little bit. He's just, give him some decades.

I'll be That is the point that I think people have made. A test usually means if you fail it, you've done something wrong.

Yes.

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

Right. Especially when you invented the theology because climate is very much like a religion, or at least the adherence to it is very religious-like, or I should say cult-like, because it's not like there's a higher power. Everyone's just terrified and you have to change everything you do now.

Because you're guilty.

And it used to be that the sign of virtue was to have an electric car. My favorite thing is going up behind Teslas now, and they have bumper stickers and say, I bought this before Elon went crazy. So now they don't... I mean, it's just everyone is trying to figure out what they're supposed to do in order to still be accepted by their group. And the climate one is one that if you When you're bringing it up with people, it's almost like you're talking about witches. Like, they want to get out of there. If you actually looked at-Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a religious thing or a cult-like thing.

Absolutely.

And they don't It's not like they've studied it a lot. Yeah, it's really interesting. And this is why I think that we've got to reduce CO₂. And you have this informed discussion with someone. You go, Oh, okay. So when did you start reading about this? What book was that? Do you see this? And do you see that? And okay. And Now you're having an informed discussion, but that's not what it's like. It's like you bring it up and they're like, oh, God. Climate change is settled. Climate change is settled. You don't believe me. Even Bernie, when I had him on, when he was talking about climate change is a real giant problem. We started showing the Washington Post thing that says that we're in a global cooling period and that it's raised up sometime over the last 100. But if you look at the peaks and valleys, the main thing is this has never been static. I said to Bernie, I'm like, There's a lot of money in this, Bernie. You've got to I can't admit this. This isn't something that we have to act on now to save each other. It might be something that we're being fucked with.

That's what it seems like to me.

The question is, why is he so enthusiastic? It's wonderful for funding.

I think he's overall a very good person. I really do. I think he would have been a fascinating president. But I think there are too many things to concentrate on in the world. If you really want to do a deep dive into the actual science of climate and CO₂'s impact on climate and what actually causes us to get warmer or colder, that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. I don't know if the Senator of Vermont has enough time to do that work and to really do it objectively or to talk to someone like you, to have an informed conversation with someone who studied it for decades and go, Okay, there's a lot more to this than I thought. Why does it fit in this same damn pattern where people get attached to an idea because that idea is attached to their ideology?

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

Yes.

I mean, for instance, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole, that's actually handled in a third year graduate course. It deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject. And it's a real problem in a field. It's true throughout science, where you're trusting people to behave, I think, decently. But the material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone. And how you deal with it, how you approximate, the same is true with nuclear power, with other things. These are technical issues. They're not trivial. And you're asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions. That's a tough issue. It involves a certain amount of trust. And what we're describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.

There's this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loved so much, trust but verify. It's hard to verify if you're an average citizen, something about climate.

That's what's so I was trying to think about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated, when they're like, climate change is a giant issue. There's so many times I've seen their very fun YouTube videos where they catch people at these protests, and some joker just starts to interview them, and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for. It's fascinating. You left the house. You had nothing better to do. You don't know why you're protesting, but you're there and you got a sign, and you still don't even understand it. That's how powerful this thing has become in our society. And the fact that they've been so... That the powers that be or whoever is involved has been so successful with pushing this narrative, that it's one of the number one anxieties that young people have about the future. In a place where we very well be involved in wars, but the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency. How dare you?

Right. There you go.

But you notice how quickly She changed.

She flipped up. Now it's Palestine. You got to mix it up. People get bored with the climate. You listen, you want to be someone that's in the news. You got to keep moving. You got to keep it moving. You stop doing rap music, start acting. You got to keep it moving. She's an entertainer. Well, she had a very unfortunate experience with that blockade in Israel. So maybe she's out of the business now, but I doubt it. But when you're taking a 16-year-old kid and having her as a face of climate change. And as you said, this is something insanely difficult to digest for the average person. You know she doesn't have this data at her fingertips.

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 odd, people blame this on models. And what the models are doing is they're taking the equations of fluid mechanics, something called the Navier-Stokes equation, and they're doing it by dividing it into discrete intervals and seeing how things change with distance and time and so on. And one of the things that we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution. But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on. Anyway, Great. They do this, and I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can. And they get answers that will often be wrong. But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe. Kuna made the point, I think, correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross product by 2100. That's not a great deal. It's not the end of the earth. You're already much richer than you are today.

So what's the panic? And it's true, the models don't give you anything to be that panicked over. So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models. So it's a confusing situation. The models have a use. They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is. You can use them to see what interacts with what and then study it further.

Joe, let me just say a little more about what Dick commented on the Navier-Stokes equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans. It really is a very hard mathematical problem to solve because they're not only partial differential equations, they're what are called nonlinear partial differential equations. And so there's a joke about Werner Heisenberg, who was the inventor of quantum mechanics, a very bright guy, and he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II. And so he was captured by the Americans and the British. And because of this activity, he was forbidden to work on nuclear physics later, after the victory. And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics, on solving the Navier-Stokes's equation. And he was, as I said, a tremendously talented physicist, but he found it very hard. He didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations. One of his students supposedly said to him, Well, you know, Professor Heisenberg, they say that if you've been a good physicist when you die and you go to heaven, that the Almighty allows you to ask two questions, and he will answer any question you ask.

And what will you ask him? And Heisenberg supposedly said, Well, I will ask him why general relativity and why turbulence? Turbulence is the Navier-Soxe equation. He says, and I think he will be able to answer the first one.

That's funny. That's funny. This is what's the best assumption or the best measurements of what's controlling the temperature on Earth.

Well, they're asking you to have great confidence in a calculation involving this miserable equation that is so hard to solve, at least very far into the future. You can solve it for a short time, but it's very hard to go much further. One of Dick's colleagues at MIT, a man named Lawrence. Why don't you tell him about Lawrence?

Well, no. Lawrence is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable. Whether that's true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics in detail. I mean, 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. Are you actually able to track the whole thing accurately? Probably not. How accurately would you have to do it if you scaled it up to climate? Who knows?

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

Yeah, that one's funny. People repeat that and they're like, No, that's not how it works at all.

I don't think it works that way.

I know, of course not. It's funny when people like to bring that up.

What I think he meant was rather simpler than that. The hurricane is likely to occur. The flipping of a butterfly's wings might have actually changed it from one day to another. It would have an influence downstream.

Everything has an influence. Everything is tied in together. Now, when we make models based on incorrect data about CO₂ levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like, at what point in time do you think another country needs to screw up the same way Nazi Germany ran with eugenics and it ruined eugenics in the United States where they're like, oh, my God, this is a horrific idea. Do you think something like that has to happen in another country where they have to take this climate change, green energy thing to its full end? You think so?

I don't think that's how it will Yes. I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country.

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

All of their nuclear power plants.

Oh, God. And they did it all for green energy?

That makes no sense.

Well, I think they did it because of the Fukushima thing and because the Green Party is so powerful in Germany. And they not only turned off their plants, not nuclear and coal as well, but they blew a lot of them up. You see these pictures Is that the plants being blown up by dynamite just to make sure that nobody restarts them. So they're fanatics. Oh my God. They're real fanatics.

That's so crazy.

Yeah. And so at some point, some country like Germany, They'll lose all their jobs. All the industry will move. There'll be no jobs. People will all be on welfare. There's no money to pay them. And at that point, someone will realize, we've taken a wrong turn here.

I can't They did. I believe they blew their plants up. That's nuts. And what are they replacing with right now? You have Russian gas.

Windmills. Windmills? Yeah. But you're right.

They're importing fossil fuels.

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

But how is Germany so smart and so dumb at the same time? Because they have tremendous engineers. They make some of the best automobiles ever.

They're looking them in Hungary.

Wow.

But that's a profound question is, how is it this country of poets and philosophers?

Had the Nazis.

Had the Nazis, exactly. Dietrich Bonhoffer was one of the few German theologians who had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany. He was invited to come to the US, but he said, I'm going to stay with my people. And he was eventually hung by the Nazis. He didn't survive. But he had this theory that it was stupidity. And it's a very interesting theory. If you look on the internet, you can read about Bonhoffer's theory of stupidity. But his view was that all of these Nazi supporters, they didn't really believe in it all. They were just dumb. It's hard for me. When I first read about this, I couldn't believe it. But the more I look at it, I I think that every nation has a problem that most of us are pretty stupid.

There's a large percentage of us that will believe almost anything. And we could point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now that people wholeheartedly believe in that makes zero sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That could go with that. And you would go, okay, there's some part of this has to be attributed to low intelligence. So what percentage of people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves? It's not a small number. Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, whatever percentage. It's enough where it's a giant problem.

That's one thing. But also intelligence itself is a complex issue. There are people who, like us, may be idiot savants There are things that we can do very well and other things we don't.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, math departments are famous, though.

I think it's a sign of almost any great person at anything. There's usually areas in their life where they're just completely lacking, whether it's hygiene or relationships or whatever. They're obsessed by what they do, and that's why they're great at what they do.

Look, there are great writers who can't do arithmetic. I don't know where you put them in that category. Right.

Well, and there's great physical athletes that they have an intelligence of moving their body in a way that they understand things at a much higher level than anybody else that does whatever their athletic pursuit is. They probably wouldn't do that well on an ACT test. It doesn't mean that they're not intelligent. It's a different intelligence.

Yeah. That makes the world a more interesting place, by and large.

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

We started with Gore.

Right.

And Gore flunked out of Harvard. Did he? Yeah. And his father, who is a senator, got him back in. I was teaching there at the time.

Oh, really?

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

Is he made the most money off of this? Because he's made a lot of money off of climate change.

He's made a few hundred million, I don't know, these days.

Small change. Still, there's a very clear motivation to keep that graph going, especially now with social media. There's so many people that, like we were talking about Greta Thunberg. I don't know what her motivations are, but I do know that there's a a lot of people out there that have large social media platforms that all they want to do is connect themselves to something that people are talking about all the time. And there's a lot of money in that. And there's a lot of power in wielding that influence. And to do so, then just hop on any bandwagon that comes along and not really know what you're talking about. It's a real problem that we have in society today.

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

Yeah, the social media aspect of it is a new problem. Another new problem is AI and fakes. You see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles. It takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today. And so if somebody wanted to push any a narrative about anything, especially climate change, you could scare the shit out of somebody very quickly with a nice video, and it doesn't even have to be real.

Well, that was the reason for extreme weather being chosen. I mean, it's interesting for quite a few years, the climate issue was temperature. And you'll have noticed the last 15, 20 years, it's extreme weather. And that shows that it was fake because it's trivial. If you looked it up, the average month There are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred year events. Each of them makes for a good video. And you have four or five a month, and they each only one is in a hundred years. And people aren't putting it together that once in a hundred year events occurring four or five times a month. But you always have a picture of a flood someplace or a rise or this or that. And those are used to scare people. It's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers.

Right. It's extreme weather events. That's what 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. No, no.

For years, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN, was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related. The last one, they had to say something because the politicians control what's in the IPCC. But even with that, they were saying no. And that had nothing to do with the public relations. Said, to hell with it, even if there's no relation, we'll say there is because that gives us visuals.

God. Now, when people like Bill Gates start talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the Earth and protect us from the sun's rays, where is all that coming from? Especially if you would imagine- I think Will said it comes from dumbness.

I'm sure.

But even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms. Hey, a few people can't make a decision that will It's going to literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all. Why? Because you were made Microsoft? Why do you get to do this? That seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on, and they would have to be really well-informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.

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

The fear is that someone would let them, though. The fear is that a country would let them. You get the right politicians in place and the right fear mongering in place, and you let them try. Or you let somebody try. And these people that do try get large grants, and they're making a lot of money to do this. And that's what scares the shit out of me, that this could be a way that people could try something out on the whole world that could be catastrophic.

Well, just technically, it would be extremely difficult because the amount of material you have to get up to the stratosphere to mimic a large stratovolcano. Even Bill Gates probably can't afford that. And I'm not sure the US Treasurer could either.

So it's just theoretical at this point?

I think it's an interesting thing. You're pointing that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeour based on the fact that he's fabulously wealthy. But as a practical matter, that particular approach probably is not going to be as dangerous as you think. It won't work.

It won't work. Yeah. Well, it's just the idea that someone would even propose something like that based on what you, gentlemen, have discussed so far today.

No, your point is right. I mean, you have people who have the means to try things And they're getting a free ride on this.

Yes, that's the thing. They're getting a lot of money to implement these changes. That's why these green new deals and these green energy initiatives and all these green things. People have to understand, why are you hearing about this all the time? Because it's a PR campaign. It's a PR campaign for a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money. That's what this is all about. And the more you get on board, the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff. And the more money these companies make. The whole thing is about money.

Much of it is money.

They're not really worried about you. That's what you have to understand. If they ever say that they're worried about your future, for the betterment of our people, we have to make sure that everybody's okay. We got to protect the climate. They don't care. That's not real. What they really want to do is make sure a lot of money comes in. If a lot of money coming in is dependent upon them scaring the shit out of you, that's what they lean towards.

Money and it's It's transferability and fungibility, its influence, its feedbacks. Yeah, but that's always been true.

Yes. Joel, let me bring up another targeted group, and that is farmers and ranchers because of their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming. Just a couple of years ago, I was invited to come down to Paraguay by some farmers there who were worried about the upcoming climate talks in the Persian Gulf. And the European bankers were demanding that Paraguay turn most of its ranch land back into forest to save the planet. And otherwise, they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay. And so the ranchers were worried that they're going to be put out of business and their families put out of business. And so I was there for a and I talked to the President. And luckily, it turned out they had a very sensible President, and he didn't need me to recognize it was nonsense. But he was, I think, grateful to have someone with a science background confirm his suspicion that it was all nonsense. So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers to go to hell, and they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay. So there were no consequences, and the ranchers did not suffer. But everybody's under the gun.

But there were consequences in Ireland.

Yes.

They had to kill half their cattle.

Yeah, which is nonsense. Total nonsense and insane. And if you pay attention to what regenerative farmers will tell you, is that if you do it correctly, it's actually carbon neutral.

At least carbon neutral.

At least carbon neutral and possibly contribute. The whole thing is nature. This is how it's all set up. Animals eat grass, they poop manure, manure fertilizes the plants. It's all real simple. It's been around forever. And this idea that all of a sudden, cow farts and burps are a giant issue, and they're going to kill us all. We need to kill all the cows. Who are you? Who's saying this? How did you get to talk? How did you get to kill half their cows? You should go to jail.

They should go to jail.

You're so stupid. You're criminally stupid. You killed their cows.

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

It might be the worst. Yeah, it might be the worst. If people can get people to do their bidding, they often love to do it, even if it's preposterous, like getting you to kill half your cows so that you have a less high methane count you're releasing from your organization.

Will has worked on this and others. But the methane thing is an example of of innumeracy. In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO₂. And so cutting back methane will have a big effect. But there's so little methane in the atmosphere. They got rid of all of it. It would have almost no effect compared to CO₂. Somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

Yeah, they just can't do simple arithmetic.

It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in social media. It's really weird how things like CO₂ become this mantra that everybody chants. It seems very coordinated and actually impressive that they've managed to silence questioning scientists and really put the fear of God into people that read things and don't agree with it.

It began right at the beginning of the issue. So as I was mentioning, I mean, already by 1989, Science magazine was... In fact, one of the ironies with Science magazine, which is an important magazine, it had an editor who was Marsha McNutt. Who actually had an op-ed appear in Science magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this.

Wow.

And you know what her reward was? She became President of the National Academy of Science.

She was a good girl.

Yeah.

Let's follow the rules.

But you know, Dick's point about forbid questioning, it's just unbelievable. When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia, and the grand old man there was- Robbie. Robbie. And Rabbi came from Eastern European Jewish family, and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education. So he would always tell me, when I would go home from school every day, my mother wouldn't ask me, What did you learn today in school? Is he? She called him Is he? Is it or? And he would tell her, and then she would say, And did you ask a good question today? So I said she was really more interested it and whether he had asked a good question, which would meant that the wheels were turning in his head than whether he had memorized something. And I always took that to heart. I think that was a very wise mother. And he turned out very well as a result.

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

Of course.

That's terrible because you would have thought with the internet, one of the things is the Internet is going to be a balanced resource of information. You're going to have the answers to any questions you want, and we'll be able to sort out what's true and what's not true. Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science.

That's right.

No, I mean, the Internet, not surprisingly, was an unpredictable phenomenon. Yes, completely. Yeah. I mean, you saw it, but you're seeing it yourself. I mean, you have media. They were looking for 100,000 subscribers. With the Internet, you're dealing with millions And that's considered small in some cases.

Yeah. There's people like Mr. Beast, some fun guy on YouTube that I think he has, what does he have? A hundred? How many million subscribers does he have? Something insane. Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before. Yeah. Nobody saw it coming. Did it on his own. Yeah. It's a weird time. And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media, which is also disturbing.

Which is also Also deserved. Right.

Also deserved. That's a problem as well. And when you see mainstream media also going along with all these climate change ideologies and all these different things that are attached to the narrative that you're not allowed to deviate from. It's just it gets very frustrating.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure about this, but my recollection was as a kid in New York, That you had newspapers like the New York Times that were always center left. But you had others, the Journal American and so on. And they differed in their coverage, but on the whole, they covered the same news. If something happened, it would appear in both. I realized in retrospect, that wasn't always true. But today, I have the feeling that if I look at the Post in New York or the New York Times, I'm looking at two different worlds. And there's something wrong with that.

Barry. Yeah, something very wrong with it. And I don't know what the answer is to how to solve it or if those things need to just go away and independent media needs to replace them. But you're seeing a massive of dissolving of trust in these... When I was a kid, I used to deliver the New York Times. And I delivered the Boston Globe, but I delivered the New York Times as well because it was prestigious. I thought it was cool to deliver the New York Times And it was a long route. It was a lot longer than my Boston globe route.

Did you have to deliver it on Sunday as well?

Yes, I did. But fortunately, the ads didn't work, so they didn't get a big, thick ad chunk like you do with the Boston Globe because it's like local ads. But the point being is It was the paper of record. And now today it's just another blog. It's an ideologically captured online blog that's very left leaning.

I think people have pointed out the correct reason for that. At the end of the classified ads. They used to have to satisfy the people paying for ads. Now they have to satisfy their readers. And so the readers only want to hear one thing.

Yeah, it's a real problem. It's a real problem. But I guess just like all things that happen, there'll be some a course correction or some new players will enter in.

It would be fine if the newspapers took different positions but covered the same items.

Right, right, right.

And here, I will say, maybe there's a bias in this. If I listen to MSNBC, there are whole areas of what's going on that I will hear nothing about. Fox may cover things differently, but they are less guilty of leaving stuff out. They may take a different view of it, but you'll hear about it. That certain media now are not even mentioning things that they don't want you to know about is a little bit disturbing.

It is. But again, it gives rise to independent media, gives rise to the very good independent journalists that exist today. But the thing is, the average person is not going to find them. They don't know where to look.

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

Yeah, he did take credit for part of that, right? Right. What did he say exactly?

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

I did, too. I bought a computer once. I had a hand in that. I played a part of the economy of the Internet.

Yeah.

Well, I think it's these conversations with people like yourself that will help, because the more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that We also question it. We get a understanding of this pattern that does go back to what you're talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history. You go, there's times where you're on the wrong side of things. You don't realize it because you've been lied to. And You've been these politicians.

But it's also the abuse of science is too much of a temptation for politicians. I mean, science, it's hard to say, But if there are a way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority, it's a methodology. And that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology, you're anti-science. Whether that helps or not, maybe people don't care.

I think people do, but they're scared to deviate again from the narrative. Do you think it's possible to get in people's heads, Hey, we have to, at the academic level, especially, separate ideology from truth. You can't attach believing in something that is so firmly a part of being a progressive person or being a conservative person that you're unwilling to look at the data and look at facts. That has to be shunned, right? So how does that go about?

I think you're hitting on something important. You can't do it every place. But with the funding agencies, the government is in a position to say funding agencies must take an open view of certain subjects or all subjects for that matter, and not lay down rules that you cannot question.

Yeah, let me add to that. I think one of the great strengths of American science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington, but you could get funding from the National Science Foundation, or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research or from some other organization, and they all competed with each other, and they didn't like each other very much. And so if you couldn't get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the army or some other place. So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country. People used to talk, We need an Office of Science. I thought that was a terrible idea. That means one point failure. There was someone in a position to throttle some important thing.

Department of Energy tried to do both sides for a long time, and they held out longer than other departments. But eventually, for some reason, they were all forced into the same box.

Money starts talking, baby.

Yeah.

There's a lot of money. Department of Energy, wasn't that the Department where from the time Trump won the election to Biden leading office, they gave out something like $93 billion in loans?

I think it was EPA or maybe it was. No, loans could have Must have been energy. Must have been energy.

It more than had been given out in the last 15 years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm sure it was smart, well spent money that we definitely couldn't get by without spending. It's funny.

It's pathetic.

It is pathetic, but it's also funny how in this day of transparency, there's so much information that's available today. It's so easy to find things out. They would try to pull something like that off and then do it successfully right in front of everybody's face.

Well, having spent time in Department of Energy headquarters, it doesn't surprise me.

I believe you. How difficult has this been for you gentlemen to debate this stuff and to bring it up with people and have conversations? Have you experienced a lot of resistance?

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting how it evolved. I think in the '90s, there was still a certain openness about it. And if there were a conference, people on both sides would be invited and so on. Somehow by the 21st century, it came down hard. There was absolutely nothing open anymore.

But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, which is a good university, and he gave a good colloquium, the next day, a Nobel Prize winner from my department walked in and said, What son of a bitch invited Lindsay to give this talk? I said, Well, I'm the son of a bitch. Get out of my office. Oh, wow.

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

No.

Just it wasn't even worth it?

It wasn't worth it. Wow.

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

The point was he didn't know the first thing about the issue. Not a thing, but he was very left wing.

Yeah, that's the point. That's why it's weird.

No, this was the political polarization. Yeah.

But it's also there's no deviation. There's no people like, everybody's either one side or the other, all in or not. And if you're not, you get cast out of the kingdom. It's very weird. It's just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities. If someone come up to you and say-I think it's worse than universities. Wow. How did that get started? Was it the same thing as the climate with everything, somewhere around the 21st century?

I'll take something that was much less publicized. The What was the program with your device?

The Star Wars. The Sodium Guide Star? Yeah.

I I mean, universities treated that as something you could not discuss, the notion that you wanted to have a defense against nuclear.

What Dick is talking about is I got called Washington because early in the Star Wars era, we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles. And so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high power lasers. And so during a classified summer study in 1982, there were some people from the Air Force, some generals, and technical people, and talked about the problem is if you even have a beautiful blue, clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward Austin, by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target. And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers, but the inverse problem with star does the same thing. When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point, you get lots of speckles. And so astronomers knew how to solve that. The problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere. They're little warm patches and cool patches.

And so what you can do is you reflect the incoming star light from a anti-wrinkled mirror, so it comes in wrinkled, it bounces, it's nice and flat, then it focuses and you get a point. And you could do the same thing when you're trying to shoot an incoming missile. You pre wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile. So it's called adaptive optics. And the mirror is called a rubber mirror. It's a mirror that you can adjust. But to do that, you need to know how to adjust the mirror. So you have to have some information to how do I wrinkle it, push here, pull there, etc. And the way the astronomers did it was they used a very bright star in the sky. And then for nearby stars, you could use the bright star to correct your mirror for all the neighboring stars. But it only works for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars. And so unless the Russians attacked us during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies, we couldn't do anything with our lasers.

Oh, wow. So I said, well, I know how to fix this. All you need to do is make an artificial star wherever you like, because there's a layer of sodium at 100 km. And we now have lasers that will excite that. And so you can make a yellow star that's plenty bright enough to use that light to adjust the mirror wherever you like. And nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during that. This was top secret meeting.

When you say make a star? Do you mean like a satellite star? Like a small- A bright source of light shining down through the atmosphere.

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

And what would this be made out of?

Sodium. So if you go to 100 km, the Earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system. And so we're constantly burning up little micrometeorites, and they're all loaded with sodium atoms. And So they get released into the upper atmosphere, and they stay there and make a lair that's about 10 km thick. And not many people know about that. I happen to know about it, and I knew you could use it for this method. That's why I got called Washington was making it. It was a highly secret invention for 10 years. Wow.

That's fascinating.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, then this was declassified, thanks to the effort of a Livermore friend and colleague, Claire Max, a woman, a physicist, astronomer. But she finally persuaded the Department of Defense to declassify it. So if you go to any big telescope now around the world, it has one of these sodium lasers you're pointing up at the sky at night. You'll see this bright yellow beam going up. Oh, wow.

Look at that right there.

Oh, there it is. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so the point where they come, this is actually green light. And so for the sodium, most of them are yellow for sodium. But that's the basic idea.

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

Well, I couldn't discuss it. It was highly classified, so I couldn't even mention it until about 1995, I think 94, 95, when it was declassified. But I'd invented it 12 years earlier.

But the point was, in academia, you could not discuss You couldn't discuss working for defense of the country.

That was somehow immoral, defending the country. I wasn't trying to attack Russia. I was trying to defend ourselves.

Yeah, that's a ridiculous position to take. We don't need defense against missiles.

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

Exactly. I mean, at MIT, you had all sorts of people saying, You shouldn't try. It's silly. It's impossible. And so on. What was the point of that? I mean, you have a problem, you try and solve it.

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

If you probe, I think, into these issues, you realize that climate is an extreme case, but politics interfaces I think science is not new.

Which just seems like human behavior, human behavior and anything else. It's like the same patterns. You'll find them in big businesses. You find them in a lot of different. You find them in almost all communities and groups of human beings. There's people that get into control and they force certain narratives. And the fact that that happens with the highest levels of academia and with science, though, is really confusing to people like myself that are counting on everybody like you to get it right.

Don't wear as much part as a crook of timber of mankind as anyone else.

It's such a great quote.

I've often mentioned, my family emigrated here from Germany, 38. But when Hitler came to power in 33, every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood before Hitler even asked. So universities are not bastions of independent thinking.

What could be done to make them more so?

The Canadians did something that I thought had potential. Every faculty member, especially junior faculty, immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for. And so in that system, every one of their faculty could function as a research scientist. Students were paid for otherwise. And at least one link in the chain of influence was broken. You had an open system there. Even there, though, other pressures came to bear, but it seemed like a good idea.

Or at least a better idea. Yeah. But again, unfortunately, it just seems like that just pattern of human behavior just pops its ugly head up over and over and over again.

Yep.

You know, Joe.

Tick just came up.

It's worth going back to the founding of this country, because if you read the things like the federalist papers, which was the theory of our government, what comes through loud and clear was that our founders believe that humans were extremely corrupt and not very reliable. And given that, how do you make a system that will function even with that? And that's what they tried to do. That was the whole reason for the balance of power and all the things that are in there. And so it was partially successful. It certainly worked better than other systems for a long time.

Better than all the other ones. Yeah. But it's amazingly astute.

Yeah.

That is papers. I mean, they've held up well.

Yeah. Anything else to add before we wrap this up, gentlemen? Is there anything else you think people should know?

Well, trust but verify.

Yeah. I mean, how should I put it? Destroying the world is not an easy thing to do. It shouldn't be the top of your list of worries.

Yeah. You mean destroying the world with climate change? Yeah. It's not really what it It's very overmagnified.

Absolutely. I mean, how should I put it? Its origins were almost entirely political. I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all. We're discussing, can it happen? Is it warming? Is it cooling? Is extreme weather increasing? It's amazing to me that politicians conscience can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.

I wonder how it would have worked if it wasn't for an inconvenient truth, if that movie hadn't been made? Because sometimes people need something like that in that a form for it to really take hold as an idea.

You may be right. I mean, something was needed to make it catch on. It had been around for quite a few years without catching on quite that way. But it was also the confluence. The UN really got interested in it. You had the World Meteorological Organization. All of them saw something they could gain in it. And so it began to seem almost overwhelming. But it did, it reached the right people. I mean, the funding agencies, the NSF got taken over almost immediately. Nasa took about 10 years. Department of Energy took 10 years, but they worked on it.

It's stunning, at least from the outside, from my perspective. It's stunning. It's stunning how successful it is. And again, like I said, if you're in a polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up, well, we've got to do something about climate change. Yeah, yeah. The record skips. How much do you know? It turns out very little, most people. And then it turns out, according to you, it's almost impossible to figure out anyway.

No, no. The notion that there's a crisis has taken hold. Right. Even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis.

And the main movie that started off that crisis from 2006 is entirely wrong. All of it's predictions.

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

It's very hard for people to swallow, but I encourage them to look at the data of hurricanes historically. And you realize like, oh, pretty stable. It's up and down and all over the place. But it's not any worse now than it has been before.

I mean, growing up in the Bronx in the '40s, every autumn, there were hurricanes. You could wake up in the morning, the streets were lined with the trees that had been blown down. Interestingly enough, that has not recurred in New York for about 30 years, 40, 50 years.

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

Yeah.

Yeah. They don't get hit by hurricanes anymore. If they did, they'd freak out. Climate change.

But then '38 was a gigantic hurricane. And I was born in a town on a Lake in Massachusetts called Lake Chagagagman, Chagagog, Chagagog, Chibunagogumang.

That's a real name?

Yes, that's a real name. But at any rate, in that Lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of 1938. Really?

Yeah. Wow.

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

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

How should I put it? I'm glad it came then, not now, I suppose. If it came now, it would be proof. Right.

Actually, the worst hurricane on record on the East Coast was the last year of the American Revolution, and it had a big impact on winning the war. What happened It was this enormous hurricane, mostly in the Caribbean, but it wiped out the British fleet. It wiped out the French fleet. There was nothing left. Really? It was just a tremendous hurricane. And so the reason it affected the war was the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet. So when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be rescued with all of the partisans coming after him. He didn't worry about the French. But the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane. They had had 12 months and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake. And when Cornelius got there, he was trapped because the British couldn't come in to rescue him from Rhode Island or they were. And so he had no choice. He had to surrender. That was the end of the war. And we can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly.

As well as the French.

The French and the French. God bless the French.

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

34, 35.

What was it like then?

It was the peak of the dust bowl, and it was, I don't know, several degrees warmer. I don't know the exact figure, but you can look at the records. They're pretty clear.

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

But globally, yeah. What you're saying completely makes sense. It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature unless you're studying other planets.

Yeah.

Yeah. It wouldn't matter. This is where people live, what's the temperature there.

Yeah.

Well, listen, gentlemen, I really appreciate your bravery in talking about this stuff and sharing all this information. Hope for the best. It's very enlightening. It helps. These conversations, they move the needle. They really do. So I really appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you. Bye, everybody.