329. The Models Are OK, the Predictions Are Wrong | Dr. Judith Curry

[0] Hello everyone on YouTube and associated platforms.

[1] I'm here today with another climate denialist because, you know, I've been racking those up.

[2] It's all part of my attempt to become the most reprehensible commentator on YouTube.

[3] And so, at least in the eyes of those who think they're my enemies.

[4] Anyways, I'm talking to Dr. Judith Curry today, very accomplished scientist.

[5] She's an American climatologist with a Bachelor in Science.

[6] degree in geography.

[7] She earned that at Northern Illinois University and a geophysical sciences PhD from the University of Chicago.

[8] Curry is the Professor Emerita and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

[9] She's had an accomplished career working with NASA, the U .S. government, and numerous academic institutions in the field of climate change.

[10] A real scientist with 190 publications.

[11] Curry advocates so reprehensibly for a non -alarmist approach, acknowledging Earth's rising temperature with a grain of salt, the grain being in -field research and a refusal to shut the doors of science to those with contrary views and findings.

[12] In 2017, Dr. Curry retired from her position at the Georgia Institute of Technology, citing the poisonous nature of the scientific discussion around man -made climate change as a key factor.

[13] Curry co -founded and acts as president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, a company, a private company, which seeks to translate cutting -edge weather and climate research into tenable forecast products.

[14] Insurance companies' financial institutions rely on Dr. Curry to provide them with information that can guide them with regard to their future financial decision -making.

[15] She's a controversial figure on the climate front, being somewhat of a contrarian in regard to the hypothetically, hypothetical scientific consensus on the climate apocalypse front.

[16] So the first thing I'd like to ask you, Dr. Curie, is if you would walk people through your professional qualifications and to let everyone know why it is that you might be regarded as a credible commentator on such issues.

[17] Okay, well, I received my PhD in 1982 and geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago.

[18] And I spent my entire career in academia with jobs at the University of Wisconsin -Madison, Purdue University, Penn State University, University of Colorado, Boulder, and most recently at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

[19] And at Georgia Tech, I served as chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for 13 years.

[20] I've written several books and published about 190 journal articles.

[21] I'm a fellow of several major professional societies have received some recognition for my research.

[22] I left my university position in 2017.

[23] I felt it was too constraining.

[24] I wanted to do a broader range of things, and I had started a company about 10 years before.

[25] It was a startup under Georgia Tech's Venture Lab program, and so then I started devoting full time to it after I left academia.

[26] I inadvertently stepped into the limelight on the global warming issue in 2005.

[27] If you recall at the time of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, I and my co -authors had a paper that was published in the journal Science two weeks after Katrina hit, and we had found that the percentage of category four and five hurricanes had doubled in recent decades, okay?

[28] And so this was with rather explosive media attention, and this was, you know, the first time, you know, that I did TV interviews or anything like that.

[29] And it was a very antagonistic debate.

[30] People were coming at us from all sides.

[31] Of course, the Enviro Advocacy groups thought, you know, I was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but there were people on the other side of the debate, you know, thought I was absolutely evil.

[32] So for the first time I started, you know, giving a lot of public lectures and people would invariably ask me questions that were, you know, outside of my expertise or knowledge.

[33] Everyone was asking about the hockey stick, for example, or what's going on with the sun and all these kind of thing, and I figure, oh my gosh, you know, I really need to just step out beyond my personal areas of expertise and try to understand a lot more of this, you know, so which I did.

[34] And eventually, the hurricane and global warming issues settled down a little bit, and then a few years later, climate gate struck.

[35] This was in November of 2009 with the unauthorized release of emails from the University of East Anglia.

[36] It was a big, it was a very big scandal at the time, IPCC authors, hiding the decline, you know, Mike's Nature Trick, all this kind of stuff, you know, and it was hugely important politically, and it's believed to have derailed the Waxman -Markey bill that was, you know, making progress, you know, towards being passed.

[37] pretty much derailed it.

[38] And I took the controversial, you know, step of saying, you know, we need to do better.

[39] We need to make all of our data publicly available.

[40] We need to make our methods transparent.

[41] We need to pay more attention to uncertainty and be more honest about the level of confidence we actually have in this stuff.

[42] And we also need to pay attention to skeptics, you know, and treat that.

[43] with respect and, you know, pay attention to their arguments and refute them if they're serious.

[44] And, you know, to me, this sounded like motherhood and apple pie kind of pain.

[45] Right, right, absolutely.

[46] Okay, but the people within the climate community were very angry at me, saying that I needed to be more sensitive to the feelings of these scientists who were involved.

[47] I said, excuse me, no one was sensitive to my feelings during the hurricane and global warming wars.

[48] And also, I wasn't worried about their feelings.

[49] I was worried about the IPCC and the credibility of it and, you know, what we should be doing about this.

[50] You know, there were much bigger issues at stake here than the feelings of these scientists.

[51] Well, anybody, any scientist who talks to you about whether you're hurting their feelings when you're launching a discussion of the factual basis of their claims has immediately stepped outside of the scientific domain.

[52] I mean, one of the things I loved about being a scientist was that the rules of engagement at professional conferences, let's say, that were genuinely scientific in nature, were pretty damn clear.

[53] I mean, we were discussing the empirical and statistical reliability and validity of your claims on a technical basis.

[54] That was that.

[55] And if we weren't doing that, it wasn't science.

[56] And so the idea that what you should be attending to when you're criticizing someone's work, which doesn't mean denigrating it, it means trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, by the way, that has nothing to do with your regard for the emotional well -being of your, say, antagonist.

[57] I mean, you could be polite and that's helpful, but it's also not mandatory.

[58] Right.

[59] Well, there's a subtlety here because I was not so criticizing the substance of the science, but the behavior of the scientists that I felt violated the norms of science in terms of, you know, everybody, you know, universalism, everybody should, you know, have a chance or a shot, you know, at the data.

[60] We should listen to skeptics, you know, and we should try to keep politics out of our science to the extent that we can.

[61] I mean, these are the kind of behaviors.

[62] You know, these emails reveal people trying to get editors fired, you know, playing fast and loose with the guidelines of the IPCC, evade Freedom of Information Act requests from people they thought would challenge their research, this kind of behavior that I strenuously objected to, and I thought that we should not defend and we should call out.

[63] So I was not challenging the substance of anybody's science.

[64] It was really the behavior in the public debate on climate.

[65] Well, that is a form of, that is a form in some sense of methodological criticism.

[66] Your point was that there's rules to the investigative process and the communication process, and politicization breaks those rules.

[67] And the response on the front of the climate apocalypse, let's say, you see this with biologists who are concerned about extinction from time to time, too, is that, well, this issue is so important that it's unethical to abide by those normative principles, because we need to do everything we can to draw as much attention to this looming catastrophe as possible, and in some sense all is fair in love and war.

[68] And that would be fine if they were correct and 100 % correct possibly, although I still think they're violating the science politics distinction, But when there's doubt and there's substantial doubt here, then that's a real problem.

[69] I wanted to take apart some of the things you said.

[70] So you came at this in a very interesting way in some sense because the first time that you rose to something approximating public prominence, you were actually putting forth a set of propositions that you could argue supported a more dire view of climate outcome, right?

[71] Making the claim that these hurricanes, severe hurricanes had increased in frequency.

[72] Do you believe now that have they continued to increase in frequency, or was that a momentary spike?

[73] Do you know that literature still?

[74] Oh, yes.

[75] It's, okay, first off, there were lots of pot shots thrown at us.

[76] Okay, the couple of criticisms turned out to be valid.

[77] One is that the global data before 1985 is pretty dodgy.

[78] You know, we went back to 1970s, so we, you know, so realistically you have to throw out 15, years.

[79] And the other thing was looking at, you know, just the natural variability and could we really distinguish a warming signal from the natural variability?

[80] And at this point, we still can't with a lot of confidence.

[81] Yeah, well, a big part of the problem here is, you know, what time frame over, this is a huge problem, and I don't even know how you solve it in some sense, if you're trying to define something like a trend towards cooling or warming.

[82] or increased or decreased variability, the question that immediately arises, well, are you talking about 100 years or 1 ,000 or 10 ,000, or a million?

[83] Like, there's an infinite number of timeframes to consider.

[84] Exactly.

[85] That is a key challenge.

[86] And one of my major themes, you know, coming out of the climate gate thing, was a more serious look at uncertainty.

[87] And I wrote a paper called Climate Change and the Uncertainty Monster.

[88] and I used that paper a series of, you know, to launch my blog, Climate, et cetera, Judith Carey .com in 2010.

[89] And again, this was people outside the clique of establishment climate scientists thought this was great, this is important, this is obvious.

[90] However, within the clique, they viewed me as trying to destroy a consensus that they had been trying to build for 20 years.

[91] well this was a manufactured consensus and it was on very flimsy ground you know so and there was okay how would you characterize that so -called consensus is that associated with this idea I talked to Richard Franzen about this recently is that associated with the idea that like 97 % of scientists agree that well it isn't clear what they agree that's the issue is that climate change is a severe and catastrophic problem which is that That statement in itself is not true by any stretch of the imagination.

[92] What's the consensus here?

[93] Okay, the issue is the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

[94] They did their first assessment report in like 1991, and following that, I mean, that was a good report.

[95] It was a good assessment at the time, and then the powers that be says we need to strive for consensus in our statements.

[96] And so this sort of narrowed the framing and the people they were.

[97] picking to be on a committee were people who were all going to agree.

[98] And so they were working to manufacture a consensus.

[99] You know, it was their view of how the policy process deals with uncertainty.

[100] So it was sort of a speaking consensus to power approach.

[101] And this was like formalized by the IPCC.

[102] And, you know, people challenging the consensus.

[103] And there's, you know, many dimensions to it, but the most fundamental one is that most of the warming that we've seen since 1950 is caused by humans.

[104] I mean, that's the most central consensus type statement.

[105] That there is warming, that there is warming, even though now the narrative is change, that there is warming, there's a certain idea about its potential magnitude, and then hypothetically the consensus is that what, about 50 % of that is due to human activity?

[106] No, no, no. They used to make the statement more than half, but they really meant 100%.

[107] Okay, but there's certainly no scientific consensus that 100 % of the global warming that's occurring at the moment is anthropogenic.

[108] That, I don't believe it right on my wrong about that.

[109] Oh, no, no, there is, the science, okay.

[110] There's no measure, I mean, when you have a complex, highly uncertain situation like this, the issue of consensus, is scientifically meaningless.

[111] It's only meaningful, you know, for political purposes, this whole idea of speaking consensus to power that that was some pathway, you know, to policymaking.

[112] It hasn't really turned out to be.

[113] Yeah, so, yeah, there's no consensus.

[114] The most...

[115] Well, it's also a preposterous claim scientifically because the way science works is that a great scientist is the first person who challenges the consensus.

[116] That's kind of how you define a great scientist.

[117] And one of the things that's so wonderful about science is that it can reveal when the universal consensus is wrong.

[118] And it's powerful in its methods precisely because of that.

[119] And you know that as a practicing researcher, is that the probability that you're going to do a study and that the data is going to reveal the consensus of your labs.

[120] theory, the validity of the consensus of your lab's theory, is basically zero.

[121] Something unexpected is going to crop up when you actually test your idea against reality itself.

[122] So the idea that science is consensus -based is...

[123] It's wrong.

[124] It's wrong.

[125] Well, it's amazing that the idea got anywhere.

[126] Okay.

[127] Look at the social factors in play.

[128] Okay, there was a big drive by the UN, you know, to deal with human, you know, dangerous anthropogenic climate change.

[129] Again, this was a 1992 treaty before we even had any evidence of human cause warming at all.

[130] Okay, and then you had scientists become invested in this, you know, and their career goals and the funding that comes into the field and all of this kind of stuff.

[131] There was this sort of social contract between the scientists and the policymakers that perpetuated this situation.

[132] And, you know, and they were, the policymakers, we need more, you know, more and more confident statements from the IPCC even though the dimensions of the problem were growing and growing and growing every year and clearly becoming more complex and obvious that there were a lot of things that we didn't understand.

[133] But there was this drive, you know.

[134] Well, it's not as if the IPC documents themselves or even that radical.

[135] I mean, my understanding, of the IPC sea documents is that the projection is something like one to two degrees of further warming with some increase in variability, especially in the polar regions, and a small degree of sea level rise.

[136] No indication in the IPCC reports that this will produce runaway out -of -control feedback loops that will have a devastating consequence.

[137] No real vision of apocalypse.

[138] And so...

[139] That's not quite correct.

[140] Until recently, people were looking at projections of four to five degrees centigrade more warming over the course of the 21st century.

[141] Okay.

[142] The issue was wildly ridiculous emissions projections, which are now believed to be implausible.

[143] The more recent IPCC assessment report with more plazaly, plausible emissions scenarios, is looking at more 2 to 3 degrees centigrade of warming.

[144] And we've already had 1 degree, so it's an additional 1 to 2 degrees centigrade of warming that people expect based on the climate models.

[145] So they were pretty alarming up until recently because everyone was focused on this extreme emission scenario, which is now widely accepted as implausible, if not impossible.

[146] So there was a lot of alarm, and all the, you know, when you talk about all the projections of extreme weather events and we won't be able to grow wine in California and crazy projections of sea level rise, all these projections were tied to that extreme emissions scenario.

[147] And it's taken a community a long time to reject it.

[148] In fact, this extreme emissions scenario was still the most often, the most widely used in the sixth assessment report, which was published only like two years ago.

[149] So, I mean, this is still pervasive, these excessively alarming projections of what could happen in the 21st century, mostly driven by implausible to impossible emissions, scenario, but also driven by climate models that are running too hot.

[150] Okay, let's go into that a bit.

[151] So I talked to Richard Linson about a week ago about the problems with models.

[152] He said, for example, that the models are based on cells, let's say, so those would be, the whole Earth can't be models, so you have to oversimplify it.

[153] You have to clump it into chunks, and the chunks are about 70 miles wide.

[154] They can't really model cloud activity very well.

[155] There's a lot of error in relationship to projecting and forecasting the effect of water vapor.

[156] The models have to build a lot of assumptions in.

[157] And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't build models, but it does mean that they have very large potential for error, and that error is magnified as you project out into the future.

[158] And so I've read, for example, you tell me if you think this is accurate, that our estimates of the cumulative effect of carbon dioxide on global warming or climate change are smaller than our estimates of the magnitude of our error in measuring the effect of water vapor.

[159] And like that's a big problem because water vapor is a major contributor to warming in principle.

[160] And so if carbon dioxide effects are under the size of the error in that measurement, that's really well...

[161] Well, I wouldn't put it that way.

[162] we have a pretty good idea of how much water vapors in the atmosphere.

[163] The question is, how is that going to change with warming?

[164] The bigger issue is the clouds, what clouds are doing.

[165] Clouds have a huge, and they're not modeled very well.

[166] And the observational basis for understanding how they're trending only goes back a few decades.

[167] So, you know, that's a tough one.

[168] but the net result of these uncertainties and water vapor and cloud feedback is that we don't know how sensitive the climate is to increasing CO2 because the way the models treated is that CO2 and clouds amplify the warming.

[169] And I think the cloud feedback might even be negative.

[170] Water vapor does overall amplify the warming, but in the tropics, where Richard Linson has done his research, he proposes that there is a negative feedback, and that's something that's hotly debated.

[171] But I think the clouds are the bigger issue.

[172] But apart from what's going on in the atmosphere, to me it's really the oceans and the sun that are the biggest sources of uncertainty in terms of understanding what's going on and be able to project into the future.

[173] So there are...

[174] Okay, why the oceans?

[175] Oh, my goodness.

[176] Okay, the oceans have these large circulation systems overturning.

[177] Okay, El Nino, La Nino.

[178] People are familiar with that.

[179] That's a mode of natural internal variability.

[180] There's also decadal and multi -decalation cycles that change the patterns of clouds, the whole patterns of sea surface temperature, influence the snowfall on Greenland, the Arctic, rainfall, regional climates, et cetera.

[181] And the models don't treat these very good.

[182] Well, there's a whole spectrum of these ocean circulations all on out to 10 ,000 years.

[183] You have millennial scale overturning that influences the climate and the models have far too little power in that part of the spectrum.

[184] So we're just missing that.

[185] And so is that a consequence, does that mean that the degree to which the ocean takes up carbon dioxide is permeated by error in measurement.

[186] Is it also an indication of our lack of understanding of how the temperature of the ocean itself is regulated by the motion of water from the depths up to the top?

[187] All of that?

[188] Oh, yeah.

[189] Is that where the error is?

[190] Well, no. Vertical transport of heat and carbon in the ocean is part of the consequences of the uncertainty in these large -scale circulates.

[191] But more fundamentally, these large -scale, you know, they change the weather patterns and changed the clouds, among other things.

[192] So, you know, this is trying to get all that modeled right, let alone making credible predictions into the future.

[193] We're not there.

[194] I mean, not even close to being there.

[195] Okay.

[196] And then once you get into the sun, it's even, you know, crazier.

[197] I mean, the IPCC has pretty much.

[198] dismissed the role of the sun, you know, in the last 150 years.

[199] But the interesting thing is that in the Six Assessment Report, Chapter 6, they finally acknowledged the great uncertainty in the amount of solar forcing in the late 20th century.

[200] And this arises from, there was a gap in the satellites measuring the sun output that occur at the time of the Challenger shuttle disaster, if you recall that.

[201] And so one solar sensor was running out, and they were supposed to launch another one, but all the launches were put off for a number of years until they sorted out what was going on at NASA with the launches and everything.

[202] So there's this so -called gap, and depending on what was actually happening in that gap, you know, you can tune the solar variability to high variability or low variability.

[203] So all the climate models are being run with low solar variability forcing.

[204] But for the first time, chapter two in the observational chapter of the sixth assessment report, acknowledge this issue that there is huge amount of variability.

[205] And this doesn't even factor in the so -called solar indirect effects in terms of there's a lot.

[206] of, it's not just the heat from the sun.

[207] There's a lot of issues related to ultraviolet and stratosphere and cosmic rays and magnetic fields and all these other things that really aren't being factored in.

[208] They're at the forefront of research, but they're certainly not factored into the climate models.

[209] So there are so many uncertainties out there that affect certainly the projections of what might happen in the 21st century, but also our interpretation of what's been going on with the climate for the last hundred years ago and exactly what's been causing what.

[210] Well, so I would say that those who object to the line of reasoning that you're putting forward, I believe, would make an argument analogous to the following.

[211] They would say, well, look, we have, despite all the objections on the measurement front, we have pretty good evidence that there's a warming trend.

[212] We have reasonable evidence that at least reasonable, proportion of that is a consequence of anthropogenic activity, most particularly the production of carbon dioxide.

[213] The potential consequence of this could be apocalyptic, 100 years down the road or 50 years down the road.

[214] Even with all those doubts in mind, it's incumbent upon us to take something like emergency action now so that we ameliorate this risk of apocalyptic transformation.

[215] And so this is just obstructionist.

[216] Hand -waving.

[217] your objections, and if you were moral and on board, you'd see that this issue is so serious and so apocalyptic that it's inappropriate to stand in the way of the amelioration.

[218] And so what do you think about that as a counter -proposition?

[219] Okay, the weakest part of their argument is whether all this is dangerous.

[220] You know, the sea level rise is, you know, creeping up, you know, the ice cap, Greenland, Antarctic, you know, it changes from year to year with a little bit of melting, but there's no catastrophe looming on those fronts, and so they've turned to extreme weather.

[221] Oh, global warming is calling, and I have to say the hurricane and global warming first put this idea into their head, ah, you know, if we can show that even one degree can cause something bad, like more category five hurricanes than we have something.

[222] So this started the This whole trend of every extreme weather event is associated with human -caused global warming, which just isn't true.

[223] Right, right.

[224] And if you look back, and they tend to go back to 1970 or 1950, oh, this is the warmest year, the worst storm, or the biggest drought or whatever since 1970, maybe since 1950.

[225] But if you look to the first half of the 20th century, the weather was way worse.

[226] certainly in North America and over much of the globe also.

[227] Right now, in the U .S. West, we're being assaulted by these atmospheric river events, bringing huge amounts of rain and snow, which is going to cause flooding.

[228] It's still snow yet.

[229] And, you know, this is horrible global warming and everything like that.

[230] But if you go back to the winter of 1861 and 1862, 15 inches of rain fell in central California over a period of a couple of months, which huge floods over a very widespread area that lasted for absolute months.

[231] Okay, and paleo -climate evidence showed that these tend to happen about every 200 years or so where you have this massive accumulation of these atmospheric rivers.

[232] So this is nothing at all unusual.

[233] So if you look back into the historical record or better yet, the paleo -climate record, invariably you will find worse weather events.

[234] So that's part of the time frame problem, right?

[235] It's like, well, over what span do you evaluate these events before you draw your conclusions?

[236] But you can't...

[237] So do you believe that any of the tipping point hypotheses.

[238] Franzen told me something interesting.

[239] This was kind of a technical proposition.

[240] He said that in complex systems with many degrees of freedom on the entropy front, so many ways they can potentially react, the probability of a tipping point positive feedback loop, you know, like the runaway global warming or something like that, the melting of the Greenland ice caps, because we hit a tipping point, said in complex systems that have multiple potential outcomes, that kind of all or none tipping point is unlikely.

[241] You get that more likely in a simple system that's characterized by the probability of radical state change, like water freezing, for example.

[242] And so I can't evaluate that argument.

[243] You know, it's outside of my domain of scientific competence, but it struck me as an interesting idea.

[244] Well, to some extent, it's true.

[245] There is one sort of tipping point that we could encounter, and if this does happen, I would expect that human -caused global warming would play only a small part.

[246] And this is the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is an unstable ice sheet.

[247] So if you took the ice sheet away, the continent would actually be underwater.

[248] But what it is, you have this huge ice sheet that sits on the continent and part of it's above water.

[249] And it has an overhang.

[250] And this is just a dynamically unstable situation, and it moves fairly fast.

[251] Underneath this ice sheet are lots of inactive volcanoes, even the occasional active volcanoes.

[252] So if these volcanoes became active, and we had a greater heat source under this, combined with sea level rise and a little bit of global warming, this could accelerate.

[253] Right.

[254] And on the time scale of three or four centuries, we could see this collapse, which could lead to a substantial sea level rise.

[255] So that's the one kind of, you know, if we saw that happening, are there engineering ways of dealing with it?

[256] I don't know, but it was something that would be a slow process.

[257] But that's the only one of the so -called tipping points that I see could happen because, you know, the, if there's going to be some solid Earth, you know, if the Earth wants to have an earthquake or a big volcanic eruption, you know, there aren't a lot of, you know, negative feedbacks in the Earth system to prevent that.

[258] So to me, that's the one, like, bad thing that could happen, but it would take centuries.

[259] But the other ones, yeah, I don't see it.

[260] So what do you think, when you look at the IPCC reports, now, and you look 50 years ahead or 100 years ahead, what would you regard as a credible representation of the so -called climate science?

[261] Do you accept the new IPC prognostications, or do you think the models are so error -ridden that even the hypothesis of one to two degrees warming isn't reliable enough, even though it's the best we have?

[262] Well, the interesting thing is that the IPCC's six assessments, report working group one, they also sort of rejected the climate models to some extent.

[263] They were guided by them in their projections, but they also defined a plausible range of climate sensitivity and looked at the projections from there.

[264] So even the IPCC is stepping back from the global climate models as being useful for projections.

[265] And people are going to these climate emulators, these simple climate models.

[266] Well, for this amount of warming, you know, run it through a damage model or an economic assessment model or something like that.

[267] So people are really stepping back from these big global climate model, and it's about time.

[268] And one of the innovations that I've been undertaking in my projection work, and this is what I do for clients of my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network, is that I look at it.

[269] I don't just look at the IPCC scenarios, and I choose the low -end ones, because I think those are more credible.

[270] But I also look at scenarios of what the ocean circulations could be doing, you know, scenarios of volcanic eruptions and solar variation scenarios and try to put forward a broader range of what we might be looking at.

[271] And so I have like a network -based approach to combine all this into producing a much broader range of scenarios.

[272] And at least over the next three decades, like the natural variability piece of this, is pointing towards cooling rather than amplifying the warming.

[273] You know, it would tamp down the global warming of whatever magnitude it is from fossil fuel emissions.

[274] So that's the approach that I'm taking.

[275] Okay, so let's go into that a bit.

[276] But you, earlier, you indicated that you left the university in 2017 to pursue an entrepreneurial activity that you had initiated at Georgia Tech.

[277] And you just made allusion to that again.

[278] So tell me, tell me, if you would, how you are modeling and you've laid out some of the conclusions.

[279] But who's interested in your models?

[280] And obviously, you're doing this on an entrepreneurial basis, so people are working.

[281] willing to pay you for your opinion, which gives, I think, some, what would you say, indication of their faith in its credibility, because people are actually spending money on it.

[282] Like, how are your models different than the models that are more broadly publicized, let's say, and who is it that is paying you to produce these models?

[283] Why is they're interested in that?

[284] And why are they doing it?

[285] Okay, well, insurance companies, financial institutions, have an interest in Atlantic Hurricanes.

[286] What are we looking at over the next three decades in terms of Atlantic hurricane activity?

[287] A big issue is a potential shift to the cold phase of the Atlantic multidicatal oscillation.

[288] This is one of those multi -decatal oscillations that I talked about, which we would expect would start to tamp down the Atlantic hurricane activity.

[289] So this is a very big deal for them.

[290] Another client was wind farm owners who wanted to know, is the wind going to keep blowing for the next 30 years and are my wind farms in the right location?

[291] Okay, they wanted to know that.

[292] Some electric utilities want to know what could we be looking at in terms of like how frequent these really bad situations could be, you know, for renewable power, like a massive cold air outbreak that lasts for weeks, the wind doesn't blow, and it's wintertime, and there's no sun.

[293] You know, how bad can it get and how frequently might these occur?

[294] So these are some of the things that I've been looking at.

[295] And also people interested in sea level rise projections, you know, in their particular location, looking at scenarios of what their location, a lot of interest from people in.

[296] Florida, San Francisco, along the Atlantic coast, you know, what could we be looking at?

[297] Yeah, yeah, we see that those projections from the IPCC, which of those should we believe?

[298] But we already know that, you know, how are the ocean circulation patterns going to influence their local sea level rise?

[299] what kind of, what kind of, what do I, what kind of trends do I see for the vertical land motion, both from local effects and large, more planetary scale up and down kind of effects.

[300] So those are some of the projects that I've been working on looking at scenarios out, say, 30 to 50 years.

[301] So why do these companies believe that you're more?

[302] are credible enough for them to pour economic resources into.

[303] And why do you believe that your models are credible enough to provide them with accurate guidance?

[304] I mean, we talked about some of the limitations of models.

[305] And so what is it that you're doing that is credible to the companies and why do you believe scientifically that you're providing accurate information?

[306] Okay.

[307] The first thing that I did, and I did this before most other people did, I say, look, you're wasting your time looking at that extreme emissions scenario.

[308] You know, if you look at the International Energy Agency, their scenarios show emissions being fairly flat for the next several decades.

[309] And I think this is a much more plausible scenario.

[310] So let's focus on that one.

[311] And this is apart from trying to predict what policy's going to do and how much you're going to change, but the thinking is now that emissions are going to stay fairly flat for the next few decades.

[312] And I saw this, and, you know, I saw the journal publications, and this is what I was pushing to my client.

[313] If you want something realistic, this is what you should be looking at.

[314] The other thing is, is not accepting the extremely high values of climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling.

[315] I don't go as low as Richard Linson does, but I'm certainly on the low end, and I justify why, to them, based on publications, including some of my own, why we shouldn't be looking at these very high sensitivity values.

[316] And I run it through a range so they can look.

[317] Right, right.

[318] But I'm saying, you know, so I give them all the scenarios they want.

[319] I'll give the high emission scenario.

[320] I'll give the high climate sensitivity, low climate sensitivity.

[321] I'll say my best judgment is that this is what it is.

[322] But then I uniquely put in scenarios of the natural variability.

[323] And they really like this.

[324] They get it.

[325] I mean, they've seen it.

[326] Okay, they've seen it, and they understand it's out there.

[327] They've just never seen anybody try to project it before.

[328] And I have publications on this.

[329] They can parameterize their risk given your plethora of models.

[330] So they can say, well, here's the worst case scenario, here's the best case scenario, here's the likely scenario, here's the range, and then they can calculate how to mitigate their risk across those scenarios.

[331] Exactly.

[332] A lot of times they want to know, well, what's the worst case?

[333] What's the worst plausible case?

[334] Okay, and so I give them that.

[335] And so they have this whole range.

[336] Okay, so, for example, in the wind farm profitability study, I gave them 81 scenarios, okay, different scenarios of how this could play out over the next 30 years.

[337] And these different, you know, there was a cluster of scenarios, you know, in a certain area.

[338] And I say, you know, you might infer that these are the most plausible outcomes because there's multiple different pathways for reaching that, but here's your plausible worst case, here's your plausible best case.

[339] Okay, and this gives them some information, okay, for making their decision.

[340] Right.

[341] So you admit right up front in some sense that there are inputs into your models that are somewhat arbitrary, right, that you have to decide about, and those might be, for example, your projections of carbon dioxide output.

[342] And then you say, given a variety of initial assumptions, here's a variety of outcomes, but a lot of the models tend to converge at this vision, you know, this range of visions.

[343] And so if the convergence of multiple models constitutes evidence, which we generally assume does, then this seems to be the most plausible pathway.

[344] Right.

[345] And so how does that differ from the IPCC approach?

[346] Okay, well, I don't say it's the more.

[347] First, they neglect all the elements of natural variability that I conclude.

[348] They're not giving scenarios of volcanic eruptions.

[349] They're not giving different scenarios of sun activity.

[350] They don't have, they do a bunch, they have a bunch of different scenarios of what the internal ocean variability is doing.

[351] but I can anchor it more closely to what the observations are and my own network model in terms of what the plausible trajectories are.

[352] So I'm giving them a more plausible trajectory for the ocean oscillations.

[353] And generally, going out 30 years, these other scenarios are cooler than the IPCC scenarios.

[354] Well, and so, and do they actually point to cooling or just less rapid warming?

[355] Some of them go as far as cooling, okay, and others are less rapid warming.

[356] And there have been another publications you never see them publicize that show for certain combinations of these ocean circulations or volcanic eruptions or solar activity that you could see cooling for a decade or two during the 21st century.

[357] That could happen.

[358] And the IPCCAR6 did, you know, if you read the fine print deep in the chapters, you know, you'll see these papers referenced and it is acknowledged.

[359] But it's not something that you hear, you know, in the public debate, it's just this relentless warming that we're going to be seeing.

[360] Okay, okay, so that's interesting because, you know, the warming, advocates are doubtful enough about their own prognostications so that it's no longer appropriate to refer to global warming, you're supposed to refer to climate change, which I think is a terrible sleight of hand.

[361] But in any case, that's what's happened.

[362] But nonetheless, the apocalyptic prognostications are still predicated on this idea of warming.

[363] Now, your claim is that the consensus that that might be apocalyptic was never there to begin with.

[364] and the initial estimates of the magnitude of warming were out by about a factor of two, partly because people accepted equally apocalyptic in some sense prognostications of carbon dioxide output.

[365] But then you're taking that further, you're saying that the models are so prone to variability that there is some non -trivial possibility that there'll be a global cooling trend over the next 30 years instead of a global warming trend.

[366] And so in the face of all that, someone might ask themselves, well, if the situation with regards to these models is as uncertain as you suggest, and also, you know, it's interesting just as an aside that financial companies will pay you for your prognostications, which is another form of validation of your opinion, why in the world are we stampeding madly to spend untold literally trillions of dollars?

[367] trying to ameliorate a problem that we haven't properly measured.

[368] Like, what's going on here as far as you can tell?

[369] Okay, you have to go back.

[370] Okay, the policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse from the very beginning.

[371] In the 1980s, the UN Environmental Program, you know, was looking for something.

[372] We hate capitalism.

[373] We don't like the oil companies.

[374] We like world government, all this kind of thing.

[375] and they latched on to the climate change, the CO2 global warming is what it was called back then.

[376] And this ceded, you know, the formation of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

[377] And there was a treaty signed by 192 nations in 1992, including the U .S. Okay, this was before we knew anything.

[378] We were to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change.

[379] we had any idea of any of this.

[380] And so this frame, the climate problem, you know, in a very narrow frame, all of climate is now caused by CO2 and by definition warming is dangerous.

[381] Why was that such an attractive political hypothesis?

[382] Like, why did politicians decide that in the absence of this, you know, stringently produced scientific evidence, that the proper place for the world's political community, to focus was on the cardinal danger of global warming that was anthropogenically produced.

[383] Like, what the hell is going on there?

[384] Especially because it's so expensive.

[385] Okay, well, people didn't pay much attention to it for decades.

[386] I mean, the Kyoto Protocol, a bunch of countries in 1997, a bunch of countries signed on to reduce their emissions, but even the ones who signed on didn't really reduce their emissions, and of course the U .S. never signed on.

[387] And reduced its emissions, weirdly enough.

[388] That's pretty funny.

[389] I know.

[390] And it wasn't really until the Paris Agreement that they came up with, you know, this more voluntary thing.

[391] And then they started phrasing it.

[392] And there was a spate of, you know, bad weather, big El Nino and stuff like that, that they latched on to, you know, this extreme, you know, if we just got rid of all this, the weather would be nicer.

[393] We'd get rid of all these floods and droughts and hurricanes.

[394] and whatever else, and heat waves that was plaguing humanity.

[395] And so people bought that kind of simple argument.

[396] And then once, there was a real shift in 2018.

[397] After the Paris Agreement, you know, the rhetoric was, you know, climate crisis, climate emergency from the world leaders, the UN, President Obama, Macron, Merkel, all of these leaders saying this.

[398] But in 2018, people started paying attention.

[399] And this is when Greta Thunberg came onto the scene.

[400] And she was, she's a remarkable person.

[401] She's wrong a lot of things.

[402] But a remarkable person, nevertheless.

[403] But what she was doing spawned the sunrise movement, extinction rebellion, all this kind of stuff.

[404] And the journalists amplified this, the climate crisis, the climate emergency.

[405] Ten years ago, even ten years ago, climate change was like really a fringe topic at journals.

[406] Now major media outlets have a climate desk.

[407] You know, I have a whole team of journalists.

[408] And there's huge money going into things like Carbon Brief, things that focus specifically on climate change.

[409] And so it's just exploded.

[410] And again, there's this social contract between the policymakers, the media, and the scientists.

[411] It's great for the science.

[412] There's nobody.

[413] Ten years ago, people with a Ph .D. in climate science, you know, would be trying to get a postdoc and whatever.

[414] And now the universities can't even hang on to them.

[415] There's so many jobs in the media and the private sector that, you know, this is just a hot thing.

[416] Every university now has some sort of climate -y, department, institute, it's just big business for everybody.

[417] And so there's this mutual reinforcement between the scientists, the policymakers, and the media.

[418] So that's where the positive feedback loops are in the tipping points.

[419] Right, they're on the sociological side.

[420] Yeah, definitely, definitely.

[421] Yeah, well, it's quite something to behold.

[422] So now, what has been the consequences?

[423] I mean, you've been pilloried, I believe, I don't believe I'm overstating this, you've been pilloried or satirized as a sort of fringe figure on the client denial front.

[424] I think that's fair to say.

[425] And it's pretty easy to smear someone with tactics like that, and it's psychologically very effective.

[426] I mean, what has it, you know, you said you rose to public prominence, partly because you formulated an argument, at least to begin with, that could be latched onto by the climate apocalypse, and quite effectively, but then you produced all sorts of other material mitigating, producing a mitigated view.

[427] What's been the consequence for you of being involved in this?

[428] Okay, let me tell you what my sin was.

[429] People don't object to my science.

[430] I mean, I'm within, you know, the likely range of the IPCC for the most part on the low end.

[431] But, you know, it's not fringe perspectives.

[432] And I commonly cite the IPCC.

[433] What happened, the reason I was shuffled off into denier camp is because I criticized the behavior of climate scientists.

[434] I criticize the IPCC for some ethical violations as well as not paying enough attention to uncertainty.

[435] So that was my sin.

[436] Okay.

[437] I offended and criticized the grand poobahs of the climate community.

[438] And then I was very quick, and most importantly, in, was it 2011, I criticized Michael Mann's hockey stick on my blog, and then he started calling me a denier, and that was really the beginning of the end.

[439] So my sin...

[440] Yeah, so let's talk about that terminology for a second, just so everybody knows.

[441] So this is quite the rhetorical move on the part of the climate.

[442] the climate purveyors of apocalyptic doom.

[443] And so we already established in our society, broadly speaking in the West, that to object to the idea that the Holocaust was a historical reality puts you outside the pale of normative and reasonable political discussion.

[444] And so you can be a Holocaust denier, and if you are such a creature, then you're lumped in with the Nazis and put on the shelf for no further contact, right?

[445] You've entered the realm of the reprehensible.

[446] Now, one of the most effective rhetorical moves of the people who were making a great living or putting themselves forward morally as climate apocalyptic doomsayers was to target people who objected to their views with terminology that was derived directly from that rhetorical move.

[447] So now, if you're a climate change denier, the connotation is you're occupied the same category morally as people who refuse to believe on the grounds of their appalling anti -Semitism and their blind historical ignorance that the Holocaust was a historical reality.

[448] And so in some sense, there's no real difference between labeling someone a climate change denier and labeling them a Nazi enabler.

[449] And the rhetorical move was designed precisely to produce that outcome.

[450] And so I'm not a big fan of that kind of rhetorical move.

[451] And let's talk about Michael Mann for a second too now, because a lot of people listening and watching, they're not going to know what that hockey stick graph was, and they don't know what Cardinal Role the scandal around that graph has produced in the discussion.

[452] So do you want to walk through the hockey stick graph a little bit?

[453] Okay.

[454] If you go back to 2001, this was the release of the third assessment report from the IPCC.

[455] And Sir John Houghton, who was the head of the IPCC, was giving the press release.

[456] And the backdrop behind him was this image, a curve that looked like a hockey stick, which was meant to portray that the climate was very stable for the last thousand years and all of a sudden you've got this big uptick, you know, that is caused by humans.

[457] Okay, and this was based on the work of Michael Mann, who was a recent PhD, this was his postdoc work.

[458] Before the ink was dry on us, Ph .D., he was appointed a lead author of the IPEO, PCC, which was a fairly unusual move to appoint someone.

[459] That's an insane move.

[460] Let me let everybody watching and listening know.

[461] Like, your PhD is putting your foot in the, or your toe in the water of scientific endeavor.

[462] So, I mean, so Judith has 190 publications, and just so those you were listening, no. Generally speaking, a PhD thesis requires approximately as much work as three scientific publications if it's a high -quality Ph .D. And so when you get your PhD, you've entered the domain of genuine scientific contribution.

[463] The PhD is actually a marker of that.

[464] And if you do a post -doc, that means that you have the opportunity to do a little bit more research work, to establish your credibility now as a more independent researcher who isn't dependent on the ideas of your supervisor.

[465] So you're a neophyte.

[466] You're a beginner when you do a PhD and a post -doc.

[467] And maybe you have to do one or maybe two, and then maybe you can get hired as a junior professor.

[468] But you're by no means at the peak of your career, and it's very, very rare for initiatory research that might be done at the PhD level to be regarded as canonical, unless you're a Nobel Prize -winning genius by the scientific community.

[469] And so the fact that man's work got so much attention, even though it was done at this initial level of scientific investigation, I mean, that doesn't speak to its validity, but my point is it's an aberration in the process.

[470] And it also points to this problem we discussed earlier of time frame.

[471] I mean, when you construct graphs, you can play with their psychological impact in all sorts of inappropriate ways.

[472] You can expand and contract the time frame.

[473] You can expand and contract the scale on the left, and you can make what's really a small effect across some historical span of time look big by playing with the scale, and you can make an effect that isn't very large, temporally speaking, by shrinking the timescale of evaluation.

[474] And so the man's graph showed this uptick in climate transformation that was attendant on human industrial activity.

[475] But he picked a very narrow time frame and a very particularized scale so that this maximized the psychological impact of the graph.

[476] But that does bring us to this problem of time scale.

[477] It's like, well, and variability.

[478] How much has things changed over 10 ,000 years?

[479] Like, what's the right time scale here?

[480] And that's a very difficult problem.

[481] Well, the issues of the hockey stick were not so much that.

[482] The trigger, the hockey stick trigger, important one, is around 2000.

[483] Right after that, this was viewed by a mining engineer, Steve McIntyre said hockey stick, hockey stick, I've seen these things.

[484] This is usually a con game trying to get somebody to buy mining stocks.

[485] He says, you know, then he got intrigued.

[486] He wanted to look at the data.

[487] So he asked for the data.

[488] They gave him some of it.

[489] And he and Ross McKittrick, Canadian economics professor, took a look at this.

[490] And they found all sorts of errors, you know, mishandling of data, inappropriate statistical methods, on and on it goes.

[491] And man went after these guys big time, rather than constructively trying to deal with these criticisms.

[492] He went after these guys, and this turned into a pretty big flame war.

[493] And then McIntyre and McKittrick published two additional papers in 2005.

[494] And the controversy, you know, was just explosive.

[495] There were congressional hearings on this, and on and on it went.

[496] So it was this huge controversy, and these Climategate emails that were released in 2009 revealed all sorts of skull dodgery, you know, trying to keep data away from McIntyre and McKittrick, trying to put pressure on journal editors not to publish their papers, and on and on it goes, and, you know, and so this was revealed in ClimateGate.

[497] Right.

[498] So those were more egregious sins than just picking a convenient time frame and a convenient scale.

[499] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[500] But there is a graphical issue, and this was the theme of my blog post, hiding the decline.

[501] So the paleo -climate record just, you know, showed these little oscillations.

[502] And to get that sort of hockey stick piece, they spliced on.

[503] the observational record on top of that, okay?

[504] And it wasn't clear in the IPCC report that was done.

[505] It was sort of in some sort of a footnote or an obscure reference, but it never occurred to me as someone in the field that this is what had been done.

[506] So, no, I don't understand that.

[507] Go into that more detail.

[508] I don't understand exactly what was done there.

[509] Okay, you see the handle.

[510] Okay, if you look at the actual tree, the tree ring.

[511] rate data that went into their analysis, it was just like the flat handle.

[512] In order to get the blade, the uptick of the blade, they spliced on the historical temperature record.

[513] Completely different data set.

[514] Oh, I see.

[515] Because the tree rings weren't showing this uptick.

[516] This is a so -called hide the decline.

[517] And so, you know, to me this is something without doing that is a bad idea but doing that without explaining it is marginal and and this is known in some circles subsequently would be given a label as image fraud and so this is what I wrote my blog post about and I wasn't particularly attacking man because he wasn't the only person involved in this little deception.

[518] But, you know, this got a lot of attention, and apparently Michael Mann was unhappy.

[519] And pretty soon after that, you know, he was calling me a denier on Twitter, and then I started appearing on all these misinformer lists.

[520] And by 2012, you know, I was firmly established as a denier.

[521] and the society of environmental journalists put together a list, a description of all the climate blogs.

[522] And my blog was under the list of denier blogs.

[523] And the description says, unlike most other denier blogs, Curry is a real scientist, she looks at both sides of the issues, digs deeps into the issues, discusses the uncertainties and all this other stuff.

[524] And I said, well, that's a beautiful description of, my blog, but why did they accept prima facie that my blog is a denier blog?

[525] I mean, it just shows how pervasive and how stupid this whole thing was.

[526] So I, you know, I got tossed into the denier camp.

[527] I don't align myself with either side.

[528] You know, I've preciously fought for my independence, which included resigning my academic position.

[529] So, you know, I think.

[530] I think, for myself, I think deep, I look at the evidence, make judgments, and it's mostly about trying to better characterize uncertainties in what we don't know.

[531] This is a key part of rational policymaking is to understand the uncertainties and what we don't know.

[532] Well, we've got a three -fold problem here by the sounds of things in some real sense.

[533] I mean, the first problem is kind of a positive feedback loop that you alluded to, is that a lot of it, attention was paid to this potential issue.

[534] A lot of money was put into funding investigation into it.

[535] That incentivized the growth of a huge scientific enterprise.

[536] That incentivized people who were primarily motivated by the money, including the grants.

[537] And I mean, it's hard not to be motivated by that if you want to be a practicing scientist.

[538] And so there was a lot of financial and practical pressure to produce an environmentally apocalyptic story.

[539] And then you can could imagine that's amplified by the fact that reporting that there's no problem on the climate front is not something that's going to produce an attention -grabbing headline, especially in the era of declining attention being paid to legacy media outlets.

[540] And so we know perfectly well that human beings are much more sensitive to negative information, comparatively speaking, than to positive information, and that you can attract attention with a story of gloom and threat, much more effectively than one that states there's no story here at all or something positive.

[541] So that's a big problem.

[542] And then the third problem, I would say, is that it's easy for venal and narcissistic politicians, and that's not all of them, to latch on to a convenient money -generating apocalyptic nightmare, to put themselves forward as white knights on the moral front, and to pull the wool over the eyes, and maybe even their own eyes, in relationship to whether or not they're making any practical progress in the actual world.

[543] And so there's a situation where we have a set of positive feedback loops, right, operating in sociological space that are producing a kind of chicken little outcome.

[544] And so we're running around claiming that the sky is falling and dumping, tilting our economic systems in a dangerous direction and spending untold hundreds of billions of dollars addressing a problem that is ill -defined and likely nowhere nearer of the magnitude that we think it is.

[545] And then I want to follow that with a...

[546] I tried to make a strong case for why you might be regarded with a certain degree of apprehension from the perspective of the climate apocalypse.

[547] But I'm also curious about this.

[548] The piece of data that has really emerged as most striking to me on the environmental front over the last last 20 years is the recent observations, or they've been going on for about five years, or 10 years perhaps, that one of the consequences of extra carbon dioxide output is that the planet has greened 15 % since the dawn of the millennia, and that most of that greening has taken place in what would have otherwise been semi -arid and rather denuded areas.

[549] And so, I don't see a statistic on the anti -carbon front.

[550] That's as powerful negatively as the statistic that the planet is 15 % greener and that our crops are also in a consequence quite a lot more productive on the pro -carbon dioxide front.

[551] So, you know, you made the claim earlier that maybe we're in for a period of cooling.

[552] That's within the error predictions of the models.

[553] But I would like to say, well, why shouldn't I look at the fact that the planet has got 15 % greener in 15 years, that's an area bigger than the United States, and say, well, why are we so sure that carbon dioxide output is a bad thing at all?

[554] I mean, some of the people who were initially hypothesized about the greenhouse effect were quite effusive in their predictions that this would produce a greener, more lush, and more productive world, a more habitable world.

[555] So is it unreasonable to put that forward as a proposition?

[556] again the apocalypticites are pushing extreme weather events as being caused by warming you know the hurricanes the Pakistan flooding the heat waves you know unusual this that and the other this is what they're pushing as being caused by warming you know it's conceivable that there is some element of contribution from five fossil -fueled warming to this, but it's because of the large amount of natural weather and climate variability, it's impossible to discern.

[557] I mean, if we were to immediately stop emitting fossil fuels, we probably wouldn't notice any change in the weather, you know, throughout the rest of the 21st century.

[558] So this is the key error in logic that people have been made, Well, I mean, it's not an error in logic.

[559] It's a very effective selling point for the alarmists, but people have bought it.

[560] And people have weather amnesia.

[561] I mean, if you just look back to the 50s to the 1950s to the 1930s or whatever, the weather was much worse, certainly in North America.

[562] So it's just something that doesn't make sense.

[563] Does that mean we should just keep amping up the fossil fuel emissions?

[564] No, we just really don't quite understand the consequences of this, but neither does it imply that we should urgently reduce emissions and disrupt the global energy systems that will make people less off and less well off and more vulnerable to whatever extreme weather and climate events might happen to occur.

[565] So we're hurting ourselves.

[566] We're not doing much in the way of reducing emissions anyways, and we're just making ourselves less prosperous and more vulnerable to extreme weather events.

[567] Well, okay, so there's two consequences of that, I would say, is the first is if we do make people less well off by making energy much more expensive, by restricting fossil fuel use, like unreasonably, let's say, or by not pursuing nuclear power, for example, as an alternative, the major consequence of that will be that a lot of poor people who are right on the edge, and there's lots of them, are poorer than they need to be and will be off the edge.

[568] And the consequence of that is, as you already pointed out, that if anything untoward does happen on the weather front, they're going to be much more vulnerable to that.

[569] I mean, distinguishing between infrastructure, inadequacy, and weather catastrophe is very, very, very.

[570] very difficult.

[571] Even when Katrina hit New Orleans, you could say that it was a natural disaster.

[572] But you could also say it was an abject failure of planning, because the Army Corps of engineer dikes were only designed to withstand a one -in -a -hundred -year storm, whereas when the Dutch built dikes, they designed them to withstand a one in 10 ,000 -year storm.

[573] So whether that was a natural disaster or a consequence of human foolishness is not precisely obvious.

[574] And the same thing applies on the energy front, you know, if we impoverish the already poor by making energy expensive, not only do we expose them to much more risk to life and limb, let's say, in property, but we also decrease the probability that those self -same people are going to be able to take an environmentally oriented view, because the data indicates that if you can get people up to producing or benefiting from economic growth to the tune of about $5 ,000 a year in average GDP, then they start to take a medium to long -term view of the future and start to attend much more carefully to what you might describe as environmental concerns.

[575] So panicking about climate in the way that we're doing, if the consequence is to raise energy prices and impoverished people, looks like it's going to kill more people, first, because they'll be more vulnerable, and second, that it's going to make, it's going to deliver us far fewer people who are capable of taking the kind of medium to long, term view of sustainability that would be actually beneficial to producing a more livable planet.

[576] And I still want to ask your opinion about the greening.

[577] Yeah, the greening's happening.

[578] I think it's attributed mostly to carbon dioxide, but also more rainfall and warmer temperatures.

[579] I mean, help.

[580] So the greening is definitely a benefit.

[581] That the greening is happening over a big, big portion of the globe, actually.

[582] So it's clearly a benefit.

[583] Well, it's also so perverse, eh, because one of the, it's perverse is the fact that the Americans decrease their carbon output by turning to fracking.

[584] Nobody predicted that.

[585] But here we have a situation where not only is the planet not getting browner and drier, which was the apocalyptic vision, but many of the areas that were really brown and dry, like the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, are actually seeing the ingress of vegetation in a manner that's, well, unprecedented even up to 15 years ago.

[586] And so, you know, not only is that not what was predicted.

[587] It's the very opposite of what's predicted.

[588] And it's, it's, it's the opposite in a, in a very, very massive manner.

[589] I mean, 15 % increase in greening is just, it's almost beyond comprehension.

[590] As I said, that's an area bigger than the continental United States.

[591] And then to say as well that that's also produced quite an increment in the productivity of human crops and enabled us to grow more food in less area.

[592] Those are facts that need to be taken with dead seriousness.

[593] They're very positive, perhaps, I mean, you could argue that maybe that rate of vegetation change brings with it threats that we haven't yet envisioned and that could be the case, But nonetheless, it certainly isn't the spreading of the deserts that we were led to be apprehensive of.

[594] Well, that's correct.

[595] Again, the framing of this, going back to 1992, was around dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.

[596] So the focus was on dangers.

[597] They were looking for dangers.

[598] The benefits weren't even acknowledged until...

[599] maybe the fifth assessment report in the IPCC.

[600] I mean, everything, they were just looking for dangers, that there was no counterweight of the benefits.

[601] Right, right, and no cost -benefit analysis.

[602] I mean, I've talked to Bjorn -Lomburg a lot.

[603] And the reason for that was that I looked through all the data that you're describing for a long period of time.

[604] One of the things that struck me, and struck me as well, about the multiplicity of goals that the UN was hypothetically pursued, was that no one was assessing these risks and benefits in any systematic manner, ranking them.

[605] And then I came across Lomburg's work, and he tried to do a cost -benefit analysis, looking at our capacity to adapt and ranking the problems that face us in terms of their severity and also what we could do about those problems in some effective manner.

[606] And Lomberg, like you, accepts the IPCC prognostications of a mild warming trend over the next hundred years, but he's done calculations showing that the net consequence of that, even if it is somewhat detrimental economically, if we factor all those costs into account, is that we'll be less more rich than we would otherwise be, right?

[607] Because our GDP is going to increase something like 400 % on average in the next 100 years, and one of the negative consequences of global warming will be that it'll be slightly less than 400%.

[608] And that it's clear that we can manage that in any real sense and that we're very good at adapting to a huge range of weather situations and climate scenarios.

[609] Some of us live in damn near Arctic conditions and other people live in the desert.

[610] And so it's not outside the realm of human adaptation to adapt to a one or two degree climate transformation.

[611] And animals should be able to do the same, assuming that we don't, you know, that we're reasonably intelligent on the environmental conservation front.

[612] And so, I don't know, are you aware of Lomberg's work?

[613] What do you think of?

[614] Oh, yeah.

[615] No, Bjorn and I are in close contact, and I'm very well aware of what he's doing, and he's doing a very good job of making those points.

[616] The thing that, you know, the UN has the 17 sustainability goals.

[617] I think the first one is to eliminate poverty.

[618] The second one is to eliminate poverty.

[619] hunger, maybe number seven is energy, affordable energy for all.

[620] The number 13 is climate action.

[621] And you've got to wonder, how did climate action, even one piece of that, which is elimination of fossil fuels, come to Trump elimination of poverty and elimination of hunger, development aid from the UN, from the World Bank, and whatever, is now focused on mitigation, the traditional objectives of economic development and help with adaptation.

[622] Those are put on the back burner.

[623] Right, right.

[624] In favor of mitigation.

[625] And this is making people less well off, and we're squandering opportunities for human development.

[626] And, you know, for senseless objectives that aren't expected to improve anyone's life over the course of the 21st century and could very well make us all worse off.

[627] Okay, so this is part of the incomprehensibility of this to me because it looks to me like a lot of the arguments, for example, that would force us to take the apocalyptic prognostications of the doomsayer seriously.

[628] The moral arguments go something like this.

[629] Well, you know, a hundred years if there's a lot of climate change, it's primarily going to be the world's poor who pay the largest price for that.

[630] The world's poor and oppressed.

[631] And to mitigate against that, we have to adopt policies that however painful they are in the short term will mitigate against that because of our concern for the long -term viability of, let's say, these poverty -stricken people.

[632] But the problem with that is that the models aren't very reliable, and it's absolutely 100 % certain that if we raise energy prices, which we have been doing quite effectively, and food prices, we're going to make life much more difficult for impoverished people throughout the developing world right now.

[633] And in a way that's going to kill plenty of people, and it's certainly going to deprive many others of educational opportunity and nutritional optimal nutritional input and all of that.

[634] 100 % certain that's going to occur.

[635] But the moral aspect is, well, we shouldn't be doing things that would endanger those people who are oppressed and poor.

[636] But the policies we're pursuing do precisely that.

[637] So, again, I'm still left with this complete incapacity to understand how this can possibly be the case.

[638] I don't get it.

[639] Because there's lots of other things we could be doing.

[640] Well, leaders in Africa are quite outspoken.

[641] They're on the front lines of being the victims of all this.

[642] They refer to green colonialism, energy apartheid, you know, that they're facing over this global warming policies.

[643] Right, right, right, right.

[644] And they can't get loans from development banks to build, you know, they have plenty of fossil, natural gas, coal, a lot of fossil fuel resources in Africa.

[645] They can't get loans to build their own power plants.

[646] The only thing that they're able to do is sell their fuel to Europe.

[647] So Europe is exploiting them doubly by taking their fuel, but not allowing, you know, it's politically incorrect for these banks to fund the development of power plants so Africans can develop their own economy.

[648] It's just evil, and I think green colonialism and energy apartheid are perfect descriptors for what's going on.

[649] Well, it's just, again, it leaves me open -mouthed in amazement that, we in the developed world, with our functional economies and our high level of luxury and security, can say to developing worlds, the developing world, well, you know, we've got it pretty good here, and we're probably willing to cut back a little bit.

[650] But you guys down there in the developing countries, you know, you should be pretty damn careful about your carbon output because, you know, we've only got one planet.

[651] And so it isn't really obvious that any of you should have the same kind of benefits that we have.

[652] the planet can't sustain that level of luxury and security.

[653] And so we're just not going to let you have any money.

[654] We're not going to help you develop your economy so that you can benefit from the same industrial revolution that has enabled us to educate our children and to have plenty to eat and to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

[655] And then what's even more preposterous is it's the very people who are constantly clamoring about the oppressive nature of Western culture who are foisting this very story on these developed countries.

[656] Yeah, the irony is that even if the African nations were given, you know, the carbon credits or whatever, and allowed to develop to where they want to be and where anyone expects them to be, at most they would be emitting like five or six percent of global emissions, and this is for like a billion people in the population.

[657] So we're not talking about a lot of extra emissions to allow them to develop.

[658] I mean, it just makes absolutely no sense.

[659] And it's evil.

[660] It's absolutely evil.

[661] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[662] That's how it looks to me too.

[663] Well, I'm glad to hear that you regard Lomburg as a credible commentator on such things.

[664] Well, you know, I've looked across a wide variety of political and scientific thinkers over a 20 -year period trying to identify people that I believe to be credible on the interface between economic development and energy and environmental management.

[665] And I like Schellenberger.

[666] I think Epstein has some interesting things to say.

[667] I like Marian Toopey.

[668] What's there's the English?

[669] What's his name?

[670] Richard Toll?

[671] Matt Ridley.

[672] I think Ridley is good.

[673] Yeah, yeah.

[674] And so, but of all those.

[675] people, I think Longberg has done the most credible job.

[676] And he's also been given a damn rough ride in the media.

[677] I mean, he's doing pretty well now, I think, promoting his message, which is a, it's such a lovely, what he lays out is such a lovely scenario, because he shows how much good we could do in the world, especially with regard to the amelioration of absolute poverty and the provision of education, at such a tiny fraction of the amounts of money that are being devoted to this insane, what, prevention of a non -examination.

[678] I've been doing everything I can for whatever it's worth to draw attention to his work.

[679] But, you know, the fact that he's been pilloried, like you've been pilloried, makes it, well, there's always a question lurking in the back of my mind.

[680] It's sort of like, well, where there's smoke, there's fire.

[681] If people are constantly being attacked for their views on moral grounds, you know, maybe there's something to that.

[682] But I certainly, I haven't been able to find that my analysis of your work or Franzen's, I certainly have seen none of that whatsoever in relationship to Lomburg.

[683] So the mystery still remains for me. Okay, they went after Lomborg early on, you know, 2003 whatever, following his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

[684] And the issue was that he didn't regard, you know, the reduction of fossil fuel emissions as the be -all and end -all.

[685] You know, there were more important things to do.

[686] And for that, he got labeled.

[687] You know, that was a very dangerous perspective because they were just so set on this one particular policy for reasons, for poorly justified reasons, and for reasons that became harder to justify as time went on.

[688] And they're still stuck on this.

[689] And it just defies logic.

[690] and it's going to cause a lot of damage in the world.

[691] It defies logic unless your primary goal is easy moral virtue.

[692] So imagine, you know, the problem with Lomberg's work fundamentally, and this is the problem with marketing it too, is that he offers a multivariate and multidimensional analysis of the problems besetting the world.

[693] He says, well, we don't just have one problem, climate apocalypse.

[694] We have like 100 problems, and then we have the problem of how to rank order these problems, and then we have the problem of generating actual solutions and assessing them.

[695] And that actually requires a lot of cognitive effort, you know, to walk through those.

[696] And so, but where if you're a climate apocalypse, you can reduce the entire panoply of human problems to one problem.

[697] And then you can put yourself forward as a moral person by just saying, well, I'm definitely concerned about the fate of the planet.

[698] And that's all anybody reasonable should be concerned about.

[699] and because I'm concerned in that manner, I'm a fully credible and reputational remarkable person.

[700] And that's part of the psychological proclivity that is behind this.

[701] Okay, and so everything bad that happens, someone finds a path to blame it on climate change.

[702] Okay, and the media amplifies it.

[703] And this gives politicians an easy out.

[704] So rather than dealing with their real problems, you know, poor land use, poor regulations, poor whatever, inadequate infrastructure, whatever might be the cause of their actual problems, they simply blame it on global warming.

[705] And so it gives them an easy out.

[706] Yeah, I read an article yesterday that climate change was increasing the risk that women were being abused in their homes.

[707] That was just a classic example, you know.

[708] I mean, you know, you could make the case that whatever produces economic, instability is going to raise the rates of abuse, but to link it directly to climate change is a really egregious example of exactly the kind of thing that you're describing.

[709] All right, well, look, and we're out of time on this segment.

[710] I'm going to talk to Dr. Curry for an additional half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.

[711] For those of you who are watching and listening, you might be interested in that.

[712] I'm going to talk about the development of her interest in her scientific endeavors and in her entrepreneurial endeavors as well.

[713] Hello everyone.

[714] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus .com.