#2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

Richard Lindzen, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. William Happer, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Physics at Princeton University. Doctors Lindzen and Happer are recognized for questioning prevailing assumptions about climate change and energy policy.www.co2coalition.org Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Buy 1 Get 1 Free Trucker Hat with code ROGAN at https://happydad.com Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Joe Rogan?

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here, I really appreciate it.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  A pleasure.

• 0:17Joe Rogan?

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

• 0:28Speaker 02

  I'm Dick Lindzen, 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 one who dealt with observations. So I went to Seattle for someone who did. And then I got my first academic position at Chicago, and stayed there for about three,

• 1:13Speaker 02

  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-biennial cycle. Turns out, the wind above the equator, about 16 kilometers, 20 kilometers, goes from east

• 1:56Speaker 02

  to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year, and so on. And, you know, we worked out why that happened, and there were other things like that. So it was a very enjoyable period. Until global warming.

• 2:12Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:17Speaker 03

  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 a army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American. And that was before World War II. So when I came to America as a small child, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. So I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge. And that's probably why I went into physics. I thought, this looks like interesting way to make a living. And if I can do it, I'll do it.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  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 served for a couple of years in Washington as Director of Energy 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.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  You know, we work for Senator Gore, we don't work for you. And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research. I can find other people who will come and talk to me, who would be glad to take my money.

• 3:58Joe Rogan?

  That's interesting. So Senator Gore has been involved in this whole climate thing for quite a long time then?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, very long.

• 4:04Joe Rogan?

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

• 4:06Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:07Joe Rogan?

  And when he made that movie, Inconvenient Truth, what year was that again? Jamie was like... Ninety-eight or something?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:15Joe Rogan?

  Something like that, ninety-nine? That... what is it? Oh, really? We're that off. Wow. Okay, so two thousand and six. So when he made that film, uh, he... there was always... when I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nimoy had a television show called In Search Of. Remember that show?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 4:33Joe Rogan?

  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 gonna freeze. This is terrifying." And then, somewhere along the line, it became global warming. And, uh, initially in the eighties, it was kinda funny. People were saying, "Well, hairspray, the more you use it, you could play golf deep into November."

• 4:56Speaker 02

  That was the ozone scare.

• 4:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it was the ozone, yes. But it was also part of global warming.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  A little bit, yeah.

• 5:01Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:14Joe Rogan?

  No?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  No, it was before, uh... No, it was a...

• 5:19Joe Rogan?

  It was study, in terms of academic study, for sure, but in terms of people panicking? When did CO2...

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Look, look, panicking, I have no idea.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  No, what happened was, uh, there was...

• 5:35Speaker 02

  I would say with the first Earth Day, nineteen seventy, 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.

• 5:54Speaker 02

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

• 6:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  And, uh, at that time, it was cooling, this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much. But, you know, you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something. And it was cooling from the nineteen thirties. Nineteen thirties were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the seventies. And that's why they were saying, "Well, you know, this is gonna lead to an ice age." And they focused on that for a while. And then in the seventies, and at that time, well, what do you say? You know, if you're worried about an ice age. They said, well, it'll be the sulfates emitted by coal burning.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Because that reflects light and the less light that we get, the colder we'll get. But then the temperature stopped cooling in the seventies and started warming. And that's when they said, well, after war, now scare people with warming. And you can't use the sulfates anymore. But the scientist called Tsuki 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,

• 7:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:54Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and this was a particular case. You wanted to deal, you know, the energy sector is trillions of dollars. Anything you can do to overturn it, to change it, replace fossil fuels, it's big bucks.

• 8:20Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  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, you know, eliminating CO2, net zero. They're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Well, if you're giving out that much, you don't need that much of your politician. All you need is millions for your campaigning. And all you're asking are the recipients of people who are getting the money that you are giving them, a half percent, a quarter percent, you're golden. So that's much better than giving out 100,000 and having all of...

• 9:12Joe Rogan?

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• 12:23Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Denier, yeah.

• 12:37Joe Rogan?

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

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Now, that's a very interesting phenomenon. I was looking at it. On the one hand, you're told the science is settled.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder, I mean, you went to college. How many climate scientists did you know? I mean, one thousand. 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 is settled. Who knows what that means?

• 13:22Joe Rogan?

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

• 13:27Speaker 02

  No. How would it remain static? That would involve a hugely reactive system.

• 13:34Joe Rogan?

  Doesn't make any sense. And but everyone seems to be buying this narrative that the science is settled, and the Earth is warming, we have to act now.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  You say everyone. I'm not so sure.

• 13:47Joe Rogan?

  A lot of politicians in particular.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Politicians are very attractive to this, because it gives them power.

• 13:53Joe Rogan?

  Right. And it's hard to define. And you can argue, and if you argue against it, you're a bad person. It's a good one.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  You do all that, but, you know, we spend part of a year in France. My wife is French. You know, ordinary people, once you get to the countryside, don't take this all that seriously.

• 14:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 14:13Speaker 02

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

• 14:22Joe Rogan?

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

• 14:32Speaker 02

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

• 14:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  I mean, it makes people poorer. It's making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it. And that involves billions of people. No, I mean, it's doing phenomenal damage and pain. But, you know, I think for politicians and for many people who are well off.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  They need something that gives meaning to their life. And saving the planet seems sufficiently

• 15:09Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  grandiose.

• 15:13Joe Rogan?

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

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheaper.

• 15:28Speaker 02

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

• 15:36Joe Rogan?

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

• 15:40Speaker 02

  They can't afford it.

• 15:41Joe Rogan?

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

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:43Joe Rogan?

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

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Coal, anything, whatever is available.

• 15:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  I mean, you know.

• 15:55Joe Rogan?

  So you think even though coal does pollute the environment and it releases particulates, right? It's, that's an issue, right?

• 16:02Speaker 02

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

• 16:20Joe Rogan?

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

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 16:25Joe Rogan?

  They're more efficient? Okay.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:27Joe Rogan?

  So stopping, so this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world Oh, yeah. that do not have electricity. And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants in.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 16:41Joe Rogan?

  And not bringing these people into the first world.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on, which are available in places. You know, there are places where you have, 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.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  They said, wasn't that a great thing? I said, that's the stupidest thing I've heard today. What's the point? Because at the time, what was replacing it? Compact fluorescents, which were awful. All they had to do was wait and do nothing and LEDs would come along and people would say, okay, I prefer that. Instead, they feel they have to do something.

• 17:38Joe Rogan?

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

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:42Joe Rogan?

  So incandescents aren't bad for you?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  They were simply less efficient than, you know, in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light. I mean, LEDs are phenomenal that way.

• 17:56Joe Rogan?

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

• 18:11Speaker 02

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

• 18:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna 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, like, we have a serious problem, we have to address it now, or there will be no America for our grandchildren. This is the thing that we keep hearing.

• 18:41Speaker 02

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

• 18:44Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  And so...

• 19:00Joe Rogan?

  Where'd this narrative come from, then? Trust the science?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  The success of science. In other words, this is a relatively new way to approach the world, I mean, a few hundred years. And the notion is, and I think it's been stated many times, you test things, and if they fail to predict correctly, they're wrong, so you find out what's wrong with them. You don't fudge them, you don't change the rules.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:53Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Well, that's also confusing technology with science.

• 20:11Joe Rogan?

  Right, the result of science. Yeah. Right, absolutely. Yeah, which is also an issue, right? And when you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  You mentioned Gore at the beginning.

• 20:25Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  You know, with that thing, he was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together. And it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2.

• 20:40Joe Rogan?

  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 the temperature was colder.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:50Joe Rogan?

  So it's not like we can point to, like, look at the dinosaurs. We don't want to live the way the dinosaurs lived. 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.

• 21:03Speaker 02

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

• 21:25Joe Rogan?

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

• 21:28Speaker 02

  He is, he wrote, he was a biologist at Harvard. He wrote about socio-biology. His specialty were ants and bees and things, social insects. And he was giving a talk, and...

• 21:46Speaker 02

  It came up for reasons that were not obvious to me. He was talking about the population of humanoids. And he was mentioning that you go back, you know, a few hundred thousand years, and you began the first humanoids, and they got to about a few million. But then during the last glacial maximum, the numbers went down to tens of thousands. There's a complete wipeout of humans. So I asked him afterwards, I said, "Do you think this could have anything to do with

• 22:29Speaker 02

  the fact that CO2 is so low that there was no food?" And his response was to turn around and walk away.

• 22:36Joe Rogan?

  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, on both the left and in academia, and even on the right. There's a lot of people on the right that believe that.

• 23:00Speaker 02

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

• 23:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, right. There's a consensus.

• 23:06Speaker 02

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

• 23:09Joe Rogan?

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• 23:54Joe Rogan?

  Happy Dad. Available nationwide across America and in Canada. Go to your local liquor store or visit happy dad.com. For a limited time, use the code ROGEN to buy one Happy Dad trucker hat and get one free. Enjoy a cold Happy Dad. Must be of legal drinking age. Please drink responsibly. Happy Dad Hard Seltzer Tea and Lemonade is a malt alcohol located in Orange County, California. You know, the weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been, you know, from core samples over a long period of time. It's this crazy wave and like, no one was controlling it back then. And we're supposed to believe that we can control it now, that we could do something about it now.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 02

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

• 24:54Speaker 02

  You know, in other words, uh, you know, for the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was five degrees. But that was because most of the earth was not affected, much of the earth anyway, very much. But, you know, somebody says one degree, a half degree. What's his name? Gutierrez at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for. I mean, doesn't anyone ask a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between, you know, nine AM and 10 AM.

• 25:34Joe Rogan?

  It does seem crazy. It's just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people. And what I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier. How much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative? So you can pass some bill that's called Save the World Climate, some crazy like that.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Well, they call it the, they call it the Inflation Reduction Act.

• 26:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, even better. Who doesn't want to reduce inflation?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:03Joe Rogan?

  And then next thing you know, there's windmills. Kill them whales and all kinds of nonsense. But the, the, the point being it's, it, it is a fascinating science. Like the science itself is fascinating.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:15Joe Rogan?

  You get rid of the ideology and you stop attaching this thing versus, you know, you're either pro-science or anti-science. Just look at the actual data of it. It's absolutely fascinating. And these minute changes, the fact that the procession of the equinoxes or the world, earth wobbles, like the whole thing is nuts. Like the whole temperature and it has to stay relatively stable in order to keep us alive in terms of like can't go too low, can't go too high. We're in this Goldilocks zone.

• 26:45Speaker 02

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

• 26:50Joe Rogan?

  It got really close, right?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  And what's interesting about that is as far as temperature goes. Okay, yeah, the poles have gotten much colder. You have ice covering Illinois, two kilometers of ice. That, 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 yet 100,000 years, people would sort of migrate to an area where it was now pleasant.

• 27:24Speaker 02

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

• 27:32Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so there wasn't enough plant life?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 02

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

• 27:46Joe Rogan?

  What's it at now, like 240?

• 27:48Speaker 02

  No, we're now 400 something. Yeah. 410.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  430 maybe today, yeah.

• 27:54Joe Rogan?

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

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Interesting question. Actually, quite a lot, but I mean, it took very funny forms. So, for instance, in, let's see, 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. So, I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it and published it, and the editor was immediately fired.

• 28:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the Iris Effect, that clouds, which were greenhouse affected, 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,

• 29:36Speaker 02

  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 is something called gatekeepers. I don't know, are you familiar with the release of emails from East Anglia?

• 30:05Joe Rogan?

  No, I'm not.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:39Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  And it had no impact at all.

• 30:43Joe Rogan?

  That sounds like that should be illegal.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, the whole business with, how shall 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. Real communication.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Today, I mean, there's much more formality in the papers. There's also, in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll or a study, how often are papers referred to? And it turns out the average paper is referred to once.

• 31:48Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 31:49Speaker 02

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

• 31:59Joe Rogan?

  How did you get involved in this?

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Well, I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy and that's what really sucked me into it. I had never paid much attention to climate science before, but I was spending a lot of money, taxpayers' money on it, and so I thought I ought to learn a little bit about it.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  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 climate scientists were completely different.

• 32:42Joe Rogan?

  Did anybody engage with you?

• 32:45Speaker 03

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

• 33:01Joe Rogan?

  So they would come to try to get funding from you, and they wouldn't answer questions?

• 33:05Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 33:06Joe Rogan?

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

• 33:14Speaker 03

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

• 33:32Joe Rogan?

  Me, Clinton. Clinton and Gore.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Clinton and Gore, yeah, that's right. So he, you know, Washington, fortunately, it's very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire because you can't find them in the org chart. So it took 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, you know, grateful in some sense for that.

• 33:59Joe Rogan?

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

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Well, you know, my field is actually hard physics, you know. I'm a nuclear physics-trained and have 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...

• 34:41Speaker 03

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

• 34:46Joe Rogan?

  Climate science.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  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. And so, you know, forming the company and getting it going and funded, used up most of my time. I didn't have time to look at climate. But eventually, that was behind me, and I invited Dick to come give a seminar at a colloquium at Princeton. And that's really when I began to get very interested in it. And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science, you know.

• 35:32Speaker 03

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

• 35:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  And if you have 100% consensus determining the truth, that's an even worse sign because, you know, the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation. And that wasn't true of the science, the climate science community. You know, they would predict all these things, and none of them ever happened. And there was no consequence, you know, one failure after another. And nothing ever happened. The funding kept pouring in.

• 36:06Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 36:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:31Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money. Dick mentioned that the love of money is the root of all evil. And universities, for example, at Princeton, we have enormous new building program. It's funded to a large extent from overhead, from climate grants, you know. And you're talking about, you know, not small change. You're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, for construction. So, it's like, you know, this famous drama of this Norwegian playwright, Enemy of the People, Ibsen. And...

• 37:07Speaker 03

  The point of the drama was there was this resort town in Norway where you would come and you would be treated at the spa. You'd drink the water and go home healthy. Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid. A local doctor said, you know, we're killing people. We're not curing them. And he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city. So it's that syndrome. It's an ancient human problem.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  So it's always been there. And it's there in spades with climate.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  And as a result, you have people, universities are almost entirely on the left. And so it's something they support. You know, the money end of it is sort of funny. I mean, I have the feeling at MIT that our president, Sally Kornbluth, you know, probably spends her time worrying about how she can use climate money to support the music department. I don't know.

• 38:32Joe Rogan?

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

• 38:38Speaker 02

  You know, it is fungible.

• 38:41Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 38:42Speaker 03

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

• 38:53Joe Rogan?

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• 39:37Joe Rogan?

  which helps you connect with top candidates sooner. Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now, you could try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. And if they take a step outside of the narrative and say, I think we need to reexamine what's going on with CO2 in the atmosphere, and it seems there's a politicalization of this subject, and that's bad for science, that's bad for education, it's bad for everything,

• 40:20Joe Rogan?

  let's take a step back, they would immediately lose so much.

• 40:23Speaker 03

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

• 40:27Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Some administrators.

• 40:29Speaker 02

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

• 40:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I think most people have no idea where grants go. They don't even think about it.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  No, I mean.

• 40:57Joe Rogan?

  And the amount of money that's involved.

• 40:58Speaker 02

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

• 41:15Joe Rogan?

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

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:21Joe Rogan?

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

• 41:26Speaker 02

  And some of it is reasonable.

• 41:29Joe Rogan?

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

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 02

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

• 41:50Speaker 02

  That often overrides everything else, you know, that you're raising money. I remember years ago, I started college at Rensselaer. And I made the mistake of mentioning to someone that I appreciated the fact, they never bothered me, I transferred out after my sophomore year. So it began bothering me. And I realized the president of Rensselaer was making over a million and a half dollars. This is years ago, probably making much more now. And the fundraiser came back to me and said, do you know how much money she raises? And I said, oh, so she's on commission.

• 42:30Joe Rogan?

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

• 42:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:14Joe Rogan?

  That makes sense.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:17Joe Rogan?

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

• 43:26Speaker 02

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

• 43:43Joe Rogan?

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

• 44:14Speaker 02

  I mean, as I mentioned before, I think for some people... Its importance is it gives quote meaning to their life.

• 44:23Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Let me back off that a little because one of the things that is sort of strange is the narrative itself deals with global temperature.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Not clear what that is. I mean, some average over the whole globe, how do you take it? What do you do with it? But more than that, what is climate?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  And, you know, there is a definition, it's an arbitrary definition. And it's that it's time, it's time variation on time scales longer than 30 years.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  It's pretty arbitrary. But it distinguishes it from weather, which is changes from day to day or week to week.

• 45:40Joe Rogan?

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

• 45:44Speaker 02

  They start calling it climate. Okay, now you can take data from every station.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  And filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years. That's called a low pass filter.

• 46:01Speaker 02

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

• 46:10Speaker 02

  And it turns out very poorly. Because most climate change, by that definition, is regional. So, for instance, in this area, let's say, the states like Louisiana, Alabama, Gulf States. They had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming. Nobody paid much attention to it, because that's normal. Different areas do different things. You have reasons why it's local. I mean, if you're near a coast, near a body of water, the circulations in the ocean are

• 46:53Speaker 02

  bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time, on time scales ranging from a few years for El Nino and so, to a thousand years. And so this has nothing to do with the global average. The whole business that the global average is an 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.

• 47:33Joe Rogan?

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

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, that's something there's argument about. I think, you know, for instance, a man called Milankovich, around 1940, made a convincing argument, and I think now it's correct, that orbital variations created a change in insulation, incoming sunlight, in the Arctic in summer, and that controlled the ice ages. And the thinking was pretty simple. He was saying that, you know, every winter is cold. Every winter has snow.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  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 you know, 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.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  They found that there were peaks in the solar, the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume, but that the time series were not lining upright. 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.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  So this was a theory, Milankovich, that I think has been reasonably sustained. But it, the people doing this got no credit, nothing. Cause you know, early in my career, these people would have been rewarded.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Now, it didn't contribute to global warming. Nobody pays attention to it.

• 50:14Speaker 03

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

• 50:19Speaker 03

  But you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue. The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it. It's all CO2, CO2 is the control knob. Don't confuse me with other possibilities. But nobody is quite sure about the sun. We have not got good records of the sun for a long time. So we're stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. And one of the proxies is when the sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere,

• 51:03Speaker 03

  things like carbon 14 or beryllium 10. These stick around for long, you know, thousands of years or longer. And you can, from that, infer how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. And they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant. It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon 14, you know, this radioactivity that's produced changes from year to year. If you don't take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon 14 dating. You know, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon 14 in it, and you get the wrong answer

• 51:47Speaker 03

  unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today. Because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies. There's a pretty good historical record of that. So it's clear the sun is always changing. And over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum,

• 52:08Speaker 03

  There have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, and that's particularly noticeable near the Arctic, you know, and high latitudes in the north. For example, my father's home in Scotland, I was a kid, I would walk up into the hills south of Edinburgh and you could see these farms from the year 1000 where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today. It was, it's too cold today, but it was clearly warming up in the year 1000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland. So what caused those? It was not people burning oil and coal, you know?

• 52:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 52:47Speaker 03

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

• 52:57Joe Rogan?

  That's absolutely fascinating. Now, when we have estimates like, say, of the Jurassic or

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:07Joe Rogan?

  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?

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:18Joe Rogan?

  So we can go back 65, 100 million years?

• 53:21Speaker 03

  You can go 500 million years.

• 53:23Joe Rogan?

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• 54:09Joe Rogan?

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• 55:06Speaker 03

  Evidence of ice ages, absolutely. They've come and gone.

• 55:10Joe Rogan?

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

• 55:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  What's special about the recent ice ages is they're pretty periodic. So for 700,000 years, almost every 100,000 years, you have a cycle.

• 55:32Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 55:33Speaker 02

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

• 55:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 55:50Speaker 03

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

• 55:53Joe Rogan?

  And so, and there's also no way to track it. Like, there's no way to tell what's gonna happen to the sun. They have some sort of an understanding that there's increased activity.

• 56:03Speaker 02

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

• 56:08Joe Rogan?

  Could have been many factors.

• 56:09Speaker 03

  Well, you know.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  How should I put it? With the ice ages, as I say, orbital theory was the main thing.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  The fact that you have, you know, 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.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said, that he correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi-periodic, really only began three million years or so ago, and at first, they were oscillating a lot faster than today. And that was approximately the time that the isthmus of Panama closed. So, one of the suspicions is that when the Panama isthmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat in things like the Gulf Stream. For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe.

• 57:20Speaker 03

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

• 57:24Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 57:25Speaker 03

  But, you know, we've set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years by this manic focus on CO2. If your theory doesn't have CO2 in it, forget it, you know, you won't get funding. And so, the true answer, I mean, to me, you know, there was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was phlogiston. There was this magic subject, you know, nonexistent, but everyone had to believe in phlogiston. And it turned out it was nonsense, it wasn't there at all, but you couldn't get anyone to support you unless you believed in phlogiston. So, I call this the phlogiston era of climate science, where phlogiston is CO2.

• 58:07Joe Rogan?

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

• 58:29Speaker 03

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

• 58:47Joe Rogan?

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

• 58:50Speaker 03

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

• 59:14Joe Rogan?

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

• 59:24Speaker 03

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

• 59:37Speaker 02

  There are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general. One of them is numbers. I mean, it isn't 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 Salve conference.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  This is the golden age of physics. If you quintupled the number of people working on physics, would you have improved the situation? I doubt it. And so, you know, I think freedom is much more important than just piling on. There's the photo. Yeah. You have that. Great.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  There they are.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Not quite. It's not the same.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  But that's a Salve conference, absolutely.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Now, the 1929 had the Curies.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Pierre might be there.

• 1:01:02Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, I wondered at times, you know, when you had

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  the Soviet competition with the US and they were the first ones into space. And we suddenly began a program to get more and more kids to get into STEM.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  That has its downside.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much. And the second thing is with peer review. I mean, peer review is new. I mean, it wasn't that common before World War II.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  But people have pointed out, it has its virtues. But, you know, you can see the Royal Meteorological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions. And the instructions were, you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify, or if it's plagiarized. It's repeating something that already exists. And that was pretty fair. Because how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not, or so on? That's asking too much of that.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  But today, peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  If you're not going with the flow.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  You can get rejected. And that's, a lot of things structurally need to be, I think, rethought a little bit. The physicists have done pretty well with archive, where they have a publication vehicle using the internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what's up on it. But all sorts of things like that need to happen. I mean, what Will is saying is true, I'm sure. Science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this.

• 1:03:28Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  Well, it's happened many times in the past, Joe. Climate is only the most recent.

• 1:04:04Joe Rogan?

  So it's just a natural thing that happens?

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Well, for example, there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe, where the claim was that the great gene pool, you know, the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low-Q Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen. It was all completely nonsense, but they had learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that, and you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being great eugenicist, you know, protecting the American genome, and it was all nonsense. It was just complete bullshit.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  And yet, and the only thing that stopped it really was, was the Nazis, because they took it over with a vengeance, you know? They were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and Britain, and they took it to its, you know, absurd extreme.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:05:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  No, I mean...

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  What Will is saying, I mean, 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

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

• 1:06:07Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:28Joe Rogan?

  We, you know, 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 kind of stuff, and you're just like, oh, this has always been a problem.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  You're dealing with people.

• 1:06:44Joe Rogan?

  Human beings. That's the problem, right? That's getting to the heart of the problem.

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, Joe says this famous quote by Immanuel Kant, you know, from the crooked timber of mankind, "No straight thing was ever made."

• 1:06:59Joe Rogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:04Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  Well, the trouble is, you know, when something like eugenics comes around.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  The population is told that this is science.

• 1:07:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:07:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  And so I don't know how you distinguish it at that time from science. Today, there are books on it, and you know, 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.

• 1:08:13Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:28Joe Rogan?

  To think of where we would be today.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:42Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, when you put things in the hands of politicians, there is a disconnect. I mean, the business with the light bulbs I mentioned.

• 1:09:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  It wasn't malice, it was ignorance. And you combine ignorance with power, and you often get nonsense.

• 1:09:10Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Dick has often made the point, which I agree with, that politicians and sort of society leaders are the worst in situations like this. The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable.

• 1:09:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  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, you know? It was not the common people.

• 1:09:42Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever read into that at all?

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

• 1:09:45Joe Rogan?

  What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory?

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  Well...

• 1:09:51Joe Rogan?

  Does it make sense?

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  I don't know. Most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way. And, you know, they had these visions of the person they were accused consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of obscene things. And that was accepted as testimony. It was called spectral evidence. And so when

• 1:10:16Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  When finally the trials were stopped, it wasn't for the right reason, which is that there's no such thing as witches. You know, they were stopped because spectral evidence, you know, was shaky. It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point. So it was getting very dangerous. Yeah, but one of them was selling a book on how to detect witches, Cotton Mather.

• 1:10:40Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'd 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.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  Right. That's right. Malice Maleficorem, you know, the Hammer of the Evil Doers. That was the first book on witches.

• 1:10:57Joe Rogan?

  What I'd read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost and that they believed this late frost might have contributed to ergot growth. Because apparently that's, 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. They're eating LSD-laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch. But either way.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Joe Rogan?

  It took

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:32Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know more about the behind the scenes. Yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  No, but I mean, people, I think what Will is saying is there are people who always want to have a chance to do in their neighbor.

• 1:11:45Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:16Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, but even with political figures, I'm always surprised. I mean, it seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear probably does not mean well.

• 1:12:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  And yet, we continually fall for it.

• 1:12:39Joe Rogan?

  Over and over again, yeah, all of them. And, you know, other countries do the same pattern.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:45Joe Rogan?

  That's what's dark. It just seems like we're terrified of being terrified. And we want safety. We want someone comes along and scares the shit out of us and vows to protect us.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:12:56Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Well, children do this all the time. Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself.

• 1:13:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, there is also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world. But when you have a, 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, like, the things that give young people the most anxiety? And climate is at the very top of that list.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:13:44Joe Rogan?

  And just to live in constant fear.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Joe Rogan?

  Like, do you think they're stupid? Do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumbass because he's buying these giant mansions like right on the ocean? Like, do you really think the water- This episode is brought to you by the mosquito bowl. Here's a story that's pretty incredible. After Pearl Harbor, four of the best college football players in America walk away from promising NFL careers to enlist in the Marines and fight in World War II. And the craziest part, it's a true story. These guys had their whole lives ahead of them, but traded the glory of the gridiron for the brutal reality of combat, where the stakes were life and death. Directed by Peter Berg, the guy behind Friday Night Lights, and starring Nicholas Galitzine,

• 1:14:34Joe Rogan?

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• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  How should I put it? I mean, you know- Even the people who are pushing it at MIT, I mean, buy houses on the shore.

• 1:15:56Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  They go back much further than that.

• 1:16:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, Joe, it's true, CO2 level is rising. It's different at different shores because the land is also rising and sinking.

• 1:16:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  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, not changing very much.

• 1:16:38Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  That's right, well.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's always variable.

• 1:16:47Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:01Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  No, you know.

• 1:17:04Joe Rogan?

  Al Gore was just off by a little bit. He's just, give him some decades, he'll be vindicated.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:25Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, especially when you invented 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.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:17:36Joe Rogan?

  Because it's not like there's a higher power. It's, it's, everyone's just terrified and you have to change everything you do now.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Because you're guilty.

• 1:17:45Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Joe Rogan?

  It's a religious thing, or a cult-like thing.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:18:23Joe Rogan?

  And they don't really, it's not like they've studied it a lot, and like, yeah, it's really interesting, and this is why I think that we've got to reduce CO2. And you have like this informed discussion with someone, you go, oh, okay. So when did you start reading about this? What book was that? Where, you know, did you see this? And did you see that? And, okay. And you, now you're having an informed discussion, but that's not what it's like. It's like you bring it up, and they're like, oh, God. Climate change is settled. Climate change is settled. Okay? You don't believe in, even Bernie, when I had him on, while he was talking about climate change is a real, is a giant problem, and 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 hundred, but if you look at like the peaks and valleys, the main thing is like, this has never been static. And I said to Bernie, I'm like, there's a lot of money in this, Bernie.

• 1:19:08Joe Rogan?

  Like, you've got to admit this. Like, this isn't something that we have to act on now to save each other. It might be something that we're being fucked with. And that's what it seems like to me. It's like-

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:16Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  I mean, for instance, you know, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole, that's actually handled in a third-year graduate course.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  You know, it deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject. And it's a real problem in a field, it's true throughout science, where you're trusting people to behave, I think, decently. But the material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone. And how you deal with it, how you approximate, I mean, the same is true with nuclear power, with other things.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  These are technical issues, they're not trivial, and you're asking, in a democratic society, for people to make decisions. It's a tough issue. It involves a certain amount of trust, and what we're describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loved so much, "Trust but verify."

• 1:21:45Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Speaker 03

  Something about climate.

• 1:21:52Joe Rogan?

  Right. That's what's so frustrating about this conversation, when you have it with people that are indoctrinated. When they're like, "Climate change is a giant issue." Like, there's so many times I've seen, they're very fun YouTube videos where they catch people at these protests, and some joker just starts interviewing them, and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:13Joe Rogan?

  It's fascinating, then, you left the house, like, you had nothing better to do. You don't know why you're protesting, but you're there, and you got a sign, and you still don't even understand it. That's how powerful this thing has become in our society. And the fact that they've been so, that the powers that be, or whoever is involved, has been so successful at pushing this narrative, that it's number, one of the number-one anxieties that young people have about the future, in a place where we may very well be involved in wars. Like, but the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency.

• 1:22:48Joe Rogan?

  How dare you!

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Right. There you go.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  But you notice how quickly she changed.

• 1:22:55Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  It's not just digest. I mean, it's, how many people can solve partial differential equations? I mean, this is one of the complaints I have, which is sort of odd. People blame this on models. And what the models are doing is they're taking the equations of fluid mechanics, something called the Navier-Stokes equation, and they're doing it by dividing it into discrete intervals and seeing how things change with distance and time and so on. And one of the things that we know is no one has ever proven

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  that this actually leads to the solution.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things and so on. Anyways, they do this, and they do, I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can. And they get answers that will often be wrong. But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Koonin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100. That's not a great deal. It's not the end of the earth. You're already much richer than you are today. So what's the panic? And it's true, the models don't give you anything to be that panicked over. So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's a confusing situation. I mean, the models have a use. They just shouldn't be used to predict exactly what the future is. You can use them to see what interacts with what, and then study it further.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  Joe, let me just say a little more about what Dick commented on the Navier-Stokes equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans. And it really is a very hard mathematical problem to solve because they're not only partial differential equations, they're what are called nonlinear partial differential equations. And so there's a joke about Werner Heisenberg, who was the inventor of quantum mechanics, a very bright guy, and he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  War II. And so he was captured by the Americans and the British, and because of this activity, was forbidden to work on nuclear physics later, you know, after the victory.

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics, on solving the Navier-Stokes equation. And he was, as I said, a tremendously talented physicist, but he found it very hard. He didn't make very much progress because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations. And so one of his students supposedly said to him, "Well, you know, Professor Heisenberg, they say that if you've been a good physicist, when you die and you go to heaven, that the Almighty allows you to ask two questions, and he will answer any question you ask. And what will you ask him?"

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:53Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

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

• 1:28:32Speaker 02

  Well, no. Lorenz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable.

• 1:28:43Speaker 02

  Whether that's true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics and detail. I mean, you know, for instance, it wouldn't be a surprise if you're looking at a bubbling brook and you have all those little eddies and so on. 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?

• 1:29:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:29:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that one's funny.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  I don't think it works that way.

• 1:29:41Joe Rogan?

  Of course not, but it's funny when people like to do that.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  What I think he meant was rather simpler than that. You know, the hurricane is likely to occur. The flipping of a butterfly's wings might have actually changed it from one day to another. It wouldn't, it would have an influence downstream.

• 1:30:02Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  I think that's how it will end, yes. I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country.

• 1:30:43Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Right. All of their nuclear power plants.

• 1:30:49Joe Rogan?

  Oh, God.

• 1:30:52Joe Rogan?

  And they did it all for green energy?

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  That makes no sense.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  They're real fanatics, yeah.

• 1:31:18Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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, you know, we've taken a wrong turn here.

• 1:31:38Joe Rogan?

  I can't believe they blew their plants up. That's nuts.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  They did.

• 1:31:42Joe Rogan?

  And what are they replacing with right now? You have Russian gas?

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Windmills.

• 1:31:46Joe Rogan?

  Windmills?

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, and imported it.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  But you're right, they're importing fossil fuels.

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:58Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  They're making them in Hungary.

• 1:32:08Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  Had the Nazis.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Had the Nazis, exactly. And Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few German theologians who had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany. He was invited to come to the 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 Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity. But his view was that all of these...

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Nazi supporters, they didn't really believe in it all, they were just dumb. You know, it's hard for me, when I first read about this, I couldn't believe it. But the more I look at it, I think that every nation has the problem that most of us are pretty stupid.

• 1:33:13Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:33:17Joe Rogan?

  And we could point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now. And that people wholeheartedly believe in that makes zero sense.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:26Joe Rogan?

  They could go with that. And you would go, okay, there's some part of this has to be attributed to low intelligence. So like, what percentage of people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves? It's not a small number, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, whatever percentage it is. It's enough where it's a giant problem.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, meth departments are famous though.

• 1:34:05Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 1:34:19Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:29Joe Rogan?

  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. Doesn't mean that they're not intelligent, it's just it's a different kind of intelligence.

• 1:34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that makes the world a more interesting place by a lot.

• 1:34:56Joe Rogan?

  It really does. But what's scary is, when you count on the people that are supposed to be the people that are obsessed in 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.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  Oh, we started with Gore.

• 1:35:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  And Gore, you know, flunked out of Harvard.

• 1:35:19Joe Rogan?

  Did he?

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And his father, who was a senator, got him back in. I was teaching there at the time.

• 1:35:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, really? Interesting.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:44Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:52Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:36:35Joe Rogan?

  And

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:36:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The social media aspect of it is a new problem. Another new problem is AI and fakes. Like, you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles. And it's like, it's very, it takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today. And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, especially climate change.

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

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• 1:37:30Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:14Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:39:11Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  And that shows that, you know, it was fake. Because it's trivial. I mean, if you looked it up, the average month, there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once-in-a-hundred-year events. So each of them makes for a good video. And you have four or five a month, and they each only won this in 100 years. And people aren't putting it together that, you know, once-in-a-hundred-year events occurring four or five times a month.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  But, you know, 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.

• 1:40:09Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, right. It's extreme weather events. I keep, that's what I keep hearing. The hurricanes are getting stronger.

• 1:40:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:14Joe Rogan?

  They're getting more frequent. And they repeat that, and I don't think that's necessarily true.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  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 was 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."

• 1:40:56Joe Rogan?

  Hmm. God. Now, when people like Bill Gates are talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the earth and protect us from the sun's rays, like, where is all that coming from? Especially if, like, you would imagine, even-

• 1:41:15Speaker 02

  I think Will said, "It comes from dumbness."

• 1:41:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, I'm sure, but, but even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms. Like, hey, a few people can't make a decision that will literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all.

• 1:41:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Joe Rogan?

  Why? Because you were made Microsoft? Like, why do you get to do this? That seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on. And they would have to be, like, really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  Well, I'd have, 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.

• 1:41:58Joe Rogan?

  The fear is that someone would let him, though. The fear is that a country would let him. You get the right politicians in place and the right fear mongering in place and you let him 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.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:42:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  You know, even Bill Gates probably can't afford that and I'm not sure the US treasurer could either.

• 1:42:43Joe Rogan?

  So it's just theoretical at this point?

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think, you know, it's an interesting thing. You're pointing that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeur based on the fact that he's fabulously wealthy.

• 1:42:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  But as a practical matter, that particular approach probably is not going to be as dangerous as you think. It won't work.

• 1:43:10Joe Rogan?

  It won't work.

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:12Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:43:30Joe Rogan?

  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, there's a PR campaign. It's a PR campaign for a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money. That's what this is all about. And the more you get on board, the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff and the more money these companies make. And the whole thing is about money.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  Much of it is money.

• 1:44:01Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  And, you know, money and its transferability and fungibility, its influence, its feedbacks.

• 1:44:32Joe Rogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's always been true.

• 1:44:35Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  Joel, let me bring up another targeted group, and that is farmers and ranchers, you know, because of their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming. Just a couple 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 ranchland back into forest, you know, to save the planet. And otherwise, they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  And so the ranchers were worried that they're going to be put out of business and their families put out of business. And so I was there for a week, and I talked to the president. And luckily, it turned out they had a very sensible president, and he didn't need me to recognize 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, you know, to go to hell. And they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay. So there were no consequences, and the ranchers did not suffer. But you know, everybody's under the gun.

• 1:46:01Speaker 02

  But there were consequences in Ireland.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:05Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  They had to kill half their cattle.

• 1:46:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, which is

• 1:46:09Speaker 02

  nonsense.

• 1:46:09Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  At least carbon neutral.

• 1:46:21Joe Rogan?

  At least carbon neutral and possibly contrib- it's like the whole thing is nature. This is how 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 gonna kill us all, we need to kill all the cows, like, who are you? Like, who's saying this? And how'd you get to talk? Like, this is, how'd you get to kill half their cows? Like, you should go to jail.

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  They should go to jail.

• 1:46:52Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:47:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it might be the worst.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:03Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:47:18Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, Will has worked on this and others, but you know, the methane thing is an example of innumeracy.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO2.

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  You know, somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, simple arithmetic. They just can't do simple arithmetic, yeah.

• 1:48:07Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

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

• 1:49:06Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:49:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:49:14Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, she was a good girl.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:18Joe Rogan?

  Follow the rules.

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you know Dex's point about forbidding questioning, it's just unbelievable. When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia and the grand old man there was...

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  Robbie.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  Robbie, I, I Robbie. And Robbie came from an Eastern European Jewish family and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education. And so he would always tell me, you know, when I'd go home from school every day, my mother wouldn't ask me, "What did you learn today in school, Izzy?" She called him Izzy, Isador. And he would tell her and then she would say, "And did you ask a good question today?"

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  So I said she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question, which would mean 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 it's, he turned out very well as a result.

• 1:50:28Joe Rogan?

  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...

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:50:41Joe Rogan?

  That's, that's terrible. Because you know, you'd have thought with the internet, one of the things is the internet's gonna be a balanced resource or resource of information. You're gonna 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.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  That's right. Now, I mean, the internet, not surprisingly, was an unpredictable phenomenon.

• 1:51:08Joe Rogan?

  Yes. Completely.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, you saw it, but, well, you're seeing it yourself. I mean, you have media, they were looking for a hundred thousand subscribers. With the internet, you're dealing with millions, and that's considered small in some cases.

• 1:51:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's people like Mr. Beast, some fun guy on YouTube that I think he has, what does he have, a hundred and, how many million subscribers does he have? Something insane. Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Joe Rogan?

  Nobody saw it coming. Did it on his own. Yeah, it's, it's a weird time. And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media, which is also disturbing.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  Which is also deserved.

• 1:51:57Joe Rogan?

  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 these, 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.

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure about this, but my recollection was, as a kid in New York, that you had newspapers like the New York Times that were always sort of center right, left. But you had others, the Journal American and so on.

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  And they differed in their coverage, but on the whole, they covered the same news. If something happened, it would appear in both. I realize in retrospect, that wasn't always true. But today, I have the feeling that if I look at The Post in New York, or The New York Times, I'm looking at two different worlds.

• 1:53:07Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  And there's something wrong with that.

• 1:53:11Joe Rogan?

  Very. Yeah, something very wrong with it. And I don't, 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, you're seeing a massive dissolving of trust in these main, like, when I was a kid, I used to deliver The New York Times. And I delivered The Boston Globe, but I delivered The New York Times as well, because it was prestigious. I thought it was cool to deliver The New York Times. And it was a long route. I had, it was a lot longer than my Boston Globe route.

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  Did you have to deliver it on Sunday as well?

• 1:53:47Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  I think people have pointed out the correct reason for that. The end of the classified ads.

• 1:54:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  They used to have to satisfy the people paying for ads.

• 1:54:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:54:23Speaker 02

  Now, they have to satisfy their readers. And so, the readers only want to hear one thing.

• 1:54:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:32Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:54:51Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:54:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:31Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:50Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:55:56Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 1:55:57Joe Rogan?

  What did he say exactly?

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:02Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Well, it's, I think it's these kind of 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 also question it, we get a kind of understanding of this pattern that does go back to, like, what you were talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history. You go, there's, there's times where you're on the wrong side of things. You don't realize it because you've been lied to, and you've been, you know, these politicians are kind of captured.

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  But it's also the abuse of science.

• 1:56:48Speaker 02

  It's too much of a temptation for politicians. I mean, science, it's hard to say, but you know, if there are a way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority. It's a methodology. And that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology, you're anti-science.

• 1:57:21Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:26Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  I think you're hitting on something important. You can't do it every place. Can't. 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.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, let me add to that. I think one of the great strengths of American science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington. But you know, you could get funding from the National Science Foundation, or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research, or from some other 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 NSAP, 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

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  Vitality of science and technology in a country. And people used to talk, we need an office of science. I thought that was a terrible idea, you know, to, that means one point failure, you know, there was someone in a position to throttle, you know, some important thing.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:59:37Joe Rogan?

  Money starts talking, baby.

• 1:59:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, money.

• 1:59:39Joe Rogan?

  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 ninety-three billion dollars in loans?

• 1:59:53Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:59Joe Rogan?

  Like, more than had been given out in the last fifteen years?

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:05Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:13Joe Rogan?

  It's kind of funny.

• 2:00:15Speaker 03

  Pathetic, yeah.

• 2:00:16Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:39Joe Rogan?

  I believe you.

• 2:00:42Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how it evolved. I think in the nineties, there was still a certain openness about it. And, you know, if there were a conference, people on both sides would be invited and so on. Somehow, by the twenty-first century, it came down hard.

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  There was absolutely nothing open anymore.

• 2:01:22Speaker 03

  But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, it's 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 Lindzen to give this talk?" And I said, "Well, I'm the son of a bitch, get out of my office."

• 2:01:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow. And what, did you have to, did you try to engage with him at all about why you were upset? Why he was upset, rather?

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:01:54Joe Rogan?

  Just it wasn't even worth it?

• 2:01:55Speaker 03

  It wasn't worth it, yeah.

• 2:01:57Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:02:03Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:09Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:02:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, this was the political polarization.

• 2:02:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. But it's also, there's no deviation. There's no people like, eh, you know, everybody's either one side or the other, all in or not. And if you're not, you get cast out of the kingdom, it's very weird. It's just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities, if someone come up to you and say...

• 2:02:35Speaker 02

  I think it's worse in universities.

• 2:02:37Joe Rogan?

  Wow. How did that get started? Like, when did, so was it the same thing as like, the climate, with everything? Like, somewhere around the 21st century? Like, when?

• 2:02:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, you know, I'll take something that was much less publicized. The, what was the program with your device?

• 2:03:02Speaker 03

  Oh, the, the Star Wars...

• 2:03:07Speaker 02

  Star Wars.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  The sodium guide star?

• 2:03:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

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

• 2:03:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, what Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because early in the Star Wars era, we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles, and so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high-power lasers. And so during a classified summer study in 1982, there were some people from the Air Force, some generals and technical people, and talked about the problem is if you even have a beautiful blue clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  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 a star does the same thing. When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point, you get lots of speckles. And so astronomers knew how to solve that. The problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere, there are little warm patches and cool patches, and so what you can do is you reflect the incoming starlight from a anti-wrinkled mirror, and so it comes in wrinkled, it bounces, it's nice and flat,

• 2:04:50Speaker 03

  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 worked for a degree.

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  or two off the direction of the correcting stars and so unless the Russians attacked us from the during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies we couldn't do anything with our lasers.

• 2:05:46Joe Rogan?

  Oh wow.

• 2:05:47Speaker 03

  So I 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 a hundred kilometers and we now have lasers that will excite that and so you can make a yellow star that's plenty bright enough to use that light to adjust the mirror wherever you like and nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during that. This was top secret meeting.

• 2:06:11Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:06:16Speaker 03

  A bright, 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.

• 2:06:26Joe Rogan?

  And what would this be made out of?

• 2:06:27Speaker 03

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

• 2:07:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow. That's fascinating.

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

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

• 2:07:29Joe Rogan?

  Wow, look at that, right there.

• 2:07:31Speaker 03

  Oh, there it is, yeah.

• 2:07:33Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:07:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's 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.

• 2:07:45Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  Well, I couldn't discuss it was highly classified, so I couldn't even mention it until about nineteen ninety-five, I think, forty, ninety-four, ninety-five, when it was declassified. But I'd invented it, you know, twelve years earlier.

• 2:08:03Speaker 02

  But, you know, the point was, in academia, you could not discuss defensive issues.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  You couldn't discuss working for defense of the country. That was, you know, somehow immoral, defending the country. I wasn't trying to attack Russia, I was trying to defend ourselves.

• 2:08:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

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

• 2:08:35Joe Rogan?

  Right, yeah.

• 2:08:37Speaker 02

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

• 2:08:53Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:08:57Speaker 02

  Now, it's, you know, if you probe, I think, into these issues, you realize that climate is an extreme case, but politics interfacing science is not new.

• 2:09:13Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  Don't. Where is much, where is much part of crooked timber of mankind as anyone else?

• 2:09:53Joe Rogan?

  It's such a great quote.

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I've often mentioned, I mean, my family, you know, emigrated here from Germany, thirty-eight, but when Hitler came to power in thirty-three, every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood.

• 2:10:16Speaker 02

  Before Hitler even asked. So universities are not bastions of independent thinking.

• 2:10:27Joe Rogan?

  What could be done to make them more so?

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  You know, the Canadians did something that I thought had potential. Every faculty member, especially junior faculty, immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for. And so, in that system, every one of their faculty could function as a research scientist, you know. Students were paid for otherwise, and there at least one link in the chain of influence was broken. You had an open system there.

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  Even there, though, other pressures came to bear. But, you know, it seemed like a good idea.

• 2:11:22Joe Rogan?

  Or at least a better idea.

• 2:11:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:26Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:11:35Speaker 03

  You know, Joel.

• 2:11:37Joe Rogan?

  Dick just gave up.

• 2:11:39Speaker 03

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

• 2:12:20Joe Rogan?

  Better than all the other ones.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:22Joe Rogan?

  But it amazingly astute.

• 2:12:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:24Speaker 02

  Federalist Papers, I mean, they've held up well.

• 2:12:28Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  Well, trust but verify.

• 2:12:40Speaker 02

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

• 2:12:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. You mean destroying the world with climate change?

• 2:12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:55Joe Rogan?

  It's not really what it is. It's very over-magnified.

• 2:12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, how shall I put it? Its origins were almost entirely political. I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all.

• 2:13:13Speaker 02

  I, you know, we're discussing, you know, can it happen? Is this, is it warming? Is it cooling? Is extreme weather increasing? It's amazing to me that politicians can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.

• 2:13:38Joe Rogan?

  I wonder what it, how it would have worked if it wasn't for An Inconvenient Truth? If that movie hadn't been made? I wonder, because sometimes people need something like that in that sort of a form for it to really take hold as an idea?

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:14:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:07Speaker 02

  But it is also the confluence, you know, the UN really got interested in it. You had the World Meteorological Organization. All of them saw something they could gain in it. And so it began to seem almost overwhelming. But it did, you know, it reached the right people. I mean, the funding agencies, the NSF got taken over almost immediately. NASA took about 10 years. Department of Energy took 10 years, but they worked on it.

• 2:14:43Joe Rogan?

  It's kind of stunning. At least from the outside, you know, from my perspective, it's kind of stunning. It's stunning how successful it is. And again, like I said, if you're in polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up, "Well, we've got to do something about climate change."

• 2:14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:57Joe Rogan?

  And you just go, like, the record skips, like, "How much do you know?"

• 2:15:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:15:02Joe Rogan?

  It turns out, very little, most people. And then it turns out, according to you, it's almost impossible. Possible to figure out anyway, the actual.

• 2:15:08Speaker 02

  No, no, I mean, the notion that there's a crisis has taken hold.

• 2:15:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:15:13Speaker 02

  Even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis.

• 2:15:16Joe Rogan?

  And the main movie that started off that crisis from two thousand and six is entirely wrong. All of its predictions.

• 2:15:22Speaker 02

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

• 2:15:29Speaker 02

  But it provides visuals, visuals.

• 2:15:32Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:15:47Speaker 02

  Oh. I mean, growing up in the Bronx. In the forties.

• 2:15:55Speaker 02

  Every autumn, there were hunger 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 thirty years, forty, fifty years.

• 2:16:12Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:16:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:16Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  But then thirty-eight was a gigantic hurricane. And I was born in a town on a lake in New Massachusetts called. Lake Chagagagagman, Chagagagshabunagagman.

• 2:16:37Joe Rogan?

  That's a real name?

• 2:16:38Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a real name.

• 2:16:39Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:16:40Speaker 02

  But at any rate, in that lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of nineteen thirty-eight.

• 2:16:47Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Really?

• 2:16:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:51Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

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

• 2:16:59Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:01Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:17:04Speaker 02

  No, I mean. If, how shall I put it, I'm glad it came then, not now, I suppose. If it came now, it would be proof.

• 2:17:13Speaker 03

  Right. Actually, the worst hurricane on record on the east coast was the last year of the American Revolution, and it had a big impact on winning the war. What happened was this enormous hurricane, mostly in the Caribbean, but it wiped out the British fleet, it wiped out the French fleet, there was nothing left, you know.

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:17:37Speaker 03

  It was just tremendous hurricane. And so, the reason it affected the war was the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet, so that when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be rescued, you know, with all of the partisans coming after him. He didn't worry about the French, and so, but the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane, they had had 12 months, and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade them out of the Chesapeake.

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  And when Cornwallis got there, he was trapped, because he could, the British couldn't come in to rescue him, you know, from Rhode Island or wherever they were. And so, he had no choice, he had to surrender. Wow. That was the end of the war, and we can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly.

• 2:18:37Speaker 02

  As well as the French.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  The French, and the French, God bless, God bless the French, yeah.

• 2:18:40Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:18:45Speaker 03

  Thirty-four, thirty-five.

• 2:18:46Joe Rogan?

  Nineteen thirty, what was it like then?

• 2:18:48Speaker 03

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

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19:02Speaker 02

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

• 2:19:17Joe Rogan?

  But globally, yeah, what you're saying completely makes sense. It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature unless you're studying other planets. Yeah. Yeah. What matters is where people live. Right. What's the temperature there? Yeah. Well, um, listen, gentlemen, I really appreciate your bravery and talking about this stuff and sharing all this information. Hope for the best. Very enlightening. Yeah, it helps. These kind of conversations, they move the needle. They really do. So I really appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thanks for being here. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. You're good. Bye, everybody.

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

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