Speaker 1: So yesterday I saw this news story and I want
Speaker 1: to I want to just read part of it in
Speaker 1: a dramatic way to bring my next guest onto the show.
Speaker 1: It's from CBS News. Nearly four hundred scientists across the
Speaker 1: United States were in four Monday afternoon that their services
Speaker 1: were no longer needed to help write a major report
Speaker 1: on climate change for the federal government. The report, known
Speaker 1: as the National Climate Assessment, is a major publication produced
Speaker 1: every four years that summarizes the impacts of climate change
Speaker 1: in the United States, and it is congressionally mandated under
Speaker 1: the Global Change Research Act of nineteen ninety. The sixth
Speaker 1: edition is scheduled for publication in twenty twenty seven, and
Speaker 1: preparations have been underway for months to meet their deadline.
Speaker 2: And then it goes on from there.
Speaker 1: But as I kept reading, the first person they got
Speaker 1: a comment from was from the Environmental Defense Fund, So
Speaker 1: already I knew exactly what the rest of the story
Speaker 1: was going to say. Okay, And they go on to
Speaker 1: quote climate scientists after climate scientists after climate scientists.
Speaker 2: Doctor Robert Kopp, a climate.
Speaker 1: Scientist and professors at rutgost University who was also working
Speaker 1: on the current assessment said, I feel badly for the
Speaker 1: federal leaders who have put a lot of time into this,
Speaker 1: but to some extent, I think the writing was on
Speaker 1: the wall when they.
Speaker 2: Dismissed the support staff a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: I think now it's clear many of the authors would
Speaker 1: like to see an up to date evidence based report.
Speaker 2: Do they really though?
Speaker 1: Joining me now from the Irrational Fear substack, doctor Matthew Willicky,
Speaker 1: Doctor Matthew, Welcome back, first of all to the show.
Speaker 1: It was very interesting that I saw this article and
Speaker 1: then almost immediately saw your column from the other side.
Speaker 1: Should we say welcome back my friend.
Speaker 3: Thanks Mandy. I enjoyed you turned into I think like
Speaker 3: a bit or englishly.
Speaker 1: You know what though, that's my best dramatic reading voice.
Speaker 1: I think it adds gravitas to whatever I'm reading.
Speaker 4: Well, thanks for having me back.
Speaker 3: You're absolutely right, though, I mean, this is kind of
Speaker 3: peddled as a scientific document, and you can hear the
Speaker 3: scientists saying that, you know, this is this is the science,
Speaker 3: but it's not pure reviewed it. It does go through
Speaker 3: no critical analysis, and when I looked at it, I
Speaker 3: found blaring contradictions right inside of it. I mean, they showed,
Speaker 3: for example, heat waves as the observable data, and to
Speaker 3: my surprise, heat waves have gone down dramatically since two
Speaker 3: thousand and two to twenty twenty one. In this time
Speaker 3: period relative to their baseline, they had gone down. I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, like, everywhere except the southeast, they've gone down.
Speaker 3: And so then I scrolled down maybe another page or two,
Speaker 3: and they had their projections of heat waves, and their.
Speaker 4: Projections had it going up everywhere.
Speaker 3: And so they're claiming the same thing has been happening
Speaker 3: over the same time period, but the opposite result will
Speaker 3: have And so then I was kind of shocked by that.
Speaker 3: I was like, you're kind of contradictory, contradictory in your
Speaker 3: own analysis. And so I went back to the very
Speaker 3: first National Climate Assessment that came out in two thousand
Speaker 3: and the biggest caveat on that, the large kind of
Speaker 3: conclusion was that heat waves were going to increase and
Speaker 3: that was going to have a huge societal impact. And
Speaker 3: yet in the fifth assessment they came out in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three, they admit the observable data doesn't show that,
Speaker 3: but they keep saying the same projection and the same
Speaker 3: mantra so it's almost as if the observable data has
Speaker 3: no meaning at all. There's just a narrative, and regardless
Speaker 3: of what the data says, the narrative is what is pushed.
Speaker 1: So okay, so let me go back to the first
Speaker 1: thing that the example that you were giving, which is
Speaker 1: they showed that for the last twenty years, heat waves
Speaker 1: meaning periods of long extended heat in an area, have
Speaker 1: actually been really flat. We haven't had a significant increase
Speaker 1: in heat waves. But now in the next twenty years
Speaker 1: they're saying, oh, heat waves are going to be off
Speaker 1: the charts. But why did we have flat heat waves
Speaker 1: in the first place. Do they even address that because
Speaker 1: it sounded like you said, look, we have the same conditions,
Speaker 1: but they're expecting a completely different result.
Speaker 4: That's right. It gets even worse than that.
Speaker 3: So they show in the National Climate Assessment, the fifth
Speaker 3: edition that came out twenty twenty three, that in the southeast,
Speaker 3: for example, there was eleven days less or over ninety
Speaker 3: five degrees from the period of twenty and two to
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one. Then happened in the baseline that they
Speaker 3: had from nineteen oh one to nineteen sixty, So they've
Speaker 3: showed a dramatic decrease in the time period. They're saying
Speaker 3: that we are increasing emissions, land use changes are also
Speaker 3: driving up climate change. So the factors that are that
Speaker 3: are driving climate change are existing and accelerating. Yet we're
Speaker 3: seeing a decrease in the amount of hot days. But
Speaker 3: then they flip it on its head in one model,
Speaker 3: even though they've made making the same predictions for twenty
Speaker 3: five years now, the first assessment came out in two
Speaker 3: thousand and getting it wrong. It's I mean, it's really
Speaker 3: the definition of insanity. I mean, you're doing the same
Speaker 3: thing over and over and expecting a different result and
Speaker 3: just completely ignoring the observable data.
Speaker 1: Maybe they're going with the blind squirrel finds a nut
Speaker 1: theory or the broken clock is right twice a day theory,
Speaker 1: Like if we just keep saying it, eventually it'll be
Speaker 1: true and they'll be able to go say, see, we
Speaker 1: knew it, that's what was going to happen.
Speaker 3: I wish that was the case, because I mean, maybe
Speaker 3: we could just kind of pass it off to kind
Speaker 3: of ignorance.
Speaker 4: But this is malice.
Speaker 3: They these are the same people that benefit from funding
Speaker 3: from making the government believe that there is a climate
Speaker 3: crisis and funding this to the tune of billions, if
Speaker 3: not hundreds of billions, if not trillions globally. And so
Speaker 3: this is the same people that write it and it
Speaker 3: ignore the observable data, realize that there is an incentive
Speaker 3: for them to make sure they make it as as
Speaker 3: crisis or as as extreme as possible, regardless of what
Speaker 3: they did. Says So I wish it was I could
Speaker 3: attribute it to ignorance, and maybe they're just missing some
Speaker 3: of the data, but it just can't keep going on
Speaker 3: and on like this without it being essentially I mean,
Speaker 3: it's fraud.
Speaker 4: There's no other way to put it.
Speaker 3: You're talking about taking siphoning off billions of dollars when
Speaker 3: the data says the exact opposite of what you're predicting.
Speaker 1: The thing that's frustrating for me, and in the many
Speaker 1: many years that I've been doing this show, I've spoken
Speaker 1: with scientists who had alternative theories of why we were
Speaker 1: in periods of warming. I mean they were everything from
Speaker 1: the where we are in the ellipses around the sun
Speaker 1: to different kind of sun variations that were not used
Speaker 1: to taking into account, and they could not get money.
Speaker 2: For their research.
Speaker 1: They could not get any dollars because they weren't in
Speaker 1: the dogma, and they would come on my show like
Speaker 1: as a I don't want to say last resort, but
Speaker 1: just to like shout into the ether, like, look, there's other.
Speaker 2: Things that.
Speaker 1: Make sense for the glare errors because you know we
Speaker 1: and you've done this on your blog. You can go
Speaker 1: back to nineteen ninety six and to your point, you
Speaker 1: can show them over and over and over and over
Speaker 1: again where they've gotten it wrong. But there are other
Speaker 1: theories that their projections were more accurate, but they're not
Speaker 1: as dire, they're not as scary. And you can't tax
Speaker 1: the sun, right.
Speaker 4: Well, that's the biggest one.
Speaker 3: If it's something that we aren't producing in terms of
Speaker 3: an industry or as a society, we can't tax it.
Speaker 3: We can't go after it and regulate it. So water
Speaker 3: vapor is the biggest one. Everybody ignores water vapor, the
Speaker 3: IPCC ignores water vapor. That's by far the number one
Speaker 3: greenhouse gas on the planet. Right, the sun, like you
Speaker 3: mentioned solar variation, we don't really understand it. We've got
Speaker 3: a couple decades, maybe five or six with satellites a
Speaker 3: couple extra centuries of measurements before that.
Speaker 4: The planet's four and a half billion years old.
Speaker 3: We have a very tiny little subset to go on
Speaker 3: to try to understand these one hundred thousand year or
Speaker 3: maybe million year.
Speaker 4: Cycles that we're going through.
Speaker 3: And so it all comes back to how much can
Speaker 3: policy get involved. And they realize they can't tax the sun,
Speaker 3: like you said, so what can we kind of nitpick at?
Speaker 4: Right, Let's go after CO two.
Speaker 3: That's an easy one now, methane hitrosoxxide, right, And so
Speaker 3: they just kind of pick down the line on things
Speaker 3: that they can regulate. But we're really talking about third
Speaker 3: maybe fourth order effects. So if you really think that
Speaker 3: taxing CO two is going to change the weather, I've
Speaker 3: got bad news for you because I really don't think
Speaker 3: it will.
Speaker 2: Let me ask you a question.
Speaker 1: You may or may not know the answer to this,
Speaker 1: but it's something that has been bugging me for so
Speaker 1: long about the entire study of the arc of history
Speaker 1: when it comes to climate, and we're told, and I
Speaker 1: think the whole ice core thing is super cool, Like
Speaker 1: they go and they drill these ice coores that are
Speaker 1: a mile long, and then they pull them up and
Speaker 1: they examine all the layers in the ice, and they
Speaker 1: extrapolate out all this data from those ice ice samples.
Speaker 1: But the thing that always gets me about that is
Speaker 1: that they keep telling us we are in an unprecedented
Speaker 1: period of warming. It's never warm this fast. Ever, We've
Speaker 1: never had this kind of warming. Okay, so let's just
Speaker 1: say we have before and all of the ice melted.
Speaker 1: So we're looking at ice cores. How can we get
Speaker 1: a true idea of what those ice cores may say
Speaker 1: if we've had prior periods of rapid and intense warming
Speaker 1: that destroyed the ice layers.
Speaker 2: Do you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Absolutely So in places like Greenland, that's definitely a big
Speaker 3: consideration because if you're not creating new ice, then you're destroying.
Speaker 4: The core basically.
Speaker 3: So we talk about this in sediment and geology. If
Speaker 3: you're not depositing layers, then you're eroding them. Well, now
Speaker 3: we have missing timeframes, we call them unconformities, and so
Speaker 3: that's a definite consideration. So one of the things in Antarctica,
Speaker 3: we're a little safer because we think that even the
Speaker 3: warming there couldn't ever get it above freezing. But it's
Speaker 3: a desert, so you don't have a lot of new
Speaker 3: snow being deposited on top. So there's a lot of trickiness.
Speaker 3: This is one of the reasons why I argue that
Speaker 3: we don't really know the variations of climate in the
Speaker 3: past on the century scale, right, that's just impossible because
Speaker 3: everything gets blurred because of the things you're talking about.
Speaker 3: What if you have a decade where there's no ice
Speaker 3: forming in Greenland because it was super warm that decade
Speaker 3: because of an ocean current or something like that, And
Speaker 3: so the resolution for our past climate is really bad.
Speaker 3: You know, we have really good update date information now,
Speaker 3: but the claims that you hear about, oh, it's the
Speaker 3: hottest year and one hundred and twenty thousand years, that
Speaker 3: is absolutely absurd. I've never seen a climate scientist that
Speaker 3: has any real worth in the field or is respected
Speaker 3: ever make that claim.
Speaker 1: And so this is it's like, how do you I
Speaker 1: think that what's happening with the Trump administration and I
Speaker 1: and this report, by the way, is congressionally required. So
Speaker 1: what would you speculate, Matthew, would be the next steps here?
Speaker 1: What would you think if they fired all the climate
Speaker 1: scientists who are invested in making sure that it's crazy
Speaker 1: who they hire now.
Speaker 2: I mean, did they get Judith Curry? Who do they?
Speaker 3: I think she would be great. Doctor John Christy would
Speaker 3: be great. There's a lot of great scientists. But I
Speaker 3: think you just have to change the mission of the
Speaker 3: report such that it is about the observable data, what
Speaker 3: have we seen has occurred, and then a big reflection chapter.
Speaker 3: What are the predictions we made in the past that
Speaker 3: haven't come to fruition and how confident are we in
Speaker 3: our future predictions. That's something that is just not done
Speaker 3: in these reports. My whole argument in most of this
Speaker 3: is that we have to focus on the observable data.
Speaker 3: That's what's telling us how things are changing. Anybody can
Speaker 3: tweak a model, anybody can tweak the knobs on the
Speaker 3: computer on the keyboard and make a model basically give
Speaker 3: you whatever you want.
Speaker 4: We call it garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 3: But the observable data is the observable data, and we
Speaker 3: have a lot of it, and so we should just
Speaker 3: be focusing on that. And the narrative on that is
Speaker 3: very different than the narrative and the projections and the
Speaker 3: models that they're doing. So I'm more than happy to
Speaker 3: keep a National Climate assessment if it focuses back on
Speaker 3: observable data and also reflects back on the last four,
Speaker 3: will I'll be five because it'd be National Climate Assessment
Speaker 3: six that looks back at the last five and really
Speaker 3: highlights how terrible the predictions and the models have been.
Speaker 3: So we can have an honest conversation.
Speaker 1: Noill, Matthew, let me ask you this because I just
Speaker 1: got this text, and I think there's probably a lot
Speaker 1: of people out here who feel this way. Hi, Andy,
Speaker 1: I'm a fan of the show and consider myself a moderate,
Speaker 1: but I feel that today's conversation with this climate denier
Speaker 1: is quite dangerous. I may not be an expert on
Speaker 1: this situation, but I can tell you anecdotally that since
Speaker 1: I've been in Colorado since two thousand, we've had much
Speaker 1: hotter temperatures, longer heat waves, and less rain. It doesn't
Speaker 1: take a rocket scientist to know that climate change is real.
Speaker 1: So I always respond to this in the same way,
Speaker 1: and that is, of course, the climate is changing. It
Speaker 1: has been changing since the beginning of time. We have
Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountains because the climate has changed. We have
Speaker 1: iceberg grooves on the bottom of the Black Sea, that
Speaker 1: were just discovered because the climate is always changing. What
Speaker 1: we're discussing here is the level of certainty about it
Speaker 1: are being our fault and the accuracy of the data
Speaker 1: and the projections that are being used to spend literally
Speaker 1: trillions of dollars that are being inflated by scientists who
Speaker 1: have an invested interest. I mean that's my take on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I agree with you one hundred percent. I
Speaker 3: would love to know where the listener lives. If they're
Speaker 3: in a metropolis area. Since two thousand that has grown
Speaker 3: quite a bit. I don't deny that the temperatures in
Speaker 3: their area are warmer. When you replace a lot of
Speaker 3: trees and grasses and prairie land with asphalt and buildings
Speaker 3: and glass, you're going to warm the climate up in
Speaker 3: that region, so that regional area will get hotter on
Speaker 3: certain hot days. We call that the urban heat island effect.
Speaker 3: The issue is is can you tax your way out
Speaker 3: of that? Or can you regulate your way out of that.
Speaker 3: You can dismantle the city, I guess you can start
Speaker 3: taking down the skyscrapers or taking down the buildings and
Speaker 3: getting rid of the roads, going back to dirt. I
Speaker 3: don't think anybody's going to be for that. So there's
Speaker 3: no denying that humans have an effect on their environment.
Speaker 3: The question is is whether this has to do with
Speaker 3: CO two and our greenhouse gases, or this has to
Speaker 3: do with the natural urban environment that we've built around ourselves.
Speaker 3: And I would argue that it's the urban heat island effect.
Speaker 3: Definitely does make cities warmer than the surrounding regions. We've
Speaker 3: seen that for a long time. But I just don't
Speaker 3: see a way of getting around that unless we just
Speaker 3: take apart the cities.
Speaker 4: And nobody seems to be for that.
Speaker 3: And so you know, we're conflating to problems or the
Speaker 3: problem exists, but you're conflating the reason for that problem.
Speaker 1: And I think that's an important distinction, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: where I want to know exactly what it impact we're
Speaker 1: having on the climate. But what we've done is take
Speaker 1: the question of what impact are we having on the climate,
Speaker 1: or what other external circumstances could be happening to be
Speaker 1: creating a climate situation, and we've turned it into your
Speaker 1: car is the problem? Oh those cows there next, and
Speaker 1: we're going to take away everything we need to have
Speaker 1: a functioning modern society. Chasing renewable energy that is inherently unreliable.
Speaker 1: So there's huge policy decisions that are being made. And
Speaker 1: the point that Matthew makes, and he makes it brilliantly
Speaker 1: on a substack irrational fear, is that we should be
Speaker 1: looking at the hard data instead of speculating and guessing
Speaker 1: without giving any you know, we never go back to
Speaker 1: look and see how those old predictions turned out. You
Speaker 1: would think that would be the first thing they would
Speaker 1: do in order to hone future predictions, but it never
Speaker 1: seems to happen. So that's what we're talking about. We're
Speaker 1: not sitting here saying the Earth is not changing, and
Speaker 1: we're not like knuckle draggers over I mean, we recognize
Speaker 1: the changes, but we're discussing what's actually going on, because
Speaker 1: in my mind, I would rather be investing trillions into
Speaker 1: mitigating for communities that need it, you know what I'm saying, Like,
Speaker 1: I'd rather assume when you look at the ancient civilizations
Speaker 1: of the Aztecs and the Mayans, why did they disappear?
Speaker 1: My guess is it got too hot there for them
Speaker 1: to live and they moved on. But we don't talk
Speaker 1: about things like that. We need to mitigate it instead
Speaker 1: of trying to stop it, because it may be a
Speaker 1: natural process that we have no way of controlling.
Speaker 3: But we really are kind of repeating history because we're sacrificing.
Speaker 3: You know, they used to make sacrifices of people and
Speaker 3: young young women and things to the gods to change
Speaker 3: the weather. We're essentially sacrificing industry. We're sacrificing our energy
Speaker 3: industry to the hope or maybe the you know, the
Speaker 3: god of energy such that it will change the weather
Speaker 3: in the future. So history really does repeat itself. But
Speaker 3: you're I agree with you on hundred percent. Be practical.
Speaker 3: There are solutions out there. This idea that I think
Speaker 3: it's ignorant to think that stasis is the goal that's
Speaker 3: never been a part of the planet. There If we
Speaker 3: just go back in history at any time, the planet
Speaker 3: is not in stasis.
Speaker 2: It's meaning the same meaning's yah.
Speaker 3: It's always changing, and the ancient civilizations realized that and
Speaker 3: they made sacrifices to the gods to hope it didn't change.
Speaker 3: It's sad to think that we're just basically doing the
Speaker 3: same thing, but with trillions of dollars and the one
Speaker 3: industry that has given us the life that we afford today.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, abundant energy is why our standard
Speaker 1: of living has raised as rapidly and as completely, not
Speaker 1: just in the United States, but we are in a
Speaker 1: period of prosperity in the world right now. Even poor
Speaker 1: nations are better off than they were one hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: And then the number of people living in extreme poverty
Speaker 1: has dramatically just dropped like a stone, all because of
Speaker 1: cheap and abundant energy, and we are trying to undo
Speaker 1: that now.
Speaker 2: So that's why talking about it.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: I used to teach a course at at University Alabama
Speaker 3: called sustainability, and you can tie energy to education, to
Speaker 3: fertility rates, going down to equality, to equality of women.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's so many things.
Speaker 3: That tie back to the infrastructure that energy provides for you,
Speaker 3: and that's what they're attacking. So it's really the fundamental
Speaker 3: fabric that has provided, you know, the living standards that
Speaker 3: we appreciate today.
Speaker 1: Doctor Matthew Willicky is am I saying your last name right,
Speaker 1: is it Whylicky? Yeah? I am I.
Speaker 2: Okay, We'll just go with it.
Speaker 1: He has a fantastic substack called irrational fear. He doesn't
Speaker 1: just talk about climate science. He talks about all kinds
Speaker 1: of science.
Speaker 2: So if you ever just.
Speaker 1: Want to kind of go and get a reality check,
Speaker 1: I would highly recommend a subscription. You can find it
Speaker 1: on the blog today at mandy'sblog dot com.
Speaker 2: Great conversation.
Speaker 1: I find this stuff fascinating and I am interested to
Speaker 1: see who ends up writing this report because I don't
Speaker 1: know if you saw this, but the NIH just put
Speaker 1: out their own report about gender or firm and care
Speaker 1: for kids that is.
Speaker 2: Sure to cause a star.
Speaker 1: Let me just say that I didn't have it on
Speaker 1: the blog today because I haven't read it.
Speaker 2: It's four hundred Actually I did put it on the blog.
Speaker 2: It's four hundred pages.
Speaker 1: But this is an administration that's not afraid to say
Speaker 1: the standard dogma is not where we're gonna stay because
Speaker 1: it's not right.
Speaker 2: And we'll see what happens next.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, thanks so much, Matthew. It's good to
Speaker 1: see you again, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 1: That is doctor Matthew Willicky from the Irrational Fear substack