Speaker 1: If you know me, you know I love to talk
Speaker 1: about climate change, one of my favorite topics, and mostly
Speaker 1: I'm being critical of what passes for climate science. But
Speaker 1: the guy that I'm bringing on again is well, he's
Speaker 1: even more critical than I am, only he brings receipts
Speaker 1: and not just opinions. His name is doctor Matthew wie Leaky,
Speaker 1: and he writes a great substack blog. It's called Irrational Fear,
Speaker 1: and I link to it on my blog today.
Speaker 2: If you want to go check it out.
Speaker 1: It is paywalld, but it is worth every penny and
Speaker 1: it's not very expensive.
Speaker 2: So welcome back to the show. First of all, Matthew,
Speaker 2: thanks Mandy, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: So you did something that I often wonder, and that
Speaker 1: is you went back and looked at predictions and about
Speaker 1: the climate and really just said were they right right now?
Speaker 1: What's fascinating me is I love it when I see
Speaker 1: in the newspapers we're fact checking no stradamis right, the
Speaker 1: very famous prognosticator from hundreds of years ago, and yet
Speaker 1: there's never that same intellectual curiosity about climate change predictions.
Speaker 1: You have that intellectual curiosity. What did you find in
Speaker 1: this rather voluminous report.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. I mean, we have to have
Speaker 3: some accountability for past practices. I think, you know, we
Speaker 3: will hear a lot of rhetoric from the media, and
Speaker 3: you'll hear some of the normal characters. We'll say things
Speaker 3: like the oceans are boiling. We all know that's not true.
Speaker 3: I don't think anybody's going to make policy on that.
Speaker 3: But the official documents that the government puts out, which
Speaker 3: primarily comes from the Global Change Research Act that started
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety, we make what's called the National Climate
Speaker 3: Assessment every year, well every like five years or so,
Speaker 3: and that document is used to drive policy. It gets
Speaker 3: involved in every policy decision that we have as a country.
Speaker 4: And so I wanted to go back and look at
Speaker 4: some of these.
Speaker 3: So I went back and looked at the National Climate
Speaker 3: Assessments one and two. So the first one was published
Speaker 3: in two thousand and the second one was published in
Speaker 3: two thousand and nine. They're not exactly always five years apart,
Speaker 3: and so when I started to dig into this, I
Speaker 3: kind of started to see a lot of the same
Speaker 3: rhetoric that they were talking about before, and increase in
Speaker 3: heat waves and increase in hurricanes, heavy precipitation, and you know,
Speaker 3: if you only have predictions that are relatively close, it's
Speaker 3: hard to judge them. But we have now twenty five
Speaker 3: years since the first report came out, and that's a
Speaker 3: decent amount of time to start to look into these
Speaker 3: And with most of these things that I looked into,
Speaker 3: I realized why they're not going back and checking on themselves.
Speaker 3: It is because most of these predictions aren't happening. Sometimes
Speaker 3: they have the trend actually completely wrong in opposite other
Speaker 3: times it's just moving and oscillating and you know, natural
Speaker 3: variability and there is no real clear trend. And so
Speaker 3: it's just this lack of accountability from all of these
Speaker 3: past predictions and how many times can you cry wolf
Speaker 3: before the public and hopefully the policymakers stopped listening.
Speaker 1: Well, And that's really my point, and that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that I wanted to have you on because
Speaker 1: it's not just hey, look at these goofy climate scientists.
Speaker 1: They got all this stuff wrong. We are using these
Speaker 1: reports to make policy that is having, in my view,
Speaker 1: an incredibly detrimental effect on our economy. In oil in Colorado,
Speaker 1: we've shut down oil and gas. We know that energy
Speaker 1: prices of skyrocket, and I've got a story on my
Speaker 1: blog today about now we're almost a ten percent delinquency
Speaker 1: for utility bills, and utility prices have gone up twelve
Speaker 1: percent in the last year. These are all choices that
Speaker 1: are being thrust upon the American people based on science.
Speaker 2: You know, we're always supposed to trust the science.
Speaker 1: But if we're not checking the science for accuracy, then
Speaker 1: we are making massive trillion and trillion dollar decisions based
Speaker 1: on garbage. Maybe not garbage, but certainly not good science.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the foundational pillar of all of this is
Speaker 3: the science, right, because we're making these sacrifices. We're going
Speaker 3: to be willing to pay a little bit more on
Speaker 3: energy because the weather was going to get really bad.
Speaker 3: That's what they were telling us in two thousand. This
Speaker 3: is why you have to make all these sacrifices. And
Speaker 3: now we're seeing that that's not actually the case. These
Speaker 3: trends aren't trending in any of the way that they predicted,
Speaker 3: and so the foundational pillar, the reason for implementing all
Speaker 3: of this change and radically transforming our energy sector for
Speaker 3: the most part, is really not supported by the observational data.
Speaker 4: Anymore.
Speaker 3: It existed in their models in two thousand, I believe
Speaker 3: it did. I really think that they were convinced that
Speaker 3: this was what going to happen. But you know, the
Speaker 3: observational data is what we have to really go on,
Speaker 3: and it's just not there.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about two things. Number One, hurricanes, because
Speaker 1: they're flashy, right, And when I was living in Florida
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, in two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: when we had a lot of storms make landfall, and
Speaker 1: all of the climate alarmists, we're like.
Speaker 2: Oh, there it is.
Speaker 1: This is just the beginning of hurricane nightmares. And then
Speaker 1: after two thousand and four and two thousand and five,
Speaker 1: it was like crickets for a really long time. So
Speaker 1: let's start with hurricane data. What did they say was
Speaker 1: going to happen versus what has happened.
Speaker 3: So you hear the common increase in frequency, intensity, and
Speaker 3: recent heavy precipitation associated with hurricanes, increased landfalls that you know,
Speaker 3: they kind of cover the gamut of all of it.
Speaker 3: And when we go back now and look at the
Speaker 3: last twenty five years, we see that hurricane landfalls are
Speaker 3: well within natural variability. In fact, this year Florida didn't
Speaker 3: get hit at all. That's not I mean, the US
Speaker 3: coastline didn't get a direct landfall at all, so that's
Speaker 3: pretty rare.
Speaker 4: None of this looks like it's trending.
Speaker 3: What you're seeing now is they play a lot of
Speaker 3: these mental gymnastics where they're transitioning from frequency and intensity
Speaker 3: to rapid intensification.
Speaker 4: This is a new metric that we haven't really.
Speaker 3: Been able to measure since we've had these fancy satellites,
Speaker 3: right and these crazy pilots willing to fly into these
Speaker 3: hurricanes where now we can actually measure them hour by hour.
Speaker 3: So you can see that as the story isn't working
Speaker 3: out in the obser observational data, that they're morphing into
Speaker 3: these new kind of more difficult to get metrics where
Speaker 3: we can't really look back one hundred years and they say, well,
Speaker 3: we might have not seen the intensity and frequency going up. Look,
Speaker 3: they're rapidly intensifying. But overall, I mean, it's hurricane landfalls
Speaker 3: that we should be concerned with. There's absolutely no data
Speaker 3: that we're seeing a trend in that. Noah confirms that,
Speaker 3: the EPA confirms that, so you know, that's the real
Speaker 3: metric that we should be worried about, because that's where
Speaker 3: we lose lives and property.
Speaker 1: I would go one step further in that now because
Speaker 1: and this is me speculating, it seems that the meteorologists
Speaker 1: who work in hurricane alley, who are going to be
Speaker 1: talking to the people who are in the line of
Speaker 1: the storm, they because they have bought into the narrative
Speaker 1: that is going to make storms, you know, more powerful
Speaker 1: and more damaging. Now we have a greater sort of
Speaker 1: pre hurricane threat level coming from meteorologists, and that's damaging
Speaker 1: because people stop listening when you keep telling them that
Speaker 1: there's going to be a twenty foot storm surgeon, that
Speaker 1: there's going to be damaging winds and everything's going to
Speaker 1: be flattened, and then it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2: And I know this.
Speaker 1: From experience of living in a hurricane alley. People stop
Speaker 1: listening and then that gets dangerous. So I wonder how
Speaker 1: much of that sort of feeds into these prediction models
Speaker 1: that are saying to people, this is going to be
Speaker 1: the worst storm ever. And then when it kind of
Speaker 1: comes through and it's a category two, which isn't that bad,
Speaker 1: people just discount.
Speaker 2: That In the future I do. I'm very concerned about that.
Speaker 4: No, I think you're right.
Speaker 3: I think there is a big psychological aspect to that,
Speaker 3: to whether the public is going to listen to experts
Speaker 3: and warning systems. I think they play a lot of
Speaker 3: games too. Now that everybody has a camera, you see
Speaker 3: all the images. Now, you know, constantly somebody's showing an
Speaker 3: image of a hurricane somewhere, because there's if there's not
Speaker 3: one landing year, there could be a typhoon in the Philippines,
Speaker 3: for example, And so you know this this this kind
Speaker 3: of if it bleeds, it leads, really does it drives
Speaker 3: this whole climate thing. The more destruction, the more the
Speaker 3: narrative fits, and that drives everybody's fear up. And my
Speaker 3: whole argument is it's not in the data. That's why
Speaker 3: I name my substack irrational fear, because it's if you
Speaker 3: look at the data, it's not a rational fear to
Speaker 3: be afraid of hurricanes increasing and you know, damaging the
Speaker 3: US coastline. Obviously it's going to happen. It's going to
Speaker 3: happen again. But it's no trend that this is some
Speaker 3: sort of runway train where where climate change is driving
Speaker 3: these more you know, they call them super charged hurricanes, right,
Speaker 3: that's just not in the observable data.
Speaker 1: So here in Colorado, we don't have to worry about hurricanes,
Speaker 1: but we do have to worry about drought. And drought
Speaker 1: is the big thing that we have to worry about
Speaker 1: when it comes to food production and everything else.
Speaker 2: Drought is what led us to the dust Bowl.
Speaker 1: While that and bad farming practices back in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties and thirties. So what did they predict for drought
Speaker 1: back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they go back and forth.
Speaker 3: The first NCA one, so that's the National Climate Assessment one,
Speaker 3: talks about heightened drought in the Southwest and regional droughts
Speaker 3: in the west. The second one increases that even into
Speaker 3: the south and the southeast. The NOAH and the EPA
Speaker 3: monitor this constantly. We have real time now remote sensors
Speaker 3: all over the place. So we have what's known as
Speaker 3: a Palmer Drought Index, and that's essentially just a scale
Speaker 3: that we use to try to identify for really getting
Speaker 3: much drier or much wetter regionally.
Speaker 4: And as a whole nation. And if you look back
Speaker 4: at that, we have data that goes.
Speaker 3: Back to eighteen ninety, and there's just no reason to
Speaker 3: think that this is trending in any direction. We recently
Speaker 3: did have a little bit of a drought area, but
Speaker 3: the late twenty tens were kind of wet, the nineties
Speaker 3: were very wet, and so you have this oscillation where
Speaker 3: you kind of move in and out, and that has
Speaker 3: a lot to do with ocean circulation patterns and these
Speaker 3: these large long term scales that we don't really fully
Speaker 3: understand yet because we haven't been monitoring the Earth's system
Speaker 3: for that long. But nothing in the data would suggest
Speaker 3: that we're driving towards drought. I think that the infrastructure
Speaker 3: that we have for managing water has not been updated
Speaker 3: in a long time. California, for example, hasn't added any
Speaker 3: surface capacity since the late seventies, even though their.
Speaker 4: Population had as doubled.
Speaker 3: So we have a lot of mismanagement in water, but
Speaker 3: it's not coming from the fact that climate is increasing drought.
Speaker 4: And you know, even.
Speaker 3: Though there are areas that have seen increased drought and
Speaker 3: there's areas that have seen increased precipitation, there's just no overall.
Speaker 4: Long term trend.
Speaker 3: I think water mismanagement has a lot more to do
Speaker 3: with our issues than climate change.
Speaker 1: Is there any area of the initial climate assessment where
Speaker 1: they nailed it right, like, dang, guys, great job, got
Speaker 1: it one hundred percent. Is there any specific area where
Speaker 1: you can say they got that right.
Speaker 3: So the thing that's most on trend, where we're actually
Speaker 3: seeing something that's increasing, would be heavy precipitation events. So
Speaker 3: these are short term events where we have a very
Speaker 3: high increased amount of precipitation. We do start to see that.
Speaker 3: There's some arguments that that has to do with just
Speaker 3: having a little bit of warmer weather and warmer atmosphere
Speaker 3: holds more moisture. You know, people have probably seen no
Speaker 3: experience that you go skiing, you get very dry. You
Speaker 3: go down to Florida, it's warm.
Speaker 4: And very wet.
Speaker 3: That's because that air capacity to hold water increases as
Speaker 3: you increase temperature, and so that.
Speaker 4: Kind of makes sense to us.
Speaker 3: Most people don't know that liquid fresh water is minuscule
Speaker 3: on the planet. It's only about two percent of all
Speaker 3: of the water budget. Most of that's locked up as ice.
Speaker 3: So I would argue that if we could increase our
Speaker 3: flood infrastructure and think about this a little bit, this
Speaker 3: a little bit of increase in heavy precipitation may be
Speaker 3: a really good thing for adding more fresh water to
Speaker 3: the surface where places like the southeast, that's the primary
Speaker 3: use of waters surface water. So I would say that's
Speaker 3: the one place that they got it pretty close.
Speaker 4: We're seeing it.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say it's abnormal increase, but we are seeing
Speaker 3: a trend that is continuously increasing in these heavy precipitation.
Speaker 2: Events in terms of key.
Speaker 3: So they got it exactly wrong. They got it exactly opposite.
Speaker 3: We're seeing less days above ninety five degrees and they
Speaker 3: predicted way more.
Speaker 4: So you know, it's hit or miss. But overall, I
Speaker 4: would I would give them, you know, a D for
Speaker 4: their predictions.
Speaker 1: So moving forward, and this is one of the things
Speaker 1: that I've had people say, well, you know, science is
Speaker 1: always getting better, the technology is always getting better.
Speaker 2: We're always able to know more.
Speaker 1: But to your point about the very brief amount of
Speaker 1: time that we even have significant rudimentary sort of weather
Speaker 1: you know analysis on a consistent basis, We've only been
Speaker 1: doing this for what like one hundred and thirty years
Speaker 1: with any real consistency, and that back then was with
Speaker 1: again almost you know, ancient style of barometric pressure measurement
Speaker 1: and things of that nature. So how do you how
Speaker 1: would you argue or make the point that perhaps we're
Speaker 1: maybe out ahead of our skis with proclamations that we
Speaker 1: one hundred percent understand what we're seeing when we only
Speaker 1: have that limited amount of data.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think one hundred and thirty is
Speaker 3: a very generous number. I would probably say more like
Speaker 3: fifty years, because it's really satellites. Right, that the whole
Speaker 3: climate crisis was sold to us as a global problem
Speaker 3: and it was going to take this radical transformation because
Speaker 3: things were going to go haywire.
Speaker 4: And in the early.
Speaker 3: IPCC assessments in the late nineties and even in this
Speaker 3: first National Climate Assessment in two thousand, we just didn't
Speaker 3: really have enough data to make to say one way
Speaker 3: or the other. And so you know, it was fair
Speaker 3: game to make these predictions. But we're twenty five years later,
Speaker 3: and we have more and more satellites, we have more
Speaker 3: and more technology, remote sensing stations all over the planet.
Speaker 4: We have the data.
Speaker 3: So if it was so obvious, right, the science was settled,
Speaker 3: this was I was called a denier to question it.
Speaker 4: If it's so.
Speaker 3: Obvious, how come we have to do more and more
Speaker 3: gymnastical gymnastics to find the little things that are that
Speaker 3: are that are kind of getting a little bit wacky.
Speaker 3: If it was supposed to be so obvious and we
Speaker 3: were going to supposed to have this radical transformation, I mean,
Speaker 3: the way that it was sold to us was that
Speaker 3: this was just going to be right in our faces.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's going to be fires burning everywhere, and
Speaker 3: there's no water and the last time you're ever going
Speaker 3: to see a ski area because snow is going to disappear.
Speaker 3: I mean I heard all of these things that no
Speaker 3: more snow was on the front of New York Times,
Speaker 3: and we're just seeing that all of this rhetoric was
Speaker 3: just for one reason, and it was for creating an
Speaker 3: emotional response and essentially taking money from the Western world.
Speaker 4: That was the motive.
Speaker 3: We now have the observational data none of it was
Speaker 3: coming true, and so why are we doing all this?
Speaker 2: So I agree wellheartedly.
Speaker 1: I mean the reality is is that this is why
Speaker 1: I find this so concerning, that we're not having genuine,
Speaker 1: robust discussions about the wrongness of these predictions as we're
Speaker 1: decapping our own economy.
Speaker 2: I mean, especially here in Colorado, our governor.
Speaker 1: Is all in on net zero and it is going
Speaker 1: to cost a small fortune to move Colorado to where
Speaker 1: he wants it to be. And if it's all based
Speaker 1: on bad intel, that is criminal. And yet because of
Speaker 1: the way the climate industry works, and Matthew, you probably
Speaker 1: know some of the scientists that I've spoken to since
Speaker 1: I got my first show in two thou and five.
Speaker 1: If you have a theory that you want to test
Speaker 1: that does not end with it's man made global global
Speaker 1: climate change, it's man's fault. It is emissions. If that's
Speaker 1: not your theory, you can't get funding. No one will
Speaker 1: fund your study because the dogma is so entrenched that
Speaker 1: we can't even look at at other alternatives, like perhaps
Speaker 1: we should be spending this much time and energy on
Speaker 1: mitigation instead of trying to change the climate. It feels
Speaker 1: like a don keyxty like quest based solely an ego
Speaker 1: at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you from a personal experience
Speaker 3: as a young academic trying to land some of my
Speaker 3: first grants and seeing the ideological stances that the funding
Speaker 3: agencies like NSF and NAH and NASA were taking. It's
Speaker 3: just I mean, you could you could see it all right?
Speaker 3: You know, this was had nothing to do with science,
Speaker 3: This has nothing to do with finding the truth or
Speaker 3: anything like that. It was just let's just push this
Speaker 3: mantra down the road that has to stay alive no
Speaker 3: matter what. And we're just going to keep going down
Speaker 3: this road regardless of what the observational data says. And
Speaker 3: if there's no money to do it, none of these
Speaker 3: young academics are going to go try to prove this anyway,
Speaker 3: so we'll have this what I call manufactured consensus.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: It's not a conspiracy where there's somebody up there like
Speaker 3: pulling the strings, but it is a conspiracy in the
Speaker 3: way that the system essentially is manufacturing a consensus, bying
Speaker 3: by having funding agencies, journals, essentially anyway to make your
Speaker 3: academic record. If you make that so ideological, then if
Speaker 3: you don't follow the you know, toe the line, you're out.
Speaker 4: I experienced that personally, and.
Speaker 3: So it creates this kind of false sense of consensus.
Speaker 3: But really what you're doing is just kicking out people
Speaker 3: that don't agree. And so I think we should start
Speaker 3: with getting rid of some of these funding agencies and
Speaker 3: their ideologies. They should be about the truth, regardless of
Speaker 3: where it takes you, especially now that we have all
Speaker 3: this observational data that proves that a lot of these
Speaker 3: predictions were incorrect.
Speaker 1: A text sur just as this, Mandy oh As chat
Speaker 1: if climate change is real? And see what your answers.
Speaker 1: I will all do that chat is my personal assistant. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm Matthew, So I asked Chad everything. Does your guests
Speaker 1: have an opinion on the movie Climate. Somebody's trying to
Speaker 1: get me to watch this movie. I don't really care.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it's about.
Speaker 4: Is it called Climate the movie?
Speaker 3: Because I'm in that that's mad for a skeptical take.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure. I haven't. I haven't. Is there a
Speaker 4: new one coming out? I can look.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's it or not.
Speaker 1: I only get so much information regarding water mismanagement. Recently
Speaker 1: visited Hoover Dam. Does that play into the water mismanagement.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go one step further, Matthew, and to partially
Speaker 1: answer this question in my view, because now we have
Speaker 1: the states trying to figure out how to divvy up
Speaker 1: the Colorado River, and they're supposed to have already done this,
Speaker 1: and they can't come to an agreement. My question is
Speaker 1: is why is California getting any of the water because
Speaker 1: they are literally on the Pacific Ocean, build desalinization plants
Speaker 1: and leave our water alone.
Speaker 2: I mean, but that's a whole different conversation.
Speaker 3: Well, unfortunately, desalization takes a lot of energy, and they
Speaker 3: are very energy poor at the moment because they are
Speaker 3: also just gung ho on this you know, green energy thing.
Speaker 3: But that the main thing with the Colorado River Lake
Speaker 3: Meat Lake POW.
Speaker 4: This was the Colorado River Compact. It was signed in
Speaker 4: the twenties.
Speaker 3: The twenties were really an abnormally wet decade and so
Speaker 3: when they originally signed this, they made predictions.
Speaker 4: This is one of the again a faulty.
Speaker 3: You know, we have to be very careful about our predictions,
Speaker 3: and we have to understand that the planet's not just
Speaker 3: going to go along with this. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: natural variability. They estimated a significantly larger amount of water
Speaker 3: than what they got for the next decades, and that's
Speaker 3: what we think is now the average. We just think
Speaker 3: that there was this little heightened blip in the twenties
Speaker 3: and so the allocations were wrong from the start. And
Speaker 3: you know, population has been growing dramatically and throughout the
Speaker 3: Southwest and the west, and so you add all those
Speaker 3: factors together, you make you have some water issues. But
Speaker 3: none of this is really related to climate or CO two.
Speaker 1: Doctor Matthew will his substack is a rational fear. It
Speaker 1: is great worth the worth a small price of admission
Speaker 1: to keep up to date on this, I put a
Speaker 1: link on the blog today. Thanks so much for making
Speaker 1: time for us again, Matthew, really interesting stuff.
Speaker 4: Thanks Mandy