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🚨HOTTEST WEEK ON RECORD: Climate Change Debate
Recorded: July 9, 2023 Duration: 2:05:31Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion focused on climate change, with participants debating the validity of scientific consensus, the role of fossil fuels, and the impact of human activities on global warming. Some argued for immediate action and technological solutions, while others questioned the extent of human influence and the effectiveness of proposed measures. The conversation highlighted differing perspectives on environmental responsibility, economic implications, and the need for global cooperation.
Full Transcription
right guys thanks for joining us we are just inviting the speakers so just hold on for a few
seconds while we get all the speakers up but we wanted to do a new topic today it's the first
time we're doing this topic and that is the topic of climate change I think it's going to be
hype but I speak to mario before and he was like oh is there actually issues to debate on and
I was like of course there are issues to debate on
You've got people who are the climate change activists who are very passionate about it, such as Greta et al.
And then you have people who believe, or scientists who are climate change scientists.
And then on the other side, we have people who are either skeptical about the level of activism that's occurring,
or you have people who completely think that this whole climate change issues are.
are a misnomer.
So we're going to get into the various topics
related to climate change in a bit.
But Sarah, obviously, your co-horse on the show,
what are you thinking?
How do you think this space is going to go?
I think that if you are in one camp
where you believe in climate change,
you are...
You believe in it wholeheartedly.
There would never be anybody that would change their mind.
And same with the other side.
On this issue, I don't think anybody is going to meet in the middle.
What do you think, Soleim?
No, I mean...
I don't think so, because I've changed, I think I've changed my view on climate change a little bit throughout, throughout this decade.
I wrote like, I wrote like an article about this maybe, I think maybe about 10 years ago, maybe longer.
And the argument that I came, the way I went about the article was, I was talking about climate change from a holistic perspective.
And that was.
I guess less about climate change, but more about this idea that as soon as a scientist tells you about climate change, people automatically counter to their position.
They do not question it.
They do not have any kind of independent thought.
And I was making the equivocation about what was happening to scientists with what happens with clergy, where there's kind of like a blind following.
There isn't this kind of questioning.
I believe, and again, we're going to, I guess we may talk about this later,
but I believe I've kind of been exonerated in the sense of,
I've been proven to be right,
because that's exactly what happened with COVID.
You had people who blindly followed the scientists.
Nobody was questioning it except for some scientists.
And so, and then many years later, people are looking back and thinking,
you know what, we should have maybe questioned some of these ideas.
Maybe we should have questioned about masks a bit earlier.
So, yeah, that's what I think from...
that perspective.
But again,
just overall,
I just want,
I do,
I'm really,
really interested in this debate
because,
I've got my own thoughts on it
but obviously I'm moderating so I'm going to be as balanced
as possible because that's what I am.
I'm a balanced guy and guys
just a quick one I forgot to mention
Mario isn't going to be on the space
today so
yeah it's just just in case you start asking him
questions I mean him being on and not being on
is probably similar anyway there's not going to be much depth
to those answers but
Guys, what I want in the comment section is this before we start getting into debate.
And I do appreciate many of the panelists are coming up now.
Before we start, because I really, because Sarah is making the claim.
She's making the claim that you guys have got no brains.
You haven't got independent thoughts.
You have already decided your position and you're not going to change it.
Let's see if Sarah's right.
And Salaman is full team Greta Thunberg.
We know this now.
He's going to start writing.
Possible.
Everybody knows I'm not down with Greta.
But anyway...
Guys, in the comments section, right?
Put down what your thoughts are about climate change.
Because is it that you're full on believe that there's a significant concern for the planet based on a variety of external factors?
Is your position that this is just something that's happening naturally?
Is your position that activism is going too far?
You know, we've had certain reports on the news where certain activists were like, you know, destroying...
archaic paintings and historical paintings and historical sites.
Is this needed because this concern is too much?
I want to hear your thoughts about climate change in the comments.
And then afterwards, let's look at the end and see if your comments are still the same.
Maybe some of you may have changed your position out of your ideas,
but we'll get into that in a second.
But I mean, I do appreciate there's a lot of people, speakers who've come on.
And I do want to go to some of you.
So I'm going to go immediately to Zach.
Zach, you're the deputy leader of the Green Party.
So this is a topic that is obviously something that you're passionate about.
But just give us your, just as an introduction before we get into the specific issues of topics that are of concern for people in this regard.
What's your overall thought in a very concise manner?
That'd be brilliant.
Thank you and thanks for having me on. I don't see this as a debate. You can't debate oxygen or gravity.
These things are facts. I think the real question here is there's no environmental justice without social, racial and economic justice too.
We know that the people who are least resilient from the impacts of climate chaos are the people who are facing the biggest brunt.
It is too performative to have debates about climate change. What we really need is real action.
So I'd say to anyone who isn't convinced by climate change,
We need to listen to the science.
The vast majority of scientists at the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
have demonstrated with peer-reviewed research over and over again,
that climate change isn't something in the future, it's right here, it's right now,
it's causing wildfires, it's causing floods,
and it's causing parts of the world to be completely uninhabitable.
We have to take action on this.
And Zach, I do appreciate your thoughts.
And I am someone that I want people to try and convince either way.
Because I have certain thoughts on it, but I just want to get more,
more basically miss basically.
I want to see what the various positions are.
Maybe I've missed something.
Maybe I haven't,
but I'd like to hear that.
So Tom,
I appreciate you joining us.
And again, you know, it says on your bio, CO2 is not the climate control knob.
So essentially, what's your initial thoughts about this debate?
I mean, sorry, I've just missed, but the person who just spoke earlier, he mentioned,
it can't even be, as Zach it was, sorry, he dropped.
So he said it can't even be debated.
It's a fact.
There's no question about it.
Now let's talk about how we're going to solve it.
But what's your thoughts, Tom?
Tom, just to speak, you just need to unmute your mic.
It's the bottom left-hand side.
So if you go to the bottom left,
I'm just press the unmute button.
You'll be able to speak.
All right, I'm back.
All right, so can you hear me?
Yeah, Tom, we can hear you.
Yeah, please go ahead.
Yeah, so climate crisis believers tend to embrace several key assumptions.
One, the Earth is currently too hot.
Two, we are experiencing a climate crisis.
Three, the weather is getting worse.
Four, CO2 is the climate control knob.
Five,
climate science is quote basic physics and six almost all experts believe in items one through five above
but every one of those assumptions is wrong and i say that the average person is perfectly capable
of becoming a well-informed climate skeptic there's
There's absolutely no need to defer to the alleged judgments of experts.
So I can get into each of those points in detail later on maybe.
But the whole idea that the earth is currently dangerously hot is absolutely incorrect.
That there's a reason why warm periods in the past have been called climate optimum.
Life on earth does better when it's warmer.
People do better when it's warmer.
And the whole idea that the earth is too hot right now
and we want it to be colder is just not supported by science.
If we were to cool back down to where we were in 1850,
that would be pretty much a disaster for human civilization.
The warming since then has been a good thing
and the additional CO2 in the air has been a good thing
because it helps plants grow.
That's my basic gap.
Yeah, so Tom, I appreciate that.
You've actually just made things easy for me
because we do want to talk about the various issues
and one of them you have mentioned
and I am going to go to Target to answer this question
because I think she had strong emotions about what you just said
but one of the points and one of the issues that I want to get into first
is this point that Tom made
And that is this. It's obviously the variability of the climate. So his argument is that the climate changes throughout history naturally. And so what we're seeing is a warming. But throughout history, we have warmings. We have coolings. The earth changes. When you look at data of the weather, we only have it in terms of concrete data for the last.
Couple of centuries, if I remember right.
And again, I did write this article a long time ago.
And anything before that is based on estimation,
based on a variety of areas.
And again, correct me if I'm wrong, if you disagree with me.
But that is the crux of Tom's argument, I believe.
And obviously, he'll add a lot more nuance and as will many other people.
But tag it.
What's your counter to that?
And also, just give me an overview of your thoughts generally as well.
I would love to hear them.
Yes, thank you.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious as to where he is getting his information since it's flying right in the face of pretty much all of the collective scientific community in general.
All right, that is absolutely not true.
I'm getting my information from peer-reviewed papers.
For example, there's a whole website about the medieval warm period.
There are many, many papers in great detail that have studied the medieval warm period,
and they have concluded that...
Can you name one?
I...
I can't name those papers, but I can send you to that site.
It's the Medieval Warmbi-Perry Project site.
So those papers are there.
You cannot deny the existence of those papers.
And they call that the medieval climate optimum for a reason,
because that was a good time for humans to be alive.
That's when we built the big churches,
and we had time to do a lot of important things
because we had plenty of food.
And during the little Ice Age...
which is also a documented fact, that was a bad time to be a human because there was a lot more disease and there was hunger.
The crops were failing.
And the whole idea that we want to go back to the little ice age is crazy.
It does not make any sense.
Okay, so I don't know that anybody says we want to go back to a little ice age,
but I don't know what peer-reviewed studies you're looking at.
I'm looking at one from the University of Leeds, published in 2021, found that the ice from the
glaciers in the Himalayas is melting at least 10 times higher than the average rate over past
centuries, a result of human-induced climate change.
Another study I'm looking at from 2021, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization said that 21%
And generally, I'm not trying to ask you to box you in, genuine question.
So like you said the past centuries and is it right?
And again, please tell me, is it right that we've got this data for all the past centuries,
but we haven't got the data for the past, first question.
And second question is,
When you're looking at it from a very minutia perspective,
and what I mean by that is the history of the earth is much larger than a couple of centuries.
So when you look at the couple of centuries,
it's but a very small aspect of the entirety of the Earth's existence.
And so the question is, the information that you're saying,
is it based on the couple of centuries or is it based on some bigger?
And therefore, when you zoom out, you have a scenario where we don't have that data.
But I really want to know from you. So go ahead.
And target.
You want to know, like, how total, how far back this is going?
Yeah, because you said a couple of centuries, but maybe you've got an explanation for time, like, before that, and what was happening with the ice captain and the changes.
So...
Yeah, this paper says the study, which was led by the University of Leeds, concludes that over recent decades, the Himalayan glaciers have lost 10 times more quickly over the last few decades than on average since the last major glacier expansion 400 to 700 years ago.
Okay, so it's 400 to 700 years ago.
Yeah, brilliant.
So, Aaron, I do want to come to you and just thinking about the, just taking into
considerations the questions I had.
I know you have strong thoughts about this.
So please go ahead, give me your perspective and just give me a bit more details.
That'd be brilliant.
I think this is a stitch up.
I think you are platforming a later climate deniers to make it look like there's a debate where
there isn't any.
When the science and this is completely settled, and we have to be urgently talking about what the solutions are.
You're giving room to people who don't even accept that the science is settled.
So, you know, these organisations are funded often by fossil fuel vested interest to deny the science.
The science is really clear. It's been settled for ages.
We have to massively reduce emissions right now, and you're continuing to make a false debate.
Thank you.
Well, Aaron, I know, I mean, Dr. Aaron, I know that's your position.
And you can see on the panel, we've only, we've got, we have got a balanced panel.
We are waiting for some more people to come on.
No, it's not balanced, it's false balance.
That's what you're doing.
If it was balanced, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists tell us that we have a massive problem that we have to solve.
All the world's governments have signed up to agreements that they say we're going to solve.
You are making it seem as though it's just one side saying this and the other side saying that.
That's not a proper debate.
That's a false debate and you are being...
You're facilitating that and that's completely wrong.
So let me, let me respond to that, Aaron.
And I know you sent a message about this as well.
So obviously, guys, I know the sound effects are, we don't normally use that.
We just want to have like intellectual conversation.
So Aaron, I know that's your position, but let's be clear.
Although you're saying the majority of the scientists are saying this,
Let's, we know again, this is your argument that essentially what we should do is
kow to authority and kauto to scientific authority.
We saw in the COVID debate is an example that many of people went through.
People who were making the exact same argument you were making about masks.
about vaccines, about various other things pertaining to that issue.
There was even academic papers written about it,
peer-reviewed journals from nature,
that now we're finding out that the peer-reviewed journal from nature
that was, for example, produced...
had significant biases when it was done.
It was controlled by certain people to ensure that a certain narrative was removed.
It was ensured that basically other positions were completely discarded,
even though they had merit and now it seems like they have a lot more stronger merit.
So you're telling everybody that ignore anything else and just trust the scientists.
So my question to you is, why should people trust the scientists when the trust in science has been destroyed by the scientific community in terms of what happened in COVID as an example?
No, again, you've completely misrepresenting this.
This science has been settled for a really long time.
It's not the same as science which was becoming, you know...
Who else are we going to turn to you for advice about what's going on in the natural world other than the people who study it for their lifetimes?
When you're sick, you go to a doctor.
When your car breaks down, you go to a mechanic.
When you're trying to find out what's going on with the earth, you go to climate scientists.
It's as simple as that.
You don't have another way to have access to the information other than to trust these experts and to ensure that there's transparency about the processes that they conduct their work by.
Right.
Okay, let me...
Are you trying to argue that masks and vaccines don't work?
Is that what your stance is, sir?
Yeah, it sounds like completely conspiracy thinking.
You're saying that nobody with a position of expertise
and intellectual education should be listened to.
No, I didn't say that. And again, I think Aaron, you...
And by the way, this is not meant to be a debate between me and you.
It's just that you got upset that while we're even having this conversation.
I guess what?
You told us...
You told me when I asked if this was going to happen.
You said we were going to be talking about the solutions to the climate crisis.
You aren't talking about that.
You're talking about, is this something we should be concerned about?
Is this real or not?
That's not the debate that you said that this was going to be...
No, no.
I mean, I'm not sure what messages you were sent, but...
We're very clear that we always have,
and please produce the message and let's look at it,
but we are very clear that in this panel,
as much as you want people not to debate or question you,
as per what the clergy did in the past,
we have a scenario where we do actually debate positions.
You may disagree with the positions and that's fair enough for you to disagree.
And again, this is not meant to be...
You said we will be discussing how we can help in solving this issue.
That's what you said to me that we would be talking about.
Well, I'll get the team to send me the message, but no, this is,
if it's, if your position is that you're unwilling to speak about,
unwilling to have conversations,
All when I have to debate, that's fine.
No, my position is that the science is very clear because the IPCC have made report after report that says we have a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a sustainable future for all.
We have to stop fossil fuel emissions within the next 30, 40 years.
We have to talk about that as a society, about how we can do that.
It's really urgent that we have that conversation,
and there are different positions that are legitimate about how to do that.
What is not legitimate is to question underlying fundamental science that has been established over 100 years of careful research by the scientific community.
Right. So, again, I mean, I'm not...
this debate isn't meant to be about a debate
about why we should even be talking about it.
Like I said, I have got panellists on here
want to debate about it.
And if you have this kind of position,
we know scientists...
Yeah, but that's because you invited them on it.
It was clear that's what they're going to do,
and they deliberately trying to prevent this conversation progressing.
That's what they've been doing for years.
There's the climate deniers.
They're trying to delay action.
They're doing it because they're funded by fossil fuel interests,
and that means that we can't as a society talk about the need to rapidly decarbonize.
And that's fine, that's your position and you're able to have the position.
But anyway, let me go to...
It's an evidence position based on research that's been conducted by investigative journalists and by sociologists and historians.
It's evidence.
Okay, it's facts that has been produced to show that that's how these groups organize and operate.
And you are giving them a platform in which to sow disinformation and mislead the public.
That's your on you and you are at fault for doing it.
Right, Aaron, right, I was trying my best to move away from this, but you're forcing me into this.
Right, let's be clear, you are basically taking a position which is,
a position of saying that nobody's able to question you, nobody's able to question the science,
you are the ultimate authority, and guess what, you're not. You guys have been talking a...
Okay, gentlemen, let me just speak my piece really quick. I don't have a ton of time for this.
I agree almost entirely with Aaron, except for a couple of things. I think that there are more,
you don't have to trust the scientists. You can trust our instruments, right? You can...
Read our thermometers and you can read the global average temperatures, breaking records, consecutive days over and over.
You can look at your own feet and you can just take a look at what's happening to people around the world being washed away in floods.
I heard a guy say something about CO2 helping plants to grow.
There are billions of trees on fire in the boreal forests.
Okay.
And when you talk about equating the...
uncertainty over the airborne transmission of COVID and whether masks were necessary at the beginning.
That's not the same as the overarching, to stay with the analogy, idea that the virus was going to kill people and that it was killing people.
We just didn't know exactly how it was spreading, and we figured it out as we went.
And that's how science works.
So there are some places of debate in climate change, and we're talking right now about
how much of this is attributable to the El Niño southern oscillation, how much the change in
stratospheric aerosols, and how much is the background rate of climate change.
But the truth is undeniable.
that the climate is warming at a rate that we have not seen in human history.
And we know that not just by the temperature records that we have,
going back to about 1850, but also from tree rings and ice cores.
So we're not just estimating, but we are reconstructing using different sources of data.
We can look at gas bubbles that formed in the ancient climates hundreds of thousands of years ago in the ice cores.
And we can see events that are recorded in history, like the use of lead by the Romans.
And all sorts of, and the little ice age, for instance, just a little piece on the little ice age.
The climate dropped about two degrees, and it was terribly, it was cataclysmic.
And now we're headed for two degrees up.
That is also going to be cataclysmic, and in fact, it is already.
You don't have to trust us.
You can just look around and observe the world around you.
Thanks for your time.
I appreciate that comment, Spencer.
And yeah, that's what the question was before.
And so, yeah, thanks for giving your position on this.
That's the whole reason we're here.
James or Mays.
Let me go to Mays.
Actually, you got your hand up.
Mays.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Again, the same question to you, which is that...
The argument that's being made, and you heard Spencer's argument, and you've heard Target's argument,
and the argument is that, look, there is concern.
The climate is changing significantly, and it's not something that's natural, but it's
something, it's not something that's natural.
But what's your thought, Ms?
Thanks, Seliman.
So first and foremost, I want to say that I want to be very respectful of everyone's
perspective.
I actually am...
You know, I appreciate the passion about the climate.
Are we putting a lot of pollution and I think are we harming the environment through a lot of the industrial,
you know, from the last industrial revolution until now?
Absolutely.
Have they been putting a lot of nuclear waste and doing a lot of, I would say, very irresponsible
you know waste dumping and from the corporate level absolutely and in in addition to that
there is I have a I have a bunch of evidence and documents and scientific
about geoengineering and climate modification which is actually probably one of the
more damaging things that's happening.
So just, so I just wanted to say that,
but I do have a question before I get to the rest of it.
And this is for Alex, is it Alex or the other gentleman?
Do you,
Would you agree that this could potentially be a real issue that's being, I would say,
captured and weaponized from like the global level, the sustainable development goals
and all that?
Because I think that's where there is a, there's like a little bit of a, like if we really want to have a meaningful conversation and, and kind of get people's take as to what it is that, you know, it's going to the extreme of being completely denied by a lot of people just because of this issue not being talked about.
So I just wanted to ask that as a genuine question.
I don't know if Dr. Aaron wants to take it or...
It's being denied for the same reasons that he said because a special interest and lobbyists that don't want to put money and investments into fixing the way that they are harming the world and the environment.
It's not everything is a huge conspiracy when you have data, when you have information.
evidence and it's just like the doctor aaron said this is a disingenuous conversation when you are
arguing about facts we shouldn't be giving opinions on facts facts are what they are we can debate
maybe how much humans are actually contributing to it but we are contributing to it it is happening
it is a real thing well so what we're arguing is
you know, the reason why I'm asking is because, you know, what, so how would you perceive, um,
you know, how would we sequester the CO2?
Like what would be the remedy, the urgent action that needs to be taken?
Because what I'm proposing with a boatload of evidence is that climate modification in geoengineering is happening.
And it's happening beyond what anyone can imagine.
In fact, if you take samples of precipitation, you will find aluminum in it.
You will find, you know, let me pull up the paperwork and I'll actually pin it up top.
So, you know, I just want to kind of at least have this conversation.
Are you a scientist?
No, I am not a scientist.
I am a researcher, though.
Okay. I mean, everybody does research and I'm an analyst, but I'm not a scientist, and I'm not going to pretend that. I'm going to listen to them.
What I would provide you is scientific. It's scientific. It's not coming from me.
But I mean, so I guess, you know, the question is out there. It's a genuine one. And this is kind of with the intention to better understand each side so that we can understand.
you know, be productive, you know?
So that's what I wanted to throw out there.
I'll grab the documentation.
I mean, it's just a ball.
There's a lot of different factors.
There are a lot of different factors at play here, obviously. Communication is a huge one,
and the lack of trust in scientists, that's something that's not about to go away. It's only
getting worse. Also, things like Twitter, as much as I love it, it becomes an echo chamber
for individuals to express their opinion, but also followers to maybe go off a clip in the wrong
direction. And when you start...
talking geoengineering and these, I mean, as a meteorologist on TV in Canada, the second I do facts about weather, just yesterday, hottest temperature we have ever seen in the Northwest Territories way above the Arctic Circle by almost three degrees.
And records go back 100 years. And that as a one-off or a two-off...
is something that is remarkable, but again, records are there to be broken.
But it's when you start seeing things happening across the planet.
It's the communication of that as a meteorologist, as a climate scientist, as a group of
individuals.
That is what the challenge is, the debate over whether or not this warming planet is good
for us or bad for us or, I mean, these are all side topics, but, uh,
I hate to kind of go off on a tangent when there's such a big picture problem with communicating what's going on around us when so many people just want to maybe look at a picture of a flood in India and say, well, there you go, climate change.
Or the other way, a cold snap in January and say, see, there is no climate change.
These are all things that we deal with every day and it's just not a big picture solution.
Yeah, and I think, Anthony, thanks.
I do appreciate that.
And that's what we don't want.
We don't want an echo chamber,
hence the reason why we want various positions and ideologies.
And maybe people are used to that echo chamber.
But James, I want to hear your thoughts about the specific point that we were talking about.
And that is you have a scenario, which Target said, she said,
and I think no one disagrees with what she said that...
the temperature is getting warmer.
That bit,
no one can disagree with.
You know,
one is able to observe it.
And she even said that where there may be some argument is possibly,
and correct me if I'm wrong target,
if I'm misstating what you said,
then just jump in.
That where there may be some kind of discussion is whether the cause of that
is some form of human impact on it.
So my question to you is James is,
first of all,
that is she right?
And the second question is,
again,
Anthony said it. We've got data for us 100 years, a couple of hundred years, but then someone
else mentioned earlier that even though we don't have the data for the time before that,
we're able to calculate it based on various other factors. And then based on that way,
we do see that there is impact and there is climate change. But James, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Yeah, thank you. I really enjoy these spaces. They're all done in the best sort of manner.
So thank you for the ones that have been set up over time. I think it's important to debate these things.
But I do feel like a lot of this debate on climate change reminds me of the COVID debate, and bear with me on this.
I think...
It is important to address that obviously the data is showing that temperatures are rising.
In the same way in the 70s, there was a lot of data suggesting that temperatures were cooling,
so therefore it was called the dawn of the ice age.
That debate is, I think, a healthy debate based on data and science to scrutinize where we're going with us.
But I think where we're getting divisive isn't so much.
about climate change. The same way it wasn't so much about the COVID's out there.
It was about the response to COVID and the response to climate change.
And that's where I have a problem. So the response to climate change is largely driven around
the auspices of net zero. Now, I'm a lifelong environmentalist, like most of us on this group
tonight and spaces tonight, and majority of people.
care about the environment. They want less pollution. They want clean air.
Now this is normal stuff, but the debate has moved away from old school environmentalism,
which is about the things I've just mentioned, and into sometimes crass logic solutions to climate
change that are creating a set of other problems. Does that not ring any bells to what happened with
COVID? So for instance, there's a debate to be had about wind turbines.
First of all, does it provide enough energy?
Secondly, the pollution that they cause after their 20-year shelf life,
when they end up in landfills,
and they're made from balsa wood, which is plundering aspects of the indigenous communities
and rainforests of the Amazon.
Secondly, with solar power, where they end up in landfills as well,
or electric cars.
You know, the cobalt within the lithium-ion battery of many electric cars,
and also tablets and mobile phones, is plundered from the landscapes of Congo with 40,000 plus child slaves.
How is that ethical or environmentally sustainable?
And then you've got an argument about farming.
Look what's going on in the Netherlands, where they're threatening over 11,000, I think it is farms,
because they're not hitting nitrogen targets.
And they're concerned about methane levels from cows.
Now, as a parma's son, I know as much as anyone else, a methane is a vital part of the carbon cycle, where it stays in the air for about 12 years and it dissipates and changes into carbon dioxide and water, goes back into the grass, acts as nutrients, the cows then eat it and it becomes part of the carbon cycle, of its cow is a critical part of that.
If we get away from old school environmentalism,
which has always worked about the land and the soil and the water
and making sure they're sustainable
and all working in the cycle together through photosynthesis and ecosystems and so on.
And we move to some of the crass logic responses,
then that is the area I think we need to scrutinize more than anything else.
Because if we don't do that,
then we'll end up in trouble like we did with a lot of the COVID responses.
They were purely...
COVID was about science in terms of what is out there,
but the response quite often was not about science.
And we're at the same point of climate change.
And therefore, it raises the debate.
And this is the area that people get called conspiracy theorists,
even though they're not.
The debate is then how when people question what the response is,
they're smeared and suppressed.
If we care about the planet,
what we need to do is come up with solutions
that are in the best keeping to heal the planet
rather than give off the impression
that it becomes like a virtue contract
that is fundamentally about asset grabbing
and more power and more control
and more digital idea and solutions
that destroy people's livelihoods and economy
rather than actually providing genuine solutions
that answers the problem that is in front of us.
So my skin in the game of this debate
is to listen and learn about what's happening with the climate.
You know, that's an important debate.
You know, the data is indicating some pretty disturbing trends right now.
But the problem to reiterate with this debate is the solutions, in inverted commas,
that are coming from a lot of our governments that are not solving the problems
and are actually almost diametrically opposite to environmental sustainability.
That's all I've got to say.
Appreciate the comments, James.
Friends, I want to go to you, and it's Friends of Science.
So we had a report by a number of people, but basically in CNN, as well as the UN saying that it
Basically, global heat is in uncharted territories, as scientists warned,
2023 could be the hottest year on record.
So, again, these are reports that are coming from the mainstream media,
but also the UN was also making similar reports.
So again, I'd love to hear any of your general thoughts
before we get specifics on what's your thoughts about what we're hearing in the news.
Yes, thanks for having us on the show.
I'm Michelle Sterling, Communications Manager.
I'd like to mention that, you know, the hottest time ever, the hottest days ever are 400ths of a degree Celsius.
Like, what's the margin of error on that?
Right.
It's probably 0.1 degree, meaning that it could be warmer or cooler.
You know, these are things that are not mentioned,
and we see that NOAA is backing away from this
because they don't believe that the data set used by the climate rean analyzer
is appropriate for what they're claiming.
But nonetheless, the real point is that
The climate is a very complex dynamic system, and there are many, many factors working on it.
And I posted on the Twitter feed a graphic that Henri Masson had put together.
He's a complex systems expert.
And it just shows the massive interactions of everything like cosmic rays, gravity, geothermy, meteorites, clouds and atmosphere.
It's a very, very complex system.
And to assign a simple thing like CO2 as the sole driver, that's absurd.
Obviously, the main driver is the sun.
And the sun operates in many different ways.
Okay.
And with reference to the COVID and climate issue, I also posted a presentation that I did for Freedom Talk, Alberta.
which we did do models versus reality, the COVID climate public policy disasters.
And as you're saying about these supposed solutions like shutting down farms
and making people die from heat or eat poverty because energy prices are so high,
you know, it's because they're using models that do not reflect reality.
And we find Roger PLK Jr. and Justin Ritchie have done great work ferreting out the use of RCP8.5,
which is an implausible scenario that is used by nearly all the peer-reviewed climate researchers.
So they're using a scenario that would use more coal than we presently have on Earth
and would be, I think, four or five times the amount of oil that we're using,
which is impossible to even attain, certainly not in the short term,
but it's just not going to happen.
But that's the basis for these very scary forecasts.
And if I can add one more thing, if you go to clintel.org, you can see that clintel,
C-L-I-N-T-E-L, has done an analysis of the IPCC AR-6 report.
And the first thing they did was issue a letter to Dr. Hosen-Lee, who is the chair of the IPCC,
asking him why he allowed...
UN Secretary General Gutierrez and all the media to claim there was a code red for humanity
when that is not reflected in the report.
In fact, in the Physical Sciences report, they only mentioned climate emergency and climate crisis
once in reference to the media.
Yeah.
Thanks for that, friends. Let me go to Zach.
Yeah, sorry, Dominic. Let me go to Dominic first because you're on a chance to jump in.
So Dominic, I mean, same question to you. We've seen reports that 2023 is the most warmest.
The temperature of the planet is the warmest. It's ever been, is that a cause for concern?
It's a cause for concern, but I think the debate really about climate change is not so much about the science.
It's not so much about.
where we sort of stack up on the response.
The simple problem is the number of people on the planet.
And I think we can all agree upon that.
You know, when I was born in 1970, there were 2.7 billion people on planet Earth,
and it's now over 8 billion.
And if I do get to the grand old age of 80, it will be probably over 9 billion.
And we have to feed more people in the next 50 years
than the last 10,000 years combined on this planet.
And we have to do it when the surface of the earth that we can grow food on is becoming more difficult to do because of climatic change, because of desertification, because of lack of water and all the other problems that we face.
And, you know, we're beginning to sort of have to address those concerns because of the scale of human population.
I think that's the problem. You know, there were far less people on this planet.
the Industrial Revolution would not have caused the problems it has
because we wouldn't have put out a fraction of the carbon
into the Earth's atmosphere that we have.
But that's just not the case.
You know, there are so many of us.
There's so little resources on this planet
and there's so much competition for it.
And oil and gas has been hugely beneficial to the growth of the population.
You know, if you look at the last hundred years, it's allowed hundreds of millions of people to be lifted out of poverty, economies to grow, technology, medical care.
It's, you know, increased our life expectancy and massively improve the way we grow food and everything.
But the trouble is, it's gone from being a huge,
benefit to mankind to suddenly being a millstone around on neck because of the scale of the population,
the planet and the competition for resources. So what we've now got to do, regardless of this debate
we're having here in other circles, is apply technology to the problem. And I'm a great believer that
humans can do that.
and that we can find solutions.
And the question is, can we find solutions in time
to prevent the worst aspects of climate change
and the sense of what that might do to our ability to grow food on this planet,
what that might do to the ability for people to actually sustain life on this planet,
where they're going to move from one country to another,
and that will bring about more disease on conflict and other problems?
So, you know, I think we've got to sort of move to a technological innovation
an adaptation process based upon the huge numbers of people on this earth where there is still
massive differences in living standards. There are still hundreds of millions of people living in
poverty despite the huge step forwards we've taken. And we have a duty to try and help everyone
to sustain life as fair as possible. But at the other end of the scale, and the thing that concerns
me is we have a disaster in the natural world as well.
You know, have a situation where, you know, in that lifetime I've said since 1970,
we've lost huge amounts of species and biodiversity on this planet.
And we can't really set the clock back for what we've lost.
We can only try and protect what still exists on this planet.
And we as the human race have a duty, in my view, to protect the natural world
because we were allowing it for life.
It's there and it has to exist for us to exist.
But equally, you know, we live in this great void of darkness in the universe.
And I know William Shatner said recently when he went to his...
trip into space.
He thought it was going to be the great moment in his life
at the end of his life,
but actually it left him with an empty void
because he looked back to the earth
and realized that space is dead.
And the only living planet we have is the earth.
And it's an intricate, beautiful, incredible place that we probably couldn't find replicated anywhere else in the universe.
Yet we are doing massive damage to it and destroying it.
And it's our only home.
And it's their only boat we're on or all on the same boat.
So we've really just got to focus, I think, on those issues in my view.
We're ever going to get out of the problems that we have.
Thanks for your comments, Dominic. Let me go to Yaron.
Yaron, what's your thoughts about, you know, this argument that's being made that the temperature is exceeding significantly?
There is, there is now, it's become imperative for us to start making moves to ensure that we can save the planet.
Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, I'm not a scientist, so I'm not going to debate the science.
But what I hear is all this catastrophizing.
There are too many people on the planet.
We're all going to die.
It's going to get so hot.
We're going to have floods.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
The number of people who die from weather events is massively in decline.
We're seeing, yeah, maybe you're seeing more.
Husha weather events. But we have the technology, we have the wealth to deal with that.
Amsterdam has been living under sea level for hundreds of years.
Certainly we can deal with rising sea levels in the future.
So I think the problem is the catastrophizing.
Yeah, it's getting warmer.
So what?
So the temperatures will get a little warmer,
and we will adapt.
We will find ways, we will innovate,
we'll create new technologies,
to make human life even more amazing on this planet
than it is today,
even if the temperatures get a little warmer.
And the solutions that are offered,
I'm not sure what the solution for overpopulation is, I'm afraid to ask.
But the solutions for the climate change is star fossil fuels.
And of course, anybody who's counter to these arguments is immediately blamed for being a spokesman for the fossil fuel industry.
So let me say right in advance, you know, I wish they gave me money, but I get no money from the fossil fuel industry.
And I do not lobby for them.
But look...
The only way we're going to deal with any kind of climate problems we have in the future
is with abundant and cheap energy. What we need right now is abundant and cheap energy so we can
deal with whatever the climate throws at us. And the reality is that right now, the only
abundant cheap energy we have that's reliable and dependable is fossil fuels. I wish that we
had more nuclear. I find it curious.
How many people are anti-nuclear who claim to be concerned about climate when nuclear clearly is the only alternative?
So I agree with those people who said, let's talk about the solutions, but the problem is
that every single solution I hear from those catastrophizing
is worse than the weather getting warmer.
It's worse than their sea levels rising.
If you actually went to net zero in terms of fossil fuels,
the catastrophe to human life, the number of deaths,
the destruction of civilization would be far more extreme
than anything that the climate can ever do to us.
So let me go to justice.
Justice, I got a question for you.
So Yaron's made a number of arguments.
Dominic also made the argument about overpopulation.
The argument on the other side is obviously population collapse.
In addition to that, you've got a scenario where some people argue that maybe, and I want to hear your thoughts on this,
that the issue of climate change is there,
but it's not as significant as people are stating.
And therefore, trying to address that,
and then, for example, you know,
trying to decrease the population,
which could cause population collapse,
the risks that it could have to jobs,
the risk, the higher energy costs,
all of these factors are much worse than, for example,
focusing on the climate.
So just look to hear your thoughts on that.
Just as you know, you might it's bottom left-hand side.
Yes, I want first of all to begin by thanking everyone who has joined this conversation.
It's a conversation that is uncomfortable for some folks, but I think it's imperative for us to have a conversation about this issue.
Because to someone like me who's coming from Africa, the most vulnerable continent when it comes to adverse impacts of climate change, it really perturbs my mind when I hear about climate deniers on this space.
But I believe that engaging with them in this conversation, we enable us to fix the climate images that we're in today.
We all have to believe that climate change is a public good problem that affects every one of us,
regardless of your race, regardless of your political affiliation, and regardless of your economic status.
Because whether you're rich or poor, when it comes to breathing dirty air, we all breathe that dirty air.
So what happened in New York a few weeks ago, both the rich and poor were breathing the same dirty air.
So as someone who's coming from the global north,
first of all, I want to say that we are in this mess today
because of mainly the global north,
because Africa emits less,
but we are facing the most adverse impacts of climate change.
We are always the first and hit the most because of our human actions.
So for anyone to come on this space and deny that our human actions
are not responsible for this climate crisis,
I believe they're factually incorrect.
As someone who comes from Uganda, because Uganda is my own country,
Uganda has the second youngest population,
and Africa has the youngest population entire world, over one billion people.
But looking at how the greatest polluters, the USA, China, Russia,
are putting us in this mess and they're not willing, you know, to pay for the damage or the loss they've caused,
which is, by the way, irreversible, speaks volumes.
Now, this hit is not a joke because you might be in the U.S. that you're privileged today.
But if you're someone who is coming from sub-Saharan Africa where there is a lot of poverty,
People are being forced to migrate because of these heat waves.
Look at the Troucana area in Kenya.
Go and look at areas like Elytra.
People are migrating.
It is forced migration.
Children are suffering from malnutrition because they have nothing to eat.
My home country, we have a region called Karamoja.
Today, there is a problem of food scarcity because of these heat waves.
So our people are dying.
You can read about 900 Ugandans in Karamoja who died a few months ago in Karamoja.
But Karamoja has the richest mineral resources in Uganda, from gold to diamond, to marble, to uranium, name it.
But it is the poorest region in our country, Uganda.
So as concerned citizens in this world, I think it is imperative for us to collectively find a solution to this problem.
Because as I said in the beginning, whether you're rich or poor, whether you're in a global north or south,
this climate change transcedes no border.
So it would not matter that you're in America or in Kenya or Uganda.
So why are we here today?
How did we find ourselves in this climate mess today?
It is mainly because of the fossil fuel companies.
They learned about this years ago, decades ago,
but they did want us to know about the catastrophe
that was likely to be caused.
So instead of alluding the public to stop their operations,
they worked to deceive the public about the harms
of them engaging in fossil fuels.
Look at countries like Nigeria.
It's in West Africa.
Shell has been drilling in Nigeria
for the last 55 years.
They came with the same talking points
of the energy industry that we're going to end
energy poverty in Nigeria.
But energy private is high.
But they've been drilling
and they've been destroying the lands.
It can read about the case of
organic community.
They destroyed the organic community
to the core. And they even sued Shell.
in the courts, and they were made to pay, I think, a fine of $15 million US dollars.
So this loss and damage that the fossil fuels is causing is, of course,
is of course a big problem to where we are today.
So I encourage everyone who is still denying that climate change is real on this space.
Of course, we know about the stages of climate denial.
Because many of us on this space we've heard from trolls on Twitter who are saying, well, this is not real.
This is not us who are responsible for this climate chaos.
I mean, we have time to solve these problems.
Maybe we should look at it in the other age.
Maybe it is too expensive for us to fix.
But if we don't fix it right now, who is going to fix it?
Are we going to leave this mess for our younger children or for our grandchildren?
So it is asked to rise up to the Cujan and say, this is a climate image.
Let's find ways on how we can decarbonize.
Because as someone I said before, we have no planet B.
This is the only planet we have to protect.
So, um,
I believe, of course, many people here, it will take them time to evolve,
or to understand until they are hit by these impacts of climate change.
But as someone who comes from sub-Saharan Africa,
at times I feel insulted by people who come on these spaces,
and they are denying that the world is burning on our watch.
Just take a flight to Somalia and see what's happening or Sudan, this forced migration.
And when folks from Africa are crossing to the global north, maybe they're going to Europe,
they're dying on the Indian Ocean, and no one is there to save them.
The global north is responsible for the climate crisis.
They are shutting doors.
So how can we survive if we're in such a world?
Why shouldn't we have open ears and find solutions to this problem that we're facing today?
Climate change is not a laughing issue.
Look at your state here.
Just as thanks for that.
I appreciate it.
Let me just quickly go to Mia because I know you've only got a short period of time and you need to leave.
So Mia, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks. So my name is Yieto, I'm the director of Mier, and I'm speaking from Sierra Leone today.
So we initially developed out of Harvard University, and my personal training was in experimental physics and chemistry and biology.
So I can really synthesize with both sides. For example, Tom mentions that there's some optimal temperature where humans can operate the best. And that's absolutely correct.
So for humans, we probably operate best, you know, around temperature somewhere in between
sub-shavering Earth, Africa and Europe.
Probably these days, you know, European weather is pretty good for us.
It also depends on how we procure our food.
So because there's the optimal temperature, if you decrease the temperature too much, of course,
we'll suffer.
And that's what happened during the mini ice age.
And if you increase temperature too much equally, our performance, our ability, you know,
to function as civilization will also suffer.
And if you look into the ecological and the biological physiological
literature, we'll notice that not only humans, but all the animals and plants, we all
display the same type of thermal tolerance and thermal performance curve.
And the shape of this curve is a bell shape,
meaning that at some temperature specific to the species, we all perform it very well.
But if you have a 5 degree, 2 degree departure from this optimum temperature,
then we really become less able to compete in the ecosystems.
So the bad news for us is that the curve drops fairly gradually and slowly going down the low temperature side, but it drops down very precipitously if the temperature is increased.
And that's pretty common and uniform for most biological species that's been studied rigorously.
So...
Without even going into the cause and the origins of this whatever, whether weirding or global warming, whatever you know, what to call it,
The reason the mere presence of disasters, of the floods, of fires is reason enough for us to try to develop solutions.
So humans, because of fossil fuel, we have gotten pretty good at dealing with cold.
We just burn coal, we burn natural gas, and we secure ourselves a warm home.
but when it's really, really hot, it becomes very challenging for existing technologies to deal with the heat stress.
And it's very challenging not only for keeping single households cold, because when you do that, you actually reject heat into neighborhood and make your neighbors suffer.
But right now, using existing technology is quite difficult to do that ecosystem-wide. And
And also, of course, how do we save, you know, hectares and square kilometers square miles of our crop fields that's scorching under the sun these days?
So that's why we developed a technology or basically a concept based on installing mirrors at the surface of the planet in order to cool it.
And the...
It's basically, you know, actually what's friend of Earth, I think.
Somebody mentioned the friend of science said before that everything is driven by the sun.
It's absolutely correct.
Everything on Earth is driven by the sun.
It's the source of energy for all the ecosystems and weather patterns.
So it just makes sense if you want to do anything thermal, you know, let's work with the sun.
So we've been conducting field experiments for the past two years, and just putting a mirror out there in a field,
one can drop the temperature of the soil by four degrees at the depth of 10 centimeters.
And we floated some mirrors on a small model reservoir, and we could suppress evaporation by 85% roughly.
And we also recently installed mirage roofs on slum communities in Sierra Leone.
And we could reduce interior temperature, air temperature, by up to 6 to 7 degrees Celsius.
And it's using very cheap material upcycled from plastic PET bottles and aluminum cans.
So I think rather than trying to debate the origins and whether there's existence of global warming, let's just
develop to enable the creation of habitable habitats for everybody on Earth.
You know, starting with people in Saraliluans who are already suffering.
So I came here in January.
And I witnessed firsthand how children are developing heat rash.
I myself, just working outside, you know, under 35 degrees Celsius weather at 90% humidity,
had to take two weeks off because my whole body was covered in heat rash.
So thermal stress and the fact that many places on Earth are no longer habitable to human species,
it's a fact.
If you are in doubt, please book a ticket and travel to some countries closer to the equator and...
So that's my two sets, I think.
Right now, I appreciate that.
I mean, thank you.
Yeah, thanks.
No, no, I appreciate that.
Thank you for that.
So, yeah, guys, I'm just going to go to Tan.
Tan, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I know you said you've got a few points to make it,
but if you could just make them a bit more succinct,
because, you know, just so we can get as many panelists in as possible
so we can make their point.
So go ahead, Tom.
All right, I have a number of responses from things that have been erased already.
The whole idea that you can fly over Somalia and look down to see something bad and conclude that CO2 caused that bad thing, that's a very bad assumption.
There's a lot of that going around where if there's a drought or a fire or a hurricane or a flood or trap yields are down somewhere, there's always the assumption that CO2 caused it.
But that's not the case.
Globally, droughts are not getting worse.
Globally, fires aren't getting worse, et cetera.
I've looked, I've been down the rabbit hole of all of these different pieces of data,
and nothing is getting worse.
So the whole idea that CO2 is the reason that things are getting worse,
it falls at the first hurdle because those things are not getting worse.
And the whole idea that if someone has heat rash now, that must be caused by CO2,
again, that's a non-starter to me.
I'd like to say that climate change has always been real, but catastrophic,
anthropogenic global warming is the most massive scientific fraud in human history.
There's a claim that people like me are funded by the fossil fuel industry.
Not true.
I have never taken one cent from the fossil fuel industry.
About debates.
Supposedly, the climate crisis side won the debate some time ago, but that debate never
really happened.
When the real debates happen in the real world, the skeptical side wins.
That's why they don't like debates like this because the...
The alarmists do not win these debates.
They don't have the data on their side.
So this whole idea that bad weather is caused by people that you don't like.
That's an ancient belief.
A lot of people believe that right now.
It's just as silly now as it was back then.
Bad weather has always happened.
And if you see bad weather happening somewhere, you can't just assume that someone caused it.
When people say trust the science, who should we trust?
I've interviewed people on my podcast.
like Judith Curry, William Happer, Richard Linson.
These people have huge credentials, and they are on the side of saying,
we don't have evidence that CO2 is the climate control knob.
There is no climate crisis.
And so there's no the science that falls on the side of climate crisis.
There is a debate, and there's lots of very learned people that say there is no climate crisis.
Okay.
I would like to say I would invite anyone to debate this with me on my podcast.
I've sent out a lot of invites, and only one person, Gerald Kooten, has taken me up on that.
But if you really think that the science is on your side, take me up on it, and let's debate it at length on my podcast.
One other thing I wanted to mention, excuse me?
sorry go ahead sorry i thought you finished go ahead finish a couple more things just uh it's very
hard to figure out what the global average temperature was uh two thousand years ago using tree rings
it's hard to figure out what it is right now and uh
So there's a lot of margin of air, but I'm saying there's a lot of evidence that of great warmth long ago.
Like there were hippos in the Thames, maybe 130,000 years ago.
There were trees growing maybe 5,000 years ago north of the current tree line.
And people were farming in Greenland, maybe just over 1,000 years ago, in places where the ground is still frozen there.
So there's been a lot of warmth in the past when CO2 was supposedly lower.
And if CO2 was the climate control knob, then those warm periods shouldn't have happened.
I wanted to mention a geological heat in the Antarctic. I think possibly one reason why we're getting this panic that there's a warm global average temperatures this week.
The maps show that there's a lot of warmth, relative warmth in Antarctica. But it's a little known that there is a lot of geological heat down there, like near the Pine Island glacier. There's warmth coming up.
from the ground.
So you can't just assume that it's CO2.
Last thing I wanted to say is that U.S. heat waves peaked in the 1930s.
There was all sorts of records back then that have not been approached since.
And if CO2, again, is the climate control knob.
Why did that help?
Why did that happen? Thanks.
Appreciate that, Tom.
Let me go to Zach.
Zach.
I know you've got some comments to make.
Please go ahead.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I just first want to repeat what I said
at the very beginning of this discussion.
There is no debate on climate change.
I was invited here tonight to talk about solutions
just like Dr. Aaron, and I'm happy to do that,
but I just wanted to point that out explicitly.
In terms of solutions, we had a speaker earlier on
who said there was no abundant or cheaper energy.
Certainly in the UK, investing in renewables
so that solar, hydro, wind energy
is significantly cheaper than fossil fuels.
And of course, it doesn't have the same
awful impact on the planet.
So it's vital that we're out there making the case.
We also know that lots of folks and lots of countries
are facing what we call the cost of living crisis in the UK.
People who are poor and living in poverty.
We know the cheapest bill is the one that you don't have to pay.
And actually insulating your home is both good for the planet
and it's good for getting down bills.
So all of these things are interconnected.
But even if you didn't believe me on any of those things, we've heard justice tonight.
Justice spoke so powerfully about what's going on in Uganda and also spoke about Sudan and Eritrea.
It is a very privileged argument for those in the West to be sat wherever they are, feeling safe, feeling warm, whatever they're doing,
and not worrying about what's going on in the rest of the world where places are absolutely uninhabitable.
And even if you did think this was some kind of big conspiracy, what is actually the result of dealing with a Green New Deal?
Well, we're looking at cleaner air, good unionized jobs, cohesive communities that deal with the gender pay gap, the ethnicity pay gap, the disabled pay gap.
It's about more active transport and making sure those are cheaper and folks can get around to their jobs and they feel more connected to their communities.
All of these things are worth doing in and of themselves.
So there's no kind of global conspiracy here other than to end up with better communities.
So the very final thing I would say is this, is I think it was President Obama who said for quite a while
that lots of people were unsure about climate change and they were looking at the science and
they were hearing it and they knew that we had to do something about this.
And then there was a tiny group of people who were just never going to change their minds.
And I think we've heard some of these people on this call tonight.
And what I would say is wherever you are in the world, look for a green party because ultimately
we've got to beat them.
So by joining the Green Party, by being political wherever you are in country, by making sure that you're voting.
That's ultimately how we get a better planet for people and planet.
Thank you very much for having me.
I appreciate that, Zach.
Millie, I want to go to you.
I mean, Zach's made the argument towards the end
that those who are climate change deniers
are unwilling to change their position.
I mean, Millie, is that the case?
I mean, the one of the arguments that's been made
by the pro-climate change people
is that there shouldn't even be a debate.
Don't even ask us about it.
Don't even have a conversation.
So is that the case?
Or what's your thoughts, really?
Go ahead.
Okay.
I think that that's a false argument because what they're laying out is something with a false premise.
Because the problem is, is they keep pointing towards CO2, right?
As though CO2 is the main thing we should all be concerned about.
And if we all don't subscribe to this doomsday belief that the world's going to end if we don't lower CO2 and methane, cowfarts,
that somehow the Earth is going to not exist anymore when I think that the,
one of the other men before me really laid out well how the earth has changed throughout the
time periods we used to have way higher CO2 and the earth did not end right the world did not end
what i think is actually really important key here is that
This climate cult is actually, it's getting a lot of money from green subsidies.
So I'm actually somebody who I was impacted directly by a wind farm project that was put near a piece of land that my family owned.
And I used to actually be very much pro-wind turbine, pro-solar panel.
And when this happened, I didn't really know what was going to happen, what all entailed with these wind turbines.
Soon I found out that these wind farms are really a scam.
It actually came down to the point where in a hearing with the county, the wind developers admitted that
they actually would not have installed their project at all whatsoever
if it weren't for the green subsidies because they wouldn't have actually made any money.
When we actually research, what we found was that these wind turbines actually kill over 900,000 bats annually.
So they're wiping out bats, which is a big problem because in areas that have mosquito issues,
that's going to make mosquito-borne illnesses and other things a bigger problem because bats are, you know, they eat large amounts of mosquitoes.
So you're messing with the food chain in some of these areas.
The other thing is that they kill an extremely large amount of our raptor birds.
That means our bald eagles, our falcons.
They literally just whack them, knock them out of the sky.
This is well documented.
They actually, this is the sad part.
I'm actually very much pro-exam.
keeping the environment clean, like making sure we're not polluting our water,
polluting our air, polluting our land, preserving our glacial runoff aquifers.
So our property actually had a glacier aquifer.
Like we're talking, this melted from the glaciers and it was pristine quality water in Colorado.
And they decided to, instead, pump millions and millions of gallons of this aquifer to make cement bases for these wind turbines.
So they completely ruined this area of cattle farmland in Colorado with this wind project,
which I thought was supposed to be about the environment.
I thought it was supposed to be about protecting endangered species.
I thought this was supposed to be about real energy.
Come to find out, most of the energy being produced by these wind turbines was actually what they called dirty electricity, meaning...
These wind farms actually have to be hooked up to coal-powered plants.
That's right.
It was hooked up to the coal-powered plant.
And if not the coal-power plant, they hook them up to diesel-gasoline generators.
Okay?
Because the giant wind turbine blades have to be moving at all times.
They can't sit for very long at all.
Otherwise, they run the risk of the blades warping.
and actually having to be entirely replaced.
And that's very expensive.
So they actually have to keep these turbines being powered by coal, powered by gas.
And only if the wind, it doesn't even count if the wind gusts.
If you have these big gusts that go and then stop...
go and then stop, you can't harvest anything from that.
What they get is dirty electricity.
They bean count it at the electricity plant, and they literally dump it.
Why are they being counting it?
Well, so they can get the carbon credits, so they can get those green subsidies,
because they want the billions of dollars that Obama put forward in those tax subsidy plans.
So...
It's about counting beans for carbon credits.
It's about getting that money.
They don't actually care about the environment.
When it comes to these wind turbines,
they do way more harm than they actually do good.
The neighboring areas get massive EMF frequency pollution
to the animals in the neighboring houses.
They also have infrasound pollution, which can cause neighboring communities as well.
Serious health problems you guys can look into.
And the reason why they kill the bats.
One more thing, and I'll wrap it up.
The reason why they kill the bats, the reason why they kill the bats and so many of them annually,
they're not actually hitting the bats.
What happens is these big wind turbine blades, which the ones they put right next to us were literally the diameter was the span of a football field.
So it sounds like a jet's constantly going over your house when they put these things near you.
They actually create pressure pockets of high and low pressure in the atmosphere around the living area, around where people are.
And the bats actually, their lungs can't handle the pressure pockets,
and they actually die of burial trauma.
Their lungs literally explode.
Okay?
So, the problem I have is when you have these climate groups and climate people
parading around saying, oh, CO2 this, wind turbines are the answer,
but they're not actually going into it and doing the research and finding out more about these things.
It's a false argument.
They're not actually helping anything.
Thank you for that, Mealy.
Let me go to...
And please let me know if I pronounce your name wrong.
Joni, Johnny, you sent a message and said...
that you've got a point to make about the history of climate science,
and that would be able to settle the question that I asked.
And I do want that question answering,
because, I mean, these are questions that people have.
And as much as people, some people are saying,
let's not talk about it, let's not talk about it.
Trust the science.
We're in the age of 2023 where people question everything.
And so...
when people question it, rather than stop them from question it, answer it,
and then you can move on to like other discussions.
So I'd love to hear what your answer is,
just so that people can understand, you know, your argument.
Okay.
Sure, absolutely. Thank you for having me on the podcast. I'm an artist and an activist, and I work. Mostly I focus against the fossil fuel infrastructure. I'll tell a little bit about how we block the coal mines in Germany, maybe later. But first, I really want to answer that question because...
Here in Europe, we have a lot less climate denial that you have in the US.
You also have a lot of flat earths still.
So when I hear those guys saying that climate change is not from human activities and is not from CO2,
we can only just laugh really hard, but sadly it's such an important question that we have to be factual.
We can't just laugh.
how done they are, we have to be very factual.
So 1912 was the first article that pointed out that coal was at the core,
was creating global warming.
In 1958, there was a consensus to say that fossil fuel are to blame in the increase of global temperatures.
And then the fossil fuel companies started being a little worried because their business plan is based on increasing CO2 emissions.
So in 1977, Exxon did like an internal research.
Okay.
So that was
66 years ago.
The conclusion of the
Exxon research was that their
activity was increasing
CO2 level in the atmosphere
and then creating
climate change.
It took about 10 years
before the Exxon research became
public. That was in
1987.
So that was how
Half a century ago, and I don't believe that on your podcast, you still give a platform to people who deny that CO2 emissions caused by fossil fuels are at the core of global warming.
Of course it is. It's a consensus.
The IPCC report is very clear at every single iteration of the IPCC report.
It's very clear.
The good news is that we have the solutions.
The solution is to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
I'll say it again because I know that a lot of our global economy...
Let me ask you some questions because I like the way you explain the things.
So I mean, let's have a bit of a back and forth.
Just from questions point of view, not like a debate.
So first question to you is, Johnny, we have a scenario, which, as you said, you've given some data points for the last century.
One of the arguments that has been made is, yes, we have these data points for the last century, which does show that the climate is changing.
But from fossil fuel activities and from fossil fuel emissions, but make sure that you say the full thing, because
We have to make sure that we don't do any disinformation on this podcast,
and it has been a consensus from 66 years ago that climate change is created from human activities,
especially the combustion of fossil fuels.
This is undeniable and you will have a few like idiots who are trying to say otherwise.
It is 2023.
We cannot like put a question mark on this sentence.
It is clear that climate change is from human activities and fossil fuel combustion.
How about instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks, you actually refute some of the arguments that we presented.
Because an ad hominem attack doesn't really do anything, does it?
I don't think it's worth talking to you anymore because it's been 100 years that we know that it's fossil fuel are driving global warming and climate change.
So the good news is that we have solutions.
We must reduce that we use of fossil fuel.
Personally, at the studio, I've been working on this for four years now.
And the good news is it's not so difficult.
We know we have to reduce plane travel.
We know we have to insulate our buildings because a lot of the fossil fuel usage is still the gas that we use to power, to heat our homes.
And we have to also reduce the meat consumption.
And we also have to reduce all consumption.
And I've done it and I've stopped flying.
I'm an international artist.
I'm working internationally.
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny.
One second, one second.
So listen, I want someone from the panel.
And it's a serious question because I keep asking these questions.
And for some reason, I'm surprised.
But the answer is always, look, we're not going to answer the question.
Okay.
It's unacceptable to answer it because science has been settled for a hundred years and therefore you can't question it.
Okay, I understand that someone, people have that position.
You know the Earth is not flat anymore, do you?
Well, for hundreds of years, they said the Earth was flat.
That was settled science until people questioned it.
The argument you're making is invalid.
You guys are hilarious.
You're a child.
Okay, okay, journey, Johnny, I think you find it hard to have a discussion without basically ad homonyms.
But my question was this, to anybody on this space, because people ask these questions,
I understand that people have the position, and I know because...
It happens in academia.
It happens in religion where you weren't allowed to question anything and they got angry and they didn't want to answer anything.
We saw it in COVID where people were unwilling to answer.
The reason I brought you up, Johnny, is because you sent the message and said, look, I can answer the history of it.
I can explain it.
But then you said, like, don't ask it.
So let me go to somebody else who maybe can answer the question for me.
I just did, I just did, Shuleman.
No, no, so my question was, Johnny, you didn't.
So my question was...
I thought there is an answer.
I think I did you just don't want to hear about it.
I think you also climate denier
in the way you introduce the question.
You are a climate denier.
And I think...
Johnny, Johnny, just think about what you said.
You're saying, just by me asking a question...
automatically makes me a climate denies.
So even when I'm going to ask people questions
who aren't making...
Johnny, let me finish my point, bro.
Look, even though I'll be asking questions
to both people who have both positions
and throughout these podcasts,
we do ask people questions from all aspects,
but your argument is,
just by me having the nerve to ask you a question
automatically,
No, no, no, no, no.
Climate change is from fossil fuels.
I mean, it's obvious, we all know.
You don't just ask, oh, so is the Earth's plot anymore?
How long are we're going to be much?
Why the forests are burning?
New York is under, like, head-y-dorf?
And now you're an artist?
Congratulations.
Very proud of you.
You're a child.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You're just attached to the opinions of others who want to give you something for free.
They want to,
that you think they're going to protect you.
You think they're going to create this nice little safe city.
And you won't have to work for a living, a produce, or be a person of merit,
that they will give this to you because of their kindness.
You're a fool.
You're a useful idiot.
Yeah.
I don't want the personal attacks, right?
I know Joni did it first and whatever, and then doc.
But I don't want a person.
Let me go to Dominic.
So Dominic, you got your hand up, and I would like to hear your thoughts on this.
One question that people have is, some people miss this argument.
They say, look, we accept that the, and just this specific question, if you can answer it, that'd be brilliant.
So they say, look, we do accept that there is definitely...
climate change, right?
But there's people who are just taking this way too far in terms of activism.
So specifically that point, do you agree with that point?
I mean, I know you don't agree with that point, but I just love to hear your thoughts on it.
Dominic, you just need to unmute your mic.
It's bottom left, but then you are unmuted, so maybe something on your end.
Okay, let me ask the same question to Mia.
Mia, same question to you.
Please go ahead.
Yeah, I think it's not a good idea to go too extreme in either direction.
So just to be clear, so MIR and we believe that global warming is happening,
but we also think that the...
the position taken by activists is not a complete view of reality.
Because while, for example, we might have suspected that 100 years ago that CO2 was to be the main driver for global warming,
we have been since discovering many more details, including the fact that the pollution
created by burning fossil fuel has a cooling impact on the planet.
And that recently, as a result of the effort to improve air quality,
there has been an unmasking of this cooling impact
that has led to increase the rate of the warming.
So our scientific understanding is not complete.
And also,
Another example.
So air travel is bad, but many people don't know that if you travel by cruise, ships,
the net impact is actually cooling.
So averaged over the lifetime of the CO2 and of the clouds created by shipping lines,
there's actually a cooling impact if you so choose to travel by ocean.
So the science is continuously being updated, but overall, the consensus is that, yes, we are living in
over a period of warming planet.
So it's not really good idea to really espouse a very extreme position of one or the other.
We really need to take a step back and listen to everybody's point of view.
And I think it's not productive.
I appreciate your answer.
I really do.
Because this is what I want.
We want a discussion.
We want people to understand rather than basically ad homonyms.
It doesn't help anyone.
Right.
So me, I mean, another question to you is,
and you said, and do correct me if I'm wrong,
but that you're basically, you're in Africa.
So this probably impacts you more than,
and this question is probably much more important to ask you,
because you're actually, you know,
in Africa where the economical situation is much worse
than, for example, the Western world.
So the question is this, when you have a scenario,
because one of the issues that people have is,
I mean, how would, in your view, how should it be balanced
economic factors on ensuring climate, you know, change factors come into place, but then
the huge economic factors that are part of it, for example, the costs of generate, you know,
the costs of, you know, costs of, you know, costs of putting these provisions into place in terms of
ensuring that the climate change factors don't occur in terms of fossil fuels.
How do you balance that, saving the planet, but at the same time, maybe people who are in financial peril, whether it's in the Western world, but more so unless in the third world, how do you ensure that there's some kind of, I mean, how would you balance it? Yeah.
I think the primary goal for civilization, for our civilization is to take care of people, take care of the well-being of the people everywhere. And of course,
Economic development is very important, but we have to ensure that the type of development ensures in the future we can continue to take care of our children and grandchildren.
And currently we're doing a lousy job of taking care of brothers and sisters in global south.
So I'm in Sierra Leone, and every day when I go out to work, I gasped by 50 people asking me for money, just for a piece of bread.
And there are many young children in the streets.
with broken limbs and flesh missing from their legs because some car ran them over and just fled.
And there's scores of handicapped people just begging for food and trying to survive.
So the picture is...
I'm going to ask you a question, but I'm going to let you carry on because I really want to hear what you've got to say.
Ask a question just on that and then continue, please.
So, I mean, is it that climate change is a first world problem?
You're talking about real perils that people are going through.
They're not even thinking about climate change.
So is climate change more of a first world problem?
First question.
And then please continue ahead with what you said.
Climate change is physics. It's something happening to the whole planet.
But psychologically, it's primarily a first world psychological focus, because it's the people who are well-off, who can think about the future and of the suffering that's coming to them, who have the mental capacity to worry about global warming.
Here in the global South, people are already living through the worst scenarios in 2050, 2060.
So for them, it's irrelevant.
What's relevant is to find food for today.
Yeah, Mia, you broke up that.
Sorry, you broke up.
So basically, it's a psychological problem for the global north.
It's a, it's a, the impacts are already playing out, and it's more than just global warming.
The primary problem is the remnants of colonialism and the continued exploitation of the global self, of the resources.
Just look at the French empire, right?
It still exists in much of,
African countries and they still have the right to determine currency exchange rates, for example.
And there's other ways that global empires like the US and to a certain extent powerful investors like China are able to extract resources from these countries without having to give the people here.
the right price for the goods they are taking.
I mean, I would say maybe the Chinese government is doing better
compared to some other traditional colonial powers.
But I think everybody can do much better than what they're doing currently.
And let me go to Justice.
Justice, I know you want to say something,
so please go ahead and say what you want to say.
But in addition to that, I mean, I've got a question for you.
One of the arguments, I'm just reading through the messages,
please do you put your comments in the bottom, right-hand side,
and we will ask the panellist those questions.
Just as one of the questions that people are making is that this whole,
I mean, science is ever evolving, and to say that there's a consensus,
I mean, science does evolve.
And one of the arguments that is being made is,
in the past, the argument that was made made
is that we're going to have a forthcoming ice age.
and then the argument was that it's called
global warming because the earth was warming
and now it's called climate change
because there is changes in the environment
and it's not as linear as one is making.
What's your thought on that
and then just add in whatever you want
just as go ahead?
I was sure the exact question.
So the question is that, so I just gave a few examples, the Ice Age, Global Warman, and then it became climate change.
So the argument is that the science is ever evolving and so why should we say that there's a consensus and really is this basically a dramatization by the scientists?
That's the comments from the audience.
Right. Just as.
Yes.
Consensus.
Things have been raised, but I will start by sharing with that.
Sorry, let me just got to justice on this.
And then, sorry, just go ahead.
That is you talking.
Go ahead.
Yes, I was saying that a lot of has been said, but let me share with us what the World Bank has warned us about, because it clearly stated that the global greenhouse gas emissions will remain above the level required to limit the global warming to the 1.5 degrees salacious.
if low and lower-midim income countries continue to follow the current policies.
So I think as the entire world, we need to collectively look into our policies.
Because you just asked the question to me that are activists going way far with their activism,
which I want to say that now.
Because many people have seen campaigns like just stop oil and, you know, they're judging them
are simply because of, you know, stopping or slowing traffic.
But in the end, I think we need global solidarity when it comes to addressing issues of climate change,
mainly getting concerned with the global north.
Because if you look at our allies, like in the UK, that are, you know, stopping traffic, it's not that some of them are being impacted by what is going through a lot compared to folks like in the global south.
Right.
But they feel like it is their responsibility to decarbonize or to put their leaders to act.
Because many times, of course, we know that there has been progress because we've seen how we've moved from international treaties.
If it begin from the Montreal Protocol to the Choto Protocol to the Paris Agreement.
You see that we've been, of course, somewhere.
But again, with the issues of free riders like China,
whereby they don't agree to these treaties since they are not legally binding,
it's, you know, backsliding the progress that we're making.
Now, as someone still who's coming from Uganda,
because me was talking about, you know, colonialism,
we all know a company called Total energies.
It's a French-based company.
It has come up with an investment in the East African crude oil pipeline, which we call
ICOP.
If you see my shirt, it has a stop ECOP hashtag.
This pipeline is going to traverse through 10 districts in Uganda, and it goes all the
way to Tanzania.
Total energies has 62% of the shares in this pipeline, but they are coming with the same
talking points that we're going to end energy private in Uganda.
But the pipeline...
is just getting crude oil from Uganda through Tanzania to the international market.
So in the end, the vulnerable poor Ugandans are not going to benefit from this pipeline.
So in other words, this corporate grid that we are seeing from these oil companies,
this is like they have a deliberate destruction of our environments.
And they're taking advantage of the weak environmental laws we have on the African continent,
simply because of our politicians.
Many of our politicians have been in power for, like Uganda.
Our president has been in power for the last 38 years.
So we are living under a totalitarian regime.
It is very corrupt, and fatal energies will come with the money.
They just give $3 million U.S. dollars to one party, the president,
and they give them the bill.
But this project after completion, the pipeline, is going to emit 34 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year.
This is six more times of what Uganda is emitting right now.
Because as Uganda, we are meeting less than 0.001% of the carbon dioxide.
As Africa, we are emitting less than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions.
But go to countries like Mozambique.
They've invested $20 billion dollars on the offshore natural gas plant.
So they are telling them that they will have purified natural gas.
But 70% of Mozambique in Africa has no access to electricity.
So as Africa, we believe that we have the potential to solutions of climate change
because we have 39% of the world's potential for renewable energy.
but we only receive 2% of the global investment in renewables.
So without this international solidarity,
We cannot find solutions to climate change.
So when we see folks like the ones of just stop oil in the UK are slowing traffic,
they are standing in solidarity with vulnerable communities like in Uganda.
Because today in Uganda, anyone who rises up against this pipeline, ICOP,
they're either detained or they're assaulted by the police.
Because we are living under the dictator, you worry Kaguta, Msevelli.
He does not want anyone to oppose the pipeline.
But the pipeline is passing through Lake Victoria Basin.
So this basin feeds over
40 million people have access to this basin of Lake Victoria.
So the Albatine Lake, where this pipeline is going to pass, of course, will be affected in case there is an oil leakage.
Because these pipelines, they can be idle for some years.
But it's inevitable for them to leak.
Because as Africa, we've seen enough with examples of oil in Nigeria with a company called Shell.
So we cannot be a gas station.
Just take 20 seconds, just wrap your point open.
So as I wrap up, we're saying that as Africa,
I think it is time for us to say that no,
we are tired of being a gas station for the global north.
And Milly was talking about wind turbines being dangerous to the birds.
But I want to inform Mili that fossil fuels is killing more birds than the windmium turbines.
And we've seen also technologies being advanced to ensure that there is less fertility of these birds compared to what are your domestic cuts and fossil fuels are.
you know, causing to the facility of these birds.
So let's embrace technology.
Let's embrace our renewables because they are the future.
As the UN's strategy, you know, Antonio,
Antonio Burtary, say that those who are investing fossil fuels,
they're leading us the highway of that climate health.
So I encourage him.
I'd like to be able to respond because he did mention me
and the statistic I gave on the bats being killed by the wind turbines.
You can't just say...
I was going to go to talk about you.
Just really quick to respond, because you mentioned me.
To just say that bats are being killed more by fossil fuels and not present any type of statistics or facts, it sounds like you're just making that up.
Okay.
I gave exact numbers.
I said about 900,000 bats are being killed annually.
I have plenty of case study to present to, you know, show that argument.
That's a real situation, a real issue.
And the reason why I'm bringing these things up is because, you know, wind turbines are purported as the solution to climate change because they say, oh, well, we need to get rid of all the gas.
to stop climate change,
but did you also know
that some of the biggest
wind turbine companies out there,
not to name names,
but they actually also are some of the largest gas companies as well.
They also own some of the largest amounts of gas in the United States.
So those green companies that own the wind farms, they also own gas pipelines
and are some of the biggest generators of natural gas in the U.S.
So it sounds like they're just trying to cut out their competition
by getting a bunch of climate cult people who don't want to let anyone question anything
to push their narrative in order to try to take out their fossil fuel competitors so that they can just dominate the market.
Can I just come back on that because, sorry, I grew up earlier on, Millie, but, you know, I just want to come back on the role of the fossil fuel companies, because it's very easy in a debate like this to fall on one side or the other. You're rather saying they're the bad guys or, you know, they're the good guys if you don't believe in climate change. I think it's more complex than that. I think ultimately...
you know, it's a bit like the tobacco debate where, you know, you have very successful businesses
selling, you know, cigarettes to the world's population, and they had more and more evidence
that those products were unsafe. And ultimately, you know, that science became public knowledge,
and governments had to take action on it and start to restrict the sales of cigarettes, and they've
been massively reduced in how much we consume, because we know they have a significant health
impact on us. I think most people on this...
conference would actually accept the cigarettes are dangerous. You can choose to use them or not.
I think fossil fuel companies have had evidence that what they were doing to this planet since the
1950s was warming it up. There's lots of evidence to show that. They knew that. And really now,
what they need to do is think about what their future is as businesses. And actually, you know,
the point you're making that fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energies is a good
thing. They have to do that. That's what they need to do.
And I personally think that, you know, if you look at Aramco, for example, the national oil and gas industry in Saudi Arabia, it has a huge, huge sovereign wealth fund, massive trillions and trillions of dollars. And yet it is the biggest investor now in renewable energies around the world. And the Saudis know they have to do that because Saudi Arabia, you know, is a hugely rising climate.
status country. It has terrible temperatures and it's very difficult to survive now, never mind
what it will be in 20, 30 years time. It has a very young growing population. Oil and gas is not the
future, but it's building up wealth. So they need to build new cities and there'll be renewable
cities and they're working on these smart cities now with amazing technology. And ultimately they can
also invest around the world in those technologies. And we're seeing in place like Norway where they've built
up masses of...
money again through their oil and gas industry, that they are pushing that technology much quicker than many other countries.
So most people in Norway now have access to electric cars and technology that other countries are much slower and adapting to.
So I think ultimately the oil and gas companies have a responsibility.
They could just basically say, we're going to keep making money and we're going to pump as much oil and gas out of the world as we can over the next 50%.
60 years to maximize our profits, knowing that it's causing devastating climatic change,
which is going to cause so much instability, the world's going to start falling apart.
Or we can start to look at how we siphon off from oil and gas, invest the money we've made
into other technologies and work with governments to find solutions, including in Africa,
where we've heard already what can happen when these companies come in and distribute their wealth
in a very...
unbalanced way in dictatorships that don't help poor people and just cause more problems.
So, you know, ultimately, we've got to get to a point where we can develop technology.
But the other thing I would say is this. It's very easy. And Zach sort of made this mistake to
agree in my view, you know, a very good eloquent speaker, Green Party representative in the UK.
But you often hear this argument that,
You know, everything's going to be fine.
We've got solutions to everything with all these renewables,
and we can basically replicate the world we have today by getting off oil and gas.
Let's be honest, we can't do that.
Oil and gas is in everything.
You know, oil is in our packaging for all our food products.
It's in the fertilizer.
It's in the pest size that allows to grow food.
Obviously, it's used for transportation.
It's used for heating, air conditioning, everything.
Pharmaceuticals.
So it's every fabric of our life that has given us so much benefit on this earth has come from fossil fuels.
if we start taking that out of the system, which we have to, it means we have to adapt and change our lives.
That's going to be difficult, but it is possible, but it might mean we have to travel less and consume less,
and we might need cultured meat to produce in factories rather than from animals.
All this technology is coming, and we can do it, and we have to try and help people in the poorer parts of the world,
have lived in poverty and need to be lifted up as well.
All of that needs to be done, but what we can't say is that the world will be the same, but...
I'll just leave you at this point. I think we can live slower lives. We can live in more local
communities. We can help each other. And actually, mankind might get back to some of the good
things actually that existed in 19th century world before we entered the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution has been hugely beneficial to us, but also we've caused massive
problems on this planet. So I think, you know, we are going to have to adapt as mankind. I think
we can. I'll leave you with that optimistic note, but it won't be easy and all of us have to think about what
changes we will go through, particularly our children will go through in what they eat,
how they clothe themselves, how they work, how they travel, how many children they have
or don't have, all those things need to be considered. But it will be a different world,
but it's a world I think that can survive and can prosper. Thank you.
Sully, if I may, Sully.
Yeah, yeah, go ahead. He made an excellent point by cigarettes, but go ahead.
Thank you. Um,
You know, Millie made a good point.
We already do have many green energy technologies, but at times we sacrifice our ecosystem.
Right.
But there has been debate that we have crossed a point of no return.
And I'm interested in some of the panel discussing whether or not that has occurred.
Have we truly passed a point of no return where those that believe in climate science and climate change have said that we are beyond being able to heal our own planet?
Is that the truth?
Is that still up for debate?
Because according to you, Dominic, we just have to live a slower life
and pay attention to our neighbors and people in the third world.
And we can solve this, but I don't think that it's that easy or that,
or that we have the technology to already repair the damage that's been done.
I agree with you.
We might not have the technology to do it.
I think we've done huge damage.
I think there's a lot of it we can't put right, but we're really adapting to where we are.
So you've got a car that's sort of got a big dint in it, and it's not going to work as well as it did to begin with, but you can still get it to go.
I think, you know, we can't put the world back to where it was.
But, you know, humans are innovative and we've got the technology and the creativity, I think, to...
to mend and to slow down the pace of change and to learn to live maybe more sustainably on this planet.
But it will be difficult. It will be complex. But there's no easy way out. If we do nothing and we just
continue doing what we're doing, it's like drinking in the last sort of drink salon. We're going to
have one more drink, one more drink. And we know at the end of the day it's going to kill us.
So you've got to literally sort of put the bottle away, you know, put the cork in it and say,
I'm not going to drink anymore. We're going to think about what we're going to do next. And I think that's
where we are. So when is that point of no return? Because if you listened to my childhood,
it would have been 10 years ago. Is it, are we years? I think it was probably, I think it was
20 years, 30 years ago. I think, you know, the industrialization of the planet was speeding up
and globalization in the 1990s.
I think the science was emerging then, but there was no political will to deal with it.
Technology wasn't available as solutions.
Mankind wasn't ready for it.
So I think, yeah, you know, historians might look back and say we could have done more 30 years ago,
but the pieces just were not in place.
And generally, humans don't do things until they're forced to do things.
You don't tend to get the fire brigade out until your house is on fire.
Well, the house is on fire and we've got to put it out.
So that's where we are.
So that's where I think where we are now, I'm afraid.
But I still think I'm optimistic.
We can find a way through it.
And I think the next generation, it's the young people that are growing up now that have to think about what they're going to do in work and life that can help to deal with these problems.
We've left them these problems.
They will inherit them.
But I have great faith.
We have a sermon at this point.
It really does.
One second, guys. One second. Let me go to Doc. I am going to come to you, Chris, in a second.
Once I got some of them. Let me go to Doc first because Alexander for a while. Doc, I mean, a question I've got for you is, Doc, I've asked a number of questions on the space. And what we've seen is people unwilling to answer those questions and saying that these questions are not even up for debate. You're not even allowed to ask them. Whenever I hear that type of language, just from,
the research I've done over time, my alarm bells start going off because that means they don't
have confidence in their arguments. They're not able to explain or relate them. And any position
you hold, irrespective of if you think it's irrefutable, you can prove that position. So for example,
yeah, so what's your thoughts on that, Doc? Yeah, no, I think that that sort of logical fallacy
that's operative in any discipline, not just in the analysis of climate change.
Right. Science does not and never has proceeded by consensus, right? The consensus is almost always wrong, as it is in the case of those who believe in anthropomorphic climate change. The climate is changing. The climate has always changed. The climate will always change. There are forces much, much, much, exponentially greater that work on our environment.
than what man does, right?
For my, you know, I go back to, I was a child in elementary school on the first Earth Day here in California in 1972 when all this nonsense started.
And then we were convinced that the next Ice Age was coming.
And we had to prepare for that.
That was the consensus based on the science.
No, science did not become all of a sudden invented in the 1920s or 2010s when this nonsense started to reach a fever pitch.
Okay, what I want to know to those gentlemen who spoke, who are from Africa, of the proposition that some put forward,
that the real goal here is to continue the colonialism control of Africa and its natural resources.
by denying them the ability to develop cheap energy on their own,
using their own natural resources,
using their own uranium, oil, coal, and gas
to lift themselves up out of poverty
without having depend on tax dollars taken out of you and me
and on my friends here all over the world, right?
Those tax dollars through carbon credit, right,
forced down our throats.
Why is it that China, the most aggressively developing nation in the world, is free to build coal plants if you want to talk about this being the need of the response to be global?
No, this is political, this is sociological manipulation.
And the young man, Johnny, you've been brainwashed, sir, as a child.
This stuff has been in place.
I should say the same because you have climate denier.
And in 2023, we can no longer listen to your bullshit.
I'm leaving this faith because your bullshit shouldn't be given a platform.
This is a shame.
Goodbye, climate denier.
This is a shame.
You act like someone offended your Christianity.
All right?
You have a blind belief and you cannot defend the statistics.
You cannot defend your belief.
It's like the invisible man in the sky.
Okay?
It's a matter of faith for you.
And that is a problem for you and your side of the argument, sir.
And it always has been.
Thanks.
Let me go to solar and then I will go to you, Chris, after that.
So just to give it a balance of solar.
You did send some message and you did say that you are, just correctly for you,
you are an environmental engineer.
And so you wanted to talk about this.
Please go ahead, Sola.
Yes, so I'm an environmental engineer. I received my degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. I've had a wide range of experiences ranging from working in regenerative agriculture to now I work in the renewable energy industry, primarily with solar development as well as hydroelectric.
and you know I'll try to jump in on another thing but I just kind of lost my train of thought from what doc said
and doc I just have one question for you and it's could you say that you are also blinded with your own beliefs
since you're completely against you know all of these other alternative ways of thinking
you know like what what's the difference why don't you narrow it down to one point one one question
you have for me instead of a broad-based attack on the way that I think
No, no, I wasn't attacking you.
I was just saying, like, because I just feel as though, you know, I forgot what his name was a thing.
It's a feeling.
Let's talk about facts.
No, no, yeah.
I just want to be respectful.
We can't talk facts.
I'm just curious as to why you believe the way that you do about climate change and why you're so, you know, adamant about thinking that anyone who believes in climate change is brainwashed.
or that they're seen is wrong because even from just a physical standpoint, let's say I'm, you know, I'm an oil company and I put waste into the soil, burn into the ground, put it into water bodies.
That physical, you know, effect of having those toxins on the soil, on the water, those have an effect on those ecosystems on the way of the microbiology.
Let's stick with that point.
It's like pollution.
Right there, okay?
Just so we don't manipulate the conversation to be too broad in scope.
So as to that particular type of pollution, I agree with you a thousand percent, right? I'm a pretty strong conservative Trump supporter. I took a lot of grief when I came out early on when Bobby Kennedy announced that he was running for president, that I would support him in the primary so that he becomes a Democratic nominee.
Because Bobby Kennedy has lived his life protecting the waters and the oceans of America.
He sued corporations like the one you just mentioned are referenced to make sure that they cleaned up their act.
I've always been for that.
I've grown up in California, right?
From the mountains to the seas, I've lived it all and I love it.
But we do not have to destroy our economy to protect the environment.
Okay.
Okay, and the question here is I understood it was about global atmospheric change relative to heat and CO2.
Look, guys, CO2 is necessary to produce oxygen.
CO2 is necessary for the greening of the planet.
I learned that in elementary school.
Did it pass the rest of you by?
The oxygen cycle, chlorophyll, right?
More CO2 means more green, right?
And that's why Greenland once upon a time was fertile.
Okay. This is not the end of the world. Let Africa develop their own natural resources, take advantage of the cheap energy that we've had here in the developed world for 100 years. Okay, these are some of the things that I think about this. I'm no expert. I'm expert in many things, honestly. And that's why I'm up on the panel, because people listen to what I have to say and they appreciate it. I don't right or wrong, okay? But this is just common sense to me.
For decades, we were told that we were going to go into an ice age.
And then we were told that the snow and the ice was going to melt off of Everest.
The oceans were going to rise.
Go look at the politicians at the top of the social economic curve and where they're buying homes.
Sir, they're buying homes on the coast.
On what Doc has said.
Yeah, go ahead, Chris.
Go ahead.
Thank you just to the hosts for letting me be on the panel.
Just as a quick disclaimer here, I am a atmospheric science major in meteorology.
I'm a junior in the program I'm in.
And I do not, just as a disclaimer to people, I do not deny or reject human impact on the climate.
The thermodynamics of how the carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and how that interacts of infrared radiation,
all that's pretty well understood.
And I do think that humans do have a pretty significant impact on the overall average temperature increase.
However, as Doc has been saying and as the friends of science, I follow their stuff.
They do great work.
As they have served, you know, as far as extreme weather goes, we've not really seen the
increase in the extreme weather events.
You can look at flood. There's been no increase in floods globally. Some places they're up, some places they're down.
Droughts, there's been no increase globally over the last 100 years.
All this is in the IPCC report. You can go read it for yourself and in fact Dr. Roger Poki Jr. posted a table
from chapter, I believe chapter 11 or 12 from the report that shows that these extreme events have not increased.
And one thing I've seen on this panel a lot here today, and it has been a very civil discussion for the most part,
and I appreciate everybody being very civil and friendly for the most part, with the exception of that one clown.
But one thing I want to point out is that a lot of people keep using the word.
I do apologize.
I let my emotions get away with you.
No, you're fine.
I'm talking about that Joni or whatever his name was.
That started getting like, I don't know, what is me.
He was acting all...
Looney, not you, you're fine, you are pretty rational.
What I wanted to say is a lot of people keep using the word belief.
And the term believe or belief is a religious, it's a religious term.
We can't use that in science.
In science, we need to stick to facts and data, and that's what matters.
And if you look at the actual numbers,
you look at the global number of hurricanes,
Dr. Ryan Malley, meteorologist,
I talk to him all the time.
Dr. Ryan Maui has a plot of global tropical cyclone frequency
and the tropical cyclones that reach hurricane status
or major hurricane status.
There's been no change in the satellite record.
You look at the number of major hurricanes, category three or higher, hitting the United States.
That's where the longest records go back, because we've been, no other, in the National Weather Service,
they've been keeping all these long-term records for many, many decades.
And we don't have that long-term data pretty much anywhere else in the world.
But if you look at the number of major hurricanes hitting the United States, they're down 50% since the 1930s.
You look at the, there was a major hurricane drought between 2006 and 2017.
We didn't have a major hurricane hit between, you know, from 2006,
Harvey in 2017, we didn't have any major hurricane strike the United States, the longest period on record.
Violent tornadoes, EF3 or higher, strong-to-violence tornadoes are down 50% since the 1950s.
There has been no increase in heat waves in the United States.
Around the world, there is evidence that heat waves have increased, which makes sense because the planet's overall warmer.
But there's a plot on my profile, if you go to my profile on my page and you look at the pin to tweet.
I recently made a graph, and I'm working on updating it with data for last year, but it's updated through last year, or through 2021 rather.
The number of 95, 100, and 105 degree days averaged per station, and I used 828 stations from the global historical climatology network.
The number of really hot days in the United States has been decreasing for over 90 years.
And people always talk about the dust bowl, the 1930s,
and how that's an outlier.
The 1930s dust ball was a natural drought
that was caused by really cool,
really warm waters in the North Atlantic,
really warm waters in the North Pacific,
and a series of La Nina episodes.
And that triple of ocean sea surface temperature patterns
forced the dust bowl drought.
There was a very similar drought during the 1850s and 1860s.
It was known as the Civil War drought.
The dustball was exacerbated by farming techniques
and stuff locally in the United States.
But all of North America, including Greenland,
was very warm during the 1920s and 1930s.
And there was also major heat waves in the 1950s.
and also in the 1910s.
So summers are much cooler now over the last 60 years
and they weren't 60 years before that.
So that's what the data shows.
The number of really cold days has historically decreased,
and that makes sense because the planet is warmer.
But as far as these solutions go, I don't like fossil fuels.
They're dirty, they're not great for the environment, but the reality is that they power the world.
And the products that come from them and the energy that we get from them is not matched by renewable sources.
And it's going to be a long time before any of those technologies are able to swiftly replace fossil fuels.
The fastest way we could, you know, decarbonize if that's what we want to do, is to go nuclear.
But I don't see a lot of people embracing that because the name scares them.
The word nuclear scares them.
And, you know, people, and it doesn't play into the hands of people on the,
you know, probably progressive left who want to implement these renewable energy and
kind of socialize the economy and energy industry.
And it doesn't play into the hands of the fossil fuel lobbyists on the right because they want
to keep their, you know, dominance in the global market.
So neither side necessarily has our best interest.
That's going to create gridlock when it comes to implementing, you know, sensible energy
policies.
Because if we were sensible, we'd embrace nuclear.
And that's all I have to say on the right.
It's right, guys, we are going to be wrapping up soon.
So I do want to hear final thoughts of a couple of panthers, just to balance it out.
So, Justice, I'd love to hear your final thoughts about this climate change issue.
If you could do that within about 30 seconds to a minute, that'd be brilliant.
Go ahead, Justice.
Well, I want to remind us that it is our collective responsibility to decarbonize.
So any small action you can take, can create a big difference.
So let's also think beyond our borders because people who are making claims that, you know, technology is accessible and it's affordable.
In Africa, technology is not affordable. We don't have the technology.
So we are spending 20 to 30% of our budgets towards climate adaptation, yet that amount of money would be spent on the human development capital where we have issues like health and education.
So it is said that we are, you know, are diverting our small budgets that have heavily indicted us.
towards climate crisis, which we are not responsible for.
So think about others as you deny that climate change is real.
And I believe that if we all rise up, we can change this world
and create a little future for each and everyone.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
And I'd just like to hear a final thought of friends.
Just if you drop up in 30 seconds to a minute, that'd be brilliant.
Thank you. Well, I think people should look at this book that was written in the 1600s called the Augsburg Book of Miracles. And it kind of describes the situation that we're in today where, you know, people almost have a medieval view of CO2 as if it's some kind of satanic gas.
and people who are quote-unquote deniers are evil and witches
and should be burned at the stake.
And Dr. Sally Bell Yunus, who was our first scientific advisor,
she's an astrophysicist,
She has a very interesting little video clip.
I'll put it in your timeline about the medieval witch burning.
And I think that's how climate change has really become twisted in the minds of so many and so fearful.
So I think that we have a hopeful future and we shouldn't give up.
And we should continue this open civil debate.
I really thank you for hosting this.
Yes, thank you.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Thank you very much.
Can I add just one little thing about the, one of the co-hosts, Sarah, and then Friends of Science?
They said something about the way that the debate works and how people act and the medieval view of it.
I just wanted to add, if I could just have one minute to add something.
Call it.
You know, the way that, you know, I'm in a university, and I'm thankful to be in a good program where people are allowed to kind of just, you know, have civil conversation.
But we see a lot of an academia across the board and across even in government positions and stuff is that you can't question the science.
If what you're saying as a scientist or as a person who's, you know, not necessarily a scientist,
somebody who's trying to, you know, put out facts, if what you're saying is true and has data and there's evidence and data that supports what you're saying,
then that has its own leg to stand on.
And if you're a scientist conducting research, you should be out there, you know, putting your words out there and supporting your argument and not shying away from debate because debate is fundamental to science.
You know, when people like my friend Tony Heller or somebody like Tom Nelson who was on this podcast earlier post something I know old, that people, the climate activists will chime in and say, well, that's old science.
They'll post something from, you know, 30 years ago that Noah said or NASA said.
And the people like, you know, the activists are like, well, that's old science.
Well, if that was old science, science had to be questioned in order for it to evolve.
So why, if you can, if old science evolved from questioning it, then how come we can't question the current science?
Because science is an ever-evolving process.
So there is this if you can't question science it's propaganda science should always be questioned sometimes when you question
You know what is said it's not wrong because what's you know that I guess the consensus view even though consensus really isn't science it's more of a political thing
There are times that there are widely agreed upon things you know like the existence of gravity that's why they agreed upon but
There are times when that consensus is correct, and there are times when that agreement is not correct.
So you should be able to question certain things, especially when it comes to climate and stuff.
Yes, the climate changes. Yes, humans have impact on it, but it's not this crisis that it's made out to be.
Appreciate that. Thank you very much, Chris. Right. I do appreciate everybody coming on to the podcast and, sorry, the space. And we did. We had a good discussion. I know initially we had this argument that you're not even allowed to talk about. You don't even question it. Science means don't question anything. For me, that's just archaic thoughts, archaic ideology. It was due as in the past...
by clergy in the past where you weren't allowed to question anything.
And I guess that's what science has become.
It happened in COVID and then it's happening even with these issues.
But yeah, I mean, Sarah, I'd love to hear your thoughts just as a co-host
because I know you have very strong views on this, Sarah.
Thank you, Sally. I do also agree that we should question, we should question the people that claim that something is settled when so many on this space disagreed that it is not settled.
