Joe Rogan Experience #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast.…

   1. NANarrator0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it.

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer0:15

      Our pleasure.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:16

      My pleasure. And if you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your, uh, your resume, like what you do.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer0:24

      Oh.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:24

      I mean, just a f- a brief-

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer0:25

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:25

      ... version of your-

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer0:28

      Uh.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:28

      ... credentials.

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer0:29

       I'm Dick Lindzen and, um, my whole life has been in academia. Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard and I did spend a couple of years, uh, at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado. Then, uh, part of that was because at Harvard, uh, I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations. So, I went to Seattle for someone who did. And then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there about three, four years. Moved on to Harvard. Spent about 10 years there and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013. Um, I've always enjoyed it. I mean, uh, the field of atmospheric sciences, when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable. So, you could, uh, look at phenomena, uh, one of them that I worked on was the sum- so called quasi-biannual cycle. Turns out, the wind above the equator, about 16 kilometers, 20 kilometers, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year and so on. And, you know, we worked out why that happened and there were other things like that, so it was a very enjoyable period, uh, until global warming.

   11. JRJoe Rogan2:12

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

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer2:17

       (clicks tongue) I'm Will Happer and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton and, uh, like, uh, Dick, I'm a science nerd. (laughs) But I was actually born in India under the British Raj. My father was a army officer in Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American and, uh, that was before World War II. So, when I came to America, uh, as- as a small child, uh, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project, so-

   13. JRJoe Rogan2:48

       Wow.

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer2:49

       ... I remember, you know, the war days at Oak Ridge and, uh, that's probably why I went into physics, uh, I thought, "This looks like interesting way to make a living and if I can do it, I'll do it." And, and I have. And I've, uh, done a number of things. I spent a lot of time at universities, at Columbia, at Princeton. I also, uh, served for a couple years in Washington as Director of Energy Research, uh, under President Bush Sr. And, uh, I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here. (laughs) Uh, I first became suspicious when I was Director of Energy Research. I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers' money and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing. And there was one exception, that was the, uh, (laughs) people working on climate and they would always be very resentful. "You know, we work for Senator Gore. We don't work for you." And so I would tell them, "Well, uh, okay, let him pay for your next year's research. I- I can find other people who will come and talk to me, who'll be (laughs) glad to take my money."

   15. JRJoe Rogan3:58

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

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer4:03

       Oh, yes, very long time.

   17. JRJoe Rogan4:04

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

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer4:06

       That's right, this is-

   19. JRJoe Rogan4:07

       And when he made that movie, An Inconvenient Truth, what year was that again, Jamie? Was it 98 or something?

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer4:15

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan4:15

       Something like that?

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer4:16

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan4:16

       '99? That...

   24. NANarrator4:19

       2006.

   25. JRJoe Rogan4:19

       What is it?

   26. NANarrator4:20

       2006

   27. JRJoe Rogan4:20

       Oh, really? We're that off. Wow, okay. So, 2006. So, when he made that film, uh, he- it ba- there was always... When I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nimoy had a television show called-

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer4:31

       Yeah.

   29. JRJoe Rogan4:31

       ... In Search Of. Remember that show?

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer4:33

       Sure.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah, I think there's…

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      making sense.

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:01

      Yeah, I think there's an old cliché, money is the root of all evil. (laughs)

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:07

      Yeah. That's what I was gonna get to. Like, th- i- this is the disturbing thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting, especially a lot of very polite, educated people that have followed the narrative that you follow if you're a good person and if you're a person who trusts science-

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:22

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:22

      ... and that is that, like, we have a serious problem, we have to address it now, or there will be no America for our grandchildren. This is the thing that we keep hearing.

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:29

      Uh, you mentioned a tough thing there, the, the business trust science.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:33

      Yes.

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:35

      And it's not a great idea, because that isn't ... Science is not a source of authority, it's a methodology. Uh, it's based on challenge.

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:47

      Right.

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:48

       And so-

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:49

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

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:52

       The success of science.

   13. JRJoe Rogan15:54

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:55

       In another words, this is a relatively new way to approach the world. I mean, few hundred years.

   15. JRJoe Rogan16:01

       Mm-hmm.

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer16:02

       And, uh, the notion is, and I think it's been stated many times, that you test things, and if they fail to predict correctly, they're wrong. So you find out what's wrong with them. You don't, uh, fudge them, you don't change the rules. Um, it's, uh, led to immense improvements in life, development of all sorts of things, and so it has a good reputation. Uh, politicians have less of a reputation, so they wish to co-opt the reputation of science. (laughs)

   17. JRJoe Rogan16:42

       Yes. That's a very good point, 'cause try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid. You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing.

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer16:51

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan16:52

       Cellphone technology, nuclear power. So many things that people go, "That's incredible that they did that."

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer16:57

       Well, that's also confusing technology with science.

   21. JRJoe Rogan17:00

       Right. The result of science.

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:02

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan17:02

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

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:12

       So u- you mentioned Gore at the beginning.

   25. JRJoe Rogan17:13

       Yes.

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:14

       You know, with that thing, uh, he was showing this cycle of ice ages-

   27. JRJoe Rogan17:19

       Uh-huh.

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:19

       ... and CO₂ and temperature going together, and, uh, it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO₂. (laughs)

   29. JRJoe Rogan17:31

       (laughs) Yeah. Gregg Braden was on the podcast recently and he was explaining there have been times where the CO₂ was much higher in the atmosphere, but the, the temperature was colder.

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:38

       Oh, yeah.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      you that what they're doing is important-

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:01

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:01

      ... so they're entitled to that money.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:03

      Uh, well, that's right. Well, you know, I was working for President, uh, Bush Sr., and when, uh, Carter and Gore won the election...... you know, Gore couldn't wait to, uh, fire me, you know, at the (laughs) behest of all of his proteges-

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:21

      You mean Clinton-

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:21

      ... who climbed-

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:21

      Clinton and Gore?

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:22

      Clinton and Gore, yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan30:23

      Yeah.

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:23

       That's right. So he, uh... You know, Washington, fortunately, it's very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire 'cause you can't find them in the org chart. (laughs)

   11. JRJoe Rogan30:35

       (laughs)

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:35

       So it took him two or three months to find me. (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan30:39

       (laughs)

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:39

       But they finally did fire me. I was glad to be fired. I wanted to go back to do research. I was tired of being a bureaucrat, so I... You know, grateful in some sense for that-

   15. JRJoe Rogan30:47

       Now, your colleagues that you, that, uh, weren't working with you, like other scientists-

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:53

       Yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan30:53

       ... were they reluctant to discuss this kind of information with you guys when, when you first started-

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer30:59

       Well-

   19. JRJoe Rogan30:59

       ... questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer31:01

       Well, y- you know, my field i- is actually hard physics, you know. I'm, I'm a nuclear physics trained and have done a lot of work with lasers and, uh, these are things you, you can measure. They don't have much political influence. A lot of them have a military significance. In fact, uh, the reason I was brought to Washington is because I invented, uh, an important part of, uh, the Star Wars defense, uh, uh, initiative, which I can say about later. But, uh, I, I'd never really paid any close attention to science until then. But I, I was-

   21. JRJoe Rogan31:36

       Climate science.

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer31:37

       Cli- yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:37

       Yeah.

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer31:37

       Climate science, I should say, yes.

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:39

       Yeah.

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer31:40

       So o- once I had this experience in Washington, I started looking to, to it a little bit, but I, I didn't have time to look a lot because my own research was going still at Princeton, and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company. And so, you know, forming the company and getting it going and funded used up most of my time. I didn't have time to look at climate. But eventually, that was behind me and I, uh, I invited Dick to come give a seminar at, um, a colloquium at Princeton, and that's really when I began to get very interested in it. And I realized that it's just completely different from normal science, you know. It, it, uh, completely politicized. If you can't ask a question, you know, that's a bad, bad sign.

   27. JRJoe Rogan32:28

       Yeah.

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer32:28

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

   29. JRJoe Rogan32:55

       Now, is this, behind the scenes, is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists? Do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue th- that that causes? Or do they just accept it?

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer33:07

       Well, I think the-
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer45:00

      and that controlled the ice ages.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:03

      Mm-hmm.

   3. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer45:04

      And the, uh, the thinking was pretty simple, uh, he was saying that, uh, you know, every winter is cold, every winter has snow, but what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle. And if you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:31

      Mm-hmm.

   5. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer45:32

      It takes thousands of years, but, you know, eventually it's big. And, uh, in recent years, for instance, uh, there have been young people who have shown that that works. It's interesting, there was even a national program called CLIMAP to study this. This was around 1990 or so, and they found something peculiar. They found that, uh, there were peaks in the solar, i- the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume, but that the time series were not lining up right. The young people looking at this said, "You're looking at the wrong thing. If you're looking at the insulation, you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume, not just the ice volume."

   6. JRJoe Rogan46:32

      Mm-hmm.

   7. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer46:33

      And then the correlations were excellent. So this was a theory, Milankovitch, that I think has been reasonably sustained. Uh, but it, the people doing this got no credit, nothing, because, you know, early in my career, these people would have been rewarded. Now, it didn't contribute to global warming. Nobody pays attention to it. (laughs)

   8. Joe, let, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with. Um, but, uh, you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that, uh, is a controversial issue. The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it. It's all CO2, CO2 is the control knob, don't confuse me with other possibilities, but nobody is, is quite sure about the sun. We have not got good records of the sun for a long time, so we're stuck with proxies of, uh, how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. And, uh, one of the proxies is, uh, when the sun activity changes, it, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10. These stick around for long, you know, thousands of years or longer, and you can, from that, infer how many of them were made, uh, 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago, and they don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant.

   9. JRJoe Rogan48:12

      Mm-hmm.

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer48:13

       Y- it's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14, you know, this radioactivity, uh, that's produced, changes from year to year. If you don't take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon-14 dating, you know, where you-

   11. JRJoe Rogan48:28

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer48:28

       ... take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon-14 in it, and you get the wrong answer unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today, because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies. They, there's a pretty good historical record of that. So it's clear the sun is, is always changing.And over the last 10,000 years, since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, and that's particularly noti- noticeable near the Arctic, you know, in high latitudes in the north. For example, my father's home in Scotland, I was a kid, I would walk up into the hills south of Edinburgh and you could see these farms from the year 1000, where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can't farm today. It was... It's too cold today, but it was clearly warm enough in the year 1000-

   13. JRJoe Rogan49:25

       Mm.

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer49:26

       ... which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland. So what caused those? It was not, uh, people burning oil and coal, you know? (laughs)

   15. JRJoe Rogan49:35

       Right.

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer49:36

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

   17. JRJoe Rogan49:47

       That's absolutely fascinating.

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer49:49

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JRJoe Rogan49:49

       Now, when we have estimates, like say, of the, the Jurassic or- ... any, any dinosaur age, was there, uh, is there enough of an understanding of the differences in temperatures back then that we know whether or not they ever experienced ice ages?

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:07

       Oh, yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan50:07

       So we can go back 65, 100 million years.

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:10

       You can go up 500 million years-

   23. JRJoe Rogan50:12

       500 million years and be pretty accurate.

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:13

       ... and see evidence of ice ages, absolutely. They come and gone.

   25. JRJoe Rogan50:16

       And so there, there have always been.

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:17

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan50:17

       There's always been an ice age, then a warming.

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:19

       And they, and they don't, they don't correlate very well with CO2. You can also-

   29. JRJoe Rogan50:22

       Right.

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:22

       ... estimate the past CO2 levels and they don't correlate with ice ages.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Hmm. They also gave…

   1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:00:00

      because they took it over with a vengeance, you know? They t- were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and, and Britain, and they took it to its, you know, absurd extreme, extreme.

   2. Hmm. They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America, a man called Laughlin. But... (laughs)

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:19

      Oh my goodness.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:00:20

      No, I mean, uh, wh- what Will is saying, I mean, it had a practical consequence, by the way. It actually led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which held that America was going to restrict immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century. So there would be a quota for England and Scotland, which was fine, a little bit less for Germany, almost nothing for Eastern Europe, almost nothing for Italy, and so on. And, and that was used in the run-up to World War II...... to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:01:13

      Wow.

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:01:14

      Um, and it was only changed in 1960. So, essentially, you were keeping out Jews, Eastern Europeans, Chinese-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:01:27

      Hmm.

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:01:27

      ... until then because of eugenics in 1924.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:01:32

      Phew. We, you know... The average person that's not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals, where they're trying to figure out how the world works. When you hear stories like that, you hear that kind of stuff, and you're just like, "Oh, this has always been a problem."

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:01:49

       You're dealing with people.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:01:50

       Human beings.

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:01:50

       (laughs) Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:01:51

       That's the problem, right?

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:01:52

       Yeah.

   15. That's, that's getting to the heart of the problem.

   16. Yeah, yeah. Joe, Joe says there's, there's a famous quote by Immanuel Kant. You know, "From the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made."

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:02:05

       Ooh.

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:02:06

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

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:02:10

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

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:02:27

       Well, the trouble is, you know, when something like eugenics comes around, uh, the population is told that this is science.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:02:41

       Right.

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:02:42

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

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:02:58

       Right.

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:02:59

       And so, I don't know how you would distinguish it at that time from science. Today, there are books on it and, you know, you have the correspondence of biologists who are saying, "Well, it's a little bit dicey." But they're saying, "It's, it's bringing it to the fore of public attention, so maybe that's a good thing."

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:03:20

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

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:03:34

       Mm-hmm.

   27. Oh, yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:03:34

       To think of where we would be today.

   29. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:03:36

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

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:03:48

       It also probably would have led to some horrific actions-
6. 1:15:00 – 1:30:00

   You know, there's this…

   1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:00

   2. You know, there's this nice Russian proverb that, uh, Ronald Reagan loved so much, uh, "Trust but verify."

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:15:06

      Yes.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:07

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

   5. Yeah.

   6. ... something about climate.

   7. Yeah.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:15:13

      Right.

   9. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:13

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:15:14

       That's what's so frustrating about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated.

   11. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:18

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:15:18

       When they're like, "Climate change is a giant issue." Like, there's so many times I've seen (laughs) ... They're very fun YouTube spea- um, videos where they catch people at these protests-

   13. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:27

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:15:28

       ... and some joker just starts interviewing them, and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for.

   15. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:33

       Right.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:15:33

       But it's fascinating that you left the house, like you- you had nothing better to do. Y- you don't know why you're protesting-

   17. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:38

       (laughs)

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:15:39

       ... but you're there, and you got a sign-

   19. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:41

       Yeah.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:15:41

       ... and you still don't even understand it.

   21. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:43

       Mm-hmm.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:15:43

       That's how powerful this-

   23. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:45

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:15:45

       ... thing has become in our society.

   25. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:47

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:15:48

       And the fact that they've been so... That the powers that be, or whoever is involved, has been so successful at pushing this narrative, that it's number- one of the number one anxieties that young people have-

   27. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:15:57

       Mm-hmm.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:15:57

       ... about the future, in a place where we may very well be involved in wars.

   29. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:16:02

       Mm-hmm.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:16:02

       Like, but the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency.
7. 1:30:00 – 1:32:29

   Yeah. Yeah, the social…

   1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:30:00

      media.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:30:00

      Yeah. Yeah, the social media aspect of it is a new problem. Another new problem is AI and fakes. Like, the, you, you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles, and it's, like, you, it's very, like, it takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today. And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, uh, especially climate change, right, you, you could scare the shit out of somebody very quickly with a nice video, and it doesn't even have to be real.

   3. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:30:27

      Well, that was the reason for extreme weather being chosen. I mean, it's interesting, for quite a few years, the climate issue was temperature, and you'll have noticed the last 15, 20 years, it's extreme weather.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:30:44

      Right.

   5. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:30:45

      And, uh, that shows that, you know, it was fake because, um, it's trivial. (laughs) I mean, if we looked it up, uh, the average, uh, month, there are four or five extreme events some place in that month that are once in a hundred year events. So each of them makes for a good video.... and you have four or five a month, and they each only oneness in a hundred years, and people aren't putting it together that, you know, once in a hundred year events occurring four or five times a month (laughs) -

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:31:29

      (laughs)

   7. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:31:31

      (laughs)

   8. ... is ... but, you know, you always have a picture of a flood some place, or a rise, or this-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:31:36

      Right.

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:31:36

       ... or that, and those are used to scare people. It's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:31:42

       Mm. Right. It's extreme weather events.

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:31:44

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:31:44

       I keep, that's what I keep hearing. The hurricanes are getting stronger.

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:31:47

       Yeah, yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:31:47

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

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:31:52

       No, no. Uh, uh, for years, the IPCC, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN, was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related. The last one, they had to say something 'cause the politicians control what's in the IPCC, but even with that, they were saying no, and, uh, that had nothing to do with the public relations. Said, "To hell with it. Even if there's no relation, we'll say there is 'cause that gives us visuals."

Episode duration: 2:11:38