Joe Rogan Experience #2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

1. 0:00 – 5:28

   Meet the guests: Lindzen’s atmospheric science career & Happer’s physics/DOE background

   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. 5:28 – 9:13

   From Earth Day to CO₂ as the ‘control knob’: how the climate narrative shifted

   1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer5:28

      But... (laughs) No, what happened was, uh, there was... I would say with the first Earth Day, 1970-

   2. JRJoe Rogan5:39

      Oh.

   3. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer5:39

      ... there was a real change in the environmental movement. It began to focus much more strongly on the energy sector and much less on saving the whales.

   4. JRJoe Rogan5:53

      Mm.

   5. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer5:54

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

   6. JRJoe Rogan6:01

      Right.Yeah.

   7. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer6:03

      And, uh, at that time, it was cooling, this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much, but you know, you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something. And it was cooling from the 1930s. 1930s were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the '70s. And that's why they were saying, "Well, you know, this is going to lead to an ice age." And they focused on that for a while. And then in the '70s... And at that time, well, what do you say? You know, if, if you're worried about an ice age, they said, "Well, it'll be the sulfates emitted by coal burning," because that reflects light, and the less light that we get, the colder we'll get. But then, the temperature stopped cooling in the '70s and started warming, and that's when they said, "Well, we have to warm, now scare people with warming, and, uh, you can't use the sulfates anymore." But the scientist called, uh, Suki Manabe showed that even though CO2 doesn't do much in the way of warming, doubling it will only give you a half degree or so, but if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant, so that every time you warmed a little you added water vapor, which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you would double the impact of CO2, which now gives you a degree, which still isn't a heck of a lot, but still, it was saying you could increase it. Uh, and that's when people started saying, "Well, now we better find CO2. It's increased because of industrialization," and so on. And that began the demonization of CO2.

   8. JRJoe Rogan7:55

      Do you think there's just always people that are going to point to anything like this that's difficult to define and use it to their advantage?

   9. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer8:04

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

   10. JRJoe Rogan8:21

       Right.

   11. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer8:21

       And one of the odd things I, I think in politics, I don't see it studied much, Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars. If you look at the Ken- McKinsey report on, uh, you know, eliminating CO2, net zero, they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Well, if you're giving out that much, you don't need that much if you're a politician. All you need is millions for your campaigning. And all you're asking are the recipients, are people who are getting the money that you are giving them, a half percent, a quarter percent, you're, you're golden. So, that's much better than giving out $100,000 and having all of it back. (laughs)

3. 9:13 – 12:02

   Why ‘the science is settled’ rhetoric works: politics, power, and debate-stopping labels

   1. JRJoe Rogan9:13

      Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge. Y- there's no room for any rational debate, and if you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier.

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer9:24

      Denier. Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan9:25

      Which is like being an anti-vaxxer or, you know, fill in the blank with whatever-

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer9:29

      Oh, yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan9:29

      ... other horrible thing you could be called.

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer9:30

      Now, that, that's a very interesting phenomenon. I mean, I was looking at it. On the one hand, you're told the science is settled. Thousands of the world's leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder. I mean, you went to college. How many climate scientists did you know? (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan9:50

      (laughs)

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer9:51

      I mean, come on, thousands... But on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports, they're pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2 and we don't understand them at all. So, we have the biggest phenomena we don't understand at all, but the science is settled. Who knows what that means? (laughs)

   9. JRJoe Rogan10:12

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

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:16

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

   11. JRJoe Rogan10:23

       Doesn't make any sense.

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:24

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan10:24

       And, and, but everyone seems to, uh, be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the Earth is warming, we have to act now.

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:33

       You say everyone. I'm not so sure.

   15. JRJoe Rogan10:36

       No, I'm not saying everyone. A lot of politicians in particular.

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:38

       A lot of poli- politicians are very attractive to this, because it gives them power.

   17. JRJoe Rogan10:42

       Right. And it's hard to define.

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:44

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan10:44

       And you can argue, and if you argue-

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:45

       Oh, yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan10:45

       ... against it, you're a bad person.

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:48

       Well, you-

   23. JRJoe Rogan10:49

       It's a good one.

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer10:49

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

   25. JRJoe Rogan11:01

       Right.

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer11:02

       Uh, here too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated. (laughs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan11:11

       Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians'-

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer11:16

       Oh.

   29. JRJoe Rogan11:16

       ... decisions, where they have to like-

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer11:17

       Oh.
4. 12:02 – 15:29

   Net zero and energy costs: effects on consumers and electrification in poorer countries

   1. JRJoe Rogan12:02

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

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:08

      Well, by making it expensive, by eliminating fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheaper. Uh, at least, uh, the experience in the UK is when you switch to "renewables," it tripled the price of electricity.

   3. JRJoe Rogan12:25

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

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:28

      They can't afford it.

   5. JRJoe Rogan12:30

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

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:31

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan12:32

      And, and, but they also, uh, th- to, if they didn't follow these net zero policies, what kind of plants are we talking about? Are we ca- talking about coal plants? Are we ta-

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:40

      Coal. Anything.

   9. JRJoe Rogan12:41

      Right.

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:41

       Whatever's available.

   11. JRJoe Rogan12:43

       Yeah.

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:43

       I mean, you know, essentially-

   13. JRJoe Rogan12:44

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

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:49

       Not, uh, uh-

   15. JRJoe Rogan12:50

       That's an issue, right?

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer12:51

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

   17. JRJoe Rogan13:09

       Okay. So, um, the particulates aren't as, uh, big of an issue as they used to be in the past, as far as-

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer13:14

       I agree.

   19. JRJoe Rogan13:14

       ... they're more efficient? Okay.

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer13:15

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan13:16

       So, uh, stopping ... So this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world-

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer13:22

       Oh, yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan13:23

       ... that do not have electricity. And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants in-

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer13:29

       I think so.

   25. JRJoe Rogan13:29

       ... and not bringing these people into the first world.

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer13:31

       Yeah. And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on-

   27. JRJoe Rogan13:35

       Right.

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer13:35

       ... which are available in places. Uh, you know, there are places where you ha- y- y- you're lucky, like in Norway or Cana- you know, Quebec, where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean. But, uh, there, there's a problem with politicians. I remember once being in DC and some Republican politicians came and said, "Do you know what we just did? We banned incandescent light bulbs." They said, "Wasn't that a great thing?" I said, "That's the stupidest thing I've heard today. Uh, wha- what's the point?" 'Cause at the time, what was replacing it? Compact fluorescents, which were awful.

   29. JRJoe Rogan14:15

       (laughs)

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer14:17

       All they had to do was wait and do nothing, and LEDs would come along and people would say, "Okay, I prefer that." Instead, uh, they feel they have to do something.
5. 15:29 – 24:43

   Trusting science vs. doing science: authority, methodology, and Al Gore’s messaging

   1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:29

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

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:33

      Yes.

   3. 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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:47

      Right.

   5. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:48

      And so-

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:49

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

   7. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:52

      The success of science.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:54

      Mm-hmm.

   9. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer15:55

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

   10. JRJoe Rogan16:01

       Mm-hmm.

   11. 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)

   12. 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.

   13. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer16:51

       Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan16:52

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

   15. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer16:57

       Well, that's also confusing technology with science.

   16. JRJoe Rogan17:00

       Right. The result of science.

   17. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:02

       Yeah.

   18. 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-

   19. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:12

       So u- you mentioned Gore at the beginning.

   20. JRJoe Rogan17:13

       Yes.

   21. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:14

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

   22. JRJoe Rogan17:19

       Uh-huh.

   23. 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)

   24. 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.

   25. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:38

       Oh, yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan17:39

       So it's not like we can point to, like, "Look at the dinosaurs. We don't want to live the way the dinosaurs lived. Look how much CO₂ they had." And like ... And then the other really inconvenient thing with CO₂ is that the Earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time.

   27. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer17:52

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

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:14

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

   29. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer18:16

       He, he is... He wrote a... He was a biologist at Harvard. He wrote about sociobiology. His specialty were ants and bees and things, social insects. And, uh, he was giving a talk and, uh, it came up for reasons that were not obvious to me. He was talking about the population of humanoids, and he was mentioning that you go back, uh, you know, few hundred thousand years and, uh, you began the first humanoids and they're, they got to about a few million. But then during the last glacial maximum, the numbers went down to tens of thousands. It was a complete wipeout of humans. So I asked him afterwards, I said, "Do, do, do you think this could have anything to do with the fact that CO₂ is so low that there was no food?" And his response was to turn around and walk away (laughs) .

   30. JRJoe Rogan19:26

       (laughs) . That's an inconvenient truth, sir (laughs) .
6. 24:43 – 32:55

   Academic pushback and gatekeeping: journals, editors, ‘Iris effect,’ and Climategate emails

   1. JRJoe Rogan24:43

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

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer24:54

      Um ... Interesting question. Actually, quite a lot, but I mean, it took very funny forms. So for instance, uh, in, let's see, 1989, for instance, I sent a paper to Science Magazine questioning whether this was something to worry about, and they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest. So, I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it and published it, and the editor was immediately fired.

   3. JRJoe Rogan25:40

      Wow.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer25:42

      About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the Iris effect, that clouds, which were greenhouse effect at the uh, uh, upper levels, uh, contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling as a negative feedback. And we got the paper, put it, it got reviewed, it was published. Again, the editor was fired immediately.

   5. JRJoe Rogan26:12

      (laughs)

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer26:12

      But the new editor came on immediately-

   7. JRJoe Rogan26:14

      (laughs)

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer26:14

      ... and said, "He's inviting papers to criticize it."

   9. (laughs) Wow.

   10. And suddenly there were tons of papers criticizing it, looking for anything that differed from what we did. Including one that found a difference that actually, uh, made the CO2 even less important-

   11. JRJoe Rogan26:37

       (laughs)

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer26:37

       ... but it was different so he thought he could (laughs) pass it through. No, i- i- it's insane. And even now, there's something called gatekeepers. I don't know, do, are you familiar with the, uh, release of emails from East Anglia?

   13. JRJoe Rogan26:54

       No, I'm not.

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer26:55

       Okay. This is 20 years ago or something, almost. Uh, somebody, anonymous, released the emails from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm, and they were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on, and they were talking about blocking publication and getting rid of editors and doing this and doing that and so on.

   15. JRJoe Rogan27:27

       Wow.

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer27:27

       And that was all public.

   17. JRJoe Rogan27:30

       Wow.

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer27:30

       And it had no impact at all.

   19. JRJoe Rogan27:32

       How ... That sounds like that should be illegal.

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer27:36

       Yeah. Well, you know, the whole business with ... How should I put it? Uh, peer r- review. It is not ancient. Before World War II, very few journals had peer review, and in fact when I have students look at old journals from the 19th century, one of the big surprises is they are less formal than today's papers. They are literally discussions among scientists about their results, their questions, their uncertainties and so on. There's real communication. Today, I mean, there's, uh, much more formality in the papers. There's also, in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll, or a study, how often are papers referred to? And it turns out the average paper is referred to once (laughs) .

   21. JRJoe Rogan28:38

       Wow.

   22. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer28:39

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

   23. JRJoe Rogan28:50

       How did you get involved in this?

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer28:52

       Well, uh, I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy, and that's what really sucked me into it. I had never paid much attention to sci- uh, climate science before. But I was sh- spending a lot of money, the taxpayers' money on it, and so I thought I ought to learn a little bit about it, and, uh, I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not, uh, appreciate my (laughs) questioning. Uh, it, they were very strange because almost any other science, when they got a call from Washington, "Come in and tell us what you're doing," they were just delighted to come and make a case about how important their work was, but the climate scientists were completely different, you know.

   25. JRJoe Rogan29:32

       Did anybody engage with you?

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer29:34

       Yeah. They had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn't come and (laughs) -

   27. JRJoe Rogan29:40

       (laughs)

   28. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer29:40

       ... so they would come, you know, and, and be very sullen and, uh, they wouldn't answer questions and, you know, you can't have a seminar without asking questions. Uh, that's how you learn.

   29. JRJoe Rogan29:51

       So they would come to try to get funding from you...

   30. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer29:53

       Yeah.
7. 32:55 – 41:14

   Climate research money and university incentives: overhead, grants, and institutional self-interest

   1. 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?

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer33:07

      Well, I think the-

   3. JRJoe Rogan33:08

      For the most part.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer33:08

      Uh, speaking as a physicist, I don't know how it is in other fields. And, and from Princeton, I think most of my colleagues recognize that, uh, there's a lot of nonsense there, but they're afraid to speak up-

   5. JRJoe Rogan33:20

      Yeah, right.

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer33:21

      ... because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money. We, Dick mentioned that. (laughs) The love of money is the root of all evil in, in universities. For example, at, at Princeton, we have enormous new building program. It's funded to a large extent from overhead from climate grants, you know. And you're talking about, you know, not small change. You know, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, for construction.

   7. JRJoe Rogan33:45

      Mm-hmm.

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer33:45

      So it's, it's like, you know, this famous, uh, drama, uh, of this Norwegian playwright, Enemy of the People, Ibsen. And, uh, the point of the drama was there was this, uh, resort town in Norway where you would come and you would, uh, uh, be treated at the spa. You drink the water and, and go home healthy. Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid. And (laughs)

   9. JRJoe Rogan34:11

      (laughs)

   10. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer34:12

       A local doctor said, "You know, we're killing people. We're not curing them." And, uh, he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city. So it's, it's that syndrome. It's an ancient human problem.

   11. JRJoe Rogan34:25

       Right.

   12. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer34:26

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

   13. JRJoe Rogan34:31

       It's part of it. Uh, another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue. I mean, in the US, and I think that's in a way fortunate, it's almost a right versus left issue. Yeah. And as a result, uh, you have people... Universities are almost entirely on the left, and so it's, uh, something they support. Uh, you know, the money end (laughs) of it is sort of funny. I mean, I have the feeling at MIT that our president, uh, Sally Kornbluth, you know, probably spends her time worrying about, uh, how she can use climate money to support the music department. I don't know. (laughs) I mean, it's... (laughs) So when they get funding for climate, they can allocate it as they wish?

   14. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer35:28

       Well f- you know, it is fungible.

   15. JRJoe Rogan35:30

       Okay.

   16. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer35:32

       You get this huge overhead, you know, of 50%, 60% of your grant goes to the administration and not to your research.

   17. JRJoe Rogan35:39

       Wow.

   18. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer35:40

       You know, they can do what they like with the overhead.

   19. JRJoe Rogan35:41

       Interesting.

   20. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer35:42

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan35:43

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   23. JRJoe Rogan36:53

       And if they take a, a, a step outside of the narrative and say, "I think we need to re-examine what's going on with CO2 in the atmosphere, and it seems there's a politicalization of this subject, and that's bad for science, that's bad for education, it's bad for everything. Let's take a step back," they would immediately lose so much funding.

   24. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer37:12

       Well, the ma- the main thing it's bad for is for overhead income to the university. (laughs)

   25. JRJoe Rogan37:16

       Exactly, exactly.

   26. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer37:17

       From an administrator's point of view.

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

   28. JRJoe Rogan37:39

       Mm. Yeah. Uh, well, I think most people have no idea where grants go. They, they don't even think about it.

   29. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer37:44

       Yeah. No, I mean, uh-

   30. JRJoe Rogan37:46

       And the amount of money that's involved.
8. 41:14 – 44:23

   What is ‘climate’ anyway? Global averages vs regional variability and ocean cycles

   1. JRJoe Rogan41:14

      It becomes a part of an ideology, and it's a very cult-like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things, unfortunately. Um, what do you think are the major factors? You talked about water vapor, CO2, there's methane, there's a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the Earth moving in any direction, correct?

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer41:36

      Okay. Yeah. I, uh, let me back off that a little-

   3. JRJoe Rogan41:40

      Okay.

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer41:40

      ... because one of the things that is sort of strange is the narrative itself deals with global temperature. Not clear what that is. I mean, uh, some average over the whole globe? How do you take it? What do you do with it? But more than that, uh, what is climate? And, you know, there is a definition, it's an arbitrary definition, and, uh, it's that, uh, it's time, it's time variation on timescales longer than 30 years.It's pretty arbitrary.

   5. JRJoe Rogan42:23

      Yeah.

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer42:23

      But it distinguishes it from weather, which is, changes from day to day or week to week or so on.

   7. JRJoe Rogan42:29

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

   8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer42:34

      They start calling it climate. Okay, now you can take data from every station and filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years. That's called a low pass filter. And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe? And it turns out very poorly, because most climate change, by that definition, is regional. So for instance, uh, in this area, let's say the states like Louisiana, Alabama, Gulf states, they had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming. Nobody paid much attention to it because that's normal. Different areas do different things. Uh, you have reasons why it's local. I mean, if you're near a coast, near a body of water, the circulations in the ocean are bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time, on timescales ranging from a few years for El Nino and so to a thousand years. And so this has nothing to do with the global average. Um, the whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets, and so you'd look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot, so that was useful. But for looking at the Earth's climate, I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device.

9. 44:23 – 1:16:51

   The Sun, Milankovitch cycles, and deep-time ice ages: alternative drivers and uncertainties

   1. JRJoe Rogan44:23

      That makes sense. How much of a factor does the sun play?

   2. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer44:27

      (laughs)

   3. JRJoe Rogan44:27

      Obviously a lot. It heats us up, but, like-

   4. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer44:29

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan44:30

      ... the changing of-

   6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer44:31

      I, uh, you know, that's something there's argument about. Uh, I think, you know, for instance, uh, a man called Milankovitch in around 1940 made a convincing argument, and I think now it's correct, that orbital variations created a change in insulation, incoming sunlight, in the Arctic in summer, and that controlled the ice ages.

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:03

      Mm-hmm.

   8. 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.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:31

      Mm-hmm.

   10. 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."

   11. JRJoe Rogan46:32

       Mm-hmm.

   12. 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)

   13. 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.

   14. JRJoe Rogan48:12

       Mm-hmm.

   15. 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-

   16. JRJoe Rogan48:28

       Mm-hmm.

   17. 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-

   18. JRJoe Rogan49:25

       Mm.

   19. 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)

   20. JRJoe Rogan49:35

       Right.

   21. 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.

   22. JRJoe Rogan49:47

       That's absolutely fascinating.

   23. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer49:49

       Mm-hmm.

   24. 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?

   25. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:07

       Oh, yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan50:07

       So we can go back 65, 100 million years.

   27. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:10

       You can go up 500 million years-

   28. JRJoe Rogan50:12

       500 million years and be pretty accurate.

   29. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer50:13

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

   30. JRJoe Rogan50:16

       And so there, there have always been.
10. 1:16:51 – 1:32:29

    Models, chaos, and why catastrophe messaging persists: Navier–Stokes, Lorenz, and PR

    1. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:16:51

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

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:17:37

       (laughs)

    3. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:17:37

       (laughs)

    4. Uh, but- but it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things-

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:17:43

       Wow.

    6. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:17:43

       ... and so on. Any rate, so they do this, and they do... Uh, I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can, and, um, they get answers that will often be wrong. But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe. Uh, Koonin made the point, and I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about, uh, a 3% reduction in the national product or gross domestic product by 2100. That's not a great deal, it's not the end of the world if, uh, you're already much richer than you are today, so what- what's the panic? And, um, it's true, the models don't give you anything to be that panicked over, so the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don't have much to do with the models, but they blame the models. (laughs)

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:19:00

       Hmm.

    8. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:19:02

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

    9. L- let, Joe, let me, uh, ju- just, uh, say a little more about what Dick commented on the Navier-Stokes Equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans, and, uh, it really is a very hard, uh, m- mathematical problem to solve, because they're not only partial differential equations, they're what are called nonlinear-

    10. Yeah.

    11. ... partial differential equations. And so there's a joke about, uh, Werner Heisenberg, who was, uh, the inventor of, uh, quantum mechanics, uh, a very bright guy. And he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II, and so he was captured by the Americans and the British, and, uh, because of this activity, was forbidden to work on nuclear physics, uh, later, you know, um, after the victory. And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics, on solving the Navier-Stokes Equation (laughs) . And, uh, he was a, as I said, a tremendously, uh, talented physicist, and, but he found it very hard. He didn't make very much progress, because it's much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations. And so one, one of his students supposedly said to him, "Well, you know, Professor Heisenberg, um, they say that if you've been a good, uh, physicist when you die and you go to heaven, that, um, the Almighty allows you to ask two questions, and, uh, he will answer any question you ask. And, uh, what will you ask him?" And Heisenberg supposedly said, "Well, I will ask him why general relativity and, uh, why turbulence?" Turbulence is the Navier-Stokes Equation. He, he says, "And I think he will be able to answer the first one." (laughs)

    12. (laughs)

    13. (laughs)

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:21:19

        That's funny. That's funny.

    15. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:21:21

        Yeah.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:21:21

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

    17. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:21:30

        Well, you know, they're, they're, they're asking you to have great confidence in a calculation involving this miserable equation that is so hard to solve, uh, at least f- very far into the future. You can solve it for a short time, but very hard to go much further. One of Dick's colleagues at MIT, uh, a man named Lorenz-

    18. Lorenz, yeah.

    19. Uh, why don't you tell them about Lorenz?

    20. Well, no, Lorenz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable. Um, whether that's true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics and detail. I mean, you know, for instance, it wouldn't be a surprise if you're looking at a bubbling brook and you have all those little eddies and so on. You know, are you actually able to track the whole thing accurately? Probably not. How accurately would you have to do it if you scaled it up to climate? Who knows?

    21. Yeah, they, the typical, uh, uh, description of this theory was that it's as though a butterfly flapping its wings in the Gulf of Alaska causes hurricanes two years later in-

    22. (laughs)

    23. ... Florida.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:22:54

        Yeah, that one's funny.

    25. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:22:55

        Yeah, yeah. People will repeat that, and you're like, "No, that's not how it works at all." (laughs) I don't think that-

    26. That's right, I don't think it works that way.

    27. (laughs)

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:23:01

        I know, of course not, but it's funny when people like to bring that up.

    29. RHRichard Lindzen & William Happer1:23:03

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

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:23:24

        Everything has an influence.

Episode duration: 2:11:38