Modern WisdomGreenpeace's Ex-President - Is Climate Change Fake? - Patrick Moore | Modern Wisdom Podcast 373
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,098 words- 0:00 – 0:25
Intro
- PMPatrick Moore
No scientist who actually wanted to retain any credibility would claim that the correlation between rising CO₂ and rising temperature at this very tiny piece of time is proof of causation. Correlation is not proof of causation. (wind blows)
- CWChris Williamson
Patrick Moore, welcome to the show.
- PMPatrick Moore
Nice to be with you, Chris.
- CWChris Williamson
What is your background?
- 0:25 – 7:34
Founding Greenpeace
- CWChris Williamson
How did you come to be involved in the environmental discussion?
- PMPatrick Moore
Well, rather checkered, I have to admit. Uh, I grew up on a floating village on the north end of Vancouver Island with no road to that area. It was a, a West Coast inlet. So we were like outlanders there. And everything was by boat. The freight came on a boat once a week, uh, to a village of about 100 people. And in 1965, when the road came finally, a 75-kilometer gravel road from Port Hardy, on the other side of the North Island, uh... V- Vancouver Island is the largest island on the West Coast of the Americas, from Alaska to Argentina. So it's a 300-mile-long island. Uh, and I was born on it and still live on it in a slightly more civilized part now. But I have a home on the beach where I grew up, so I'm really lucky that way. And, uh, when the road came, we thought, "Wow, now this place is just gonna explode." Half the people used the road to get out. So we learned something of human nature that day. And, uh, I then ended up being sent to boarding school 'cause the one-room school I went to till grade eight only went to grade eight. (computer chimes) So I was sent to Vancouver to St. George's School, which is mo- modeled after the English public school. And, uh, there I excelled in science, and particularly life science. W- went to the University of British Columbia in an honors Bachelor of Science in Biology and Forestry, which is the industry I grew up in. And it's what we have almost on the entire province is trees, and much of which is in parks and much of which is in places where you're allowed to cut them and make lumber and paper. And so, uh, I then discovered the word ecology before it had been in the popular press and realized it was an obscure branch of science going back to the late 1800s, which basically dealt initially with soil-forming processes. And when you un- when you understand soil science, you understand that all life emanates from soil, on the land, that is, not e- not in the ocean, of course. But, uh, it, it then led me to realize that ecology was about the interrelationships among all the factors on Earth, especially with relation to life. But life is made of rocks and air and water, so it includes those two and all those factors that come into effect. So it's almost like infinity, the number of interrelationships there are. And infinity is kind of a spiritual concept because none of us can actually fathom it. And so as an agnostic in my family, uh, my whole family was not particularly religiously oriented, I suddenly discovered religion in a, uh, non-religious sense, in a way, in science. I, I discovered the i- the wonder of the infinity of life and the universe and realized it was unfathomable at a certain level, but that we could know more about it, uh, by studying it. And that's where I got my beginnings. And then I learned about... While doing my PhD, I learned about this little group that was beginning to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church in Vancouver to plan a protest voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska, taking on the world's most powerful organization at that time, a bunch of hippies. And, uh, but we were actually all professionals of one sort or another. It's just that, of course, we looked like hippies 'cause it was the hippie era in the early '70s. And we sailed on that boat, uh, 12 of us, and, uh, John Cormack and his 12 disciples, as we called ourselves, and, uh, we caused quite a ruckus and got on Walter Cronkite's Evening News in the United States and helped change the course of nuclear weapons, uh, development. It was the cusp of the Cold War when they stopped increasing the number of nuclear weapons, and we stopped those nuclear tests on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians, then went on to campaign against French atmospheric nuclear testing. France was still detonating hydrogen and atomic bombs in the air in the Southern Hemisphere, in French Polynesia. And the French people didn't even know this was happening 'cause France controlled all the media, including Le Monde. And we got in- we got this issue in Le Monde for the first time in France, and the campaign against that began domestically as well as internationally. And, uh, oh, just the rest is history. We stopped the killing of 30,000 whales per year in the North Pacific when we turned from the nuclear issue, having won two major victories. Uh, and then three, four years of campaigning against the o- o- ocean killing of whales by big factory fleets. It took that long, but we ended that, uh, by 1981. Uh, deep sea whaling was banned in all the oceans of the world by the International Whaling Commission, which is a branch of the UN. And so we lobbied at the UN and we went out on the ocean and got in front of the harpoons, so we had footage of people actually trying to save the whale from being killed by a harpoon. That's what made, made it, and that made us famous and then we started making a lot of money, and then we hired a lot of people, and then we had a payroll to meet, and then...As time went on, the left sort of, I guess, realized that there was money and power in this new environmental movement that we had helped create along with many other groups. But we were the only ones that knew how to boat up the coast-
- CWChris Williamson
At what point, because we're talking about Greenpeace specifically as a movement here, at what point did it become Greenpeace?
- PMPatrick Moore
It became Greenpeace right at the beginning. Uh-
- CWChris Williamson
At the hydrogen test when you went up to Alaska?
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes. When, when one of the people in the church basement meetings said, uh, as we were breaking up the meeting, someone said, "See you later," uh, and said peace, 'cause peace then meant sort of see you later. And, uh, someone s- he said, "Why don't we make it a green peace?" And so it started there. So we named our boat The Green Peace. We nicknamed our boat that we went to, it was named The Phyllis Cormack after the captain's wife, but we put a big sign saying Green Peace on the front of it, on the cabin. And, uh, by the middle of next ... well, early next year, the sa- in sev- 1972, we changed our name from what it had been, The Don't Make a Wave Committee, to The Greenpeace Foundation. And Foundation-
- CWChris Williamson
That's much better. That's much better, as it goes.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes. Foundation wasn't because we were wealthy, like foundations are. It was because of the Asimov trilogy, uh, about the small group of people on the opposite side, what Star w- what Star Wars is fashioned after, uh, that, that took on the em- the empire. And we were taking on the empire, indeed, and, uh, succeeded.
- 7:34 – 15:41
Why Patrick Quit Greenpeace
- PMPatrick Moore
- CWChris Williamson
What about your exit?
- PMPatrick Moore
My exit was unfortunate, but it was caused by the fact that as we became more well-known and powerful and political, uh, the ... we were basically hijacked by the left in the end, who were more clever at politics than we were, uh, as that was their game. And, uh, so I ended up being the only director of Greenpeace International during the last six years, from s- '79 when we created Greenpeace International, and I was instrumental in the negotiations that brought that about. Uh, and until '86 when I left, I was the only director with any formal science education. And we were now dealing with toxic i- uh, waste and issues of chemistry. And you, you don't need to be a PhD marine biologist to know to save the whales, or you don't need to be a nuclear physicist to want to stop hydrogen bombs. But if you're gonna get into the issue of toxicology, and now where they're calling plastic toxic, right, and calling carbon dioxide toxic, uh, which is complete BS, uh, you've gotta know some chemistry and you've gotta understand toxicology. And 'cause toxicology is not just about something being poisonous. It's about how much of it does it take to be poisonous, which is known as the poison is in the dose, which is basically the first rule of toxicology. Such like, do no harm is in medicine. Uh, the poison is in the dose. Is ... And, and like for example, table salt is one of the best examples. It is an essential nutrient. Sodium chloride, right, with chlorine in it, is an essential nutrient. You die without it. That's why Gandhi made salt at the sea, so they didn't have to pay a tax on something that was essential for life. Well, at a certain point, it gets to be too much. And if you actually ingest four or five tablespoons of s- of table salt all at once, i- you're likely to die because it becomes toxic at those higher levels. And you also ha- y- at four or five tablespoons sitting on the counter isn't harmful to you. It's only harmful if you're exposed to it. So there's a l- a lot of issues in toxicology that just got ignored in the whole thing. And then suddenly I find my other five directors in Greenpeace agreeing that we should have a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. That would be our next big campaign. And it was based on the fact that chlorine was a constituent of dioxins, DDT, and other chlorinated hydrocarbons. Chlorinated hydrocarbons are a very common group of elem- of, of molecules because carbon is the basis of life and chlorine is essential, as in sodium chloride salt. So there's lots of chlorinated hydrocarbons around and not all of them are toxic, uh, at, at, at low levels, and some of them are. But banning chlorine specifically, uh, was such a stupid idea, seeing as though it is the most important element for public health, adding it to drinking water, swimming pools, spas, as we use bromine also these days, there was a time when iodine, which is another one of the halogens in that group along with chlorine, was the most important thing in your m- in your medicine cabinet, as it was when I was a child. If you got a cut, you put iodine on it to stop infection. And so there's that p- reason for chlorine. The other reason is that 85% of our pharmaceuticals are made with chlorine chemistry and 25% of them actually have chlorine in them. If you look at the ingredients in your cold or flu medicines, just for an example, you'll see a little CL after a lot of them. That's chlorine. So at a purely, uh, scientific perspective, I couldn't stay in a group that was going to launch a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. But that was just the sharp end of the stick. For some years, after a long evolution, 15 years for me, from the beginning of being involved in the beginning of the environmental movement or the modern environmental movement, we actually had a fairly strong humanitarian orientation in the early years. We were trying to save civilization from all-out nuclear war. And so that must means you care about people.... as well as the environment, which was the green part of Greenpeace. But the peace part of Greenpeace was to end nuclear war or the threat of nuclear war. And we did a pretty good job of helping with that. And- but by the time I had to leave, the environmental movement, now controlled largely by the political Left, had basically changed the tune to humans are the enemies of the Earth. Humans are the enemies of nature. As if we are the only bad or evil species on the planet and everything else is either benign or good or whatever you want to say, but they're not evil, right? Just- so this is original sin reinvented for environmentalism as it is in extreme Christianity and I suppose other religions, I don't know much about other ones. But I do know that in Christianity, there's a wing of it that considers humans to be born with evil in them. Uh, not that they don't have some good in them, but I don't believe that one iota. I- I just think we're ... it's- it's not even a, uh, a relevant thing to discuss.
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that transition happened, from it being about peace to this, Alex Epstein calls it human racism?
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes. It's the same reason why Americans now think America is evil, uh, even though they are Americans. Uh, I- I- um, it's self-loathing is another way of expressing it. Um, it is a deeply, uh, d- destructive mental condition to believe that you are evil, even when you're good. And so I- I- I have never-
- CWChris Williamson
That's what it is. So why is it? Why did it happen?
- PMPatrick Moore
Fear of death, I think, is at the root of it. Um, that's why doomsday predictions are made throughout history, is because people believe that when they die, the world will end, 'cause they think they're so bloody important or something. I don't know what it is, but it is, it is the fear of own's- one own- one's own death projected on the universe or- or on the world, end times, apocalypse. They keep saying it's going to happen. They've been saying it for 10,000 years or more. This little guy's standing on a street corner with a sign saying, "The end is near." Well, they used to say, "The end is nigh," but I- I think that's an English term that nobody knows what it means anymore. But the end is near, right? And that's what AOC is saying, and that's what G- uh, Greta is saying, and that's what the I- IPCC is basically saying, that's what the World Economic Forum is saying, that's what Biden is saying. They're all saying the end is near because of climate change now, not- it used to be because of the devil or witches or something like that. But now it's because of climate change that the end is near. And I'm sure it's a projection of one's own fear of death. One of the reasons I'm sure of that is that I don't think that way, and I'm not afraid of my own death. I have absolutely no fear of it because there's one thing that you must do in life is not to worry about things you can't do anything about, because then you'd be worrying about way too many things and you'd never get anything done. And so I only worry about things that I can do something about. And as- as far as I can see, I can't do anything about the fact that I have a short life on this Earth. Short meaning under 100 years or so.
- 15:41 – 23:52
Environmental Fear & Guilt
- PMPatrick Moore
- CWChris Williamson
It definitely does feel like there's a narrative at the moment of human racism, of the descriptions of humanity being a scourge on the Earth. People are made to feel guilty about the cars that they drive or the flights that they take or, you know, you have Greta Thunberg going back from conferences on a- a- a rowing boat and it's taken her six months to get back across the Atlantic. I don't know ... I- I think I'm unconvinced that all of this can be attributed to the denial of death. You know, Ernest Becker might agree, but I'm not sure that all of it could be, but I don't know where else it could come from. It's definitely a v- you know, fear is a very good control mechanism for people. So there are other, um, there are other powers at play there. However, I don't understand why people would take it and imbibe it themselves and then start to push it back out. Because if it's something that is- that makes you feel uncomfortable, I- e- most people tend to- to shy away from it. But it really does feel like people have become their own torturers with this. You know, w- i- it's almost par for the course that humans are damaging the Earth, that we're causing harm, and that we shouldn't be here.
- PMPatrick Moore
You said it. Uh, and I- I too don't know if I have the whole picture, but I think that's part of it. Now, fear and guilt, you see, those are the two that, when they're combined, are so powerful in controlling people. The way I put it is you're driving your SUV down the road, you're afraid that you are killing your grandchildren by putting out the toxic CO₂, which is actually the main food for all life on Earth. Why they can't get that, I don't know. But it is. It is a fact. And it is not toxic (laughs) , et cetera. But there's a fear, and then that makes you feel guilty because you're killing your grandchildren, right? So fear and guilt, that's why I call a chapter in my book Climate of Fear and Guilt. And, uh, Mi- Michael Crichton used the word fear in his book on climate change as well. Uh, I forget the whole title, but the word fe- climate of- might have been Climate of Fear. But, uh, the- the- the- the fear that is put into people about the end times, you know, and if people would just think straight...... they would realize that people have be- been predicting the end times since practically the beginning of time, and they have never once been right. They are batting zero on end times, right? So why should we believe the new end times story?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, because this one's backed up by science, and it's got all of these people around the world, they all agree with each other. There's research, there's studies that have been done, and you have 80% of scientists say that climate change is real.
- PMPatrick Moore
Well, this is because lying has become acceptable to a lot of people. Bald-faced lying. It- the, the 80% thing or the 97% thing is a lie. It's been shown to be a lie in the- they, they- y- you know, this one study that said it was 97% done by a psychologist from Australia, a not a sci- not really a scientist, that's a, a soft science at best, and he came up with this 97% number. When analyzed, and this, uh, Christopher Monckton was involved in this reanalysis, uh, along with a couple of other really smart people on numbers and statistics, and it turns out to be 0.3%, not 97%, who actually, in their paper, declared that humans will cause a climate disaster, basically. Many of them said humans have a role in climate change, but they didn't say it was gonna be a disaster. So that, that, if you break down what people actually said or even inferred, you will not find that many climate scientists who will outright come out and say, "This is a climate emergency." The scientists are hiding behind the politicians who fund them. That's where they get all their money. They get their money from politicians through bureaucrats in the deep state in the S- in the United States. I don't know what you have as equivalent to the deep state. But having watched Boris rise to fame, I can't fathom what caused that, so it must've been some kind of weird political thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Good hairdo. That's what, that's what caused it as well-
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah, right. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... is a good hairdo.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah. (laughs) Let's not talk about that anymore, um, is my attitude towards it, 'cause I just watch these things... Somebody came out today and said that polar bears are inbreeding, right? And that's because there's not enough ice for them to find each other anymore. And-
- CWChris Williamson
Is that so?
- PMPatrick Moore
Oh, yeah, right. (laughs) That's so weird. Is that true? That- it- well, first, what is inbreeding, right? Is i-
- CWChris Williamson
Is it beyond cousins or second cousins? Anything closer than that, genetically?
- PMPatrick Moore
That's our definition of it, yes. But in plant breeding, for example, and animal breeding, inbreeding is commonly used in order to maintain characteristics that are desirable. But I've-
- CWChris Williamson
I've seen- I've, I've seen tigers that have got Down syndrome from too tight inbreeding.
- PMPatrick Moore
Y- y-... Yes, but inbreeding is absolutely necessary. Like, you're not gonna start breeding with snails, right? So how far out does it go? Right?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, it needs to be within your own species, but not within your own-
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... hereditary genetic pool.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah, but it e- sh- it should always be someone of another race, right? 'Cause that's the most outbreeding you can get, right? It should never be anybody in your own race, because that's inbreeding. You see, inbreeding and outbreeding are flexible terms in that sense. There's extreme inbreeding and there's extreme outbreeding, right? If you outbreed, you water down the genetics. If you inbreed, you concentrate them. A combination of those two things is always essential in species evolution. And so therefore, they're just using the word inbreeding as a political term rather than a scientific term. They're- 'cause inbreeding is bad, period, right? That's, that's how they're getting away with that. And the idea that they aren't finding enough of each other, the, the population of polar bears has grown by four or five times since the treaty. Do you know about the treaty on polar bears?
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- PMPatrick Moore
So you do, but nobody else does, 'cause they never mention it. They never mention that in 1973, on the advice of wildlife biologists, because too many people were now able to go to the Arctic in planes and hire Inuit guides and get polar bear rugs, there were too many people doing that. It was- had become too easy, and rich people were able to easily do that. So, the polar bear population was declining due to overhunting. So, the- n- all the nations with polar bears signed a treaty, international treaty, to end the unrestricted hunting of polar bears. In other words, there had been no restrictions on killing polar bears up till then, 'cause there didn't seem to need to be any, 'cause there was lots of polar bears and hardly anybody ever went up there and killed one. Besides which, they're really mean and horrible and they'll kill you if you don't watch out. But with a high-powered rifle, the odds are turned in your favor. So, they signed that treaty, and since then, the polar bear population has grown from somewhere between 6 to 10,000 to somewhere between 30 and 50,000. Those are the accepted figures by all the people involved in this except for, uh, fakers, which are not scientists, right? They're poli- political activists.
- 23:52 – 29:39
Extinction Rebellion
- PMPatrick Moore
- CWChris Williamson
Give me your thoughts on Extinction Rebellion.
- PMPatrick Moore
They're really, really stupid and bad.
- CWChris Williamson
Elaborate on your thoughts about Extinction Rebellion.
- PMPatrick Moore
Uh- (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
'Cause you, you come from, right- you come from Greenpeace, co-founder of Greenpeace, and Extinction Rebellion...There, there seems to be people could see some sort of lineage or progression or connection, you know? It's an-
- PMPatrick Moore
No.
- CWChris Williamson
... environmentalist movement.
- PMPatrick Moore
No. There's no lineage or progression. We didn't dress up like cult t- teams of a cult movement, like all dressed in really stupid looking red uniforms that are somewhere be- a cross between the Inquisition and, uh, a cartoon. Uh, the, the... And spraying blood on buildings and this sort of thing. Actually, I signed off when people started chaining themselves to other people's stuff. Um, peace- peacefulness, pacifism, is non-violence, right? But it doesn't include inciting other people to violence against you. That is not pacifism. In other words, by you making the first blow or you chaining yourself to someone's tractor who is trying to make a living with it, that is not peaceful. And yet, they, they were basically saying that anything short of killing the other person is peaceful, almost. You know? It, it's not peaceful to interfere with other peoples' livelihoods in a way that threatens their livelihood. That's not peaceful. And so-
- CWChris Williamson
But they think that, that, they think that this is a really important and just-worthy cause. They need to get attention and people aren't looking, so they need to do more.
- PMPatrick Moore
So, why don't they go with the Taliban? That would be good. They, then they'd have machine guns and they could kill anybody they wanted and have mass murder, uh, to destroy the human race. You know, that's more or less what they're recommending, as far as I can see. Uh, so I think they are, I think they are evil. There are good people and bad people and people that are sort of in between, like actually most people are little bit good and a little bit bad. But these people are evil. That's what I think of Extinction Rebellion.
- CWChris Williamson
What about Greta Thunberg, the other, one of the other Horsemen of the Environmental Apocalypse?
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah. Well, it's funny that people didn't notice right away that she is a young girl with pigtails because, uh, that's what Stalin and Mao and Hitler, all used young girls with pigtails in their photographs. That's all been well-documented. Um, I don't know what the pigtails has to do with it, but, uh, dictators o- often, it seems almost always, use children as, as a front to make it look as though they're nice, I suppose. I'm not sure what their reason-
- CWChris Williamson
Isn't she Danish, though? Is there someone, someone in Denmark sending her over? Is there some totalitarian leader in Denmark trying to get Greta Thunberg to...
- PMPatrick Moore
No, the movement is totalitarian.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- PMPatrick Moore
And the movement, the movement controls her. Uh, green... She, she's, she's... There's all kinds of photographs of her on trains with the head of Greenpeace, et cetera. I mean, and, and, and of course Al Gore, and the list is endless. And her speeches are written for her, obviously, and she doesn't know anything much about climate change or science. So, what, what is she then? She's simply a tool. Right? She is just a tool, nothing more. She is not a wise person telling us what we should be doing. She is being used by Hollywood actors and phony politicians like Al Gore. Uh, none of, none of whom actually have any science. What scientist is behind Greta Thunberg? Thunberg, I should say.
- CWChris Williamson
It sounds like you've got a problem with the delivery mechanism, especially for Extinction Rebellion, and I can absolutely agree with you there. I don't think that going and hammering and chiseling the front door of banks or trying to erect structures in the middle of London Bridge, I don't think that that's a, a fantastic way to get people on side, simply from a human psychology perspective. If you want to compel people to be a part of your cause, you need to convince them, not terrorize them. That being said-
- PMPatrick Moore
Well, yeah, yeah. But I mean, gluing your breasts to the street, for example.
- CWChris Williamson
Has that happened?
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes. It did.
- CWChris Williamson
Gluing, gluing your breasts-
- PMPatrick Moore
To the street.
- CWChris Williamson
What, like, so lying face down-
- PMPatrick Moore
And, and gluing your breasts to the concrete so that you can't be moved so that you're blocking the traffic or whatever.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- PMPatrick Moore
Right? So that, that's the kind of thing they do. And I, I agree that it's very sensational and everything, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue whatsoever, whatever the issue is. I don't even know what their issue is. Is it that humans are, should be exterminated? It seems to be that would be basically their issue. And so I recommended that a man glue his penis to the top of a, of, of a, uh, subway car. And somebody did a cartoon of it on Twitter as a result of my suggestion (laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Right. So you can disagree-
- PMPatrick Moore
That's not, that's not one of the five un- un- unacceptable words either.
- CWChris Williamson
No. No. Um, you can disagree with their methods, but there is an awful lot of well-known people who appear to have credentials saying that we are in a climate emergency,
- 29:39 – 39:46
Are We In a Climate Emergency?
- CWChris Williamson
which we are, aren't we?
- PMPatrick Moore
No. We are not in a climate emergency. I don't know, people say to me, "Well, all you have to do is look outside to see that it's a climate emergency." I h- I'm looking outside and I see a beautiful green mountain with a glacier on top of it where I live, and a whole mountain range right next to me, and the whole of Vancouver Island is as healthy as can be. And yet, they say it's been strip-mined of all its trees. No, it has not. And-
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think they mean when they say climate emergency?
- PMPatrick Moore
I think they mean the end times are coming. It's just another way of saying we're all doomed, right? Because if there was an emergency, it means that if you don't do anything about it, you're doomed.
- CWChris Williamson
It got upgraded, right? It was climate crisis. And then within the last couple of years, it, it is now climate emergency.
- PMPatrick Moore
Precisely. And I can't imagine what more extreme word they could now invent after they've come from, you know, crisis to emergency.
- CWChris Williamson
Change, cr- crisis, emergency.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah. Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. There isn't ... You are right, there isn't much left. But there's, there's so many differing critiques around what the impact is that humans have had on the planet. So, the world's getting too hot, for instance, increases in the temperature. That's something that's happening, is it not?
- PMPatrick Moore
The world has been warming ever so slightly since about 1700 when the little Ice Age stopped getting colder and started getting warmer. There have been these thousand-year cycles for the last 6,000 years of the interglacial period known as the Holocene, which we are in now, which is about 12,000 years long. Since we emerged from the last major glaciation, which peaked 22,000 years ago, which was one of 45 major glaciations that have occurred during the Pleistocene Ice Age over the last 2.6 million years, which is the first ice age in 250 million years. Since the previous ice age ended after 100 million years. From 350 million years ago to 250 million years, there was another ice age, the previous one to this one. Since the last 250 million years until recently, which was 2.5 million years ago, it was warmer than it is now at all times. It is now colder than it has been even in this interglacial period, during this Pleistocene Ice Age, which has gone up and down and up and down and up and down in cycles of 41,000 years for the first 1.6 million years, and in cycles of 100,000 years for the last 1 million years in concert with the two Milankovitch cycles related to the tilt of the Earth changing and the orbit of the Earth changing shape. This is caused by the gravitational attraction of Jupiter on our Earth. And so, these people want us to think that the world began in 1850 when we started using fossil fuels. But for 150 years before that, it was also warming, and during one of those warming spurts, because when the Earth warms, it just doesn't warm continuously. It goes up and then down, and then up and then down, and then up and then down. But net warming, net cooling looks like this. Down and then up, down and then up, down and then up. There's cycles within cycles within cycles. We understand very few of these cycles. We certainly don't know what causes the onset of an ice age such as the one we are in now, and we have no idea when it will end, because actually at the bottom level, it is still getting colder. And until we came along only 150 years ago, we started restoring a balance to the global carbon cycle by putting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere that had been taken out by life and drawn down CO₂ to the lowest level it has ever been in the history of the planet, which is 4.6 billion years. So-
- CWChris Williamson
When was the lowest?
- PMPatrick Moore
22 million years... 22,000 years ago, CO₂ sank to 180 parts per million due to the cooling of the glaciation causing the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The o- wa- Liquids hold more gas when they're cold than when they're warm. Air holds more humidity, in other words gas, when gaseous forms of what can be liquids, holds more of it when they're warm. Like, warm air holds more water than cold air does. That's why fogs form when the air cools, because it condenses. So it's the exact opposite. Water, and in particular, holds more gas when it's cold. So when the Earth cools, the oceans absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere. And the, the total CO₂, there's nearly 50 times as much CO₂ in the oceans as there is in the atmosphere today. That wasn't always the case, because the atmosphere had a lot more CO₂ in it in the past. Going back 200 million years, it had about 2,000 ppm. Today, it's 400 because of our increasing it from when we came along, it was 280.
- CWChris Williamson
So you do agree that we as humans have had an impact on the climate?
- PMPatrick Moore
No, just producing CO₂ doesn't mean you're having an impact on the climate. The primary impact of increased CO₂ is more plant growth, and that's called the greening of the Earth. And NASA has verified this with maps on the internet, and so has CSIRO in Australia, which is the one... They're the one that broke it in, in 2000 and, uh, 14 or... I think it was, uh, when they showed a map showing up to 30% increased photosynthesis due to increased CO₂ in the atmosphere. So that is the main known fact from what has happened as a result of more CO₂ in the atmosphere. There is zero evidence that the CO₂ increase in the atmosphere is the cause of rising temperature. None whatsoever, because it was already rising. As I was about to say, during the first 150 years of rising out of 1700...There was a period of over 40 years where the temperature increased more and faster than it has done since 1850. Es- especially since 1950, when we were actually starting to put a significant amount more CO2 in the atmosphere post-fall. And today, it's exponential. There's a wonderful graph, it's in my book, which shows the temperature record in Central England from 1660 or so, when the first f- thermometer existed. So this is- this is the longest thermometer record of temperature in the world, as they were invented in England. And so that shows a very steady continuous rise in temperature of a little over one degree Celsius in 320 years. It's not a big deal. Certainly compared to previous ... Like, they, they keep saying it's never gone this fast, it's never risen this fast. That is a lie. It has risen this fast many times in the even recent past. Especially from about 1690 to about 1730. It rose faster and longer than it ever has done since. It's all in the record. Now, they'll say, "Oh, that's just a local measurement." Well, all measurements are local measurements.
- CWChris Williamson
But not if you aggregate them across multiple, right?
- PMPatrick Moore
No, that's called the climate. If you aggregate them across global, except global is really badly skewed by there being by far the most measuring centers in North America and Europe, and hardly any in many other places, especially Africa. So, e- even that is skewed badly in terms of localism. But never mind that. The fact of the matter is, is climate is a 30-year average of each weather event, right? Whether it's hurricanes or tornadoes. Tornadoes are almost nonexistent in the United States this year compared to previous years. For some reason, the conditions just didn't happen, 'cause United States has 90% of the world's tornadoes. There's a reason for that. It's geographic. It's because from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, there are no mountains in the way, because that was an inland sea. The prairies, in other words, of the United States were, and of Canada. That was- that was the sea bottom at one point. And so it's a straight shot for arctic air to come all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico and for hot Gulf of Mexico air to come all the way up, and they combine, and boom. And that's how hurricanes are formed too, is the convergence of cold and warm air masses. And that's why when the Earth warms, the tropics w- hardly changes when the Earth warms. The warming is- is ... What's the not inadvertently? (computer notification sound) Is greater anyways. The warning is always greater towards the poles (computer notification sound) when the Earth warms. It wasn't that long ago when all the arctic islands of Canada were covered in forest and there was giant camels roaming there, five million years ago. That's not very long ago that- that's ... Five million years is like an eternity to these people. They don't even know what it means, right?
- 39:46 – 48:36
Rising Sea Levels
- CWChris Williamson
So if we have most of the effects of global warming, or of any warming that occurs at the poles, presumably that is going to increase the melting of those ice caps. Is there a concern, whether it is manmade or otherwise cyclical in nature or simply a trend over time, should we be concerned about increased warming, rising sea levels? We have a lot of coastal cities, we have people who live there who may not be able to move very easily. Is that a danger?
- PMPatrick Moore
People who can't move very easily? Do you have some of those? Are they in wheelchairs or what?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) You have people who may-
- PMPatrick Moore
I say, I say two things about this. Number one, you won't have to run. Right? This is happening very, very slowly and always will happen very, very slowly. It doesn't happen quickly. Number two, hire the Dutch. Right? 25% of Holland is below sea level, and they're growing most of their food there on this land that is below sea level. It is not difficult to build dykes around pieces of land. Especially if the land is steep ... Sorry, especially if the land is flat, you can save a lot of land by building a foot of dyke or two. If the land is steep, you have to decide whether it's worth it or not to build a wall, because you're only gonna lose a small amount of land if it's coming steep out of the water. So, those are the basic situations. The sea level has always been rising and falling. We should not weep because we happen to be victims to this eternal factor in the Earth's climate and sea level, right? The- the Earth's sea level has been 40 meters higher than it is today in the past, and it's been 100 meters lower. So, it goes up and down. But if you look at the islands at the equator in Indonesia which are made of limestone from ancient coral reefs, they're all undercut, sometimes up to 12 feet undercut. They've got this angle undercut. They look like mushrooms, right? You may have s- seen them in photographs. Vietnam has them too. They're all through that part of the world where the islands are made of limestone, which is more erodible than granite, by waves. Now, if- if the sea was constantly rising for the last 10,000 years or whatever, 'cause it stopped rising pretty much around 7,000 years ago when the glaciers melted, coming out of the last glaciation-... the most recent glaciation. It's not necessarily the final one, as people think the last glaciation means the final glaciation. It just means the most recent-
- CWChris Williamson
The most recent.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes. The most recent one of 45 that have occurred in the Pleistocene. So we have no guarantee that anything is going to change. Another one should be here in 80,000 years, according to the last million years of cycles, all which is thoroughly documented by ice cores from Antarctica. So this sea level rise and up and down has been happening forever. And people in the last 10,000 years have adjusted to it. It's not going to like th- they, they're, they're, they're making it seem as though it will be a flood, like an inundation, right? That's the climate emergency scenario, that all of a sudden our houses will be underwater. It's not going to work that way. And that's why Obama is perfectly happy to buy a $14 million house right on the ocean in Cape Cod, because he also knows this, that he's safe there.
- CWChris Williamson
There's some inland harbors in the UK, isn't there? Aren't there some ruins of, of Roman shipping places that are actually miles inland from when the sea level was higher?
- PMPatrick Moore
Precisely. And that was 2,000 years ago when the Romans built docks on all across the south of Britain and, uh, Lewes. You know where Lewes is?
- CWChris Williamson
No.
- PMPatrick Moore
Well, it's one of those castle towns, uh, on a river that flows south. It's way inland. It was on the sea. Also, there's a place in France called something sur la mer. It's like many, many kilometers from the sea today. It used to be a harbor. So it appears as though the sea level is lower today, and that would be worldwide than it was 2,000 years ago. And that is because the world was warmer 2,000 years ago during the Roman Warm Period. That's why they have a name for it, because it was the Roman Warm Period. And in the Roman Warm Period, 2,000 years ago, it was warmer than it is today. In addition, during the Medieval Warm Period, 1,000 years ago, interestingly, a thousand years, a thousand years, a thousand years, this has been the trend. There was also a thing called the Minoan Warm Period before the Roman Warm Period. The Earth has been cooling for 6,000 years, net cooling. We are in a slight upward tick now. It's just an upward tick in a downward movement.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you think that we've got further to go down?
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes, 80,000 years further, the Milankovitch cycle-
- CWChris Williamson
So what do you think-
- PMPatrick Moore
... 100,000 years cycles.
- CWChris Williamson
So you think that r- realistically we are seeing this upward tick. What has happened is it has coincided with an increase of releasing carbon dioxide, which has led some scientists to associate the increase in temperature with the increase in carbon dioxide, which justifies blaming it on humans, but that if you were to roll it forward by another 500 years, you are going to see the crest of that thousand-year cycle actually diminish, and we're going to start to cool again and then cool again to a lower level than we would have seen previously at the previous low?
- PMPatrick Moore
You got it. If things continue on the same pattern they have for the last 6,000 years, which is typical of an interglacial period. Through the Antarctic ice cores, we have a really good picture of the last 800,000 years, and now they're starting to go back more than a million years into the y- times when there was a 41 thous- thousand-year cycle. Right now, we only have really good information for the hundred-thousand-year cycles, especially going back through four of them. They all have names. The previous one was the Eemian. I'm forgetting the other two right now, but they have names on a chart, and they were 100,000 years apart in quite perfect synchronization. We know the CO₂ levels and the temperature at the Antarctic during those cycles because we can measure proxy measurements of isotopes. And actually the CO₂ is measured directly from bubbles in the ice down 400,000 years in ice. And so we've got that, and we know that the interglacial periods come out in 10,000 years, whereas... And then there's a 10,000-year... This, these are not all equal exactly, right? But approximately 10,000-year interglacial period where the temperature remains higher for a period of time, and then a gradual 80,000-year decline into the next major glaciation. So it appears as though... And the, and, and the interglacial periods are virtually always warmer at the very beginning of them. In other words, as you come out of the previous glaciation, it goes up to what we call the Holocene climatic optimum, meaning it was warmer then for the first 6,000 years of the Holocene interglacial period. And since then, it has been cooling. This is well-documented. The graphs are in my book. They're from Iceland and Antarctic ice cores, and they're also from marine sediments. Marine sediments can take you back half a billion years because stuff has been falling on the bottom of the sea from all the life in the ocean and the stu- uh, and the sediments flowing into the ocean, uh, in addition. So the life that dies falls to the bottom and is embedded in the sediments that come from the land. And that record is in layers. And we can date all of that with radioactive techniques. So we've got that.
- 48:36 – 1:01:50
Only 50 Harvests Left?
- CWChris Williamson
What do people mean when they say that we've got 50 harvests left?
- PMPatrick Moore
Is that like 50 years of crops? Is that what they-
- CWChris Williamson
Apparently, yeah, I think so. I don't know why they wouldn't just say 50 years of crops as opposed to 50 harvests, because that's just confused me, but yeah, let's call it 50 years of crops left. What do they mean? Is that-
- PMPatrick Moore
They tend to go-
- CWChris Williamson
... something to do with soil, microbiome-y stuff, or biome stuff, environe stuff?
- PMPatrick Moore
No, it’s, it’s simply a cult doomsday prediction-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- PMPatrick Moore
... is what it is. They have absolutely no reason to say that. There's no-
- CWChris Williamson
Topsoil degradation, none of this?
- PMPatrick Moore
Oh, yeah. Topsoil degradation. It's happening everywhere. No, we're- our farming methods are so improved now that soil conservation is so improved now that we're not losing soil like they say we are. And yes, soil gets washed into the sea by rivers, right? New soil is created. It's not as if soil creation has ended. And people think that trees use dirt to make themselves and therefore, if you take the trees away over and over and over again by harvesting them, the soil will eventually go away, right? No. The soil is made by the bloody trees. That's how soil gets there. If there was no trees, that would be rocks there, no soil. Soil doesn't just happen by itself. It happens because of the leaves falling and the branches falling on the ground and decaying, and some of it turns into soil. Soil-forming processes was the beginning of ecology in the steppes in the Ukraine. Studying the grasslands of the Ukraine, which are very productive, deep Chernozem soils have been created by grass. Doesn't- it's not just trees that make dirt. It's all plants make dirt. And when you look at a tree and you see this huge, say at a big mature tree, you see this huge solid thing, it's hard to believe that it's 99% made from air and water, right? The carbon and the hydrogen and the oxygen in that tree, which is over 99% of that tree's biomass, came from carbon dioxide and H₂O, water. That's what made it. Trees are basically carbohydrates. So are we, except for our bones. And so the, the, the knowledge of, of life is so poor. Science has progressed so far, and yet the average person's knowledge of science has degraded because they're being told all these lies that carbon dioxide is poison, when in fact it is the primary food for all life and there isn't enough of it right now, and there certainly wasn't enough of it when we first started putting some back. It's important to note that all the carbon that we are releasing was made by life in the form of fossil fuels and much more importantly, in the form of carbonaceous rocks. Now, have you heard of carbonaceous rocks?
- CWChris Williamson
I have not.
- PMPatrick Moore
Of course you have. It's called limestone.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes, I have.
- PMPatrick Moore
And limestone is what we make cement with. And limestone is calcium carbonate. It is a carbonaceous rock. The carbon in limestone came from CO₂ in the ocean, and the CO₂ in the ocean came from the air. So as the shelled creatures evolved, what we call the marine calcifying species, all life in the sea was microscopic, invisible and unicellular until about 600, 570, 600 million years ago. Then the Cambrian explosion occurred, which was the advent of multicellular life in the sea, and large creatures this big came into being. If you read Stephen, uh, Gould's book, A Wonderful Life, you will see the history of early life as discovered through the Burgess Shale, which is a fossil deposit in the Rocky Mountains at Yoho National Park in Canada, the Chinese have a parallel one, where soft-bodied organisms were preserved, because most fossils are bones or shells because they were hard parts and they could be preserved more easily. Soft parts would normally decay. But because of mudslides which immediately ended oxygen exposure, ancient creatures that were only soft, like jellyfish, were preserved as fossils. So there's a record of these species' evolution in the early times of the Cambrian. At a certain point, many different species, somehow from a common thread, developed the ability to combine calcium and carbon dioxide. Calcium, like sodium and potassium, is in the salts in the sea. And combined calcium with carbon dioxide to make calcium carbonate to form shells, armor plating around their soft bodies like oysters and mussels and crabs and barnacles and shrimp and tiny coccolithophores, which are a plant, phytoplankton, and little bit larger foraminifera, which are about- they're an animal. They're about the size of a very tiny grain of sand, and they are all marine-calcifying species. Coral reefs are actually the predominant one, which is about 50% of all the calcification going on in the world, and was much more before when coral reefs were much more widely spread when the Earth was warmer. They've been reduced to basically, uh, small places where the ocean is still warm enough for the high biodiversity of corals, the particular- Indonesian Coral Triangle. And so today...We have a situation where these coral species and other calcifying species are still using the carbon dioxide out of the ocean and it's raining down on the bottom as dead shells, right? As shells from dead creatures. And that has built up and formed all of the ca- all of the limestone in the world over the years, and that's where most of the carbon dioxide has gone. 90% approximately. Only about 10% of it has gone into fossil fuels. Now, the fossil fuels are also the result of forests being buried and turned into coal, of species sinking to the bottom, the- the- la- the soft parts of species turning into oil and gas, in... and now we find them on the land in places like Texas, which was once a sea bottom. And- and the fracking deposits all were at one time a sea bottom. Whereas the coal deposits were a terrestrial environment, were forests. But all of the fossil fuels were made with photosynthesis. They were all created by solar energy. They were all created by carbon dioxide being drawn out of the atmosphere and locked away for hundreds of millions of years, where the plants on the land and in- in the sea could no longer use it because it was gone into these locked up sediments. They call it sequestration or sequestered carbon. It is out of the cycle. That's why CO₂ came down to such a low level at the last glaciation when the oceans cooled and pulled it out of the atmosphere to 180, which is 30 parts per million above the death of plants. Plants don't just need CO₂. Just like us, they need a certain level of CO₂ just like we need a certain level of oxygen. If you have an- an atmosphere with 5% oxygen, you die. Actually, you die at 10% oxygen. I think it's even higher than that. Whereas oxygen is around 20% in the atmosphere. But you go up to the top of Mount Everest and you've got to be a Sherpa who's been doing it for their whole life before you can breathe up there s- and successfully live. So, th- these are true- truisms about life, that they need a certain level of their essential nutrients and carbon dioxide being the key essential nutrient for all plants, they need it at one- 130- 150 and they start to die. And it is believed that during some of the last major glaciations, because of ash layers that are associated with the peak of those glaciations, that high altitude plants did all die and burn because they were dried out. And, uh, that would be because when you r- when you... the higher you go, the thinner the air gets. So even though CO₂ is still at the same parts per million compared to the other gases, it's more dispersed and therefore more difficult for plants to obtain. That's... th- everything I'm saying is thoroughly documented on the internet. The... and- and the most important point is that no scientist who actually wanted to retain any credibility would claim that the correlation between rising CO₂ and rising temperature at this very tiny piece of time is proof of causation, right? Correlation is not proof of causation. Correlation just means two things are going in the same direction. And very often the reason they are is because of a third common factor. And let me give you an example. The relationship between ice cream consumption and shark attacks, they are perfectly correlated. When ice cream consumption goes up, shark attacks go up. Ice cream consumption goes down, shark attacks go down. It's a perfect annual cycle. Do ice cream consumptions cause shark attacks? No. Do shark attacks cause ice cream consumption? No. This is a correlation which is not an example of causation because temperature, a third factor, is the cause of both of them going in the same cycle. When the temperature gets warm, people go to the beach, eat an ice cream and go swimming and some of them get attacked by a shark. In the winter, neither happens. So this is... co- correlation is far more common than causation. And there's a- a website called something correlations.
- CWChris Williamson
Spurious Correlations. Yeah, it's-
- PMPatrick Moore
That one.
- CWChris Williamson
It's very good.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes, Spurious Correlations.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like Nicolas Cage correlated with the number of people that die by being caught up in their bedding every year.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
There's a statistically significant... All right, so what's the third... What do you think is the third factor in that case? Is there something that-
- PMPatrick Moore
Oh, there doesn't have to be one.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- PMPatrick Moore
It- it... there doesn't have to...
- CWChris Williamson
I understand.
- PMPatrick Moore
It's just that they're both ri-... There could be a- a separate factor causing temperature to change and a separate factor for our emissions-
- CWChris Williamson
A fourth one, yeah, yeah.
- PMPatrick Moore
...causing CO₂ to change. And the fact that they're both going up at this time, but they're not going up in sync. If you look at... there's one graph in- in my book that shows that in this interglacial period, we came... before humans started emitting, we came to a point where CO₂ was at 280 and temperature was at a certain point. I don't know what exact Celsius it was. And then suddenly CO₂ just shoot- shoots up off the chart if you put it in a 100,000 years graph. This little bit of time right now, 150 years, and really only the last 60 or 70 where it's been substantial, 60 years of incr- of radical increase in CO₂. I won't, you know, say that that's wrong. It is a radical increase. We don't need to do it this quickly. And that is why in my book I make it very clear that reducing fossil fuel consumption would be an excellent strategy if you had something reliable, cost-effective to replace it with, right? And that is nuclear energy.... with nuclear energy, we could easily take out half the fossil fuels being used today, not because of climate change, but because they're precious and should be conserved because they're non-renewable. They- they don't- they're not being made as quickly as we're using them by orders of magnitude, right? So we should be conserving fossil fuels for the essential things like flying airplanes. It's not easy to fly an airplane with anything else besides a liquid fuel. And liquid fuels are hard to come by, as are gaseous ones like methane, natural gas. So electricity is mostly being made by fossil fuels today, not just in China. It's only in France that more than 50% of the electricity is being made by nuclear energy. And they- they diss France for this, and they hold up Germany as a shining example of green, when in fact Germany is emitting nearly two times the CO2 per capita of France. And the only reason France is emitting less CO2 is because of nuclear energy.
- 1:01:50 – 1:07:58
Using Nuclear Energy
- PMPatrick Moore
So-
- CWChris Williamson
Why is the world so averse to nuclear energy?
- PMPatrick Moore
Because they're idiots, and they're- they're brainwashed and whatever else, right? I- I have nothing but contempt for people who just re- reject nuclear energy when almost no one has ever been killed by it except Chernobyl, which was a stupid reactor design that the Russians made from their plutonium production reactors to make nuclear weapons. They just cookie-cuttered the same cheap reactor all across the former Soviet Union, all of which have been shut down in any of the former satellites. They still have 10 running, eight or 10 running in- in, uh, Russia, but they have modified them so that can't happen again. They should have done that in the first place 'cause they had a negative void coefficient or a positive void coefficient. I never get them right, but one is good and the other is bad. And their reactor was a design that could theoretically go critical. In other words, become a nuclear bomb. And that- a slow one. That was a slow nuclear bomb, that explosion. They happen faster in real nuclear bombs and do more damage than that one did. But it blew a 2,000-ton lid off itself, a concrete lid, and then burned, 'cause they had a huge carbon moderator in there that was 2,000 tons or something, uh, too. I mean, there- there's big numbers involved in Chernobyl. And that burnt for 10 days while firefighters tried to put it out, spewing more and more radiation into the atmosphere the whole time. Whereas Three Mile Island wasn't even worth talking about. It was a bad accident, a cor- a core meltdown, but it didn't cause any damage to anything or anyone. And no one died in Fukushima from radiation, and no one will 'cause no one received a su- sufficient dose to cause any harm. And this is confirmed by the Radioactive Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, formed after the Second World War by MacArthur and the Japanese to study the life history of people who were exposed to the radiation and survived. And though-
- CWChris Williamson
Aren't there some tuna or some fish in the sea who are showing higher levels of radiation from-
- PMPatrick Moore
And tinnies too, yes. Tinnies. Imagine that.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- PMPatrick Moore
No, there are not. There's... Higher levels means infinitesimal higher levels, if that's what they mean. They did have a ban on fishing in the region because a lot of liquid was going into the water that was contaminated, as they say, had radioactive substances in it. There are radioactive substances in you and me, potassium-40 in particular, if you eat a banana, which is radioactive. We have radiation-
- CWChris Williamson
That stuff wasn't from a banana, was it? That was from something much more dangerous.
- PMPatrick Moore
Well, what do you mean? What was more d- they... Nuclear reactors are not inherently dangerous.
- CWChris Williamson
They are if you eat them.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah, but we- we- we don't eat them. And nobody ate anything from Fukushima because they stopped taking crops from the land nearby. I mean, they took the- the... Fukushima was one of the stupidest accidents that ever occurred in the world. And the Japanese are so insular in their culture that they did not take, uh, the- the- the lessons that were learned from other accidents that occurred. They just didn't. And the- the difference in culture can be explained this way. In the United States or Britain, when a reactor has a problem, the operator phones the Prime Minister and tells him what the problem is and what he's doing to try to fix it. In Japan, the operator phones the President and asks the President what he should do, right? 'Cause he's the President and he d- doesn't know what the heck to do. So those three explosions that happened one day after another, I think approximately, at Fukushima could all have easily been prevented even after the meltdowns occurred because they were hydrogen explosions. People think those were explosions in the reactor. They weren't. They were explosions of hydrogen gas that was not released as it should have been to prevent it from becoming concentrated. At 8%, hydrogen almost spontaneously ignites with any spark and causes a huge explosion. So, and then they evacuated the- all the people, even though they were not subject to sufficient radiation to require evacuation. And over 2,000 people died from the evacuation because they evacuated five intensive care wards into gymnasiums in other communities where they did not have the facilities to keep them alive. So that- that's the kind of overreaction that happened to- in Fukushima, which was a bad accident. It was a huge industrial accident, but it did not cause death. What caused death of almost 20,000 people was the tsunami. And I saw on CNN a headline written across the screen during the Fukushima disaster which said, "Nuclear Crisis Deepens as Bodies Wash Ashore." That's what it said.And that was, to me, the beginning of fake news all the way when they started showing fo- smog and calling it carbon dioxide, basically, and showing backlit chimneys of factories with black smoke coming out of them supposedly, but no. It was water vapor and that's what water vapor looks like when you backlight it. So, the, the... And, you know, and the same with the inbreeding polar bears. I mean, they are just making up one story after another now and floating it in the media. And it all comes back to the fact that the politicians are funding the scientists to give them what they want, which is something that they can instill fear and guilt into the population about in order to have power. And then the media and the activists are the bullhorn, right, the megaphone, that puts that into just a giant global story and nothing else matters. The truth doesn't matter one bit anymore in this discussion.
- 1:07:58 – 1:18:54
Earth’s Next Big Extinction Event
- PMPatrick Moore
- CWChris Williamson
What about the people that say we're seeing the beginning of the next big extinction event?
- PMPatrick Moore
So stupid. We're not seeing the beginning of the next big extinction event. Okay, if a big extinction event was happening and it was being documented, I could get it. But read the chapter in my book on extinction, where I appeared before a committee of the US House of Congress with three people there claiming to be United Nations scientists saying that, yes, we only know of 1.7 plus million species which have been identified, named, photographed, written up, et cetera, but there are very likely 8.7 million species. That's what they said. There's probably 8.7 million species, and this is our best estimate. Where did they get that estimate? Thin air. There's no way you can turn 1.0, 1.7 into 8.7 without having any actual observation of any real thing. So they were saying there's about seven million unreal species that we don't know about. And then they say, "And a million of those will go extinct in the next few decades," right? Well, two-
- CWChris Williamson
How many of the- h- how many of the observed creatures have they seen go extinct?
- PMPatrick Moore
An ever-decreasing number. As humans in around 1920 when the passenger pigeon became extinct, suddenly the general population took an interest in the f- issue of extinction. Prior to that, which wasn't very long ago, 100 years, nobody cared about extinction. They thought it was a normal thing, except a few naturalists who bemoaned the extinction of the Dodo bird or other species that went extinct as a result of human activity. And most people don't realize that the, the main cause of species extinction is not hunting, right? It, it is actually agriculture and the changing of habitats. So, that is why most species recovery programs are based on habitat and making sure that there's a place for these species to exist. That's key. But we have not, like, overrun 90% of the world's habitat, and much of the area that we are using, especially for forestry, is perfectly suitable for most of the species that always lived in the forest. Agriculture's different. Agriculture creates a monoculture on purpose, and that's pretty hard to get away from. People who preach that you should have 17 different species of plants growing on the same plot of land, I'd like to see them do it successfully. It's not possible. So they... The, the farmer wants to get rid of every insect, every animal, you know, everything other than... every other plant. All other, all other plants are weeds in this case. And so agriculture is, is where you have to really look at what you're doing in the landscape and make sure that in that landscape... And it usually happens naturally. If you fly across the, uh, whole agricultural area of United States, you see lots of forest interspersed among the agricultural land because... and Dr- and Europe too. I mean, most people don't realize that 200 years ago, 250 years ago, less than 10% of Europe remained forested because the trees were being used for everything to do with fuel. They were being used to heat all the buildings, to f-
- CWChris Williamson
(beep)
- PMPatrick Moore
... to smelt all the iron and copper, to do the glass works and steam engines. Everything was fueled by wood. And all the building of everything. So, forests started to disappear in Central Europe initially and then spreading out over the whole of Europe. The first time in the history of humans where forests were disappearing. They, we were cutting them faster than they were growing back. That's why agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago and forestry wasn't invented until about 1750 in Central Europe, because they realized they had to start planting some trees. And then silviculture, otherwise known as, as, as forestry, scientific forestry came into being. And now there's 43% forest cover in Europe. And there's still-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, speaking of trees, I thought, I thought the Amazon rainforest was wrecked.
- PMPatrick Moore
10% of it has been modified into great-
- CWChris Williamson
That's quite a lot. That could be quite a bit. It's a fair big forest, isn't it?
- PMPatrick Moore
It's a huge forest and it's not in any way endangered. The, uh, the problem with... You know, my book is titled Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom for a reason I put the word invisible in there. Because to most people, the Amazon is invisible. They show you a picture of a fire that takes up the whole screen, right? It might be about 10 feet.... of the, uh, you know, of the Amazon, which is almost as big as the continental United States. Brazil itself is almost as big as the continental United States, and Amazon is a huge part of Brazil. And there are parts of the Amazon that have been developed, but most of it is intact. And even where it's been developed, it is only small areas. If you just look at a satellite photograph of it, you can see it. I've flown over it in an airplane at fairly low elevation, and you go for five hours and you hardly see any people. It's called a human desert by people. But even the, y- you know, the, the, the leader of, of Brazil now is under attack over the Amazon from the left. And one of the reasons you can get away with that is m- almost no one in Brazil has ever been to the Amazon, even though it's in their own country. People don't go there. What would you do there? It's got Manaus, which is basically a manufacturing hub for electronics, so it's a, sort of a tax-free zone of some kind. You've got Belém at the mouth of the river, which is, I've been to that city. It's not very interesting. It's just a city at the mouth of the Amazon. And there's not much else to do there. You can go on a boat up and down the river. Then you see, all you see is trees the whole way. And the Amazon is 300 miles wide during the flood period. It will never have a bridge over it. It doesn't have a road anymore because the road, the plants grew up through the pavement and destroyed the road within 10 years when they did build one to Manaus. So-
- CWChris Williamson
And I'm gonna guess that if we continue to increase the concentration of carbon dioxide, that's just going to happen quicker?
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes, the Amazon is, is growing faster, but interestingly, it's the drier places (computer notification chime) that benefit most from increased CO₂ because s- increased CO₂ has two effects. One, more CO₂ for growth, like... I'll give you the second one in a minute, but first I digress to say that I used to laugh at people who said their plants grew better when they talked to them, as if plants have ears and can hear you and are empathetic or whatever. And I, so I sort of chuckled at that. Then I realized that when you're talking to your plants, you're breathing 40,000 parts per million p- CO₂ on them. That's our breath, is 100 times the level it is in the air. So you're basically breathing super concentrated fertilizer onto your plants when you're talking to them, and they do grow better because of that, 'cause they would like to have more CO₂ than exists in the natural world today. The second thing that increased CO₂ does is it makes most plants more efficient with water, because now it's easier for them to get the carbon dioxide they need because it's more concentrated in the atmosphere, and therefore they don't need to make as many holes in the bottom of their leaves. They're called stomata. It's where they take in the air with the CO₂ in it, but it's also where they lose water through transpiration. So, the fewer of those holes there are, the less water they lose, therefore the more efficient they become with water and gives them the ability to survive in places that have less water than they could before. That's why trees are marching out onto grasslands in many parts of the world, the Southwest of the US, for example, and Australia, uh, very eastern part of, uh... Sorry, the very western part of Australia, Western Australia as it's known, is the driest part of Australia. The Nullarbor Desert is there too, which doesn't have much of anything growing on it because it's so dry. But in the, in the west, like around Perth and down to Albany, the f- the trees are growing much faster now, and so are the crops because they, you know, if, if, if you're a farmer today and you are giving your plants all the water and all the fertilizer they need, the f- the mineral food, the limiting factor to the plant's growth is carbon dioxide because of how low it is in the atmosphere even today. And the, the proof is in the pudding here, because all commercial greenhouse growers in the world inject carbon dioxide into their greenhouses 'cause they have an enclosed space where they can increase the level of CO₂, and they generally go up to between 800 and 1,200 ppm, which even above that the plants grow faster, but there's a curve 'cause economics is involved. They have to buy the CO₂. So, at this level, at rate somewhere in the curve they say, "Okay, 1,200 is optimum for us," 'cause above that buying more CO₂ has an ever decreasing increase in yield. And so 1,200 works really well in greenhouses. That's four times... Sorry, three times what it is today in the global atmosphere. And that is, we should not even be concerned until CO₂ gets up to 20,000 ppm because that's what submariners survive in for three months underwater. And the p- the pe- the, the people who, uh, had the trouble on Apollo 13 where the CO₂ was building up, it went up to at least 20,000 in there. See, w- our breath is 40,000. We have 40,000 ppm CO₂ in our lungs just before we breathe out.
- CWChris Williamson
I don't want to be breathing that in though.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yes, you do.
- CWChris Williamson
What, the same air that I breathe out? Well, in that case you can just be-
- PMPatrick Moore
No, no, just once. Just once.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, but you don't want to be a closed system of breathing that back in.
- PMPatrick Moore
Exactly. When you put your mask on, you are breathing a significant portion of the air you just breathed out back in again.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- PMPatrick Moore
So, we, we, we can survive at a whole different bunch of levels of CO₂ just fine. And plants are happy with it at 10,000 ppm or they wouldn't be here because that's what it was back 500 million years ago.
- CWChris Williamson
One of
- 1:18:54 – 1:30:56
Lies from Climate Activists
- CWChris Williamson
the things that I decided to fact check you on, or internet check you on, was photos of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and photos of birds with plastic inside of their stomachs? Now, I've seen these floating around on the internet, and when I was reading your book and listening to you, I found that-... you'd said, "Try and find me a photo of a big patch of garbage that doesn't have mountains in the background." Because in the middle of The Pacific, there aren't any mountains that are nearby. So, if someone was to take a photo of it, something that's supposed to be... Didn't someone say it was nearly the size of Texas or something like that?
- PMPatrick Moore
Twice the size of Texas-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- PMPatrick Moore
... and growing faster than anyone ever predicted.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Um, and I thought-
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... "Well, if this thing's so big, then that seems ridiculous." I'd seen photos of big clumps of plastic floating together, bottles and, and, and stuff in the middle of the ocean. So I did a search and I kept on looking in the background and people have re-cropped numbers of different photos and twisted them so that they look like they're at different angles. And I thought, "Oh, that's, that's kind of interesting." 'Cause I thought, I was pretty sure that that was there. And then the other thing that you mentioned was birds. That birds don't have teeth, so the way that they digest their food is actually by putting little stones or nuts into their stomach, into their gullet, and then they use that to grind up the food and then they eject the little bits of plastic back out. So I thought, "Well, I'll have a bit of a read about that and I'll have a look." And I'd seen a photo, it's sort of a carcass of an albatross, and it's laid on the floor and it's really just sort of bones and some feathers. And it's got, like, a thimble, like a full reel of string inside of it and other stuff. And you'd mentioned that a lot of these might be staged. And I thought, "Yeah, actually-"
- PMPatrick Moore
No, no, not a lot of them. Not a lot of them, Chris. All of them.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- PMPatrick Moore
They're all stage.
- CWChris Williamson
I, I looked and I thought with a skeptical eye, I was like, "Yeah." I mean, that, that one does look a bit ridiculous. And then a few of the other ones too. And I read an article from, I wanna say it was a BBC, one of David Attenborough's documentaries about life or something, and it's one of the write-ups that's a partner to one of the episodes. In the episode, you see one of the birds eating plastic. And I was like, "Right, okay, well maybe they're doing this thing, maybe they're-"
- PMPatrick Moore
No, you don't. Not in his episodes you don't see a bird eating plastic.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, it might have been... It's definitely a documentary on the BBC, um, and this was-
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah, he's-
- CWChris Williamson
... a-
- PMPatrick Moore
He's holding up a plastic bag next to a chick in a nest-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- PMPatrick Moore
... and saying, and saying, "The adult birds are feeding plastic to their chicks." There's no pic... I've, I've searched the internet thoroughly. He's actually removed one sequence, that sequence where he's holding up the plastic bag. It no longer is available on the internet. I don't know why.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, that's interesting.
- PMPatrick Moore
Yeah, it... He-
- CWChris Williamson
When did you see it the first time?
- PMPatrick Moore
If... Ab- about a year ago.
- CWChris Williamson
All right.
- PMPatrick Moore
If cer- well, before I wrote my book. I th- I think he's onto me, uh, and he, he, he's, he's an absolute liar in many, many cases. And I've g- made three of them in the book. One of them is that albatross adults are feeding plastic to their young, mistaking it for food. Greenpeace says the same thing. The Smithsonian Institute in the United States is saying the same thing. They are pushing this lie that albatross can't tell plastic from food. Da- Sir David Attenborough never mentions the word gizzard anywhere. He wrote the bloody Secret Life of Birds book. He did a ten-part series on BBC on birds, right? And he doesn't know that birds all have gizzards that need to have solid objects in them to grind their food 'cause they have no teeth and therefore have two stomachs? All birds, every bird in the world. That's why all land birds take pebbles into their stomach, and when their chicks are in the nest and can't go and get pebbles for themselves, they put pebbles in their chick, which-
- CWChris Williamson
So, if you have a more convenient pebble that is made of plastic and it's able to do the same job, then s-
- PMPatrick Moore
No, the, the... Land birds do not feed bits of plastic to their chicks, as far as I know, because there's plenty of pebbles. But out in the ocean where birds are actual marine animals that nest on rocky islands, barren, rocky islands, where all there is is a bit of grass, right? There's no pebbles there either.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- PMPatrick Moore
So traditionally, their favorite... Well, naturally, they feed their chicks squid, little squid. In those squid is a beak. That beak is retained in the gizzard as part of the digestive aids, right? It's like a ball mill in mining where they put steel balls into a mill to grind the ore. It's exactly the same concept in many ways. But in the, in the gizzard, it's a muscular motion where they go like this with their gizzard and grind the food with these sol- solid objects in there to help with it. And so the other thing they'll take is pumice, which is volcanic lava from undersea volcanoes. And because it's spongy, it floats. It's got air in it, or gases in it, so it floats. So, little bits of p- pumice will come to the surface, sometimes in huge layers when an undersea volcano goes off. But they're not, it's not always there. So they have to resort then to hard bits of wood and nuts that have dropped off a plant in a river or by the seashore and come out in the ocean. So, it, they have to work really hard to find enough digestive aids that are suitable in size and, and hardness. It's not easy for them. And when plastic started showing up in the ocean 60 years ago, they started choosing pieces of the right size. Not plastic bags, not cigarette lighters, not spools of yarn. That's all staged. They don't feed them those kind of things. And they're actually, they're not feeding the plastic bits. They're giving it to them to ingest so they can put it in their gizzard. That's where it goes. They know how to decide which goes in which stomach.
- CWChris Williamson
So the story that I read had this lady explaining about the situation and that the parents, she'd used the word feed, she'd... Parents had come back and given their chicks these plastic pebbles. And I can't remember the word that they used, uh, to describe what happens as they're just about to fly the nest. Some bird word.
- PMPatrick Moore
They, the bolus. They cough up-
- 1:30:56 – 1:31:42
Where to Find Patrick
- CWChris Williamson
keep up to date with all of the other stuff that you're doing, where should they go?
- PMPatrick Moore
You will perish in flames. That's what I have to say about that.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) There's a little man on the front. Who's the little man? Who's the guy? Who is he supposed to be?
- PMPatrick Moore
He's just a made-up guy, made-up guru, right? But th- "You will perish in flames" is, I, I stole it from Ghostbusters. I don't know if you remember the scene where, uh-... the l- the short guy, M- Maranus-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- PMPatrick Moore
... uh, approaches the horse and buggy in Central Park and first goes up to the horse and says, "Are you the key master?" or something like that, right, to the horse. And then runs off with his eyes blazing, screaming at the driver, "You will perish in flames." So, uh-
Episode duration: 1:36:19
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