Greenpeace's Ex-President - Is Climate Change Fake? - Patrick Moore | Modern Wisdom Podcast 373

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)

Patrick Moore, welcome to the show.

Nice to be with you, Chris.

What is your background? How did you come to be involved in the environmental discussion?

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-