#2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

Joe Rogan: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Richard Lindzen: Our pleasure.

William Happer: My pleasure.

Joe Rogan: And if you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your resume, like what you do? I mean, just a brief version of your credentials.

Richard Lindzen: I'm Dick Lindzen, and my whole life has been in academia. Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard, and I did spend a couple of years at the University of Washington and in Norway and in Boulder, Colorado. Part of that was because at Harvard, I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations. So I went to Seattle for someone who did. 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.

I've always enjoyed it. The field of atmospheric sciences, when I entered it, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable. You could look at phenomena. One of them that I worked on was the so-called quasi-biennial cycle. It 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. We worked out why that happened. There were other things like that. It was a very enjoyable period until global warming.

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

William Happer: I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton. Like Dick, I'm a science nerd. I was actually born in India under the British Raj. My father was an army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American. That was before World War II. When I came to America as a small child, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. I remember the war days at Oak Ridge. That's probably why I went into physics. I thought this looks like an interesting way to make a living. If I can do it, I'll do it. And I have.

I've done a number of things. I spent a lot of time at universities at Columbia, at Princeton. I also served for a couple of years in Washington as director of energy research under President Bush Sr. I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here. 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. There was one exception: the people working on climate. They would always be very resentful. "We work for Senator Gore. We don't work for you." So I would tell them, "Okay, let him pay for your next year's research. I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be glad to take my money."

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

William Happer: Oh, yes, very long time. When he was a senator, before he was vice president.

Joe Rogan: That's right. And when he made that movie, *An Inconvenient Truth*, what year was that again, Jamie? It was like '98 or something?

Jamie: [Off-mic] 2006.

Joe Rogan: Something like that, '99? Oh, really? Wow. Okay. So 2006. When he made that film, there was always... When I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nimoy had a television show called *In Search Of*. Remember that show?

William Happer: Sure.

Joe Rogan: On that show, he warned of an oncoming ice age. I remember being a kid and freaking out like, "Oh my God, Spock is telling us the world's going to freeze. This is terrifying." Then somewhere along the line, it became global warming. Initially in the '80s, it was kind of funny. People were saying, "Well, hairspray, the more you use it, you could play golf deep into November." That was the ozone scare.

William Happer: That was the ozone, yes.

Joe Rogan: But it was also part of global warming.

Richard Lindzen: A little bit, yeah. They were worried about global warming, but they were worried about the ozone hole. It wasn't CO2 as much back then.

Joe Rogan: CO2 seems to have really significantly become a part of the zeitgeist after this Al Gore film.

Richard Lindzen: No.

William Happer: No.

Joe Rogan: No?

Richard Lindzen: No, it was before.

Joe Rogan: In terms of academic study, for sure, but in terms of people panicking, when did CO2...

William Happer: Panicking, I have no idea. What happened was, with the first Earth Day, 1970, 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. There was a big difference. The energy sector involved trillions of dollars; the whales, not so much. At that time, it was cooling—this global mean temperature, which doesn't change much, but you focus on one degree, a half degree, so it looks like something. It was cooling from the 1930s. The 1930s were very warm, and it was getting cooler until the '70s. That's why they were saying this is going to lead to an ice age. They focused on that for a while.

Then in the '70s, if you're worried about an ice age, they said it would be the sulfates emitted by coal burning, because that reflects light, and the less light we get, the colder we'll get. But then the temperature stopped cooling in the '70s and started warming. That's when they said, "You have to now scare people with warming, and you can't use the sulfates anymore." The scientist called 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—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. That still isn't a heck of a lot, but it was saying you could increase it. That's when people started saying, "Now we better find CO2. It's increased because of industrialization." That began the demonization of CO2.

Joe Rogan: 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?

William Happer: Oh, yeah. This was a particular case. You wanted to deal with the energy sector, which is trillions of dollars. Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels, it's big bucks.

Joe Rogan: Right.

William Happer: One of the odd things in politics—I don't see it studied much—Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars. If you look at the McKinsey report on eliminating CO2, net zero, they're saying it'll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. If you're giving out that much, you don't need that much as a politician. All you need is millions for your campaigning, and if you're asking the recipients of the money you're giving them for a half percent, a quarter percent, you're golden. That's much better than giving out a hundred thousand.

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Joe Rogan: Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge. There's no room for any rational debate. If you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier, which is like being an anti-vaxxer or fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing you could be called. That's a very interesting phenomenon. 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? Thousands.

But on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports, they're pointing out 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?

Richard Lindzen: It's also this very bizarre dynamic of the Earth's temperature itself, which has never been static.

Joe Rogan: No.

Richard Lindzen: How would it remain static? That would involve a hugely reactive system. It doesn't make any sense.

Joe Rogan: But everyone seems to be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the earth is warming, we have to act now.

William Happer: You say everyone. No, I don't say everyone. A lot of politicians in particular. A lot of politicians are very attracted to this because it gives them power.

Joe Rogan: Right.

William Happer: And it's hard to define.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

William Happer: And if you argue against it, you're a bad person.

Joe Rogan: Well, you do all that. But we spend part of a year in France. My wife is French. Ordinary people, once you get to the countryside, don't take this all that seriously. Here, too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.

Joe Rogan: Yes, but unfortunately, these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians' decisions. In the UK, they were getting rid of cows, forcing people to kill cows. They're paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills. It makes people poorer. It's making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it, and that involves billions of people.

William Happer: No, I mean, it's doing phenomenal damage and pain. But I think for politicians and for many people who are well off, they need something that gives meaning to their life, and saving the planet seems sufficiently grandiose.

Joe Rogan: How are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity?

William Happer: By making it expensive. By eliminating fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheaper. At least the experience in the UK is when you switch to renewables, it tripled the price of electricity.

Joe Rogan: Right. But what I'm talking about is third world countries, parts of the world that are undeveloped. They can't afford it. That's all it is. They can't afford it. If they didn't follow these net zero policies, what kind of plants are we talking about? Coal plants?

William Happer: Coal, anything, whatever is available.

Joe Rogan: So you think even though coal does pollute the environment and releases particulates, that's an issue, right?

Richard Lindzen: How should I put it? It's always a matter of cost. We have a plant 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.

Joe Rogan: So the particulates aren't as big of an issue as they used to be in the past.

Richard Lindzen: I agree. They're more efficient.

Joe Rogan: So this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world that do not have electricity. The overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants in.

Richard Lindzen: I think so. And not bringing these people into the first world. There are, of course, alternatives like natural gas, which are available in places. There are places where you're lucky, like in Norway or Quebec, where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean. But there's a problem with politicians. I remember once being in D.C. and some Republican politicians came and said, "You know what we just did? We banned incandescent light bulbs. Wasn't that a great thing?" I said, "That's the stupidest thing I've heard today. What's the point?" Because at the time, what was replacing it? Compact fluorescents, which were awful. All they had to do was wait and do nothing, and LEDs would come along, and people would say, "I prefer that." Instead, they feel they have to do something, and they switched to fluorescents, which turned out to be terrible for people.

Joe Rogan: So incandescents aren't bad for you? They were simply less efficient in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light. LEDs are phenomenal that way.

Richard Lindzen: The best.

Joe Rogan: It's interesting when they have these decisions that they make like that, they do turn out to be negative ultimately. Yet people still allow them to make silly decisions that don't seem to be making sense.

William Happer: I think there's an old cliche: money is the root of all evil.

Joe Rogan: That's what I was going to get to. This is the disturbing thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting, especially a lot of very polite, educated people that have followed the narrative that you follow if you're a good person and if you're a person who trusts science. That is that we have a serious problem. We have to address it now or there will be no America for our grandchildren. This is the thing that we keep hearing. You mentioned a tough thing there: "trust science."

William Happer: Yes.

Joe Rogan: It's not a great idea because science is not a source of authority. It's a methodology. It's based on challenge.

William Happer: Right.

Joe Rogan: Where did this narrative come from then, "trust the science"?

William Happer: The success of science. This is a relatively new way to approach the world, a few hundred years. The notion is, and I think it's been stated many times, you test things. If they fail to predict correctly, they're wrong. So you find out what's wrong with them. You don't fudge them. You don't change the rules. It's led to immense improvements in life, development of all sorts of things. So it has a good reputation. Politicians have less of a reputation, so they wish to co-opt the reputation of science.

Joe Rogan: Yes, that's a very good point. Try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid. You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing. Cell phone technology, nuclear power, so many things that people go, "That's incredible that they did that."

William Happer: That's also confusing technology with science.

Richard Lindzen: The result of science.

William Happer: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Which is also an issue. When you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science. You mentioned Gore at the beginning. With that thing, he was showing this cycle of ice ages and CO2 and temperature going together. It never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2.

Richard Lindzen: Greg Braden was on the podcast recently. He was explaining there have been times where the CO2 was much higher in the atmosphere, but the temperature was colder.

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

William Happer: I think we'll speak to that. Essentially, the increased amount of CO2 in the industrial era has added greatly to the arable land. There's a funny story. Do you know the name E.O. Wilson?

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

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

Joe Rogan: That's an inconvenient truth, sir. It just seems very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance that we have settled this, that the science is settled, from so many people on both the left and in academia, and even on the right. There's a lot of people on the right that believe that.

William Happer: Yeah, I know.

Joe Rogan: It should be the first thing that makes you suspicious. There's a consensus. This is not how science is done. Something that's never static.

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Joe Rogan: The weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth from core samples over a long period of time. It's this crazy wave. No one was controlling it back then. We're supposed to believe that we can control it now, that we can do something about it now.

Richard Lindzen: There's something else about it which I find funny. People pay no attention to the actual numbers. We're not talking about big changes. For the temperature of the globe as a whole, between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was 5 degrees. But that was because most of the earth was not affected much. Somebody says one degree, a half degree. What's his name? Gutierrez at the UN says the next half degree and we're done for. Doesn't anyone ask, "A half degree?" I deal with that between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Joe Rogan: It does seem crazy. It's that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people. What I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier: how much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that's called "Save the World Climate," something crazy like that where everyone goes along. They call it the Inflation Reduction Act.

William Happer: Oh, even better.

Joe Rogan: Who doesn't want to reduce inflation? Then next thing you know, there's windmills killing whales and all kinds of nonsense. The point is, it is a fascinating science. You get rid of the ideology and stop attaching this thing versus "you're either pro-science or anti-science." Just look at the actual data. It's absolutely fascinating. These minute changes, the fact that the precession of the equinoxes or the world wobbles—the whole thing is nuts. The temperature has to stay relatively stable to keep us alive, can't go too low, can't go too high. We're in this Goldilocks zone.

Richard Lindzen: The interesting thing is during the ice ages, we almost get wiped out. Got really close. As far as temperature goes, the poles have gotten much colder. You have ice covering Illinois, two kilometers of ice. That's uninhabitable. But you get south of 30 degrees latitude, not very different from today in terms of temperature. You would think over 100,000 years, people would migrate to an area where it was pleasant. The trouble was, without CO2, which went down to about 180, there wasn't enough food for the people.

Joe Rogan: So there wasn't enough plant life.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah. Get down to 160, 150, all life would die. There would not be enough food for anything.

Joe Rogan: What is it at now? Like 240?

Richard Lindzen: No, we're now 400 something.

William Happer: 410. 430 maybe today, yeah.

Joe Rogan: When you first started discussing this and when you first started getting interested in this, how much pushback did you get?

Richard Lindzen: Interesting question. Quite a lot. It took very funny forms. In 1989, I sent a paper to *Science* Magazine questioning whether this is something to worry about. They sent it back immediately saying there was no interest. So I sent it to the *Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society*. They reviewed it and published it. The editor was immediately fired.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

Richard Lindzen: About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the iris effect: clouds, which were a greenhouse effect at upper levels, contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling as a negative feedback. We got the paper reviewed and published. Again, the editor was fired immediately. The new editor came on and said he's inviting papers to criticize it. 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 made the CO2 even less important. But it was different, so he thought he could pass it through.

Joe Rogan: It's insane.

Richard Lindzen: Even now, there's something called gatekeepers. Are you familiar with the release of emails from East Anglia?

Joe Rogan: No, I'm not.

Richard Lindzen: This is 20 years ago or something. Somebody anonymously released the emails from a place in England, the University of East Anglia, which has a lot of people pushing climate alarm. They were communicating with other people like Michael Mann and so on. They were talking about blocking publication, getting rid of editors, doing this and that. That was all public. It had no impact at all.

Joe Rogan: That sounds like that should be illegal.

Richard Lindzen: The whole business with peer review is not ancient. Before World War II, very few journals had peer review. 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. There's real communication. Today, there's much more formality in the papers. In my field, the Meteorological Society did a poll or a study. How often are papers referred to? It turns out the average paper is referred to once.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

Richard Lindzen: Papers are written to satisfy the funding agency. Nobody seems to pay attention to them.

Joe Rogan: How did you get involved in this?

William Happer: I mentioned my stay at the Department of Energy. That's what really sucked me into it. I had never paid much attention to climate science before, but I was spending a lot of the taxpayers' money on it, so I thought I ought to learn a little bit about it. I already mentioned that most of the climate scientists did not appreciate my questioning. They were very strange. Almost any other science, when they got a call from Washington to come in and tell us what you're doing, they were delighted to come and make a case about how important their work was. The climate scientists were completely different.

Joe Rogan: Did anybody engage with you?

William Happer: They had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn't come. They would come and be very sullen, and they wouldn't answer questions. You can't have a seminar without asking questions. That's how you learn.

Joe Rogan: They would come to try to get funding from you and they wouldn't answer questions?

William Happer: That's right.

Joe Rogan: That sounds crazy. That sounds like people that don't think they have to convince you that what they're doing is important. They're entitled to that money.

William Happer: Well, I was working for President Bush Sr. When Carter and Gore won the election, Gore couldn't wait to fire me at the behest of all of his protégés.

Joe Rogan: Clinton and Gore.

William Happer: Clinton and Gore, yeah. Washington, fortunately, it's very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire because you can't find them in the org chart. So it took him two or three months to find me. They finally did fire me. I was glad to be fired. I wanted to go back to do research. I was tired of being a bureaucrat. So I'm grateful in some sense for that.

Joe Rogan: Now, your colleagues that weren't working with you, like other scientists, were they reluctant to discuss this kind of information with you guys when you first started questioning whether or not this narrative is correct?

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

Joe Rogan: So once you had this experience in Washington, you started looking into it?

William Happer: I started looking at it a little bit, but I didn't have time to look a lot because my own research was still going at Princeton and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company. Forming the company and getting it going and funded used up most of my time. I didn't have time to look at climate. But eventually, that was behind me, and I invited Dick to come give a seminar at a colloquium at Princeton, and that's really when I began to get very interested in it. I realized that it's just completely different from normal science. It's completely politicized. If you can't ask a question, that's a bad, bad sign. And if you have 100% consensus determining the truth, that's an even worse sign, because the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation. That wasn't true of the climate science community. They would predict all these things and none of them ever happened. There was no consequence, one failure after another. Nothing ever happened. The funding kept pouring in.

Joe Rogan: Is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists? Do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue that causes? Or do they just accept it for the most part?

William Happer: Speaking as a physicist, I don't know how it is in other fields. At Princeton, I think most of my colleagues recognize that there's a lot of nonsense there, but they're afraid to speak up because it's bringing in enormous amounts of money. Dick mentioned that the love of money is the root of all evil in universities. For example, at Princeton, we have an enormous new building program that's funded to a large extent from overhead from climate grants. We're talking about not small change. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars for construction.

Richard Lindzen: It's like this famous drama by the Norwegian playwright Ibsen, *Enemy of the People*. The point of the drama was there was this resort town in Norway where you would come and be treated at the spa. You'd drink the water and go home healthy. Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid. A local doctor said, "We're killing people. We're not curing them." And he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city. That syndrome is an ancient human problem. It's always been there, and it's there in spades with climate.

William Happer: Another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue. In the U.S., it's almost a right versus left issue. As a result, universities are almost entirely on the left, so it's something they support.

Richard Lindzen: The money end of it is sort of funny. I have the feeling at MIT that our president, Sally Kornbluth, probably spends her time worrying about how she can use climate money to support the music department.

Joe Rogan: So when they get funding for climate, they can allocate it as they wish?

Richard Lindzen: It is fungible.

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

Richard Lindzen: Yeah, they can do what they like with the overhead.

Joe Rogan: Interesting.

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Joe Rogan: If they take 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 politicization of this subject, and that's bad for science, that's bad for education, that's bad for everything, let's take a step back," they would immediately lose so much funding.

William Happer: Well, the main thing it's bad for is overhead income to the university.

Richard Lindzen: Exactly. From an administrator's point of view. This is something the press didn't deal with very much. Trump was cutting the overhead. He was 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.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I think most people have no idea where grants go. They don't even think about it. And the amount of money that's involved.

Richard Lindzen: When I was active, if I got a grant, I'm a theoretician, so I didn't need laboratory work. It mainly was for supporting students. But then 50% of it went to the administration.

Joe Rogan: It's like a lot of charities. A lot of money goes to overhead. A lot of money goes to executives. A lot of money goes to the administration on grants. Some of it is reasonable, but you're also kind of attached to keeping that money flowing in. There's a gigantic incentive to not rock the boat and not discuss it the same way you would discuss nuclear science.

William Happer: Oh, yeah. The attraction, if you're an administrator, if you're a president of a university, that often overrides everything else. You're raising money. I remember years ago, I started college at Rensselaer, and I made the mistake of mentioning to someone that I appreciated the fact they never bothered me. I transferred out after my sophomore year. So it began bothering me. I realized the president of Rensselaer was making over a million and a half dollars. This was years ago, probably making much more now. The fundraiser came back to me and said, "Do you know how much money she raises?" I said, "Oh, so she's on commission."

Joe Rogan: That is kind of what's going on. It gets real weird when you bring that kind of stuff up and people get very reluctant to have these discussions. They don't want to rock the boat. I've talked to a lot of friends in academia and they say people pull you aside in quiet corners to discuss how this is kind of bullshit. But there's also the alumni. I find this with Harvard especially. A lot of the people who graduate from Harvard really love the place, for better or for worse, and they will do anything to protect it.

Richard Lindzen: That makes sense.

Joe Rogan: Especially since to stick your neck out, there's not a whole lot of benefit unless you're writing a book about how ridiculous current climate change models are. A lot of people did at first. Inhofe, a lot of politicians wrote books saying this is a hoax. And they managed to ride that out by just keeping on demanding that it be accepted. It's interesting because it's universally accepted on the left. I've had conversations with people and I say, "Why do you think that? What do you know about climate change?" Almost none of them have any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they've been, what Al Gore predicted in that stupid movie, which is so far off. He thought we were all going to be dead today. There's very little change between 2006 and today.

Richard Lindzen: I think for some people, its importance is it gives meaning to their life. It becomes a part of an ideology, and it's a very cult-like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things, unfortunately.

Joe Rogan: What do you think are the major factors? You talked about water vapor, CO2, methane. There's a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the Earth moving in any direction.

Richard Lindzen: Let me back off a little because one of the things that is sort of strange is the narrative itself deals with global temperature. It's not clear what that is. I mean, some average over the whole globe. How do you take it? What do you do with it? More than that, what is climate? There is a definition. It's an arbitrary definition. It's that it's time variation on time scales longer than 30 years. It's pretty arbitrary, but it distinguishes it from weather, which is changes from day to day or week to week. So if they can see a rise in temperature over 30 years, they start getting concerned. They start calling it climate. 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. You can look at that at each station and see how does it correlate with the globe. It turns out very poorly because most climate change by that definition is regional. For instance, in 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. 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 time scales ranging from a few years for El Nino to a thousand years. This has nothing to do with the global average. The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets. You look at the average for each planet and that varied quite a lot, so it was useful. But for looking at the Earth's climate, I'm not sure a global mean is a particularly useful device.

Joe Rogan: That makes sense. How much of a factor does the sun play? Obviously, a lot. It heats us up.

Richard Lindzen: That's something there's argument about. A man called Milankovitch 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. That controlled the ice ages. The thinking was pretty simple. Every winter is cold. Every winter has snow. But what the temperature or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts before the next cycle. If you're at a point where it doesn't melt, you build a glacier. It takes thousands of years, but eventually it's big. In recent years, there have been young people who have shown that that works. There was even a national program called Climap to study this around 1990. They found something peculiar. They found that there were peaks in the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume, but 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." Then the correlations were excellent. So this was a theory, Milankovitch, that I think has been reasonably sustained. But the people doing this got no credit, nothing. Early in my career these people would have been rewarded. Now it didn't contribute to global warming. Nobody pays attention to it.

William Happer: Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with. You asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that 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 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 how bright the sun was 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. One of the proxies is when the sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon-14 or beryllium-10. These stick around for thousands of years or longer. You can, from that, infer how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago. They don't give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant. It's very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon-14 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 take an Egyptian mummy, you burn up the cloth, 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. There's a pretty good historical record of that. So it's clear the sun is always changing. Over the last 10,000 years since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings, particularly noticeable near the Arctic 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's too cold today, but it was clearly warming up in the year 1000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland. So what caused those? It was not people burning oil and coal. I think the best 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.

Joe Rogan: That's absolutely fascinating. Now, when we have estimates like, say, of the Jurassic or any dinosaur age, is there enough of an understanding of the differences in temperatures back then that we know whether or not they ever experienced ice ages?

Richard Lindzen: Oh, yeah. We can go back 65, 100 million years. You can go up 500 million years.

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Joe Rogan: 100 million years and be pretty accurate?

Richard Lindzen: Evidence of ice ages, absolutely. They've come and gone. There's always been an ice age and a warming. And they don't correlate very well with CO2. You can also estimate the past CO2 levels, and they don't correlate with ice ages. What's special about the recent ice ages is they're pretty periodic. For 700,000 years, almost every 100,000 years you have a cycle. If you go back further than that, you begin seeing that fall apart. For about 3 million years, 40,000 years is the dominant period. Then you go back further than that, and you don't have ice ages for a long time.

Joe Rogan: Wow. It's very poorly understood, I would say. There's also no way to track it. There's no way to tell what's going to happen to the sun. They have some sort of an understanding of increased activity. It's not clear that solar activity was the issue. Could have been many factors.

Richard Lindzen: With the ice ages, as I say, orbital theory was the main thing. The fact that you have various factors determining the orbit of the earth versus the sun give you periodic changes in the incoming radiation as a function of geography on the earth.

William Happer: Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said. He correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi periodic, really only began 3 million years or so ago, and at first they were oscillating a lot faster than today. That was approximately the time that the Isthmus of Panama closed. One of the suspicions is that when the Panama Isthmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat in things like the Gulf Stream. For example, the Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flowed into the Pacific instead of to North Europe. That was about the time that these fluctuating ice ages began.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

William Happer: We set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years by this manic focus on CO2. If your theory doesn't have CO2 in it, forget it. You won't get funding. The true answer... There was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was phlogiston. There was this magic subject, nonexistent. But everyone had to believe in phlogiston. It turned out it was nonsense. It wasn't there at all. But you couldn't get anyone to support you unless you believed in phlogiston. I call this the phlogiston era of climate science, where phlogiston is CO2.

Joe Rogan: This is what confused me. You gentlemen are academics. You're obviously very intelligent people. There's other very intelligent people that are involved in academia. How does this problem get solved? How do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?

William Happer: I think stopping the funding for this massive funding for climate would help. It's certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds. If you're willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded. You'll be elected to societies. You'll win prizes. And you'll be shunned if you don't.

Richard Lindzen: That's right.

William Happer: I think if some administration in Washington wants to slow this down and get some sanity, they should cut the funding or they should at least open up the funding to alternate theories of what is controlling climate. Because the theory that the control knob is CO2 doesn't work. It's completely clear it doesn't work.

Joe Rogan: It just seems so insane that if we move in the same direction and, as you say, it really is holding back climate science by 50 years, that's a travesty.

William Happer: Dick would have made a lot more progress and his colleagues would have made a lot more progress if they hadn't been forced to deal with this CO2 cult. We might understand climate today without that.

Richard Lindzen: There are a lot of things that are peculiar about science in general. One of them is numbers. It isn't about having more people work on something. You want to have an environment where there's freedom. Will is familiar with this. There's a photograph from 1929 of all the world's physicists at a Solvay conference. This is a golden age of physics. If you quintupled the number of people working on physics, would you have improved the situation? I doubt it. I think freedom is much more important than just piling on.

Joe Rogan: Here's the photo.

Richard Lindzen: Great. There they are.

William Happer: Not quite. It's not the same. But that's a Solvay conference.

Richard Lindzen: Absolutely. The 1929 had the Curies. Well, Pierre might be there. Either way, I guess we got it. I wondered at times, when you had the Soviet competition with the U.S. and they were the first ones into space, we suddenly began a program to get more and more kids into STEM. That has its downside. First of all, you're going to dilute the field if you increase it too much. The second thing is with peer review. Peer review is new. It wasn't that common before World War II. People have pointed out it has its virtues, but the Royal Meteorological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions. The instructions were: you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify or if it's plagiarized, repeating something that already exists. That was pretty fair because how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not? That's asking too much. But today, peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity. If you're not going with the flow, you can get rejected. A lot of things structurally need to be rethought a little bit. The physicists have done pretty well with arXiv, where they have a publication vehicle using the internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what's up. All sorts of things like that need to happen. What Will is saying is true, I'm sure. Science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this.

Joe Rogan: It just seems like it's bad for any kind of science to have open, free discussion and debating ideas based on their merit and what data you have. That's what it's supposed to be about. It's not supposed to be attached to an ideology. I just don't understand how it got this far and how it can be separated. When did it really become a problem where ideology started invading into certain segments of science?

William Happer: It's happened many times in the past, Joe. Climate was only the most recent. It's just a natural thing that happens. For example, there was the eugenics movement in America and Britain and Western Europe. The claim was that the great gene pool of the Anglo-Saxon race was being diluted by all these low-IQ Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen. It was all completely nonsense, but they had learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that. You had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being a great eugenicist, protecting the American genome. It was all nonsense. It was just complete bullshit. The only thing that stopped it really was the Nazis because they took it over with a vengeance. They were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and Britain, and they took it to its absurd extreme. They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenicist in America, a man called Laughlin.

Richard Lindzen: What Will is saying had a practical consequence, by the way. It actually led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which held that America was going to restrict immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century. So there would be a quota for England and Scotland, which was fine, a little bit less for Germany, almost nothing for Eastern Europe, almost nothing for Italy, and so on. That was used in the run-up to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

Richard Lindzen: It was only changed in 1960. So essentially you were keeping out Jews, Eastern Europeans, Chinese until then because of eugenics in 1924.

Joe Rogan: The average person that's not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals, that they're trying to figure out how the world works. When you hear stories like that, you're just like, "Oh, this has always been a problem." You're dealing with people. Human beings.

Richard Lindzen: That's the problem.

Joe Rogan: That's getting to the heart of the problem.

Richard Lindzen: There's a famous quote by Immanuel Kant: "From the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made." That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.

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

Richard Lindzen: The trouble is, when something like eugenics comes around, the population is told that this is science. How are they going to say no? You had various famous laboratories devoted to this. It wasn't a fringe thing. I don't know how you distinguish it at that time from science. Today there are books on it. You have the correspondence of biologists who are saying, "Well, it's a little bit dicey, but it's bringing it to the fore of public attention, so maybe that's a good thing."

Joe Rogan: It just makes you shudder to think. What happens if the Nazis didn't take over Germany and eugenics continued to progress in America? That's terrifying.

William Happer: Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan: To think of where we would be today.

Richard Lindzen: We would have been a much poorer country because so many leading Americans, creative, productive people, have immigrated fairly recently.

Joe Rogan: They also probably would have led to some horrific actions in order to enact this. When you put things in the hands of politicians, there is a disconnect. The business with light bulbs I mentioned. It wasn't malice. It was ignorance. You combine ignorance with power and you often get nonsense, and the narrative that you're doing something good for everybody.

William Happer: Dick has often made the point, which I agree with, that politicians and society leaders are the worst in situations like this. The ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable. For example, I like to tease Dick because he's a Harvard grad about the Salem witch trials, but they were orchestrated by people from Harvard. It was not the common people.

Joe Rogan: Have you ever read into that at all?

Richard Lindzen: Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

Joe Rogan: What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory? Does it make sense to you?

Richard Lindzen: I don't know. Most of the... Yeah, I've looked into it carefully.

Richard Lindzen: Well, I don't know. Most of the testimony was from young women about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way. And they had these visions of the person they were accused of consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of obscene things. That was accepted as testimony. It was called Spectral Evidence. When the trials were finally stopped, it wasn't for the right reason, which is that there's no such thing as witches. They were stopped because spectral evidence was shaky. It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point, so it was getting very dangerous. But one of them, Cotton Mather, was selling a book on how to detect witches.

Joe Rogan: I've read about that, about the printing press. When the printing press was first devised, a lot of people were like, "Oh, we're going to get so much knowledge." No, a lot of the early books were like how to detect witches.

William Happer: That's right. Malleus Maleficorum, the hammer of the evildoers. That was the first book on witches.

Joe Rogan: What I'd read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost. They believed this late frost might have contributed to ergot growth, because apparently that does happen a lot when the plants grow and then they freeze and then they get mold on them. That mold could contain ergot, which has LSD-like properties. That totally makes sense if they're eating LSD-laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch. I think that's a kinder explanation of what happened.

Richard Lindzen: I'm less generous.

William Happer: Well, you know more about the behind the scenes.

Joe Rogan: No, but I mean people – I think what Will is saying is there are people who always want to have a chance to do in their neighbor.

William Happer: Yes.

Joe Rogan: Sure. If you could say your neighbor is a witch, what better way? "We can't have witches in our neighborhood. Let's burn them or drown them."

William Happer: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: That's one of the parts of Orwell's 1984 that many people forget. A big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate. People seem to have this need for hatred. You have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or somebody. So if you're hating CO2, at least that's better than hating your neighbor.

William Happer: Well, if you're on Twitter, you're using up a lot more than two minutes of hate.

Joe Rogan: Even with political figures, I'm always surprised. It seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate and fear probably does not mean well. And yet we continually fall for it. Over and over again.

William Happer: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: All of them. Other countries do the same pattern.

William Happer: Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan: That's what's dark. It just seems like we're terrified of being terrified. We want safety. We want someone who comes along and scares the shit out of us and vows to protect us.

William Happer: Yep.

Richard Lindzen: Well, children do this all the time. Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself.

Joe Rogan: There are also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world. But when you have everything scaring the shit out of everybody, everything is the end of the world. Climate is one of the key ones I hear all the time with young people. There were some recent surveys about the things that give young people the most anxiety, and climate is at the very top of that list. It's really strange to think that this is causing young people not to want to have children, not to want to continue, to have no hope for the future. This is bizarre. To live in constant fear of one day. Meanwhile, is anybody paying attention to all these rich people buying shoreline property? Do you think they're stupid? Do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumbass because he's buying these giant mansions right on the ocean? Do you really think the water is going to raise that much?

William Happer: Even the people who are pushing it at MIT buy houses on the shore. Obama did. He got that beautiful house on Martha's Vineyard.

Joe Rogan: If you've looked at the timelines, I'm sure you've seen a time-lapse video of the shoreline from 1980 all the way up to 2025. It doesn't move. It goes a little bit in Malibu, but—

William Happer: They go back much further than that.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah, I think, Joe, it's true. Sea level is rising. It's different at different shores because the land is also rising and sinking. But it's not very much and it hasn't accelerated. There's no evidence that CO2 has made any difference. It started rising roughly 1800 at the end of the Little Ice Age, and it's not changing very much.

Joe Rogan: Wasn't there an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that increased recently?

Richard Lindzen: That's right. That's always variable.

Joe Rogan: When that happens, how come that doesn't hit the news? If the ice goes away, then it's going to hit the news. "Oh my God, look at this, we lost a chunk the size of Manhattan," and everybody freaks out. Well, we were supposed to be ice-free 20 years ago.

Richard Lindzen: Yes.

Joe Rogan: Al Gore was just off by a little bit. Give him some decades. He'll be vindicated.

Richard Lindzen: That is the point that I think people have made. A test usually means if you fail it, you've done something wrong. Only in theology does it mean that you change the goals.

William Happer: Right.

Joe Rogan: Especially when you invented the theology. Climate is very much like a religion, or at least the adherence to it is very religious-like. Or I should say cult-like. Because it's not like there's a higher power. Everyone's just terrified and you have to change everything you do now because you're guilty. It used to be that the sign of virtue was to have an electric car. My favorite thing is going up behind Teslas now and they have bumper stickers that say "I bought this before Elon went crazy." Everyone is trying to figure out what they're supposed to do to still be accepted by their group. The climate one is one where if you bring it up with people, it's almost like you're talking about witches. They want to get out of there.

William Happer: Oh, yeah. It's a religious thing or a cult-like thing. Absolutely.

Joe Rogan: And they haven't studied it a lot. You have this informed discussion with someone. You go, "Okay, so when did you start reading about this? What book was that? Did you see this? Did you see that?" Now you're having an informed discussion. But that's not what it's like. You bring it up and they're like, "Oh God, climate change is settled. Climate change is settled."

William Happer: "Okay, you don't believe me."

Joe Rogan: Even Bernie, when I had him on, he was talking about climate change being a giant problem. We started showing the Washington Post thing that says we're in a global cooling period and that it's raised up sometime over the last hundred years. But if you look at the peaks and valleys, the main thing is this has never been static. I said to Bernie, "There's a lot of money in this, Bernie. You've got to admit this. This isn't something that we have to act on now to save each other. It might be something that we're being fucked with."

Richard Lindzen: Well, the question is, why does he find it so enthused? Why is he so enthusiastic?

William Happer: It's wonderful for funding.

Joe Rogan: I think he's overall a very good person. I really do. I think he would have been a fascinating president. But there are too many things to concentrate on in the world. If you really want to do a deep dive into the actual science of climate and CO2's impact on climate and what actually causes us to get warmer or colder, that's a lot of work. I don't know if the senator of Vermont has enough time to do that work and to really do it objectively, or to talk to someone like you. To have an informed conversation with someone who studied it for decades and go, "Okay, there's a lot more to this than I thought." And why does it fit in the same damn pattern where people get attached to an idea because that idea is attached to their ideology?

Richard Lindzen: You're hitting on a problem. I think Will knows this as well. A lot of this stuff is actually tough material. For instance, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the pole is actually handled in a third-year graduate course. It deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject. It's a real problem in a field. It's true throughout science where you're trusting people to behave decently. But the material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone. How you deal with it, how you approximate it, the same is true with nuclear power, with other things. These are technical issues. They're not trivial. You're asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions. That's a tough issue. It involves a certain amount of trust. What we're describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.

Joe Rogan: There's this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loved so much: trust but verify.

William Happer: Yes.

Joe Rogan: And it's hard to verify if you're an average citizen something about climate. That's what's so frustrating about this conversation when you have it with people that are indoctrinated. When they're like, "Climate change is a giant issue." There are so many times I've seen very fun YouTube videos where they catch people at these protests and some joker starts interviewing them and they clearly don't know what the hell they're protesting for. It's fascinating. You left the house. You had nothing better to do. You don't know why you're protesting but you're there and you got a sign and you still don't even understand it. That's how powerful this thing has become in our society. The fact that they've been so successful at pushing this narrative that it's one of the number one anxieties that young people have about the future, in a place where we may very well be involved in wars. But the war doesn't freak them out as much as being involved in a climate emergency. "How dare you!"

William Happer: Right. There you go.

Joe Rogan: That lady. But you notice how quickly she changed. She flipped up. Now it's Palestine. You got to mix it up. People get bored with the climate. You want to be someone that's in the news? You got to keep moving. She's an entertainer.

William Happer: Well, she had a very unfortunate experience with that blockade in Israel. So maybe she's out of the business now, but I doubt it.

Joe Rogan: When you're taking a 16-year-old kid and having her as a face of climate change, and as you said, this is something insanely difficult to digest for the average person. She doesn't have this data at her fingertips.

Richard Lindzen: It's not just digest. How many people can solve partial differential equations? This is one of the complaints I have, which is sort of odd. People blame this on models. 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. One of the things that we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution. But it's used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things. At any rate, they do this. I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully, or as carefully as they can. They get answers that will often be wrong. But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe. Koonin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN's models, you're talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100. That's not a great deal. It's not the end of the earth. You'll already be much richer than you are today. So what's the panic?

William Happer: And it's true.

Richard Lindzen: 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. It's a confusing situation. 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.

William Happer: Joe, let me say a little more about what Dick commented on the Navier-Stokes equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans. It really is a very hard mathematical problem to solve because they're not only partial differential equations, they're what are called nonlinear partial differential equations. There's a joke about Werner Heisenberg, who was the inventor of quantum mechanics, a very bright guy. He was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II. He was captured by the Americans and the British, and because of this activity, was forbidden to work on nuclear physics later after the victory. So he decided to work on fluid mechanics, on solving the Navier-Stokes equation. He was a tremendously talented physicist, 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. One of his students supposedly said to him, "Professor Heisenberg, they say that if you've been a good physicist when you die and you go to heaven, the Almighty allows you to ask two questions and he will answer any question you ask. What will you ask him?" Heisenberg supposedly said, "Well, I will ask him why general relativity and why turbulence." He says, "And I think he will be able to answer the first one."

Joe Rogan: That's funny.

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

Richard Lindzen: Why don't you tell them about Lorenz?

William Happer: Lorenz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it's a statement that these are not predictable. Whether that's true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics in detail.

Richard Lindzen: For instance, it wouldn't be a surprise if you're looking at a bubbling brook and you have all those little eddies. 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?

Joe Rogan: The typical 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 Florida.

William Happer: Yeah, that one's funny.

Joe Rogan: People repeat that and they're like, "No, that's not how it works at all." I don't think it works that way.

Richard Lindzen: Of course not, but it's funny when people like to bring that up. What I think he meant was rather simpler than that. The hurricane is likely to occur. The flipping of a butterfly's wings might have actually changed it from one day to another. It would have an influence downstream. Everything has an influence. Everything is tied in together.

Joe Rogan: When we make models based on incorrect data about CO2 levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like, at what point in time do you think another country needs to screw up the same way Nazi Germany ran with eugenics and it ruined eugenics in the United States? They were like, "Oh my god, this is a horrific idea." Do you think something like that has to happen in another country where they have to take this climate change green energy thing to its full end?

William Happer: I think that's how it will end, yes. I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country.

Joe Rogan: Germany has shut off a couple of their nuclear power plants, correct?

William Happer: All of their nuclear power plants.

Joe Rogan: Oh, God. And they did it all for green energy? That makes no sense.

William Happer: I think they did it because of the Fukushima thing and because the Green Party is so powerful in Germany. They not only turned off their plants, not nuclear and coal as well, but they blew a lot of them up. You see these pictures of the plants being blown up by dynamite just to make sure that nobody restarts them. They're fanatics.

Joe Rogan: Oh, my God.

William Happer: They're real fanatics, yeah.

Joe Rogan: That's so crazy.

William Happer: At some point, some country like Germany, they'll lose all their jobs. All the industry will move. There will be no jobs. People will all be on welfare. There's no money to pay them. At that point, someone will realize we've taken a wrong turn here.

Joe Rogan: I can't believe they blew their plants up. That is nuts. What are they replacing it with right now? Russian gas? Windmills?

William Happer: Yeah. But you're right. They're importing fossil fuels. And importing electricity from France, which still has a large nuclear power base.

Joe Rogan: How is Germany so smart and so dumb at the same time? They have tremendous engineers. They make some of the best automobiles ever.

William Happer: They're making them in Hungary.

Joe Rogan: Oh.

William Happer: That's a profound question: how is this country of poets and philosophers had the Nazis?

Joe Rogan: Had the Nazis, exactly.

William Happer: Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few German theologians who had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany. He was invited to come to the US but he said he was going to stay with his people. He was eventually hung by the Nazis. He didn't survive. But he had this theory that it was stupidity. It's a very interesting theory. If you look on the internet, you can read about Bonhoeffer's theory of stupidity. His view was that all of these Nazi supporters didn't really believe in it at all. They were just dumb.

Joe Rogan: It's hard for me. When I first read about this, I couldn't believe it. But the more I look at it, I think that every nation has the problem that most of us are pretty stupid. There's a large percentage of us that will believe almost anything.

William Happer: Right.

Joe Rogan: We could point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now that people wholeheartedly believe in that makes zero sense.

William Happer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan: You would go, "Okay, there's some part of this that has to be attributed to low intelligence." What percentage of people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves? It's not a small number. Maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20. Whatever percentage, it's enough where it's a giant problem.

Richard Lindzen: Intelligence itself is a complex issue. There are people who, like us, may be idiot savants. There are things that we can do very well and other things we don't.

Joe Rogan: Absolutely. Math departments are famous for that. I think it's a sign of almost any great person at anything. There's usually areas in their life where they're just completely lacking, whether it's hygiene or relationships or whatever. They're obsessed by what they do, and that's why they're great at what they do. There are great writers who can't do arithmetic.

Richard Lindzen: Right.

Joe Rogan: There are great physical athletes that have an intelligence of moving their body in a way that they understand things at a much higher level than anybody else. They probably wouldn't do that well on an ACT test. It doesn't mean that they're not intelligent. It's just a different kind of intelligence.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: That makes the world a more interesting place by and large. But what's scary is when you count on the people that are supposed to be the people that are obsessed and studying this one thing like this climate change emergency that we're supposed to be under, and then you find out, "Oh wait a minute, this isn't an exact science." We started with Gore.

Richard Lindzen: Gore flunked out of Harvard.

Joe Rogan: Did he?

Richard Lindzen: Yeah. His father, who was a senator, got him back in. I was teaching there at the time.

Joe Rogan: Interesting.

Richard Lindzen: The person he attributes his awareness of CO2 to, Roger Revell, was teaching a sort of science for poets course and he got a D minus in it.

Joe Rogan: Has he made the most money off of this? He's made a lot of money off of climate change, right?

William Happer: He's made a few hundred million, I don't know. These days, small change.

Joe Rogan: Still. There's a very clear motivation to keep that graph going. Especially now with social media, there's so many people like we were talking about Greta Thunberg. I don't know what her motivations are, but I do know that there's a lot of people out there that have large social media platforms that all they want to do is connect themselves to something that people are talking about all the time. There's a lot of money in that. There's a lot of power in wielding that influence. To do so and just hop on any bandwagon that comes along and not really know what you're talking about is a real problem that we have in society today. It's in a way a new problem given social media.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Another new problem is AI and fakes. You see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles. It takes time to pay attention to what's real and what's not real today. If somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, especially climate change, you could scare the shit out of somebody very quickly with a nice video and it doesn't even have to be real.

William Happer: That was the reason for extreme weather being chosen. For quite a few years, the climate issue was temperature. You'll have noticed the last 15, 20 years, it's extreme weather. That shows that it was fake because it's trivial. If you looked it up, the average month, there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred year events. Each of them makes for a good video. You have four or five a month, and they're each only one that's in a hundred years. People aren't putting it together that once in a hundred year events are occurring four or five times a month. But you always have a picture of a flood someplace or a rise or this or that. Those are used to scare people. It's got harder and harder to scare people with numbers.

Joe Rogan: It's extreme weather events. That's what I keep hearing. The hurricanes are getting stronger. They're getting more frequent. I don't think that's necessarily true.

William Happer: No, no. For years, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN, was honestly saying they could find no evidence that these were related. The last one, they had to say something because the politicians control what's in the IPCC. But even with that, they were saying no. That had nothing to do with the public relations. They said to hell with it, even if there's no relation, we'll say there is because that gives us visuals.

Joe Rogan: God. Now, when people like Bill Gates are talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the earth and protect us from the sun's rays, where is all that coming from?

William Happer: I think Will said it comes from dumbness.

Joe Rogan: Even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms. "Hey, a few people can't make a decision that will literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all."

William Happer: It comes from dumbness.

Joe Rogan: Why? Because you made Microsoft? Why do you get to do this? That seems like something you would have to have the whole world vote on. They would have to be really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.

William Happer: I'd have to hope that most of the world agrees with you and me and that Bill Gates will never be permitted to do something like that.

Joe Rogan: The fear is that someone would let him. The fear is that a country would let him. You get the right politicians in place and the right fear mongering in place and you let him try. Or you let somebody try. These people that do try get large grants, and they're making a lot of money to do this. That's what scares the shit out of me, that this could be a way that people could try something out on the whole world that could be catastrophic.

William Happer: Just technically, it would be extremely difficult because the amount of material you have to get up to the stratosphere to mimic a large stratovolcano. Even Bill Gates probably can't afford that, and I'm not sure the US treasurer could either.

Joe Rogan: So it's just theoretical at this point?

William Happer: I think it's an interesting thing. You're pointing out that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeur based on the fact that he's fabulously wealthy. But as a practical matter, that particular approach probably is not going to be as dangerous as you think. It won't work.

Richard Lindzen: It won't work.

Joe Rogan: It's just the idea that someone would even propose something like that based on what you gentlemen have discussed so far today.

William Happer: No, your point is right. You have people who have the means to try things, and they're getting a free ride on this.

Joe Rogan: Yes, that's the thing. They're getting a lot of money to implement these changes. That's why these green new deals and these green energy initiatives and all these green things, people have to understand why you're hearing about this all the time.

Joe Rogan: Because it's a PR campaign. It's a PR campaign for a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money. That's what this is all about. And the more you get on board, the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff. And the more money these companies make. And the whole thing is about money. Much of it is money. They're not really worried about you. That's what you have to understand. If they ever say that they're worried about your future, for the betterment of our people, we have to make sure that everybody's okay, we've got to protect the climate—they don't care. That's not real. What they really want to do is make sure a lot of money comes in. And if a lot of money coming in is dependent upon them scaring the shit out of you, that's what they lean towards.

Richard Lindzen: And, you know, money and its transferability and fungibility, its influence, its feedbacks.

Joe Rogan: Yes.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: But that's always been true.

Richard Lindzen: Yes. Joe, let me bring up another targeted group, and that is farmers and ranchers, you know, because of their supposed contribution to greenhouse warming. Just a couple of years ago, I was invited to come down to Paraguay by some farmers there who were worried about the upcoming climate talks. And the European bankers were demanding that Paraguay turn most of its ranch land back into forest, you know, to save the planet. Otherwise they wouldn't give loans to Paraguay. So the ranchers were worried that they're going to be put out of business, their families put out of business. I was there for a week and I talked to the president. Luckily it turned out they had a very sensible president, and he didn't need me to recognize it was nonsense. But he was, I think, grateful to have someone with a science background confirm his suspicion that it was all nonsense. So he went to the conference and basically told the bankers to go to hell. And they didn't pull the funding out of Paraguay. So there were no consequences and the ranchers did not suffer.

William Happer: But there were consequences in Ireland.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

William Happer: Yes. They had to kill half their cattle.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, which is nonsense. Total nonsense and insane. And if you pay attention to what regenerative farmers will tell you, if you do it correctly, it's actually carbon neutral. At least carbon neutral, and possibly contributes. The whole thing is nature. This is how it's all set up. Animals eat grass, they poop manure, manure fertilizes the plants. It's all real simple. It's been around forever. And this idea that all of a sudden cow farts and burps are a giant issue and they're going to kill us all, we need to kill all the cows. Like, who are you? Who's saying this? How'd you get to talk? How'd you get to kill half their cows? You should go to jail. They should go to jail. You're so stupid. You're criminally stupid. You killed their cows.

Richard Lindzen: But when it comes to attractive drugs, power is one of the worst. It might be the worst.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it might be the worst. And if people can get people to do their bidding, they often love to do it. Even if it's preposterous, like getting you to kill half your cows so that you have a less high methane count you're releasing from your organization.

William Happer: I mean, you know, I've worked on this and others. But the methane thing is an example of innumeracy. In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO2. And so cutting back methane will have a big effect. But there's so little methane in the atmosphere, if they got rid of all of it, it would have almost no effect compared to CO2. Somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, simple arithmetic. They just can't do simple arithmetic. It's just weird how these narratives become so prominent in social media. It's really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants. It seems very coordinated and actually kind of impressive that they've managed to silence questioning scientists and really put the fear of God into people that read things and don't agree with it.

Richard Lindzen: It began right at the beginning of the issue. As I was mentioning, by 1989 Science Magazine was... In fact, one of the ironies with Science Magazine, which is an important magazine, it had an editor who was Marsha McNutt, who actually had an op-ed appear in Science Magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this.

Joe Rogan: Wow.

William Happer: And you know what her reward was? She became president of the National Academy of Science.

Joe Rogan: She was a good girl.

William Happer: Yeah, followed the rules.

Richard Lindzen: But you know, Dick's point about forbidding questioning, it's just unbelievable.

William Happer: When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia, and the grand old man there was Isidore Rabi. And Rabi came from an Eastern European Jewish family, and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education. So he would always tell me, when I would go home from school every day, my mother wouldn't ask me, "What did you learn today in school, Izzy?" She called him Izzy. And he would tell her, and then she would say, "And did you ask a good question today?" So she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question, which would mean that the wheels were turning in his head, than whether he had memorized something. I always took that to heart. I think that was a very wise mother. And he turned out very well as a result.

Joe Rogan: Do you think there's more uniformity in thinking in academia now with the pressure of social media and the pressure of these echo chambers that people find themselves in?

William Happer: Of course.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. That's terrible because you would have thought with the internet, one of the things is the internet is going to be a balanced resource of information. You're going to have the answers to any questions you want, and we'll be able to sort out what's true and what's not true. Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science.

Richard Lindzen: That's right. Now, I mean, the internet, not surprisingly, was an unpredictable phenomenon.

William Happer: Completely.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. I mean, you saw it, but you're seeing it yourself. I mean, you have media. They were looking for 100,000 subscribers. With the internet, you're dealing with millions, and that's considered small in some cases. There's people like Mr. Beast, some fun guy on YouTube. I think he has... What does he have? How many million subscribers does he have? Something insane. Way bigger than any television show that's ever existed before. Nobody saw it coming. Did it on his own. Yeah, it's a weird time. And then there's a lack of trust in mainstream media, which is also disturbing.

Richard Lindzen: Which is also deserved.

Joe Rogan: Right. Also deserved. That's a problem as well. And when you see mainstream media also going along with all these climate change ideologies and all these different things that are attached to the narrative that you're not allowed to deviate from, it's just... it gets very frustrating.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure about this, but my recollection was as a kid in New York that you had newspapers like the New York Times that were always sort of center left, but you had others, the Journal American and so on, and they differed in their coverage. But on the whole, they covered the same news. If something happened, it would appear in both. I realize in retrospect that wasn't always true. But today, I have the feeling that if I look at the Post in New York or the New York Times, I'm looking at two different worlds. And there's something wrong with that.

Joe Rogan: Very. Yeah, something very wrong with it. And I don't know what the answer is to how to solve it, or if those things need to just go away and independent media needs to replace them. But you're seeing a massive dissolving of trust. When I was a kid, I used to deliver the New York Times. And I delivered the Boston Globe, but I delivered the New York Times as well because it was prestigious. I thought it was cool to deliver the New York Times. And it was a long route. It was a lot longer than my Boston Globe route.

Richard Lindzen: Did you have to deliver it on Sunday as well?

Joe Rogan: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. But fortunately, the ads didn't work, so they didn't get a big, thick ad chunk like you do with the Boston Globe because it's like local ads. But the point being, it was the paper of record. And now today it's just another blog. It's just an ideologically captured online blog that's very left-leaning.

William Happer: I think people have pointed out the correct reason for that. The end of the classified ads.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

William Happer: They used to have to satisfy the people paying for ads. Now they have to satisfy their readers. And so the readers only want to hear one thing.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's a real problem. It's a real problem. But I guess just like all things that happen, there'll be some sort of a course correction or some new players will enter in.

Richard Lindzen: It would be fine if the newspapers took different positions but covered the same items.

Joe Rogan: Right, right, right.

Richard Lindzen: And here, I will say, and maybe there's a bias in this, if I listen to MSNBC, there are whole areas of what's going on that I will hear nothing about. Fox may cover things differently, but they are less guilty of leaving stuff out. They may take a different view of it, but you'll hear about it. The fact that certain media now are not even mentioning things that they don't want you to know about is a little bit disturbing.

Joe Rogan: It is. It is. But again, it gives rise to independent media, gives rise to the very good independent journalists that exist today. But the thing is, the average person is not going to find them. They don't know where to look.

William Happer: Well, this is an opportunity to put in a good word for Al Gore, since he was an inventor of the internet.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, he did kind of take credit for part of that, right?

William Happer: Right, yeah.

Joe Rogan: What did he say exactly?

William Happer: I think he said, "I had a hand in that," or something like that.

Joe Rogan: I did too. I bought a computer once. I had a hand in that. I played a part of the economy of the internet. Yeah. Well, I think these kinds of conversations with people like yourself will help. The more people listen to this and the more people start reading other articles written by different people that also question it, we get a kind of understanding of this pattern that does go back to what you were talking about before with eugenics and with many other things in history. There's times where you're on the wrong side of things. You don't realize it because you've been lied to and you've been, you know, these politicians are kind of captured.

Richard Lindzen: But it's also the abuse of science is too much of a temptation for politicians. I mean, it's hard to say, but if there's a way of making people understand that science really is not a source of authority, it's a methodology, and that if you are using it as a source of authority and destroying it as a methodology, you're anti-science. Whether that helps or not, maybe people don't care.

Joe Rogan: I think people do, but they're scared to deviate from the narrative. How do you think... Do you think it's possible to get in people's heads that we have to, at the academic level especially, separate ideology from truth? You can't attach believing in something that is so firmly a part of being a progressive person or being a conservative person that you're unwilling to look at the data and look at facts. That has to be shunned, right? So how does that go about?

William Happer: I think you're hitting on something important. You can't do it every place. But with the funding agencies, the government is in a position to say funding agencies must take an open view of certain subjects or all subjects for that matter, and not lay down rules that you cannot question.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah, let me add to that. I think one of the great strengths of American science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington. You could get funding from the National Science Foundation, or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research, or from some other organization, and they all competed with each other, and they didn't like each other very much. So if you couldn't get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the Army or some other place. So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country. And people used to talk, "We need an office of science." I thought that was a terrible idea. That means one point of failure. There was someone in a position to throttle some important thing.

William Happer: Department of Energy tried to do both sides for a long time. And they held out longer than other departments. But eventually, for some reason, they were all forced into the same box.

Joe Rogan: Money starts talking, baby.

William Happer: Yeah, money. There's a lot of money.

Joe Rogan: Department of Energy, wasn't that the department where from the time Trump won the election to Biden leaving office, they gave out something like $93 billion in loans?

William Happer: I think it was EPA, or maybe it was... No, loans must have been energy.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

William Happer: Must have been energy.

Joe Rogan: Like more than had been given out in the last 15 years.

William Happer: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan: I'm sure it was smart, well-spent money that we definitely couldn't get by without spending. It's kind of funny.

William Happer: Pathetic.

Joe Rogan: It is kind of pathetic, but it's also kind of funny how in this day of transparency, there's so much information that's available today. It's so easy to find things out, and they would try to pull something like that off and then do it successfully. Right in front of everybody's face.

William Happer: Well, having spent time in the Department of Energy headquarters, it doesn't surprise me.

Joe Rogan: I believe you. How difficult has this been for you gentlemen to debate this stuff and to bring it up with people and have conversations? Have you experienced a lot of resistance?

Richard Lindzen: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting how it evolved. I think in the 90s there was still a certain openness about it. If there were a conference, people on both sides would be invited and so on. Somehow, by the 21st century, it came down hard. There was absolutely nothing open anymore.

William Happer: But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, which is a good university, and he gave a good colloquium, the next day a Nobel Prize winner from my department walked in and said, "What son of a bitch invited Lindzen to give this talk?" And I said, "Well, I'm the son of a bitch. Get out of my office."

Joe Rogan: Oh, wow. And did you try to engage with him at all about why you were upset, why he was upset, rather?

William Happer: No.

Joe Rogan: Just it wasn't even worth it?

William Happer: It wasn't worth it, yeah.

Joe Rogan: Wow. It's just hard to believe as someone who's outside of academia. It's hard to believe there's closed-minded people at universities.

William Happer: The point was he didn't know the first thing about the issue. Not a thing.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

William Happer: But he was very left-wing.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's the point. That's why it's weird.

Richard Lindzen: No, this was the political polarization.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. But it's also there's no deviation. There's no people like, "Eh." Everybody's either one side or the other. All in or not. And if you're not, you get cast out of the kingdom. It's very weird. It's just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities.

William Happer: If someone comes up to you and says... I think it's worse in universities.

Joe Rogan: Wow. How did that get started? Like when did... So was it the same thing as with the climate? Like somewhere around the 21st century?

Richard Lindzen: You know, I'll take something that was much less publicized.

William Happer: What was the program with your device?

Richard Lindzen: Oh, the Star Wars. The sodium guide star.

William Happer: Yeah.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah, I mean, universities treated that as something you could not discuss, the notion that you wanted to have a defense against nuclear...

Joe Rogan: What Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because early in the Star Wars era, we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles. So that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high-power lasers. During a classified summer study in 1982, there were some people from the Air Force, some generals and technical people, and they talked about the problem: if you have a beautiful blue clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward Austin, by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target. That was a problem well known to astronomers, but the inverse problem of stars does the same thing. When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don't get a point. You get lots of speckles. Astronomers knew how to solve that. The problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere—little warm patches and cool patches. So what you can do is reflect the incoming starlight from an anti-wrinkled mirror. It comes in wrinkled, it bounces, it's nice and flat, then it focuses and you get a point. You can do the same thing when you're trying to shoot an incoming missile. You pre-wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile. It's called adaptive optics. The mirror is called a rubber mirror—a mirror you can adjust. But to do that, you need to know how to adjust the mirror, so you have to have some information: how do I wrinkle it, push here, pull there, etc. The way the astronomers did it was they used a very bright star in the sky, and then for nearby stars, you could use the bright star to correct your mirror for all the neighboring stars. But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars. So unless the Russians attacked us during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies, we couldn't do anything with our lasers.

Joe Rogan: Oh, wow.

William Happer: So I said, "Well, I know how to fix this. All you need to do is make an artificial star wherever you like, because there's a layer of sodium at 100 kilometers. And we now have lasers that will excite that. So you can make a yellow star that's plenty bright enough to use that light to adjust the mirror wherever you like." Nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during that. This was a top secret meeting.

Joe Rogan: When you say make a star, do you mean like a satellite star, like a small...?

William Happer: A bright source of light shining down through the atmosphere. Most of the problem is fairly close to the ground, the first kilometer or two up.

Joe Rogan: And what would this be made out of?

William Happer: Sodium. If you go to 100 kilometers, the Earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system. We're constantly burning up little micrometeorites, and they're all loaded with sodium atoms. They get released into the upper atmosphere and they stay there, making a layer that's about 10 kilometers thick. Not many people know about that. I happen to know about it. And I knew you could use it for this method. That's why I got called to Washington. It was a highly secret invention for 10 years.

Joe Rogan: Wow. Yeah. That's fascinating.

William Happer: When the Soviet Union collapsed, this was declassified thanks to the effort of a Livermore friend and colleague, Claire Max, a woman physicist astronomer. She finally persuaded the Department of Defense to declassify it. So if you go to any big telescope now around the world, it has one of these sodium lasers pointing up at the sky at night. You'll see this bright yellow beam going up.

Joe Rogan: Oh, wow. Look at that right there. Oh, there it is. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so the point where they're coming, this is actually green light. And so for the sodium, most of them are yellow for sodium. But that's the basic idea. And so this was a difficult thing to discuss in academia?

William Happer: Well, I couldn't discuss it. It was highly classified, so I couldn't even mention it until about 1994 or 1995 when it was declassified. But I'd invented it 12 years earlier. But the point was, in academia you could not discuss defensive measures. You couldn't discuss working for defense of the country. That was somehow immoral, defending the country. I wasn't trying to attack Russia. I was trying to defend ourselves.

Joe Rogan: Right. Yeah, that's a ridiculous position to take. "We don't need defense against missiles." They're hard to defend against, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

William Happer: Right, yeah. Exactly. I mean, at MIT, you had all sorts of people saying, "You shouldn't try. It's silly. It's impossible," and so on.

Joe Rogan: What was the point of that? I mean, you have a problem, you try and solve it. Yeah. It seems like that's what science is supposed to be for.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah. Now, if you probe into these issues, I think you realize that climate is an extreme case, but politics interfacing science is not new.

Joe Rogan: Well, it just seems like human behavior. Human behavior and anything else. It's like the same patterns. You'll find them in big businesses. You find them in a lot of different... You find them in almost all communities and groups of human beings. There's people that get into control and they force certain narratives. And the fact that that happens with the highest levels of academia and with science, though, is really confusing to people like myself that are counting on everybody like you to get it right.

William Happer: Don't. We're as much part of the crooked timber of mankind as anyone else.

Joe Rogan: It's such a great quote. You know, I've often mentioned, my family emigrated here from Germany in '38. But when Hitler came to power in 1933, every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood before Hitler even asked. So universities are not bastions of independent thinking. What could be done to make them more so?

Richard Lindzen: You know, the Canadians did something that I thought had potential. Every faculty member, especially junior faculty, immediately got grants that they didn't have to apply for. So in that system, every one of their faculty could function as a research scientist. Students were paid for otherwise, and at least one link in the chain of influence was broken. You had an open system there. Even there, though, other pressures came to bear. But it seemed like a good idea. Or at least a better idea.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. But again, unfortunately, it just seems like that pattern of human behavior just pops its ugly head up over and over and over again.

William Happer: Yep. You know, Joe, Dick just came up. It's worth going back to the founding of this country. If you read things like the Federalist Papers, which was the theory of our government, what comes through loud and clear was that our founders believed that humans were extremely corrupt and not very reliable. And given that, how do you make a system that will function even with that? That's what they tried to do. That was the whole reason for the balance of power and all the things that are in there. It was partially successful. It certainly worked better than other systems for a long time.

Joe Rogan: Better than all the other ones.

William Happer: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: But amazingly astute.

William Happer: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: But those papers, I mean, they've held up well. Yeah. Anything else to add before we wrap this up, gentlemen? Is there anything else you think people should know?

Richard Lindzen: Well, trust but verify.

William Happer: Yeah. I mean, how shall I put it? Destroying the world is not an easy thing to do. It shouldn't be the top of your list of worries.

Joe Rogan: You mean destroying the world with climate change?

William Happer: Yeah. It's not really what it is. It's very over-magnified.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah. I mean, how shall I put it? Its origins were almost entirely political. I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all. We're discussing: can it happen? Is it warming? Is it cooling? Is extreme weather increasing? It's amazing to me that politicians can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.

Joe Rogan: I wonder how it would have worked if it wasn't for An Inconvenient Truth, if that movie hadn't been made. Because sometimes people need something like that in that sort of a form for it to really take hold as an idea.

Richard Lindzen: You may be right. I mean, something was needed to make it catch on. It had been around for quite a few years without catching on quite that way.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Richard Lindzen: But it was also the confluence. The UN really got interested in it. You had the World Meteorological Organization. All of them saw something they could gain in it. And so it began to seem almost overwhelming. But it reached the right people. The funding agencies—the NSF got taken over almost immediately. NASA took about 10 years. Department of Energy took 10 years. But they worked on it.

Joe Rogan: It's kind of stunning, at least from the outside, from my perspective. It's stunning how successful it is. And again, like I said, if you're in polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up, "Well, we've got to do something about climate change," the record skips. Like, how much do you know?

Richard Lindzen: Right.

Joe Rogan: It turns out very little, most people. And then it turns out, according to you, it's almost impossible to figure out anyway. The actual data.

Richard Lindzen: No, no. I mean, the notion that there's a crisis has taken hold.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Richard Lindzen: Even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis. And the main movie that started off that crisis from 2006 is entirely wrong. All of its predictions. And what's supporting it now is the extreme weather, which is a fake. But it provides visuals.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. It's very hard for people to swallow, but I encourage them to look at the data of hurricanes historically, and you realize, "Oh, pretty stable." It goes up and down and all over the place, but it's not any worse now than it has been before.

Richard Lindzen: Oh, I mean, growing up in the Bronx in the 40s, every autumn there were hurricanes. You could wake up in the morning and the streets were lined with trees that had been blown down. Interestingly enough, that has not recurred in New York for about 30, 40, 50 years. I think the last one I remember when I lived in Boston was Gloria.

Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah. They don't get hit by hurricanes anymore. If they did, they'd freak out, "Climate change!" But then '38 was a gigantic hurricane.

William Happer: I was born in a town on a lake in Massachusetts called Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

Joe Rogan: That's a real name?

William Happer: Yes, it's a real name.

Joe Rogan: Whoa.

William Happer: But at any rate, in that lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of 1938.

Joe Rogan: Wow. Just blowing stuff around?

William Happer: Really.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. Wow.

William Happer: But that also killed a lot of people because we didn't have the information of it coming.

Joe Rogan: Right. And I'm sure buildings weren't really designed to withstand those either.

William Happer: No. I mean, how shall I put it? I'm glad it came then, not now, I suppose. If it came now, it would be proof.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Richard Lindzen: Actually, the worst hurricane on record on the East Coast was the last year of the American Revolution, and it had a big impact on winning the war. What happened was this enormous hurricane, mostly in the Caribbean, but it wiped out the British fleet. It wiped out the French fleet. There was nothing left.

Joe Rogan: Really?

Richard Lindzen: It was just a tremendous hurricane. The reason it affected the war was the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet. So when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be rescued, with all of the partisans coming after him, he didn't worry about the French. But the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane. They had had 12 months, and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake. When Cornwallis got there, he was trapped because the British couldn't come in to rescue him from Rhode Island or wherever they were. So he had no choice. He had to surrender.

Joe Rogan: Wow. That was the end of the war.

Richard Lindzen: And we can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly. As well as the French.

Joe Rogan: The French and the French. God bless the French. What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of recent years?

Richard Lindzen: '34, '35. 1930.

Joe Rogan: What was it like then?

Richard Lindzen: It was the peak of the Dust Bowl and it was, I don't know, several degrees warmer than – I don't know the exact figure but you can look at the records. They're pretty clear.

Joe Rogan: Yeah.

Richard Lindzen: You're not going to see gigantic numbers, but again, that global metric is a little bit confusing. Locally, it was a huge effect. But globally, yeah.

Joe Rogan: What you're saying completely makes sense. It doesn't make sense to try to have a global temperature, unless you're studying other planets.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. What matters is where people live.

Richard Lindzen: Right.

Joe Rogan: What's the temperature there.

Richard Lindzen: Yeah.

Joe Rogan: Right, right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I really appreciate your bravery in talking about this stuff and sharing all this information. Hope for the best. It's very enlightening. It helps. These kind of conversations, they move the needle. They really do. So I really appreciate you guys.

Richard Lindzen: Thank you.

Joe Rogan: Thanks for being here. I really enjoyed it.

Richard Lindzen: Thank you.

Joe Rogan: Bye, everybody.

[End of conversation. Podcast transitions to advertisements.]

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