Environment and Climate News Podcast | Unlearning Climate Alarmism – The Climate Realism Show #191

An encouraging trend is growing. Bright young people who were convinced of the truth of climate alarmist dogma open their eyes and mind to the actual data on the climate. Then they become climate realists, and even evangelists for science and truth. Anika Sweetland is one of those people. She is a former energy advisor with a degree in climate studies who gave an address on her awakening at Heartland's World Prosperity Forum last month. And she's one of the UK's best public opponents of that country's Net Zero policy and keeps a keen eye on the climate communism of the European Union.

Anika joins us to talk about her journey, and also comment on some of the Crazy Climate News of the week, including a proposal to chop down boreal forests in the far north and throw the wood into the Arctic Ocean, how stupid and counterproductive California’s aversion to oil refining really is, and how the European Union may be poised to make countering the climate alarmist narrative illegal.

Join The Heartland Institute’s Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, Jim Lakely, and special guest Anika Sweetland LIVE at 1 p.m. ET on YouTube, Rumble, X, and Facebook. Participate in the show by leaving your comments and questions in the chat.

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Creators and Guests

Host

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., hosts The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News podcast. Burnett also is the director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, is the editor of Heartland's Climate Change Weekly email, and oversees the production of the monthly newspaper Environment & Climate News. Prior to joining The Heartland Institute in 2014, Burnett worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years, ending his tenure there as senior fellow in charge of environmental policy. He has held various positions in professional and public policy organizations within the field. Burnett is a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller’s e-Texas commission, served as chairman of the board for the Dallas Woods and Water Conservation Club, is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, works as an academic advisor for Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is an advisory board member to the Cornwall Alliance, and is an advisor for the Energy, Natural Resources and Agricultural Task Force at the American Legislative Exchange Council.

What is Environment and Climate News Podcast ?

The Heartland Institute podcast featuring scientists, authors, and policy experts who take the non-alarmist, climate-realist position on environment and energy policy.

Sterling Burnett: 00:04

One of the most urgent tasks of our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.

Anika Sweetland: 00:12

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.

Jim Lakely: 00:15

The ability of c o two to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.

Anthony Watts: 00:21

The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.

Sterling Burnett: 00:26

That's not how you power a modern industrial system.

Jim Lakely: 00:29

The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.

Sterling Burnett: 00:38

You know who's tried that? Germany. Seven straight days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.

Linnea Lueken: 00:45

They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910. Today is Friday.

Jim Lakely: 00:56

That's right, Greta. It is Friday, and this is the best day of the week. Not just because the weekend is almost here, but because this is the day the Heartland Institute broadcasts the climate realism show. My name is Jim Lakeley. I'm executive vice president, Heartland Institute and your host.

Jim Lakely: 01:11

The Heartland Institute is an organization that has been around for forty two years, and we are known as the leading global think tank pushing back on on climate alarmism. Heartland and this show bring you the data, the science, the truth that counters the climate alarmist narrative you've been fed every single day of your life. There is nothing else quite like the climate realism show streaming anywhere, so I hope you will bring friends to view this livestream every Friday at 1PM eastern time. And also like, share, and subscribe, and sure to leave your comments underneath this video. We do read them, and these all convince YouTube's very mysterious algorithm to get this show in front of even more people.

Jim Lakely: 01:49

And as a reminder, because big tech and the legacy media are not big fans of the way we cover climate and energy on this program, Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized. So if you wanna support this program, and I really hope you do, please visit heartland dot org slash t c r s. That's heartland.org/tcrs, and you can join other friends of this program who help bring it to the world every single week. And we also wanna thank our streaming partners who help us get this show out in front of a lot of people, junkscience.com, CFACT, What's Up With That, c o two coalition, and our friends at Heartland UK Europe. Oh, we got a big show today, so let's get started.

Jim Lakely: 02:28

We have with us, as usual, Anthony Watts, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and publisher of the world's most viewed website on climate change, what's up with that? We have Sterling Burnett. He's the director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on climate and environmental environmental policy at the Heartland Institute and also known as the archbishop of Rancherberry. We have Lanea Lukin, research fellow for energy and environment policy at Heartland, and we are so happy to welcome for the first time a very special guest, Anika Sweetland. Anika is a former energy adviser with a degree in climate studies.

Jim Lakely: 03:00

She gave an address on her awakening to climate realism at Heartland's World Prosperity Forum just last month. You can find those videos right here on this very Heartland Institute YouTube channel. And she's now and also has been one of The UK's best public opponents of that country's stupid net zero policy and keeps a keen eye now on the climate communism of the European Union. Annika, so happy to have you on the show.

Anika Sweetland: 03:25

Thank you. Yes. Great to be here. Really good.

Jim Lakely: 03:28

Yes. Not a and and and, what's really neat is that when I first met you in in Switzerland, last month, you said that you were a fan of the show. You watched the show before we even met, and not every fan of the show gets to be a guest, so congratulations.

Anika Sweetland: 03:41

Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I'm genuinely a real life fan of this show. You know? On Fridays, if I'm lucky, I'm out on my scooter, fully manual, none of this electric stuff, and listening to the show, and I feel like a kid again.

Anika Sweetland: 03:55

And life feels good because there's something profoundly cathartic about hearing the truth spoken without apology. So, yeah, it is definitely one of my favorite shows.

Jim Lakely: 04:04

Oh, fantastic. Well, we're so happy to have you on the on the show today, and I'm sure you will not be a stranger. And before we get into our the main part of this show, good reminder, Anika is gonna be one of the speakers at the Heart Institute's sixteenth International Conference on Climate Change, which is coming up April in Washington DC. Space is limited, and it is starting to fill up pretty full. So if you want to join us and meet Annika and great speakers like Willie Soon, John Clauser, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, is going to be giving a keynote address because he knows from looking at the data that human caused climate catastrophe is complete BS.

Jim Lakely: 04:44

You don't wanna miss that. Our friends at CFACT and the c o two coalition and what's up with that are cohosts of this event. It is the place you need to be if you're interested in this topic and really interested in learning the very truth about this topic. There is no other climate conference like this anywhere, and we are the ones who've always put it together with our friends and cohosts. So go to heartland.org.

Jim Lakely: 05:09

You can see a feature right there on the front page that'll take you to the specialclimateconference.heartland.org website where you can learn more information, look at the program as it's coming together, look at our speaker list so far, and also get your tickets. You're not gonna wanna miss it. April, coming up sooner than you think in Washington DC at the Hotel Washington, just across just a block away from the White House. So it's a great time to be in DC. Alright.

Jim Lakely: 05:35

So with that out of the way, I want to start our show as we always do with the crazy climate news of the week. Hit it, Andy. Thank you very much, Bill Nye. We'd be happy to have you debate somebody on climate change at our conference, by the way, if you're interested in coming. So just let me know.

Jim Lakely: 06:06

[e-mail], and we can make that arrangement. Alright. Our first item today, I've titled chop chop dummies. This comes to our good friend, Joe Nova, in Australia from her great blog, joannenova.com.au. Headline is scientist's new plan to save the world by chopping down boreal forest and tossing it into the Arctic Ocean.

Jim Lakely: 06:28

Joe writes, the great Northern Boreal Forest has expanded by 12% since 1984, which means it has locked up all this extra carbon in it. Instead of waiting for it to catch fire and burn, the thinking is that we could cut it down now and throw the logs in a river that leads to the Arctic Ocean where they will sink eventually, maybe, and take carbon to the sea floor. The journal New Scientist thought this was a good idea. Future anthropologists may file modern eco science with arsenic cures and radium toothpaste. In order to save the environment, says New Scientist, I guess, we need to cut down 180,000 square kilometers of forest and toss it into the river every year.

Jim Lakely: 07:12

And Joe Nova asks, how many trees do we have to kill to stop a cyclone in twenty one hundred AD? Had a peek over at the New Scientist article to get where they are coming from with this. Write: Cutting down boreal forests and sinking the felled trees in the depths of the Arctic Ocean could remove up to 1,000,000,000 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, but it could come at a cost to the Arctic ecosystem, you don't say. Coniferous trees prone to wildfires could be felled and carried to the ocean by six major Arctic rivers including the Yukon and Mackenzie where they would sink in about a year according to a team of researchers. Is now a forest that is sequestering lots of carbon.

Jim Lakely: 07:57

But now the next thing is how to store it in a way that won't get burned, said Ulf Buntkin of the University of Cambridge. Alright. That's enough of that nonsense. Anthony, I'll start with you because you picked this one for us this week. So you win.

Jim Lakely: 08:09

This is, without a doubt, the craziest climate news of the week. And can can you work out how this even works?

Anthony Watts: 08:17

Well, this is one of those things where the scientists that never get out of the office and live in the real world come up with these crazy ideas that they think will work based on models and calculations and whatever. It it is they also don't pay any attention to unintended consequences. What are the unintended consequences of totally, you know, making the Arctic full of logs? You know, is there gonna be a beaver population explosion, you know, which then brings in more wolves or whatever. I mean, they just don't know.

Anthony Watts: 08:50

And it's just like the whole idea that was pushed a few years ago where let's put some iron filings and iron oxide rust into the ocean to help make the plankton go, you know, and that'll sequester more carbon dioxide. And it's just nuts. It is just nuts. They they don't have a clue. This is just another appeal to feel good in this.

Anthony Watts: 09:15

We're saving the planet, you know, and listen to us. We're scientists. We know what we're talking about when they really don't. They have no idea what will happen down the road. And quite frankly, why would we wanna throw away all that wood?

Anthony Watts: 09:27

It's usable. You can still sequester wood by putting it into buildings or whatever. You know? You don't have to sink it in the Arctic. The whole idea is just beyond absurd.

Jim Lakely: 09:38

Right.

Sterling Burnett: 09:39

Oh, Sterling, actually, you I could have

Jim Lakely: 09:41

been wrong in our discussions this week. You may have actually picked this crazy story. But but look, I'm trying to figure this out. So we use the trees to sequester c o two, then we determine, by the experts, we'll determine when they have served their useful purpose. And then we cut them down, and then we send them to the Arctic Ocean.

Jim Lakely: 09:57

And then, what, do we plant new trees? I mean, what's the carbon footprint of carrying out this crazy scheme anyway?

Sterling Burnett: 10:03

It's it look. This is idiotic from the get go. First off, as I wrote in climate change weekly this week, the boreal forest is actually expanding. And all these young trees that are growing are absorbing more carbon. It's it's completely throwing a monkey wrench into the carbon balance that is assumed in climate models because the forest are taking up more c o two than they, assume.

Sterling Burnett: 10:33

And these guys say, oh, well, forest, which are absorbing carbon, let's cut them down now before they might possibly catch fire. Now I've got no no problem with logging. I have advocated, logging for a long time in national forest. What we know is older trees, real old trees, stop absorbing carbon and start putting carbon back into the atmosphere. And then, of course, there can be forest fires.

Sterling Burnett: 11:03

So they wanna just clear cut whole swaths of forest rather than sort of selectively cutting, the trees that are have reached their, maximum absorbs and started to go downhill. And as Anthony points out, why throw them into the, ocean or the river to get down to the ocean eventually, as opposed to building houses where they also will not rot? Building all sorts of things that, stores that carbon. It stays there. It's it's not like it's it's leaking out while it's in your, your main patio chair.

Sterling Burnett: 11:50

And, now I'm gonna disagree with Anthony on one thing. The iron filings is not a stupid idea. I've advocated it for a long time, and the reason is it's good for ocean life. I don't care what it does for carbon. What it does is you put them in the dead spots of the ocean, and it creates the whole food chain, which is good.

Sterling Burnett: 12:11

We have more fish. We have more plankton. We have more everything that the oceans seem to like. Why just leave dead spots of the ocean dead when we can make it better? And if you're worried about c o two, take c o two out of the atmosphere.

Sterling Burnett: 12:25

Well, look. Look. Trees.

Jim Lakely: 12:29

They they I mean, the trees will float. I mean, have you guys ever seen pictures of the the logging industry from the late early twentieth century? Look. Hey. Polar bears need something to play with up there besides seals, and so they might have a little fun on those floating log.

Sterling Burnett: 12:41

Yeah. Well, we created our own natural lake here in Texas due to floating logs, but this is just a stupid, stupid, really what's that that movie? Really, really, very bad day? Well, this is a stupid, stupid, very bad idea.

Jim Lakely: 13:00

Alright. Anyone any other comments before we move on?

Sterling Burnett: 13:02

There's lots of crazy stuff.

Anika Sweetland: 13:03

Look. I'm a bit more cynical in believing that this is nothing more than another piece in their puzzle to destroy our natural world. Back in the early global warming days, deforestation was evil, and once again, they've moved the goalpost to suit their narrative. Now they're pro deforestation all of a sudden. There are some unique habitats and ecosystems in these forests, and to destroy them, first of all, goes against all of their biodiversity propaganda.

Anika Sweetland: 13:31

Surely, wouldn't want to accelerate their mythic sixth mass extinction event. So I think we need to take a little bit of a closer look as to how the removal of these trees is going to benefit their financial interests. There will be a money trail. We just need to find it.

Sterling Burnett: 13:49

Mhmm. Good point. For sure.

Jim Lakely: 13:50

And I I find it ironic that they refused. They steadfast steadfastly refused to thin out the tinderbox forests of California, which Anthony knows very well. Yet this scheme here is in place or is proposed, at least. It's never gonna happen.

Sterling Burnett: 14:05

Well, you know, we've got ways to deal with forest fires. Timber logging is, you know, logging is one of them, but, just clear cut logging, you know, you you can fight forest fires. There's all sorts of things you can do. Right. But my suspicion is if you log these things to store the carbon, you're gonna lose as much in carbon absorption as you would end up putting out into the atmosphere.

Sterling Burnett: 14:34

Remember, it all balances. The c o two is locked up in them. If it burns, it reaches the atmosphere. If it goes into the ocean, they're no longer taking that amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.

Jim Lakely: 14:45

Yeah. Right. Alright. Well, speaking of California, our second item today, I've titled unrefined California idiocy. This comes from our, good friends at the Daily Caller.

Jim Lakely: 14:57

Headline, California importing foreign fuel after running refineries out of town. So you may have noticed that, you know, governor Gavin Newsom has been preening on social media all week about because Trump with got rid of the endangerment funding for carbon dioxide through the EPA that he says that Trump might be giving up on stopping climate change, but California won't. Well, this one this one cost of this is having one of the highest gas prices in the nation in California. Truly stupid policies. So good luck running for president in The of The United States on that on that record.

Jim Lakely: 15:33

But, anyway, let me read from the story a bit. So California imported a record amount of gasoline in November after major refinery closures tied to years of golden state leaders imposing strict regulations according to Bloomberg News. Over 40% of imported gasoline to California hailed from The Bahamas, with Asian nations like Japan and India contributing additional volume According to data from Vortexa, California politicians have imposed harsh regulations on the oil and gas industry for years, enacting America's highest tax on gasoline and implementing a cap and trade program for emissions that some policy experts have linked to rising energy costs in the state. The state has the most expensive gas prices in the nation at $4.58 a gallon, standing in contrast with a national average of $2.92 a gallon, according to the most recent AAA data. Bloomberg News reported that added shipping expenses are further burdening California's already costly gas market.

Jim Lakely: 16:32

Two major refineries are also closing shop in California, with Phillips sixty six winding down its California refinery, while Valero is set to shutter its Benicia facility and a record $1,000,000,000 write down on their books. Bloomberg News reported that the Bahamian trade route is now a crucial part of California's strained supply chain with two tankers carrying gasoline arriving from The Bahamas in 2026 so far. In 2025, California imported more gasoline from The Bahamas than it had in the nine preceding years combined. Linea, you are a still a a trained petroleum engineer, so I wanna go to you first. This does not seem a very efficient way to go about this and is doing more harm to the climate, if you actually believe carbon dioxide emissions seriously harm the climate.

Jim Lakely: 17:22

But we should put Kevin Wilson at his word and hold him to his own standards. Refine your gas in California instead of putting it on ships from the other side of the continent with each ship having to travel 8,000 nautical miles round trip. It's completely insane.

Linnea Lueken: 17:37

Well, it's it's there there are two parts to this that I'd comment on. One, it's the usual, like, left wing abuse of major industry where, you know, Gavin and all of his will say, we don't need these guys here. They suck. They're destroying the planet. We want them gone.

Linnea Lueken: 17:55

We're gonna sue them out of existence if they operate in our state, and, we hate them. Go away. And then as soon as the companies are like, alright. Fine. We'll leave.

Linnea Lueken: 18:04

I guess we can't afford to work here anymore. The same people will sue them for leaving, and we'll be all upset with them for trying to escape. It's it's it's an abusive situation. It's kind of remarkable to watch. But also, yeah, once again, this is just outsourcing your pollution.

Linnea Lueken: 18:21

So pollution. We don't believe that carbon dioxide is pollution on this show, but you are outsourcing your emissions to China, to India, to other countries. It's the same thing as when California has chased other major industries out of their state and to international sources. It's I don't know. It's there's there's if if climate change is caused by carbon dioxide emissions and there's no net decrease globally in carbon dioxide emissions from what they're doing, then then what are they doing other than virtue signaling?

Linnea Lueken: 19:00

You know? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They may even be making it worse as you indicated. You know, shipping is not free.

Linnea Lueken: 19:08

They're not using sailboats to do it. And even if they were, everything that you need in order to construct a sailboat comes from oil and gas at this point in time. It's it's I don't know. California is completely out of control.

Sterling Burnett: 19:21

Yep. You could you could ship all that oil much more easily, safely, and with less carbon emissions if you did it through pipelines to the refineries. Pipelines that exist, by the way. That's how they've been getting their oil that and and tanker, you know, trains. You know?

Sterling Burnett: 19:39

And the funny thing is, you know, we have this story. At the same time, California's actively asking these refineries, refineries that they're shutting down that are shutting down due to climate regulations at a cost to the refiners. They're now begging them to stay open despite the climate rules forcing them to close. They they they've accurately gone out and said, please stay open. What can we do to get you to stay open?

Sterling Burnett: 20:03

Well, you know, the answer is get rid of your climate rules and let us operate. You know, I don't know if Gavin Newsom will ever be president. But if he is, it reminds me of, when I was young, one of the bands my favorite bands in my youth was the Psychedelic Furs. They had a song called president gas. Well, he would be president gasbag or president gas price because that's, that's what he is.

Jim Lakely: 20:32

Yeah. I mean Go ahead, Anna.

Anika Sweetland: 20:34

Can I just jump in quickly? This topic, you know, it saddens me because it's exactly what's happening here in The UK. In the last few years, we've gone from 19 oil refineries to four, and I figured out that the reason this is happening is because these climate alarmist extremists, they're fanatical about this zero balance, this zero number on their carbon ledger. They're obsessed with getting this net zero number on their ledger sheet. So regardless of whether, you know, 10 times more carbon emissions are created in the world somewhere, as long as it doesn't reflect on them in their country or, constituency, then they don't care.

Anika Sweetland: 21:14

It's, yeah, a bit ironic and a bit sad.

Sterling Burnett: 21:18

Well, some people in our notes have commented that, Newsom is making, you know, is allying with Ed Milleband over there in England. They have similar goals and similar dreams, and that tells you, as far as I'm concerned, that should tell you all you need to know about whether he needs to be president of The United States because no offense to you, Melaband is is called mad Melaband for a reason.

Anika Sweetland: 21:41

I take absolutely no offense from that whatsoever.

Jim Lakely: 21:45

Didn't think so.

Anika Sweetland: 21:46

He's completely out of his mind. Most of the people in government here currently are. So, yeah, it's yeah.

Jim Lakely: 21:53

Yeah. Well, by the way, I did you guys have have hinted at it, but I actually looked this up. So about what the carbon footprint would be for and in this scheme. And it's this idea of just kinda offshoring your your carbon footprint as if that really matters, and in fact, makes things a lot worse. So just a a one way trip from The Bahamas to Long Beach, California, which is where all the imports come in.

Jim Lakely: 22:14

They have to go through the Panama Canal. That is 4,000 miles one way. That expels about six according to Grok, I asked them to do the calculations for me, 6,000 tons of c o two emissions. And if you have a 20 mile commute to work every day in your car, it would take you until the year 3051, taking those daily commutes five days a week every day to to match that one trip in the tanker. That's one thousand six hundred and twenty five years from now.

Jim Lakely: 22:45

But California is green, and, you know, it's it's it's it's madness. And these things need to be pointed out, and that's the whole net zero thing is a scheme to offshore things as well because it's not gonna happen.

Sterling Burnett: 22:57

Jim, you you're you're such an optimist. You say that these will go through the Panama Canal. Large oil tankers can't go through the Panama Canal. They have to go around the tip of South America to come up to California, Add thousands and thousands of miles to that round trip. Small or mid sized oil tankers, which they're getting rid of, don't don't fit to the Panama Canal.

Jim Lakely: 23:24

Well, great. Then it won't be till the year, like, 4212 then. You know? No worries. Alright.

Jim Lakely: 23:34

Let's move on to our next item here. Nature doesn't lie. Right? Well, we'll see. This comes from the Japan Times.

Jim Lakely: 23:43

I believe Sterling put this for us to look at this week as well, suggested it. Headline, Japan's godless lake warns of creeping climate change.

Sterling Burnett: 23:52

Mhmm.

Jim Lakely: 23:52

And forgive me for the length here. It's gonna take a little bit of setup here, but it's gonna be worth it. Settle in. Story begins. The priests and worshipers gathered before dawn, hoping that climate change had not robbed them of the chance to experience an increasingly rare communion with the sacred.

Jim Lakely: 24:09

A few dozen men, mostly in their sixties, were headed to Lake Suwa in Nagano Prefecture in search of a phenomenon called God's Crossing that has gone from reliable to elusive in recent decades. Known as omiwatari, it occurs when a crack opens up in the frozen lake surface, allowing shards of thinner ice to break through and form a ridge where local deities are believed to cross. For centuries, the priests of the nearby Yatsuguri Shrine has led an annual watch for the crossing, contributing to a unique record of a changing climate. This year's watch began on January 5, with Kiyoshi Miyasaka, a priest in the Shinto religion, leading the flock. One man carried a worn flag, another a giant axe.

Jim Lakely: 24:57

All wore jackets bearing the shrine's crest. They set out with hope, despite a seven year stretch in which God's Crossing had not appeared once. Quote, this is the start of the decisive thirty days, Miyasaka told them. But as they neared the water, dark and choppy in the predawn light, Miyasaka's staple smile disappeared. How pitiful, he said, lowering a thermometer into the water.

Jim Lakely: 25:22

Miyasaka's predecessors noted when the entire lake surface froze and when the Omigatari appeared. More recently, priests have added temperature readings and ice thickness. Consecutive records date all the way back to 1443 the shrine's priests only took over the job in 1683. The Chronicle shows data taken at a single location over hundreds of years and thanks to it we can now see what the climate was like centuries ago. We find no other meteorological archive comparable to it.

Jim Lakely: 25:58

Global researchers who study climate history see it as a very valuable set of observation records. God's crossing has not appeared since 2018, an absence that both scientists and believers attribute to climate change. We are seeing the signs of climate change in many places of the world, and Lake Suwa is no exception, Miyazaki said. Nature doesn't lie. Well, I guess that settles it then because it's been said at that at that holy lake there.

Jim Lakely: 26:31

So Sterling, I'll start with you here. What did what what do you make of this? Because I know there's there's a lot of, you know, so called or quote unquote ancient but long standing weather observation posts that go back centuries that that we do tend to look at from time to time. So what do you make of this?

Sterling Burnett: 26:52

Well, you know, I think this would certainly be longer standing record than anything than any you know, you got proxy data beyond that. As far as temperature stations, they don't go back, I don't think, to the sixteenth or or fourteenth century. To know what I think about this, I'd have to know what the record is in in the sense that, are you telling me that there's never before in the history of this lake been a period when God's Bridge did not appear? They don't say that in the story. They say it hasn't happened since 2018, but they don't say there's been no comparable period in the past.

Sterling Burnett: 27:35

So I wonder about that. But even if it were to be the case that there is no comparable period past, remember when they started recording this during the little ice age that the Earth experienced. So you start recording in the depths of the little ice age. You know, go back to England two hundred years ago, and the Thames is freezing over. If you start recording then suddenly, the Thames

Anthony Watts: 28:02

is well, it's never freezing over anymore.

Sterling Burnett: 28:04

Oh my god. Must be climate change. And and I guess it is climate change. It's a recovery from the little ice age when they first started recording this. It it it's unclear to me that solely c o two emissions has anything to do with this happening.

Sterling Burnett: 28:26

I'd like to look at the longer record, but even like I said, if if you start recording during a particularly cold spirit period that's unusual and it warms up, then the warming and the lack of ice formation isn't that unusual. My suspicion is this is what this has waxed and waned over the centuries. Maybe it was more consistent in the early part of the, Little Ice Age, but has become less consistent since we came out of it.

Jim Lakely: 29:00

Yeah. I mean, we we've we I don't know if we've mentioned it much on this show, but I know that there are several there are several temperature stations in The UK that go back, you know, a couple hundred years, and they have they don't show the kind of spikes that the models show and that the, you know, temperature has been well within natural variation. So I I'm I'm not I'm surprised, not surprised that a counterexample like that was not included in this as well.

Sterling Burnett: 29:30

Well, I would also ask

Jim Lakely: 29:32

You're muted, Anthony. You're you're you're talking you're our temperature station guy. Go ahead.

Anthony Watts: 29:37

Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I had muted myself because I've had a coughing fit this morning. You know, the the these older stations, you're right, they don't show these spikes.

Anthony Watts: 29:50

And the article itself, they don't wanna have any other kind of, you know, constraining problems or whatever. It's talking about real facts. That's a problem that we see in the media time and again, which is why we have climaterealism.com, where we go in and debunk the media on a regular basis. For example, I just did a an interview with the Toledo Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio asking about, you know, shorter winners. And the data that they used from Climate Central, which is an advocate group, went out and looked at all of these, urban stations, you know, airport stations and so forth and said, well, based on the temperature, winters are getting shorter.

Anthony Watts: 30:30

Well, duh, UHI. And they paid no attention to that whatsoever because that's inconvenient. That doesn't fit the narrative. So when I pointed it out to the Toledo Blade reporter, he actually put it in because, you know, it makes sense. If you have temperatures that are warming in cities alone and the cities are growing, getting bigger, more concrete, more asphalt, more jet exhaust, all that stuff, you're gonna see warmer temperatures, and you're going to see what appears to be shorter winters based on those temperatures.

Anthony Watts: 30:59

But that doesn't mean climate change is causing it.

Sterling Burnett: 31:02

I I don't wanna be sacrilegious, but, you know, does god really need? Can he not form a bridge on his own if he wants to to, form that bridge or not need a bridge at all, perhaps? I just

Anika Sweetland: 31:21

I mean, you know, water is traditionally very important in religion. So I understand the fascination of seeing a particular climate event to do with the water might occur and create traditions, etcetera, like the frost fairs in England. But, you know, there are the fifteen hundred year events, which are the warming and cooling cycles. So as you said, Sterling, you know, when they took these first records, the earth was in the little ice age, and a lot of people don't realize that actually this was global in nature. You know, they've studied many proxies, bee, pollen fossil, you know, all of the proxies.

Anika Sweetland: 32:12

And, basically, this was a worldwide thing. So, you know, a lot of people think that this only happened in Europe. But so they would be coming out of that into warmer weather, and, eventually, it will descend back, and they will get the bridge again.

Sterling Burnett: 32:29

And we'll all be suffering because the ice age came back and crops start failing and

Anika Sweetland: 32:37

Well, we're hoping for some technological advances that will save us, I think.

Sterling Burnett: 32:44

Build the dome. Yeah.

Jim Lakely: 32:48

Yep. Alright. Well, that just interesting. It's like and, you know, another thing we we cover, we call it the crazy climate news because, you know, literally anything can be tied to you know, tragic tragically to human caused climate change. So even even even that.

Jim Lakely: 33:07

So alright. Go

Linnea Lueken: 33:09

ahead. Sorry. I said it's as I've said before, Jim. It's like it's a it's a climate hypochondria.

Jim Lakely: 33:16

Absolutely. Yep. That's a great description of it for sure. Alright. Our fourth one here is, we're gonna be talk I wanna talk a little bit about climate well, supposedly, the fight against climate disinformation in Europe.

Jim Lakely: 33:29

And we wanted to have we were hoping to have Annika on a few weeks ago when I saw this tweet that she had to talk about this, and now we're so lucky enough to have her here with us today to talk about this. Andy, it's in the show notes. You might be able to bring the tweet up for us. In fact, I'll grab it on my own over here. So, you know, looking at this tweet, you had you had said this was back on February 2, I believe.

Jim Lakely: 33:56

Mhmm. You said, news. EU endorses landmark declaration on information integrity on climate change. And you said this matters because now it's only a matter of time until denying man caused man made climate change becomes illegal. And here, I'll read from their own statement here, and then you can you can tell us more about it, Annika.

Jim Lakely: 34:18

This comes from the EU. There's a lot of talk about climate change, but some of it is designed to mislead. Climate disinformation is the intentional spread of false or misleading information about climate change and climate action. This show is very guilty of that. It can take many forms, from denial and conspiracy theories to softer, more insidious arguments that seek to muddy the waters.

Jim Lakely: 34:41

Those who push climate disinformation deliberately finance, create, or spread content to destruct climate action. For example, they try to cast doubt on the scientific consensus or sway people's opinions in order to reduce pressure to regulate pollution or prepare for the impacts of climate change. And this comes from the European Commission's director general for climate action. So, Annika, we are all on this show very, very guilty of everything the EU is is now, as you say, might even turn into a actual crime one day.

Anika Sweetland: 35:15

Yeah. I mean, that's the way it's going. You know, the idea that you criticizing or disputing the climate alarmist narrative might be illegal, I mean, that's very worrying. Here in The UK, people are getting locked up every day, multiple people, for just writing their opinions online because it doesn't fit the signed off narrative that the government wants people to think. So in effect, the EU have shown their true colors here.

Anika Sweetland: 35:50

The EU seem to be narcissists. The technique that they're deploying here is known as psychological projection, and it's where someone attributes their own thoughts, motives, or behaviors to another person. So firstly, they're denying their behavior, lying about the origin of climatic change. They're attacking us, the realists, for raising it, and then through this climate facts matter campaign, they flip the script so that they become the victim and we become the aggressor. And the scariest part is that I know this is just a precursor to making it illegal, To have podcasts like this, to post about it online, they're, you know, throwing people in prison all over the place.

Anika Sweetland: 36:38

And, you know, if you take a look at the wording, it's just missing a few words on the end, so I will add those words now. Those who push climate disinformation deliberately finance, create, or spread content to obstruct climate action, for example, try to cast doubt in the scientific consensus or sway people's opinions in order to reduce pressure to regulate pollution or prepare for the impacts of climate change will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And those are just the missing words. Whether it's coming in six months, or six weeks, I don't know. Now the reason they're doing this, that's the most important factor.

Anika Sweetland: 37:19

They're doing it from the fear that they're finally being exposed, which they are. And they're doing this because people are waking up, and therefore, their policies are no longer being put through to filter trillions of dollars to them. They're seeing a substantial financial loss, and I think this is why we've seen this.

Jim Lakely: 37:41

Yeah. I mean, we've seen this in The United States. I mean, it it was it was this way until, frankly, Elon Musk bought Twitter, but the government was conspiring with social media companies to silence anyone who questioned the dogma of catastrophic human caused climate change, who presented data and facts that did not meet the, you know, meet the narrative, were suppressed. This channel has been suppressed like crazy, The Heartless Peaks YouTube channel, because of this show and the positions that we've taken for a long time on it. They're not arresting people in The United States for this just yet.

Jim Lakely: 38:15

Yet. Yet.

Anika Sweetland: 38:18

Yeah. I call America the free world. I think you guys are going to be a lot safer than we will overhear. But the fact that, you know, the show was demonetized, I mean, that that is just that's completely out of order.

Sterling Burnett: 38:32

You know, it sounds to me, and I've been following what's going on in UK on free speech, not on climate not just on climate, but on a variety of other matters. You know, people being locked up for speaking about religion. It's 1984. And, if you go to you know, Jim, when he first started reading it, he said something about they do the if they're doing this with the intention of misleading or something like that, I forget what the actual language was, but the the word intention was there. Intention is a is is is important in criminal law.

Sterling Burnett: 39:10

And I would just say, what if your intention is just having you know, presenting data, for others to consider? We used to call that education, or debate. And does it have the intention to persuade? Yeah. To persuade them that, you know, this view, but not to say climate doesn't change doesn't occur.

Sterling Burnett: 39:38

I've never disputed that. Now I will dispute whether there's evidence it's a disaster. But, is my intention to mislead? No. My intention is to inform.

Sterling Burnett: 39:52

And if all they're saying is if you inform people about something we don't like, your intention is necessarily to mislead, well, then we've really gone down the nineteen eighty four rabbit hole.

Anthony Watts: 40:06

Yeah. You know, I'm probably on the hit list as far as, people who are breaking the law with what's up with that and, you know, the law as they see it, you know, because we've been doing this for twenty years. We've been pointing out facts instead of disinformation. Of course, they call it disinformation because it doesn't align with their worldview. And, you know, I've had calls from people saying that, you know, I should be jailed.

Anthony Watts: 40:31

Some people had said I should be killed. I mean, you know, there's all these whack jobs out there that think that we are preventing the planet from healing. Well, that's not the case at all. The planet's doing just fine. We've got a more greening going on.

Anthony Watts: 40:46

We've got more productivity going on with our populations. Everything is great. We live in a golden age of success success as far as the planet is concerned, and the planet's actually doing better itself because of the greening and so forth. Yes. There are some pollution out there.

Anthony Watts: 41:01

Yes. There's some problems with that, but even so we've made great strides since the Environmental Protection Agency was put together in the early nineteen seventies by Nixon, I will point out, a republican. And, you know, we've got cleaner air, cleaner water, you know, cleaner everything, but it's never enough for these people. And if you push back against them, they call you a climate denier. They call you an earth wrecker.

Anthony Watts: 41:26

They call you a a a planet murderer. All these crazy ideas. So, yeah, I could probably end up getting arrested if I go into the EU, but I have no plans to visit the EU any soon.

Jim Lakely: 41:41

Might Well, I guess you're not coming to if we go back out there to counter the Davos conference, I guess you can't come. We'll just we'll pipe you in this way. But I just wanna point out that, as Andy, our our producer extraordinaire in the background, noted in our little private chat that What's Up With That was the most cited skeptical website globally on Reddit from 2020 I'm sorry, 2014 to 2022. So Anthony Watts has even a bigger target on his on his forehead from the people in the EU when it comes to pushing skepticism. But as everybody knows

Anthony Watts: 42:14

I think maybe I should change my I think maybe I should change my subtitle here from, at Watts up with that to outlaw. How's that?

Jim Lakely: 42:22

There you go. Global outlaw, Anthony Watts. Yeah. Because everybody knows when you're winning the argument and you have the facts and and and the the moral high ground on your side, the first thing you do is shut up and jail everyone who opposes you. So everybody knows that.

Sterling Burnett: 42:37

You know? The most stupid you know, in my opinion, the most stupid thing about the whole climate debate, all of this, is the idea that we're damaging the Earth. The Earth's not a living being, and regardless of what we do, the Earth will abide. There was a great science fiction book called Earth Bites. It was it was here before man.

Sterling Burnett: 42:55

It will be here after, man mankind and or humankind, not to be gender biased. But, you know, the problem the problem with all of this is that the people who are worried about climate change, they have a what I what I call a time slice view of the world. They've got an idea for this is the perfect environment for the Earth. Why why this? Why not the middle of an ice age?

Sterling Burnett: 43:26

The Earth doesn't care whether it's an ice age or hotter than today. Did the Earth complain when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth? You know, they're picking the point of view that they think is best from the once again, their god's eye point of view. They know better. They they say they follow nature.

Sterling Burnett: 43:45

Well, okay. Nature goes all over the place if that's what you really want. From a a human fecundity and, flourishing point of view, higher c o two is better for us than lower c o two.

Anthony Watts: 43:59

Yep.

Sterling Burnett: 44:00

But they've got somehow they picked, I don't know, the eighteen seventies or the seventeen hundreds or the nineteen twenties as the ideal, climate global average temperature. And it's like, where where did they come with that? You know, why why that and not some other? It was made out. Well,

Anika Sweetland: 44:22

that was actually a measurement to distinguish different planet temperatures from one another. There was only ever a global average so that they could say the Earth is 30 degrees. Venus is 400 degrees, etcetera. It was only ever meant to be used to compare planets against one another.

Jim Lakely: 44:41

There you

Anika Sweetland: 44:41

go. So it's useless.

Jim Lakely: 44:44

Great. Well, alright. Well, I wanna move on. I wanna talk a little about, you know, the main topic on this thing in the thumbnail is, you know, about kind of a a realism a journey to climate realism. And and, Annika, you are joining us as a speaker at Heartland's Climate Conference, April in Washington DC.

Jim Lakely: 45:02

Be sure to get your tickets now. Go to heartland.org. And as I mentioned earlier, you're with us in Switzerland for the Heartland Institute's World Prosperity Forum, and your speech was very popular with viewers. In fact, people have mentioned it in the chat today. So so I wonder if you could talk to our audience a little bit about, you know, for lack of better term, climate realism journey.

Jim Lakely: 45:23

You know, where did you start? You know, what did you think about the climate and the science at the time, and why? And how did you end up here with us today having fun on the climate realism show?

Anika Sweetland: 45:35

Well, so I had been bombarded with global warming propaganda my whole life. I grew up in the most isolated city in the world, Perth, and was very sheltered. And after convincing myself that I could find a solution to the world's problems, I decided to embark on a four year climate studies degree at the University of Western Australia. But what I was taught wasn't the cutting edge science I was assured I was learning. It was actually just a climate scientist training camp.

Anika Sweetland: 46:09

They were training me to be one of the 97% of scientists that agree on the science of climate change. There were no textbooks. We just read journal articles that comfortably fit the climate alarmist narrative, and therefore our lectures were the main source of information. So my lecture notes felt like the Bible, and most of the time, it didn't feel like an open scientific debate. It felt almost religious in tone.

Anika Sweetland: 46:42

So in that spirit, I thought I'd have a bit of fun and turn what I was taught in university into the 10 climate commandments. Are you ready?

Jim Lakely: 46:53

Yes. Let's go.

Anika Sweetland: 46:56

Thou shalt declare that c o two shall heat the globe until the oceans boil over. Thou shalt speak of consensus and not of uncertainty. Thou shalt speak not of the sun, sea, nor volcano, for man alone holdeth the thermostat of the earth. Thou shalt measure all storms against the year 1850. Thou shalt erase the medieval warmth and the little ice age, for they trouble thy narrative.

Anika Sweetland: 47:25

Blessed are the off setters for they shall inherit moral superiority. Thou shall not question the model projections. Thou shall repent of thy carbon footprint. Thou shall sacrifice thy gas boiler for the greater good, and thou shall treat each storm as prophecy fulfilled. So that is basically what I learned, and it was like a cult.

Anika Sweetland: 47:53

Now I see that. But, you know, I believe this stuff. Like I said in Zurich, I thoroughly respected my professors, the institution of university itself. You know, I worked really hard in school to get into the best university in my state. And, yeah, I really thought I was learning the cutting edge stuff in the world.

Anika Sweetland: 48:17

So going back through my lecture notes and when I saw things like carbon dioxide will starve trees, yeah, I mean, now that sounds so obvious. Right? For anyone listening, they're probably like, how did you believe that? But it was at the higher level of carbon dioxide that trees would starve. I mean, when you're brainwashed, there's just no logic.

Anika Sweetland: 48:43

So and for one of our practical assessments, we were assigned roles in a mock conference of the parties. You know, some of us were fossil fuel nations, some were small island states, some some were negotiators, some press, and it normalized the climate problem as something that needed to be negotiated, something that was political in nature, and this was the tragedy that they were never training scientists. They were simply training socialists to enact their agenda. Yeah. And so the things the science, it didn't add up.

Anika Sweetland: 49:24

I remember thinking in climate modeling, energy in doesn't really and it equal energy out in the real world. And I remember emailing one of my professors because I did things like hydrology and environmental systems engineering as well. And so when I was doing all the redox reactions and all of that, I could see from the math that there was loads of unaccounted energy in the system, loads of unaccounted for energy. And so I emailed one of my professors, and I said, look. Actually, I know this is what we're doing, but I think, actually, energy in doesn't equal energy out.

Anika Sweetland: 50:07

And I just never got a reply. And by that point, I was getting pretty fed up because things weren't adding up. And, yeah, it was a journey, you know, to realize that this thing I dedicated my life to was not real. And yeah. So now that I know the truth, I'm kind of like their worst nightmare.

Anika Sweetland: 50:31

And ever since my speech came online in Zurich, I've had a plethora of haters come after me because they are afraid that one of their climate scientists it's like, I've escaped a concentration camp, and I'm telling everyone what they're doing to people. Like, that is the reality for them. One of their brainwashed has become unbrainwashed, and, that's a dangerous place for them to be in, And that's the story.

Jim Lakely: 50:58

That's a great story, and it it's you know, you had some fun with the 10 commandments of climate alarmism, but it's it's apropos because we've we it is a religious I mean, maybe not everybody on this show agrees with me, but I can it's a cult. It's I call it the climate cult, and it because it is impervious. The the people that are in this climate cult are impervious to reason and data and science. Not all of them, obviously. You're not you're not one of those, and and there are many others who have been pulled out of the cult.

Jim Lakely: 51:29

But it is extremely difficult because there's two factors at play. If you allow data and observation and logic to penetrate your belief system, that's a lot. It's a belief system, and so it's very difficult emotionally and spiritually to pull away from it. I think our our friend Tom Harris from Canada, who's another climate realist, former climate alarmist, and who you know, one of the rare people that saw the data himself and decided and changed his mind because of that. He he makes the point when I speak to him on occasion that, you know, you can't if somebody reaches a position based on emotion, you can't get them out of it via logic.

Jim Lakely: 52:13

And if they if that you need to have make an emotional appeal. Maybe that's not universally true, but it seems generally true.

Sterling Burnett: 52:22

I I wrote a series of articles. I wrote started with writing for human events, and then I wrote for National Review calling climate the the climate change belief a religion and not not science seventeen years ago seventeen, eighteen years ago. Because I just did an explanation of what what religion does and how science works, and I pointed out that the climate science wasn't working like science. They take model assumptions and model outputs as a matter of faith, and faith has a a role in our lives. I I I'm a religious person myself, but faith and religion is not science.

Sterling Burnett: 53:04

They they they they satisfy different needs for human processing. And, you know, the main thing that got me was in science, you make a theory. You you, you set up a hypothesis, then you develop a theory to basically explain a phenomenon, and then you test it against reality. And, if you claim that if humans put c o two in the atmosphere, it causes warming and warming causes more hurricanes and more hurricanes aren't occurring, that should lead you to question not the data, but the theory. If if you if you do the same thing about tornadoes or wildfires, then none of those things are and pretty soon, as the data mounts, as as as your different prongs of predictions are disconfirmed, you should start saying, well, maybe we need a need a better explanation for the phenomenon that's going on than humans are causing c o two, human c o two is causing warming that's a catastrophe for the Earth, but they never questioned that.

Sterling Burnett: 54:11

In fact, they can make diametrically opposed predictions for the same place and same right now, you can find newspaper articles that say, the monsoon season is getting worse, and the monsoon season is getting less severe, both of which either of which are bad for the farming in monsoon, prone areas because they depend on the monsoon rains. You can find, you know, that all over the earth. You can find predictions that just pick your climate catastrophe, and they will say worse or better. You know? The snow.

Sterling Burnett: 54:47

Just recently, snow's been the we will find the end of snow. New York Times ran two separate articles over the years called the end of snow. Then they run articles saying, oh, climate change is causing more snow, and we can explain why. It's like, look. It can't cause both less snow and more snow in the same location in the same time period.

Sterling Burnett: 55:07

It can't. That's called impossible. That's a religion. You know, in religions, impossible things can happen, not in science.

Jim Lakely: 55:17

Man caused climate change is the alpha and the omega. Don't you know that, Sterling?

Sterling Burnett: 55:21

Well, that's why I'm the archbishop for Rannerberry. I'm the archbishop for realism.

Anika Sweetland: 55:30

Yeah. I mean, I forgot to mention my key thing about when I said all these people came after me. I forgot to mention that I know they are paid by the climate establishment establishment to to do do that. That. Just like, you know, in the fifties in America, you had misinformation officers going to people's houses and saying, look.

Anika Sweetland: 55:47

I know that you think this, but we're experts, and, actually, it's not true. So I know that they're paid. I know they're just doing it as a job, so I'm actually not huffed by it.

Anthony Watts: 55:58

Yeah. We just had a story on on WhatsApp with that just yesterday, I believe it was, where there was $2,000,000,000 worth of money being sent from the EU, not the EU itself, but from Europe, to The United States to fund these kinds of outfits. $2,000,000,000 and yet at the same time, the left accuses us of, you know, taking big oil money. We we've never gotten a freaking dime, not 1 dime. And, you know, they are just simply telegraphing what they're doing themselves.

Anthony Watts: 56:29

It's Yes. It's pathetic. There's the article right there.

Sterling Burnett: 56:32

Al Al Gore I I don't often say Al Gore is right, but he he made one claim. You know, he was citing someone else, but it's something to the effect. It's hard to admit you're wrong about something when you're paid to believe something.

Jim Lakely: 56:53

Mhmm.

Linnea Lueken: 56:56

Yeah. The another example of this recently that I was kind of, like, pulling my hair out this morning looking at article came out from Science Daily News, and it was a study from Queen Mary University of London that said that it's actually like they now that they've looked at the data on, I guess, like, invasive species or, like, species overturn in different niches, ecological niches. They used to say that climate change was gonna cause this to happen rapidly, and it was a bad thing because, you know, species that were used to being in these environments are being pushed out. And so new species are coming in, and it's a bad thing. Well, now they've come out with this study that says, actually, what they're calling now, like, eco ecosystem turnover is slowing down, and that's a bad thing because it means that they aren't adapting fast enough.

Linnea Lueken: 57:52

And they don't you know, the fact that invasive species aren't coming in is a bad thing because it means that it's just collapsing. And it's like, you don't get to have it both ways. I'm sorry. You've you've run out of

Anika Sweetland: 58:04

They have no say.

Linnea Lueken: 58:05

Everything can't be a bad thing. It's not possible. Yeah. I I just don't believe you anymore.

Anika Sweetland: 58:11

Everything is a bad thing, Linea.

Anthony Watts: 58:13

Okay. Come on, Linea. Get with the program. Climate change causes everything bad that changes.

Linnea Lueken: 58:19

Yeah. All change is always bad. That's what I've learned from the news.

Jim Lakely: 58:24

Well, even if you wanna paint we can wrap it up here. But even if we if you wanna paint us as the doubting Thomases of the of the climate cult, you know, at least at least in the Bible, Thomas was convinced of the resurrection by seeing proof, and he was convinced of it. And the the trouble with the climate cultists is that there is no proof. They can't all of their models are are false. They are not if if we were presented and we mean this.

Jim Lakely: 58:50

We say this on the show a lot. If you present us with evidence that we are wrong, that our our view our views on climate and energy use and is wrong, bring the evidence that will convince us because our positions are not emotionally based or spiritually based. They are logic and data based. And if you can show us the data that proves us wrong, bring it on. And, again, Bill and I any of you alarmists, we know that some of you I'm sorry to say alarmists, but you're just gonna have to deal with that.

Jim Lakely: 59:20

Gonna be I've been called a denier for the last twenty years. You're gonna have to put up with alarmists. I'm sorry. But if you wanna come to our climate conference and challenge the positions that the scientists that we're gonna have there are presenting, you're welcome to it. This is not invitation only.

Jim Lakely: 59:33

Buy your tickets today. Go to heartland.org, and it's it is filling up, so you're gonna wanna be there.

Sterling Burnett: 59:40

Sorry, Jim. Did you wanna continue?

Jim Lakely: 59:42

No. No. I just wanted to get into I I have no segue. None. So I'm just going to talk about our sponsor for this program that helps make it make it happen.

Jim Lakely: 59:51

Boo. And that I know Boo and Lin is booing. I had one, and then I lost it. So oh, well. So with a horrible segue, I can still tell you about the sponsor of this program, which is Advisor Metals.

Jim Lakely: 01:00:05

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Jim Lakely: 01:00:37

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Jim Lakely: 01:01:03

He refuses to work with proxies of the Chinese Communist Party, and he, like us, abhor the machinations and schemes of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. That is why we are so proud to have Advisor Metals as a sponsor. So you wanna diversify your portfolio, you wanna back up your IRA with real physical bullion of precious metals, go to climaterealismshow.com/metals. You can leave your information there, and Ira will make the whole process very easy for you. Climaterealismshow.com/metals, and be sure to tell them who sent you because that helps this show while you're helping your financial future.

Sterling Burnett: 01:01:41

Yep. If Thank you for

Jim Lakely: 01:01:42

your attention to this matter.

Sterling Burnett: 01:01:44

If I could just say, I found the quote. Was up in Sinclair that that Gore was quoting, and it says, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. That applies so well to all the academics working on climate change and all the bureaucrats, staffing agencies who are raking in, and who have raked in billions of dollars on climate change. Meteorology, climatology, meteorology, those departments have raked in more money in the past fifteen years on the climate scam than they cumulatively received throughout history before that. What?

Sterling Burnett: 01:02:28

If it goes away, their funding does. If we start devoting funding to actually some curing something like hunger in the developing countries or cancer, they're out of work.

Jim Lakely: 01:02:39

Well, we've we've said it on this program a million times. I mean, Greenpeace spends more on catering than the entire budget the annual budget of the of the Heartland Institute and our allied organizations. And it's just the whole idea that we're swimming in in fossil fuel money, you know, if oh, if it was only so. It is totally not so. We say what we say on principle, and we are supported by other men and women of principle who think the message is important.

Jim Lakely: 01:03:03

That's it. We don't take money from NGOs. We don't take money from government. It's it's always look. We have another program called In the Tank from the Heartless Institute.

Jim Lakely: 01:03:13

We talk about lots of things, not just climate. And, man, leftism is just projection all the way down. Everything they accuse their opponents of doing is exactly what's actually happening in their own shops, So don't get me started on that. What we should get started on, though, is the q and a, everyone's favorite part of the show. So, Lanea, take it away.

Linnea Lueken: 01:03:45

Alright. I wanna bring up this comment that ClimateBell, frequent viewer of ours, had. It wasn't a question, but I thought it was good to read. He said, there are honest but careless climate scientists who assumed someone did their computations properly and parrot their narrative without checking, but others who knowingly support dishonest science. Yeah.

Linnea Lueken: 01:04:09

And that's the thing that's frustrating across the board in this area. There are scientists who are earnest, but maybe a little bit lazy or at least a little bit too trusting in their colleagues and assume that people are doing checking when they're not doing checking. That's a big problem in peer review right now in every area of science is people not actually checking the math the way that they're supposed to when these papers are going up. So, yeah, that is a difficult situation. Alright.

Linnea Lueken: 01:04:39

So Spirlock. I I'm not sure how to pronounce this Spirularch. Spiral arch. Spiral arch. Yes.

Linnea Lueken: 01:04:48

Is I have not seen you in the chat before, I don't think so. Welcome. But I'm going to address this question here. Alright. Anthony, this is for you.

Anthony Watts: 01:04:56

Well, hold on a second. I'm doing some research. So

Jim Lakely: 01:04:59

I'm

Anthony Watts: 01:04:59

gonna defer that question, and come back to it. Okay? Sure. Alright. There was a

Sterling Burnett: 01:05:04

book published there was a book published a couple years ago called Black Carbon, and it argues that a lot of the, change in albedo and warming is due to soot that has fallen upon, white surfaces, causing the melting and, causing heating.

Linnea Lueken: 01:05:22

Sterling, you gotta let me address the question first so that our our audio only listeners know what we're talking about. Alright. So this question was, what

Anthony Watts: 01:05:30

percentage I got an answer.

Anika Sweetland: 01:05:32

Okay. What percentage of

Linnea Lueken: 01:05:33

the darkening of Earth's albedo or reflectivity to space is due to the proliferation of near black solar panels?

Anthony Watts: 01:05:41

You have to actually surprised me. I You

Sterling Burnett: 01:05:43

gotta you gotta let her finish. She just told me that. You need to listen too.

Linnea Lueken: 01:05:49

Okay.

Anthony Watts: 01:05:51

Sorry. So I had a calculation done. Okay. And this is based on 2024 data. So this is using capacity and acres per megawatt to help calculate this.

Anthony Watts: 01:06:06

The earth's land surface area is about 149,000,000 square kilometers. Solar panels occupy roughly One twentieth of 1% or about point o four to point o 5% of the Earth's surface is covered by solar panels. So that's not a lot. And therefore, probably is not a factor in any kind of changes in in the climate. We we see changes that are larger than that based on seasons.

Sterling Burnett: 01:06:39

Well, you might see local changes. Right? If if we talk about the urban heat on effect. Well, local albedo might change. The heating might be caused some of it might be caused by solar panels, but not you know, global average temperature doesn't seem like probably largely affected.

Linnea Lueken: 01:06:58

Yeah. Alright. Awesome. Okay. Sterling, this one's for you.

Linnea Lueken: 01:07:02

From Wheelman, he says iron fillings are a good thing or iron filings are a good thing to spread in the ocean.

Anthony Watts: 01:07:10

Yeah. This is an old

Sterling Burnett: 01:07:13

I think

Anthony Watts: 01:07:14

she said the question was

Sterling Burnett: 01:07:17

for me, Anthony. Alright. I think that's disagree. Go ahead first. Yes.

Sterling Burnett: 01:07:23

K. So we don't have a shortage of iron filings. We do milling. We have a lot of it. There are places in the ocean that are called dead spots because they don't have minerals, for life to congregate.

Sterling Burnett: 01:07:38

They don't start the, phytoplanktons and the planktons, the whole food chain. And they did experiments where they could dump, iron filings in the ocean. It doesn't cost a lot. The filings are considered waste anyway. And they started the food chain, and, fisheries improved.

Sterling Burnett: 01:07:59

And they were worried about carbon dioxide. Turns out it takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Now I'm not worried about the latter. But if we can create more places where sea life thrives, that doesn't seem to be a bad thing to me. I'm I'm I'm not one of those that says we don't tamper with mother earth.

Sterling Burnett: 01:08:17

Every time we log, we tamper with mother earth. Every time we build a new subdivision, we tamper with mother earth. I don't see this, but just one more thing that we might do to make life a little bit better.

Linnea Lueken: 01:08:29

Yep. It's the same reason you, not sinking logs in the, Arctic or Antarctic, but sinking logs in a pond to make fish habitat is a fun thing to do as well. Not worrying about carbon dioxide on that one. Alright. So Ma Mason says the graph by Hapr Linzen to show how concentrations go up, how when concentrations go up, the greenhouse effect does not go up linearly.

Linnea Lueken: 01:08:58

Is there a way that we can describe how this works if someone can visualize it?

Anika Sweetland: 01:09:06

I mean, I would just say that because c o two doesn't really have a huge relationship with temperature I mean, that's the reality really, isn't it? Not a direct relationship, not one we've seen produced again and again. There's so many variables that go into it. So yeah. Lynne, do you think that that would be an equation as it were?

Linnea Lueken: 01:09:32

Well, of course. Yeah. There's an equation. That's what they're referring to here is the logarithmic, basically, relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide. Anthony has a good model for this.

Linnea Lueken: 01:09:45

I also have a model for this. There's a whole bunch of different, like, examples that you can give. Mhmm. I can let Anthony tell his, I think, the soup model, and I can also tell my windowpane model. But Anthony?

Anthony Watts: 01:09:59

Yeah. Well, the soup model is basically you go to a restaurant, you order a bowl of soup, you taste it. Yeah. It's kinda bland. I need some need some salt.

Anthony Watts: 01:10:08

Put some salt in the soup. Taste it again. It's a little better, but I need some more salt, I think. So you salt it yet again and you accidentally put too much salt in it. Now you taste it and it's too salty.

Anthony Watts: 01:10:22

Well, no matter how much more salt you would add to it at that point, it's still going to taste too salty. Your taste buds response to the salt is saturated, and that's how it works with the atmosphere. As you get more and more c o two, at some point, you reach a saturation point, and no matter how much more you add, the response is the same. And so that's my model on it or my analogy.

Linnea Lueken: 01:10:46

Yeah. And and I had a professor in college when I was taking remote sensing that explained it like, if you have a window pane and you put strips of masking tape that's semi transparent, you know, kinda like painter's tape on it. You know, the the strips for carbon dioxide only go in a certain location, only block certain wavelengths of the light coming in through the window. And every time you add more, you're just putting the same strips on top of where strips already are. And there is a little bit of a blurring effect over time, but at a certain point, they're not blocking any more light no matter how many more you add.

Linnea Lueken: 01:11:23

So that my example works a lot better if you can, like, actually see the see the window pane example that our professor gave, but that's the one that I have. So there's a couple different examples. Yeah. And above us only Skye mentions that Will Happer has a red paint on the barn example as well. There's tons and tons.

Linnea Lueken: 01:11:45

So alrighty. And l t Oracle truth also says, I've been getting a lot of articles in my news feed about orcas and Greenland warning of climate catastrophe. What's up with that? I have not seen an orca thing.

Sterling Burnett: 01:12:01

I haven't seen one either.

Anthony Watts: 01:12:02

I I've seen it, and, basically, it's just another, unverified claim. You know, climate change is killing the orcas, making the orcas get less food. You know, pick any argument you want. It's just another it's just like the the polar bears. You know?

Anthony Watts: 01:12:20

The polar bears, they can't really exploit that too much anymore. So now they're going after the orcas.

Linnea Lueken: 01:12:24

Yeah. It's harder to count a a whale, I guess.

Sterling Burnett: 01:12:28

Except I've seen how the orcas play with their food, and I have a lot less sympathy for them than it it it's hard for me to generate tears after seeing an orca toss around a seal so his kid can learn how to hunt.

Linnea Lueken: 01:12:44

Yeah. Albert says, question. Will you please talk a bit about the BBC lying about the state of the Great Barrier Reef? I did see this one. That it was pretty remarkable recent article.

Linnea Lueken: 01:12:56

The BBC said that the Great Barrier Reef has suffered the worst, like, coral die off in all of history or whatever. And the way that they framed it made it sound like the coral the Great Barrier Reef is just gone. It's just devastated. And then you look at the chart, you can there's available current data on coral extent, and it's still at, like, all time highs. So it's just nonsense.

Anthony Watts: 01:13:21

Yeah. It is. But, you know, it just goes along with their narrative of we're only gonna report what's changed and what's bad. We're not gonna report anything that's good like recovery as that would be against the narrative.

Sterling Burnett: 01:13:31

Well, it's also confusing bleaching events with death. You know, they've had some large bleaching events. They've had multiple years of large bleaching deaths in the last I mean, bleaching events in the past decade. But the vast majority of the coral recovered and other parts of the coral will grow continue to grow. So it keeps setting records despite these bleaching events, which aren't death.

Anthony Watts: 01:13:55

Right. And the bleaching events are actually part of the natural cycle for coral. Coral has a symbiotic relationship with these, you know, little tiny, algae organisms and so forth. And, you know, they're basically, you know, renting space in the coral. You know, the the coral is an algae high rise, so to speak.

Anthony Watts: 01:14:13

Right? So every once in a while, the coral says, hey, you know what? I'm cleaning house. Get out. And then once it does that, then the spaces are available again and they come back right back in.

Anthony Watts: 01:14:24

It does not mean death, just as Sterling said.

Anika Sweetland: 01:14:26

Mhmm. And a little interesting note there is that corals also bleach in cool water, not just warmer water.

Sterling Burnett: 01:14:32

Yeah. They bleach in response to all sorts of they bleach in response to all sorts of things. Silt, farm runoff, all sorts of things can make it harder for them to, colonies to expand.

Linnea Lueken: 01:14:51

Yep. Alright. We have a great question here for Annika from our friend, m Johansson, who says, is Annika working with any of the climate realism groups here in the EU SSR? That would be the Global Warming Policy Foundation or Clintel, etcetera.

Anika Sweetland: 01:15:10

I hope to. Do get in touch if you're with one of these organizations. I would love to be affiliated with all climate realism groups. Yes. That's all I can say, really.

Sterling Burnett: 01:15:23

I advocate Lois reach out to her, and she works with Heartland UK Europe.

Anika Sweetland: 01:15:29

I would really like that. Yeah.

Linnea Lueken: 01:15:31

Alright. I have another question for Annica. This one from Above Us Only Sky who says, would you consider consulting with any political parties in The UK on climate and energy issues in future elections?

Anika Sweetland: 01:15:46

So I think I'll kind of answer that question in reverse. So I've been sort of in talks a little bit. Basically, the only political party here in The UK that is aligned with my views on energy, excluding the new political party that came out a couple of days ago, is reform. So they're the only party that would want to do things like leave the climate change act, leave United Nations infrastructure just like America has. So, yeah, I actually wrote a paper, a net zero paper, which I've shown to the party, and we've been talking about it and discussing it.

Anika Sweetland: 01:16:31

So, yeah, that's actually what I always wanted to do in university, was be an adviser, an energy adviser to the minister for climate change. So I definitely want to, you know, work on energy policy in this country. I mean, it's in a dire state at the moment. And, as we all know here on the show, the solution is really obvious as to the optimal kind of energy strategy. So definitely, yes, I am, and, watch watch that space, I guess.

Jim Lakely: 01:17:05

You're muted, Linea.

Linnea Lueken: 01:17:06

Man, it got me.

Sterling Burnett: 01:17:08

She pulled the gym.

Jim Lakely: 01:17:09

You did it.

Linnea Lueken: 01:17:10

With gym today. Okay. So here's here's a kind of a little bit of a sarcastic question from Minnesota Beekeeper who says, wasn't the younger driest global warming caused by the Clovis culture driving SUVs and heating caves with evil fossil fuels?

Anthony Watts: 01:17:25

Well, yeah, that's that's just about as good as any other crazy theory I've heard.

Sterling Burnett: 01:17:30

That that's currently the reigning theory.

Linnea Lueken: 01:17:34

Thank you very much.

Jim Lakely: 01:17:36

They they used

Sterling Burnett: 01:17:37

to do their climate models on abacuses, and they were and and the math the math added up.

Linnea Lueken: 01:17:43

Yeah. They push bones around on the cave floor. Steven Lindsay says, question to Annika. How many times once told by your professor did you think, well, that doesn't add up? Were the contradictions overwhelming and same to everyone else?

Anika Sweetland: 01:18:02

Only towards the end did I kind of realize this isn't adding up and, you know, I wasn't on campus as much because I was working on my dissertation. So you know? But when I didn't hear back from the emails, and I got kind of frosty reception from my professors about a few questions. I mean, when you're in that power dynamic, you're not kind of, like, brave enough as, like, a 20 year old to be like, I must be right, and they're wrong. I thought, oh god.

Anika Sweetland: 01:18:33

That must have just sounded really stupid. Oh god. I'm just not worth even replying to. So, you know, it wasn't until I very much was out of the system and grew up a bit that I could reframe the narrative.

Linnea Lueken: 01:18:50

Alrighty. Awesome. Okay. So another question for Annika from our good friend Stan Goldenberg who says, what are the current hopes? So make a forecast, so to speak, for The UK to come back to their senses regarding man made climate change.

Anika Sweetland: 01:19:09

Well, I mean, I was asked this recently. You know, do I think that the next political party of the day should come out and say, hey. Look. We don't believe in this man made climate change theory. And my response was that I don't actually think it's necessary to say something so controversial because, obviously, the media would have a field day with it and all of that.

Anika Sweetland: 01:19:33

But I think actions speak so much louder than words. So I think just leaving the climate change infrastructure would say everything that needs to be said, And my forecasts are that we do exactly that. We repeal the climate change act, scrap net zero, and all of that other nonsense to take back our economy. You know, at the moment, there's these crazy taxes, people trying to drill oil in the North Sea, which has just become illegal, and we have the highest quality crude, gas here in the world, and, we're not allowed to drill it. And companies that are here at the moment drilling it, they're taxed 78¢ on the dollar.

Anika Sweetland: 01:20:18

So it is simply not profitable, and this is exactly what's been happening with oil refineries. They've had to shut down because it's too expensive. So, yeah, I've come to my senses. Lots of people in the country have come to their senses. It's just when will we get into parliament so we can make those changes.

Sterling Burnett: 01:20:36

Can would it help to just shift the conversation? You said you said just start taking actions. Shift the conversation to what they've done here, which is affordability. Look. Do you wanna keep heating your home?

Jim Lakely: 01:20:48

It's Yeah.

Sterling Burnett: 01:20:49

It's we we recognize. We. I am now whatever party you want me to be. I am now recognizing that we have an affordability crisis, and here's the solution. Get rid of things that are making energy more costly, that are restricting access to energy.

Sterling Burnett: 01:21:06

They just happen to the climate policies that, by the way, haven't stopped temperatures or c o two emissions from rising at all, but we're gonna focus on affordability. Let let Miliband and and his talk about climate change.

Anika Sweetland: 01:21:20

Yeah. And this is the argument that is being pushed, you know, is the economic argument. It's completely making the country poor. It's making our bills the highest in the developed world. Commercial energy prices here are the highest in the developed world.

Anika Sweetland: 01:21:34

But even so, you know, the left still say, well, there's so much money in green energy, and, actually, our bills are going to be cheaper one day. So they just say the exact same thing we're saying. It's just it's beyond, but people are definitely feeling it in their pockets big time.

Linnea Lueken: 01:21:56

Absolutely. Alright. So we're we're almost out of time here, but I'm gonna get us this question, which I think is quite good from Above Us Only Sky. This is a question for the whole panel, so we'll go around to everybody. But when did you each have your light bulb moment, if you did have a light bulb moment, that the climate change narrative did not match reality?

Anthony Watts: 01:22:19

I'll go first. My moment came when I met the former state climatologist of California, James Goodridge. And he started showing me some of his work. And his work was all data driven work. But he also introduced me to some of the weather stations that he had found in California where one, for example, at the Mount Hamilton Observatory, you know, where they've got telescopes and scientists running around like, you know, everywhere.

Anthony Watts: 01:22:52

They had the temperature shelter right next to an incinerator. And so it's like, what? Really? And then he showed me another example like that. And he says there's bunches of these all over the state.

Anthony Watts: 01:23:06

And and that's when I started looking into it. And that's what got me really going, looking into these the way these temperature stations were placed and how they'd been compromised. And once I saw the magnitude of this problem, I realized the temperature record can't possibly be correct. That was my light bulb moment.

Sterling Burnett: 01:23:26

I'm I'm not

Jim Lakely: 01:23:27

sure I had a

Sterling Burnett: 01:23:27

light bulb moment. I look. I came at it from a as a skeptic from the start. I think that's the position you start with with any new theory. They had a they had a novel theory.

Sterling Burnett: 01:23:38

They predicted lots of things, and I said, let's see how it works out. Let's see how the theory plays out in reality. I will be skeptical until I'm convinced, and I've just never been convinced.

Anika Sweetland: 01:23:53

That's a really good question. I think for me, it was when I saw the ice core data, and I saw that, you know, the temperature had been higher at different times in history and that it was a kind of predictable cycle. That's when I realized.

Jim Lakely: 01:24:14

Jim? Yeah. I mean, for me, I mean, I I mentioned this, I think, a couple of shows ago. I was a journalist at the Pitt News, the University of Pittsburgh student newspaper, back in the early nineties. Al Gore was sending out free copies of his book, Earth and the Balance, and I started flipping through that.

Jim Lakely: 01:24:29

And even though I'd only taken a few science courses, I was trying to be a writer after all, I thought he was I thought he was full of shit right from the beginning. None of that really made sense to me. So my light bulb my light bulb has been screwed in the top of my head from the beginning.

Anthony Watts: 01:24:45

I would like to amend my first answer to say that I the real light bulb moment for me came when I got my $2,000,000 check from ExxonMobil.

Jim Lakely: 01:24:58

That's getting clipped. Oh, boy.

Linnea Lueken: 01:25:01

Yep. Oh, they're gonna spread that all over the Internet now.

Anthony Watts: 01:25:05

You know what? Let them because it it wouldn't matter. They they would do it anyway. They all. Every one of those people thinks that we are in the pocket of big oil when we've never gotten a dime.

Anthony Watts: 01:25:16

You know? It's crazy. The

Linnea Lueken: 01:25:19

I guess, I think I've mentioned part of my I mean, I was always pretty skeptical just because I'm I'm not a like, I grew up in a fairly conservative household and stuff with people who were fairly skeptical. But the moment where I realized that, like, oh, nobody knows what they're talking about was when I was in middle school. And I this is, like, petty, but this is where I became not just like a whatever. Who cares? This stuff is everywhere.

Linnea Lueken: 01:25:47

It's whatever, like, skeptic. And into, like, actively researching mode was when I was in, like, seventh or eighth grade, and all of our classes were in this pilot program where they introduced climate into every single class that we were taking. So I was being just bombarded with it left and right. And then a author that I had been enjoying, like, their book series, one of their books had, like, a climate narrative thing in it. And it was literally like a young adult novel series and it made no sense for them to just shoehorn it in there.

Linnea Lueken: 01:26:24

And so I was already kind of tired of it. And then one of my teachers told me that polar bears were not good at swimming. And so that's why they were being killed because the ice was melting and they were going to drown. And I thought, well, that's not true. I knew it because I was that kid that had the, like, zoo books.

Linnea Lueken: 01:26:41

You know? And so I knew that wasn't true. So then I was like, oh, my teachers don't know what they're talking about either. So now I'm, like, actively against this, not just, like, passively against this. But Alright.

Linnea Lueken: 01:26:55

Jim, I'm handing it back to you. That is all the questions that we have.

Jim Lakely: 01:26:58

Alright. And that will do it for this episode of the Climate Realism Show. Before we go, I wanna remind everybody, again, well, I think the third or fourth time, we are putting on the sixteenth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington DC, April. The the wonderful, Annika Sweetland will be on the program. So you're gonna if you wanna meet her and hear her speak in person, you're gonna wanna be there.

Jim Lakely: 01:27:22

And you can go to heartland.org. There's a feature there that you can click to go to the special climate conference webpage where you can get your tickets, see more of the list of speakers and the program that we have. We really hope to see every fan of this show there or at least as many as we can fit into the ballroom. I wanna thank our streaming partners, Junk Science, CFAC, c o two coalition, Climate Depot, What's Up With That, and Heartland UK Europe. I wanna thank our regular panelists, of course, Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, Lanea Luken.

Jim Lakely: 01:27:51

And, again, thank you so much, Annika Sweetland, for being on the show. I hope this not gonna be your last time you'll be on here again because I think we all had a lot of fun. And I wanna thank our audience, especially those of you in the chat that watch us live every Friday at 1PM eastern time on Fridays, and we will see you again next Friday. Bye bye.

Anika Sweetland: 01:28:11

Bye. How dare you?