While the political tide has shifted right in the United States – and away from the climate alarmist agenda – our neighbors to the north are still currently all-in for the economically ruinous and scientifically unnecessary Net Zero agenda. But climate realists in the Great White North are pushing back, and a new book released in conjunction with The Heartland Institute will serve as an important weapon in the scientific and public relations arsenal.
On Episode #135 of The Climate Realism Show, we welcome the co-authors of Energy & Climate at a Glance: Canadian Edition, which outlines why the climate plans of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate plans will cause economic hardship in Canada and will do nothing measurable to improve the global climate. Heartland’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the week and take your questions in the chat. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET this Friday and every Friday.
Support the show: https://donate.heartland.org/campaign/599325/donate
Visit our guests at :
https://friendsofscience.org/
https://www.icsc-canada.com/
https://sensiblechange.ca/
On Episode #135 of The Climate Realism Show, we welcome the co-authors of Energy & Climate at a Glance: Canadian Edition, which outlines why the climate plans of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate plans will cause economic hardship in Canada and will do nothing measurable to improve the global climate. Heartland’s Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will also cover some of the Crazy Climate News of the week and take your questions in the chat. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET this Friday and every Friday.
Support the show: https://donate.heartland.org/campaign/599325/donate
Visit our guests at :
https://friendsofscience.org/
https://www.icsc-canada.com/
https://sensiblechange.ca/
Creators & Guests
Host
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.
And that's what climate change is about. It is literally not figuratively a clear and present danger.
Greta Thunberg:We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
Jim Lakely:The ability of c 02 to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.
Anthony Watts:The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.
Sterling Burnett:That's not how you power a modern industrial system.
Andy Singer:The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.
Sterling Burnett:You know who's trying that? Germany. 7 straight days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.
Linnea Lueken:They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910. Today is Friday.
Jim Lakely:That's right, Greta. It is Friday. It's my favorite day of the week and should be yours as well because it is the day that the Heartland Institute live streams the Climate Realism Show. My name is Jim Lakeley. I'm the vice president of the Heartland Institute and your host for today.
Jim Lakely:You know, there is nothing else like the Climate Realism Show streaming anywhere all around the world, actually. We have a lot of international, viewers that are in in the chat with us on YouTube right now. So I hope all of you will like, share, and subscribe, and leave your comments underneath this video. These all convince YouTube's algorithm to smile upon this program and to get the show in front of more people. And as a reminder, because big tech and, the legacy media do not approve at all of the way we cover climate and energy policy on this here program.
Jim Lakely:Our YouTube channel has been demonetized. So if you wanna support this program, please visit heartland.org/ tcrs. That's heartland.org/tcrs. That stands for the Climate Realism Show, and you can help donate, some a little bit of money to help us make this show every single week. Any support you can give is a warmly welcome and greatly appreciated.
Jim Lakely:And we also wanna thank our streaming partners, those being junk science.com, CFACT, Climate Depot, and what's up with that. So we have a pretty special, show to get to today with our friends from the great white north. But first, let's introduce our usual panel here. That's and one of the people there is Anthony Watts. He is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and the publisher of the most influential climate website in the world.
Jim Lakely:What's up with that? We also have Sterling Burnett. He is the director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute. And also, of course, Linnea Lukin. She's a research fellow for energy and environment policy at Heartland.
Jim Lakely:Welcome to our usual panelists and our 2 very special guests from up in, Kanakistan, also known as Canada, north of the border here in the United States. We have, we have Tom Harris, of the International Climate Science Coalition and Ron Davison. He's the president of the Friends of Science Society, both fantastic Canadian organizations that are like us, nonprofits, and could also use your help. Welcome Ron and Tom to the program.
Tom Harris:Hey. Nice to be on.
Ron Davison:Nice to meet all of you. It's great to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks.
Jim Lakely:We're looking forward to, having a discussion with you. They're on the program today, folks. The Heartland Institute's, actually, I should say 2 of the co lead authors of a new book called Energy and, Energy and Climate at a Glance, Canadian edition. Sterling Burnett and, and Ron were the 2 lead authors, and Tom Harris was a a contributing author there's several men, involved in that project. And it's a timely book being released just this week to fight back at net zero nonsense up there in canada Fellas, I saw a chart and we've actually Linnea was on the in the tank podcast from the Heartland Institute yesterday at this very time, and I brought up a chart that showed that in every developed country, the ruling class had been voted out, over the last year.
Jim Lakely:And it's the first time that's happened. They were tracking, they were tracking elections since 1905, and this is the first time that we get to the end of the year, and every single incumbent party and, ruling class were voted out. You guys are next.
Ron Davison:Yep. Except us. I
Anthony Watts:hope so.
Ron Davison:It's coming. It's coming.
Jim Lakely:It's coming. Great. And this book is gonna help make the case, for climate realism up in Canada, which is something that, you 2 guys have been fighting for for a long time. And now I think the fight is really gonna, really gonna come on. But if
Sterling Burnett:I We're also Go ahead.
Tom Harris:If I
Sterling Burnett:can interject real quickly. So the the booklet is published by Canadians for a sensible climate policy, and, you can find it, at Friends of Science on sale.
Jim Lakely:Yep. We'll put that up on
Ron Davison:I just wanna point out, our administrator is out of town for a couple days, so it will be a few days before we can get it.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. And you can order
Tom Harris:it through ICSC as well at icsc dash canada.com, starting in about a day.
Jim Lakely:Great. Well, we'll we'll have the, websites where you can get the book, scrolling across the bottom of the screen here as we move along in the program today. And yeah, as I mentioned just before he went on air, I'm wearing a flannel shirt in, in tribute to our Canadian friends. I feel warm and fuzzy already. Alright.
Jim Lakely:I have a lot of them. Yes. Yes. This is actually the isn't this the formal shirt in a Canadian tuxedo? Isn't this what you have underneath?
Tom Harris:Yeah. Bring on the global war, baby.
Linnea Lueken:I thought I thought the Canadian tuxedo was all denim.
Jim Lakely:Choice. That is true. I have a denim jacket. Gosh. Darn it.
Jim Lakely:Maybe if I'm off camera, I'll go get it. Alright. So here we go. So you guys should, Ron and Tom, you should have some fun. We like to start off our show, every week with, with something we call the crazy climate news of the week, and here we go.
Jim Lakely:I made that drop just for Anthony. He never tires of looking at it always makes him smile the good old bill 9. Alright.
Anthony Watts:I wonder I got a I wonder, you know, with all these celebrities that are leaving the United States now supposedly because Trump got elected, is Bill Nye going to go to Canada? And if he does, would you accept him?
Tom Harris:No. Put a dunce cap on it and make a decision harder. Yes. Yes.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Well let's see here.
Tom Harris:Let's see
Jim Lakely:if we can get this story up here on the screen. Andy, our our producer extraordinaire is off today. So I'm trying to host and produce at the same time. So if you see a little bit of a hiccup, I hope you won't, but that'll be the cause. Alright, here we go.
Jim Lakely:This is a story from The Daily Skeptic, which is spelled with the c so that must be either in the UK or Canada, you guys misspell things all the time, but that's okay. We have it here. Science Shock. UK Met Office is quote, inventing temperature data from 100 non existent stations. I think guys that we've touched on this in the in past shows recently, but let's hit on this again because I think it's very important.
Jim Lakely:I'll read a bit from the story. Shocking evidence has emerged that points to the UK Met Office inventing temperature data for over 100 non existent weather stations. The explosive allegations have been made by citizen journalist Ray Sanders and sent to the new Labor Science Minister Peter Kyle, MP. Following a number of freedom of information requests to the Met Office and diligent fieldwork visiting individual stations, Sanders has discovered that 103 stations out of 302 sites supplying temperature averages do not exist. Quote, how many how would any reasonable observer know that the data was not real and simply made up by a government agency?
Jim Lakely:Asked Sanders. He calls for an open declaration of likely inaccuracy of existing published data, quote, to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions, unquote. Now Anthony Anthony Watts, you might be the best person in the entire world to talk about this issue. You're currently, working on a project with Heartland to set up new temperature stations, that actually will exist all across America and hopefully internationally. You've written an important report for Heartland on how most of the temperature stations that we do have down here in the lower forty eight, that do exist are actually pretty much garbage and, and and run too hot.
Jim Lakely:So, this story is starting to get a little pickup, but maybe it needs to get more pickup.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Well, I would say, let's use the Dan Rather defense on it. These are fake but accurate. Here's here's what's going on. The this started in the United States, and I will credit Tony Heller for finding a number of these.
Anthony Watts:I also found some myself. But the bottom line is is that the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, considers continuity of record to be more important than the accuracy of the record. And so what's been happening is is that as stations close due to attrition, you know, people that have been, volunteer observers, they get old, they get tired, they don't wanna do it anymore, and the station closes, they can't find an alternate. And so what happens is is NOAA fills in the data from surrounding stations and creates a continuity of record, which is completely false. It's made up on the spot.
Anthony Watts:So the UK, the the Met Office, you know, they played follow the leader, and so they're doing the exact same thing over there. It's one of these stupid artifacts of their homogenization process. And in no branch of science that I can think of, would this kind of making up data just to make a continuity of record be tolerated? It should be stopped and stopped right now.
Tom Harris:I I used to do that in high school all the time with my physics experiments. Is that not okay?
Sterling Burnett:Just just fill in whatever gets you the answer you want. Yeah. Which is, of course, what they're doing. The interesting thing about this story, as you know, Jim, I wrote about it in, climate change weekly this week. And, it's not just that over a third of their stations, we found in the US, EPIC Times did an investigative report and found about 30% of the stations, in the US didn't exist.
Sterling Burnett:But, so a third of the stations there didn't exist. But of the ones that are left, it they they were unfoul of what Anthony also detailed in his previous reports, which is most of their stations are garbage. He he found that I forget some absurdly no number. It was like, I don't know, 18 or 37 of the stations met their top tier 1 and 2 standards. The rest of them, many of them were 45, which the WMO says, look, could have a range of error of 2 to 5 degrees and are not fit for use.
Sterling Burnett:That's crazy.
Anthony Watts:It is. And yet it's all over. It's everywhere. My study published in 2000 or 2022, showed that up to 96% of the stations I surveyed all across America, and these were not selected specifically. This was pretty much random.
Anthony Watts:A lot of just random driving went on, and I had volunteers also doing some random driving to places. And it didn't matter where they were from Florida all the way up to the northeast to the West Coast to the Great Plains. These stations were biased high in temperature because of their placement. And what's happened is that infrastructure has grown up around it. The the classic idea behind this to help you get a, a thought about it is Chicago O'Hare Airport.
Anthony Watts:Now Chicago O'Hare Airport had been measuring temperature since the airport was put together started way back in the thirties. Right? So what was the airport, the identifier that you have for Chicago O'Hare is o r d, and that stands for O'Hare now, but it originally stood for Orchard Field, o r d, Orchard Field. And so that's how it started. It went from this, you know, sort of agricultural paradise up to this big megaplex of concrete and asphalt and terminals and jet exhaust and all this other stuff, yet they still measure the temperature there.
Anthony Watts:It's not suitable for climate. It's not fit for purpose.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And yet they're saying that the temperature rate of increase has increased by 1 one hundredth of a degree in global temperature. It's ridiculous.
Sterling Burnett:It's it's it's increased. It's increased as they, it's increased as they've, shut down stations and made up numbers for the non existing stations.
Ron Davison:Yeah. Just to put a personal note on it, in Calgary, I looked at the measured and the homogenized temperatures. And, since 1973 when they put the newest station in, it goes back to 18/84 from another station out at the airport. But, the measured temperatures have dropped 1.7 degrees. Our homogenized temperatures have gone up 1.35 degrees, which which I find ridiculous.
Sterling Burnett:That's like 2 and a that's like 2 and a half degrees gap
Ron Davison:between It's over 3 degrees Wow. Change. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Ron Davison:Yep. And, you know, my experience is I I feel measured temperatures not not homogenized temperatures.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And I guess, Anthony, you noticed they said that the global average temperature increase rate has increased by 1 1 hundredth of a degree from 0.25 per decade to 0.26. And they say it's the fastest in history. So you go back 1200 AD or something. I mean, what's your accuracy about?
Tom Harris:Plus or minus 2? So you really it's it just doesn't make any sense.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Yep. Alright. We'll move on to our second crazy climate news of the week. Although, speaking of crazy, I, I was not kidding.
Jim Lakely:I told you guys I had a denim jacket in the closet over there. Anthony Watts spoke just long enough for me to grab it and put it on, and I actually am wearing jeans. So this is officially a Canadian tuxedo. So that's, good. Let's find one with you.
Jim Lakely:I may
Sterling Burnett:have a cord a corduroy jacket that, I think Canadians also like corduroy.
Anthony Watts:They're on a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey somewhere.
Ron Davison:There you go. Careful now.
Sterling Burnett:Oh, well, yeah.
Jim Lakely:Actual war if we continue
Linnea Lueken:down this time of conversation. So let's go. That is true. Alright. I'm gonna try to get the next, the next
Ron Davison:thing up here.
Jim Lakely:Let's see. Oh my gosh. I hit the wrong button. Next craziness. It's appearing.
Jim Lakely:Coming up now. Yes. Our next our next crazy, crazy thing here. I hit the wrong darn button. Here we go.
Jim Lakely:Here we go. All right. So this is from, one second. This is from Yale Climate Connections. I guess this is still a growth industry in academia.
Jim Lakely:We'll see how long that lasts. This is the planet is on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster, scientists warn. Oh, my gosh. I that's the first time I've ever seen a headline like that. The 2,004 state of the climate report says climate scientists are more worried than ever and calls for, quote, transformative science based solutions across all aspects of society.
Jim Lakely:Considering we just saw, that's 1 1 third of all temperature stations in the UK are don't exist. Maybe maybe science based actually would be good. Real science, not big science. Anyway, story says that Earth's climate in 2024 is quote in a major crisis with worst to come if we continue with business as usual, a team of 14 climate scientists warned in the 2024 state of the climate report. Perilous times on planet Earth.
Jim Lakely:Oh, goodness. The report did not sugarcoat their view of the dangers humanity is facing. Quote, we are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster, the report begins. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on earth is imperiled.
Jim Lakely:We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. The report is the latest such annual peer review paper published by the journal Bioscience by an international team of scientists led by Oregon State ecologist William Ripple. We
Anthony Watts:all know that biologists are great climatologists. Right?
Sterling Burnett:They are. Ecologists are even better.
Jim Lakely:Right. Right. So, just real quick here. We'll continue on. The authors found that 25 of 35, quote, planetary vital signs, unquote, reached record levels last year, including global temperatures, human climate pollution, fossil fuel subsidies, heat related mortality rates, meat production, and loss of forest cover.
Jim Lakely:Then it goes blah blah blah. We fear the danger of a climate breakdown. Now, Sterling, let let's, start with you here. I mean, these reports never stop. It's just saying how many one after another one.
Jim Lakely:You're claiming to be peer reviewed. Is this still gonna be a growth industry or maybe the funding is gonna start to dry up for this nonsense?
Sterling Burnett:Oh, well, I don't know. You know, as long as the World Bank and them are still funding this crap, it it could go on forever. The, you know, I I was led to wonder just how many times has the end been predicted, since the seventies, none of the predictions having come true. They always give you some date in the relatively near future, which then gets surpassed, and they say it like a, you know, like a death cult. They say, oh, well, we did the math wrong.
Sterling Burnett:We we we we gotta make another prediction and, you know, it is in a few more years and and it passes. But you know how you know how you know this isn't science is look at what they take as the metrics. The earth doesn't care whether you're using fossil fuels. How is that tipping point for the Earth? Now, if you believe emissions are a problem, but that has not you know, you can you know, theoretically, you could remove all the emissions and still use the fossil fuels.
Sterling Burnett:So the earth doesn't care about fossil fuels. The earth doesn't care about most of these things. In fact, the earth will abide and so will human society so long as we don't so long as politicians don't go mucking about and take away our fossil fuels prematurely before we have better alternatives, better, cheaper, as reliable alternatives. I'm not saying we won't have them someday. There may be a day when we have, fusion energy.
Sterling Burnett:Right? Nuclear fusion. And that could replace a lot of, electricity. We don't have it now. I don't suspect we'll have it for the next well, for the remainder of my life.
Sterling Burnett:But the point is, when we have alternative sources that are reliable, as, inexpensive, that won't keep present generations of poor people impoverished. That is the threat, you know, that a 1000000000 people don't have access to reliable electricity. A 100, you know, several 100,000,000 still have malnutrition and starvation each year, and that's not due to climate change. That's due to lack of access to the things that have helped Western societies avoid, having to pray to the gods and sacrifice virgins to the climate, which was fossil fuels. It's it's offensive for these guys to claim to be scientists and to claim that you can't peer review something scientifically that's not science, and this isn't science.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And you notice how we're always on the brink. I'd say we're on the brink of being on the brink. Well, it's nice to
Linnea Lueken:see that they're toning down.
Anthony Watts:You're engaging in brinkmanship. Stop it.
Linnea Lueken:They're toning down the, the narrative and the and the rhetoric here for sure with, you know, we were, we were boiling the earth a couple of months ago and now we're just at the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. So to me, that's progress. I don't know.
Tom Harris:We're backing
Linnea Lueken:off. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:Anthony, did you have something you wanted to, weigh it on?
Anthony Watts:Yeah. This headline is so predictable. Charles Rotter, my right hand man over what's up with that, put together with, chat gbt, a climate disaster article writer. And, basically, what what's happened here is that climate disaster stories have become so commonplace that now even a robot can write them. And so he's got this template here that we published.
Anthony Watts:It shows exactly, you know, how you can put all these different pieces and phrases together and come up with a a media credible story that, talked about, you know, this craziness. Hold on.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Craziness went berserk. Craziness that will pass pure craziness that will pass peer review because peer review is nothing more than oh, does this agree with what I say? Oh, yeah, it does. Okay.
Sterling Burnett:Well then it's, it's past the muster.
Tom Harris:Yeah. It's power review. It's not peer review.
Ron Davison:It's power.
Anthony Watts:Power review. Exactly.
Jim Lakely:Always has been. All right. So yeah. So go to what's up with that.com. You can check that out yourself.
Jim Lakely:And, yeah, the the idea that chat g p t can can crank out a climate alarmist story, probably even better than the New York Times. I guess that's gonna be more journalists out of work. Oh, well.
Linnea Lueken:I'm convinced they already do use, ChatGPT to write their articles because I've read some that made no sense once you got further into it or it, like, outright contradicted itself. So I'm pretty sure that they've already been using computers to write these things for a while, at least for, like, the the smaller outlets.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And I learned something the other day about Copilot, which is Microsoft's Bing AI. And that is if you get in and you show where it's making mistakes, it'll make corrections, but only in your immediate discussion. When you get back in tomorrow, it'll make the same mistake. So I asked it.
Tom Harris:I said, how do you learn? How do you learn that some of the things you're saying are wrong? And he's and and the the machine said, well, it's only if my programmer changes my program. So it was saying that we have the fastest rate of we have the fastest rate of warming in history. So I went back.
Tom Harris:Okay. Let's take a 1000 years. What was the accuracy in 1200 AD, etcetera? So finally, it admitted, oh, well, I guess the accuracy isn't sufficient in the last millennia to compare with today's more accurate measurements, so we really don't know.
Anthony Watts:If if
Tom Harris:tomorrow and ask the same question, it'll give you, oh, yes. It's the fastest in history. Though it forgets. As soon as you get out of your session, it doesn't remember the correction.
Anthony Watts:If if
Jim Lakely:if artificial intelligence actually starts telling the truth about what's happening in the climate by actually scraping the real data and spitting it out and letting people know it will be at that point that I'm worried about Skynet. But until then, you're safe.
Anthony Watts:Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. It's just reading news articles and Wikipedia. It's you can't
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Yeah. It's not intelligence.
Jim Lakely:Right. Alright. Let's let's get down to our last one, and this this should be a lot of fun. So I I came across this on on X the other day, and, this is a a media interview, down in New Zealand. And so the Kiwis apparently are working on how to save the planet from methane as they like to say down there.
Jim Lakely:Very very, charming. So, I wanna I wanna play this about a minute and a half, clip from a news article or, I'm sorry, from a news interview that even the presenter down there in New Zealand almost can't believe her ears. Here we go.
Speaker 7:Okay. So how we can reduce methane is where your research comes in. Right? So you're developing a vaccine. What is it and how does it work?
Speaker 8:Yeah. Look. What what happens is we don't want those bacteria that make the methane to be in the stomach. So what we do is we adding adding a vaccine to the cow. The cow will generate antibodies in its saliva.
Speaker 8:So like we do when we get vaccinated that makes antibodies and then the saliva is full of antibodies, they go with the saliva into the stomach, where they attach to the bacteria and stop them from growing and therefore stop the methane production. So very similar to what we do with vaccination except in this case it's targeting the bacteria inside the cow's stomach.
Speaker 7:Wow. So when is this technology available?
Speaker 8:We are working currently, we're being funded by the government and by industry, through the Pastoral Greenhouse Gas Research Consortium and New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Center. We are targeting currently 5 to 7 years for the technology. This is a very very leading edge globally challenging science that we're doing here in New Zealand. So there are technical challenges to making it work. We've shown so far that we can make the antibodies.
Speaker 8:We can show so and so far we can get it into the saliva of the animals. And now we're trying to make sure it survives in the stomach to attack those bacteria and stop the methane. So 5 to 7 years.
Speaker 7:So in terms of
Jim Lakely:So there you have it guys. This is fantastic news not just for the planet but for anybody who travels frequently in airplanes, you know, eventually.
Linnea Lueken:It's such a terrible idea. I can't
Anthony Watts:I think they already have something for this. It's called Beano. You can buy this in the drugstore.
Sterling Burnett:I wonder if it you know, the methane is produced through the digestion process, and it may be with these bacteria, but I'm wondering if they aid in the digestion process.
Linnea Lueken:They do. They absolutely do.
Sterling Burnett:I would be concerned that your cows would blow up and finally explode because they don't their food is no longer digested.
Linnea Lueken:You're you're destroying you're destroying beneficial stomach flora. You're you're probably basically going to give all of these cows like Crohn's disease is what you're gonna do with this. This is an awful, awful idea.
Jim Lakely:Well, maybe we can use this as I mean, it is a very awful idea, and it's it's, you know, I'm a big believer in advancing scientific knowledge and, you know, for useful things. But there is the idea that methane, as they say in the southern hemisphere, is some sort is is uniquely bad for the environment, even more so, many say, than carbon dioxide. Maybe you guys can discuss that myth or fact for a bit.
Sterling Burnett:Well, when I'm in an enclosed place like the jets or, other small spaces, methane can be bad for the environment, I guarantee, at the local level. I mean, I was hearing this about the vaccines, and I think I know people that I'd like to be test cases for this the dead gum vaccine. When it comes to human trials, I've got the folks to to test it on. Yeah. And, of course, William Not myself, of course.
Tom Harris:I can't
Anthony Watts:I can't wait to see I can't wait to see what the meat from these cows is gonna be labeled at, in the supermarket. You know? What is it gonna be? Fart free beef? You know?
Anthony Watts:A what?
Sterling Burnett:Well, this may just be the part of the plot to get rid of meat eating. Right? If the cows end up dying, that helps you reduce your meat consumption. No more meat no more meat consumption.
Tom Harris:And remember William Happar at Princeton University has shown that you can double methane in it methane, and it doesn't really matter very much because, you know, all of main three greenhouse gases, methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide, they're essentially close to saturation. We're just not gonna see much warming even if we double. So if the science doesn't back it up anyway.
Sterling Burnett:But on the bright side, he gets a lot of research funding from the government for it.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Right. Well, they're only yeah. They're 5 to 7 years away. I mean, how exciting is that?
Tom Harris:Yeah. We're on the brink of the break.
Sterling Burnett:Well, yeah. It'll just be it'll be just a few years after disasters occurred.
Ron Davison:Yeah. It's a little too late.
Anthony Watts:Right.
Linnea Lueken:Apparently, we're way too late. We've we've breached that 1.5 for the 2nd year in a row, I think so.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Alright. Well, let's get, let's get into a couple things. There's one we usually do something we call the, the memes of the week or the cartoon of the week. But actually, I wanna use this tiny segment to kind of update us on something that was pretty serious and now appears to have come to an end.
Jim Lakely:And that is, that is this story. This is, the editor in chief of Scientific American has resigned after expletive filled rant against, Trump voters. Now, this is this is a woman we we cover this on the show last week. This was this is, Laura Hellmuth, who who had a series of 3 expletive filled rants against, Trump voters. And, so now she has said, I've decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting four and a half years as editor in chief.
Jim Lakely:I'm gonna take some time to think about what comes next and go bird watching. But for now, I'd like to share a very small sample of the work I've been so proud to support. And then she has a thread which we are not going to read. But the point here being that, as we mentioned last week, this the the fact that the editor in chief of of of really a popular science magazine of Scientific American that pretends to, that I shouldn't say pretends, but purports to present to lay people the scientific world and consensus in the in the sense that makes sense, not like in climate, but to inform people about what what is happening out there in the world of science. It's an it it is an example of how all science, it seems, all from scientific journals, as Tom Harris said, are interested in power review, not peer review.
Jim Lakely:And then here is even a popular scientific magazine that is dedicated to advancing political agendas and not informing people on science. So I guess this is a small victory, depends on who she's replaced with. But, in this case, after four and a half years, a radical leftist is no longer at the helm of, I guess, a once prestigious, magazine journal.
Sterling Burnett:You know, it's interesting. Scientific American went a 120, I think a 126 years without ever endorsing a presidential candidate. They said, we're not into politics. We do science. Four and a half years ago, she becomes the editor in chief, just before the 2020 election.
Sterling Burnett:And for the first time ever, they endorsed the candidate, Biden, and then they endorsed Harris. I'm hoping that they get back to science and get away from politics and no longer I don't care what the editor in chief of Scientific American or their editors have to say about politics. I want them to inform me about science, and I think it's no coincidence that the first time ever that happened came about 6 months after she took the helm. Hopefully, they will, the publishers who are gonna lose the money when people stop subscribing to this journal, hopefully, they'll say, you know what? We need to get away from this.
Sterling Burnett:We need to go back to to doing the science.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. I don't think that's gonna happen. They've had a long history over the past 20 or so years of getting worse and worse and worse. And I used to subscribe to Scientific American. It was one of my favorite monthly reads.
Anthony Watts:Now I can't even stand to look at it.
Jim Lakely:It just
Ron Davison:Yeah. That's that was my approach too. I got it regularly, and I just it was one of the first ones I had to give up. I just couldn't stomach it anymore.
Tom Harris:You think they're gonna follow the approach of the Los Angeles Times and say, hey. We we're fair and balanced, so fire all of their editors.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Well, you know, I I what it'll take. I actually suggested to to a few of my friends and colleagues that now that they've cleared out their editorial staff at the LA Times, maybe we can start submitting op eds and things again because they're the ones that came to the decision. They were the first. The Los Angeles Times is the first that came to the decision.
Sterling Burnett:They would no longer publish any climate realist or skeptics. You you couldn't get a large of the editor published. You couldn't get an op ed published. They the debate was over. Hopefully, that will change.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. The mark the the market is there. It exists. The the market for what Scientific American used to be still there. It still exists.
Jim Lakely:People are finding it in different places. They're finding it at places frankly like climateataglance.com. They're finding it at Tom at at Tom your website, Ron your website. You know, we have so many friends and allies in the climate realist movement who, so there is a market for it. And Scientific American has
Tom Harris:abandoned that market, and so they can choose in the next
Jim Lakely:iteration of itself to actually seek out that market or continue down its ideological, you know, blind alley, but we'll see.
Tom Harris:All the way to bankruptcy.
Jim Lakely:Yep. That's the way it's working. But yeah. So, and then one more thing here, an image that Anthony shared just before we went on the air, which I think is, is a pretty good thing to mention. This is the number of named storms.
Jim Lakely:Well, you can take us through it, Anthony.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Well, you know, Michael Mann went on record, you know, in a big way saying that there was gonna be 33 named storms in the Atlantic, for 2024. And everyone who had half a brain and any kind of an understanding of climate science or hurricanes or anything said, you've gotta be kidding me. Not gonna happen. Well, so far, it hasn't.
Anthony Watts:I mean, 2024, only 18 so far, and the clock is ticking. Yep. Hurricane season ends December 1st. So we've got 15 days for an additional, 12 storms or no, 15 storms to be named. And I don't think it's gonna happen.
Anthony Watts:Will man eat crow? No? He's leaving Twitter because people are mean and Trump got elected. So he's gonna go over on Blue Sky with Laura Helmuth and they'll have the rap fest over there.
Jim Lakely:Right. Not that Michael Mann leaving Twitter had anything to do with us because he's blocked everybody on this on this call and probably most people in the audience if they've ever engaged with him. So that's just the way he rolls. And and and all of these threats, I mean, Stephen King said he's leaving, on January 20th, I think, and other people are leaving, and they're not leaving. They're coming back.
Jim Lakely:They're all coming back. They can't they can't stay away. They can't quit, Twitter. They just can't. So There's no fun when they come crawling back.
Sterling Burnett:There's no other comparable Blue Sky. You know, how many subscribers does Blue Sky have? 2,000? I don't think man wants to lose that many, people following him.
Jim Lakely:No. For sure.
Anthony Watts:Alright. He'll come up with some excuse somewhere around January 20th to stay on. I can't wait to read it.
Sterling Burnett:His ego will not suffer losing that many followers.
Jim Lakely:For sure. For sure. Okay. Alright. Well, let's, so that was a very fun segment.
Jim Lakely:I'm I'm hope, Ron and Tom, you guys had a good time, and I know our audience really enjoyed it.
Ron Davison:Enjoyed it.
Jim Lakely:But, let's let's get into, our our main topic today, and that is, this new book, Energy and Climate, At a Glance, a Canadian edition. Sterling, maybe you can meet kinda lead you or a coauthor on this, but maybe we can maybe I'll start it off by just asking, Ron and Tom, you know, why timing for it really good right now in Canada? Yeah, as lead author, I'll let you go first, Ron. All right. Thank you.
Jim Lakely:Well,
Tom Harris:it's, we we set it up obviously as a,
Ron Davison:in the format that you guys used with Climate at a Glance, and, we just wanted to move it into something that have a more Canadian perspective. And it it as as I said, it's set up like your format. It's, there's just quick a few statements and some comments, key takeaways, and, and we've got the reports highlighted where you can go find all the detailed work that people like Ross McKittrick and and many others have done already. And it's just it it's been a long time, and and we're getting to the point now where people are actually starting to figure out that there is a real need for energy security. And, while climate change might be a problem, it's not the biggest problems we face.
Tom Harris:Yeah. For sure. And it's gonna be very useful for the activists that I help organize. You know, here in Ottawa, for example, I've been working with various people who go to what are called delegations, where they actually speak to committees in the city, and they go to public meetings and debates and things like that. And they use the tools of Saul Alinsky, you know, rules for radicals.
Tom Harris:We actually get to the microphone right away, You know? And we make sure that the people asking questions actually know more about the topic they're asking about than anybody else in the room. And they specifically ask politicians who they know don't know it. So we're using a lot of the rules. We also tend to personalize it.
Tom Harris:In other words, we say, why did you vote for this particular program? You know, we don't just say, oh, why did the city do it? And it it's very interesting. A lot of people don't realize, but the left took over our institutions largely by using the rules of Saul Alinsky from Rules for Radicals. So this book is gonna be what we then leave with the politicians.
Tom Harris:We leave with the leading opinion makers and reporters and others. We'll be leaving this with leading experts and and and others across our society. So this will be a great tool for our activists.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. So and and where can where can one, get a copy of this book? I know it's it's, we we the Heartland Institute put out a blasted a press release on this. I know that I forwarded at least one contact to one of you guys earlier this week to talk about it. But, where where can one start to purchase this, and and are they affordable so you can buy multiple copies and get them into other people's hands?
Tom Harris:Yeah. They're just $14 Canadian each, plus shipping and handling. And within the next couple of days, you'll be able to go to icsc dash canada.com and actually order a book. And, yeah, we got a donate page. Click on the donate page, but put in the comment when you're doing the donation.
Tom Harris:This is for the climate green book as we call it. And $14 Canadian, you can't lose. It's, it's a pretty substantial book too. We'll mail it to you.
Jim Lakely:$14 Canadian, is it about is that's about 3.50 American. Right? Yeah. No.
Tom Harris:Yeah. We can sell it in gold instead of dollars Canadian because they go down so fast. But, yeah, working Canadian, it's about $10 American.
Ron Davison:Yeah. It will also be available at Friends of Science, the middle of next week. Friends of science.org.
Jim Lakely:Okay. Is that website? Hopefully, I want
Tom Harris:Yeah. That that's great. My
Jim Lakely:icsc.hyphencanada.com. Yep.
Tom Harris:Yeah. Perfect. Not immediately, but within a couple of days.
Sterling Burnett:Okay. Hopefully, after they've had some success selling it, they'll put either chapters or, it online for people to download themselves, like we've done with our book to spread it far and wide. But, I know this is an outlay and, they want to spread the word, but they also wanna make some money back on it. You know, this started for me, and Ron. Tom wasn't a part of the the meeting, but this started for Ron and I back in October of 2023 with a meeting with John Zacharias, the president of, Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy held in, in Canada.
Sterling Burnett:And he he wanted a book that as, you know, Tom said, you could leave behind that's easily digestible for the general public and for legislators and for business interests who are pushing the green agenda. And and he wanted to cover a little bit more ground than we covered in in in our climate at a glance because he wanted to hammer on the economics. What's what's hurting? What are these policies doing to Canada? What are they, what are the economic impacts?
Sterling Burnett:What are the benefits? I mean, if if Canada follows Trudeau's plans to the t, does everything Trudeau wants to do, get to net 0, how much impact will it have on warming? How much sea level rise will it prevent? How many people's lives will it save? And it turns out it can't be measured, and I don't mean it can't be measured because it's so great.
Sterling Burnett:It can't be measured because it doesn't exist. There's no sea level rise prevention, there's no temperature rise prevention, it won't save any lives, though it could cost lives, both in Canada and especially in developing countries. And so their book, you know, I'm gonna go through it. It's got 4 sections. They are Canadian climate commitments to net 0 at 2050, section 2, domestic c 02 restrictions are futile and harmful.
Sterling Burnett:Section 3, there is no climate crisis. Section 4, the benefits of fossil fuels and c o two. And section 5, what are our best options? Some of those are very particular to Canada, and and Canadian issues.
Jim Lakely:Some of
Sterling Burnett:them are more general because it's science questions and the science doesn't discriminate between countries. So, if you are Canadian or if you're outside of Canada, but you really care what goes on in Canada, this book can arm you with the facts about, the the truth about the science of climate change, the truth about the economics of fighting climate change on Canadians, and is there a better path? Yes. It suggests a better path. Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:That's how I'd summarize it.
Tom Harris:A good half of the book is applicable anywhere, quite frankly. And, you know, you know, I'll just point out that, people can get this book for free if they commit to us to give it to one of these leading opinion opinion makers and tell us who they give it to. So, yeah, if you just wanna buy the book, that's great. You know, we'll send it to you. But, also, if you wanna commit to giving it to a leading politician or a decision maker, we'll we'll give it to you for free.
Jim Lakely:Right. Well, let me let me ask you guys, because the first part of that book is, or the first section of the book relates to Canada and net zero, net zero by 2,050. Now the United States has not made any official commitments about net zero. It is now never going to happen that the United States, at least not in the next 4 years, is going to commit itself to net zero. I actually, above the personal opinion, that in the next 4 years, everybody will have been abandoning their net zero by 2,050 commitments, but especially because the United States is never going to do it.
Jim Lakely:So I want you guys to talk a little bit about how and why Canada dedicated it. So I know you have a socialist nut job, you know, He wears nice socks, though. He does wear
Tom Harris:nice socks and wears good blackface too
Jim Lakely:as a kid. Yeah. But so what is the what is the status of net 0, 2050 for Canada, right now? And how do you even get there?
Tom Harris:And how do you even get there? Well,
Ron Davison:we we we can't get there. It's Ross McKittrick, put together a really good report on our status. He looked at, emissions reduction plan that Canada has in place and, and then went through the information as to where we are. Our our goal is 40 to 45% below 2,005 emissions levels, and, we've only progressed a small part of the way there. It's just it's just not gonna happen.
Ron Davison:Yeah. Anyways, that's you get something to add, Tom?
Tom Harris:Yeah. Well, also, it would have no effect anyway. You know, it's interesting. When Pat Michaels was still alive wonderful man. Doctor Michaels actually offered to tell us how much our Ottawa climate plan would change world temperature.
Tom Harris:Because in Ottawa, city of a 1000000 people, we have a plan which is 57.4 $1,000,000,000. Okay? That's like about 40,000,000,000 American dollars. And we sent him, you know, how much Ottawa was putting out, and we asked how much would it change world temperature if Ottawa met this target of net zero and kept it that way all the way to the end of 21st century? And he came back with a number.
Tom Harris:Are you ready for it? It would affect global temperatures, if you believe the models, by 1 10000ths of 1 degree for $57,400,000,000.
Ron Davison:Yeah.
Tom Harris:Now Canada is about 1 and a half percent of world emissions. So, yeah, obviously, it would be more. Ottawa is a little less than 1% of Canada, but the amounts are just trivial, and you can't measure.
Anthony Watts:No. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:Well, here I have up on the screen, this is this is Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy, which you can get to, that URL is sensible change dot ca. And yeah, they're they're folk our friends there are focused and Ron and others are focused on, you know, telling the truth, implementing a net 0 by 2050 plan entails significant transition. And as Ron said, going to take place. It's not feasible. Right.
Tom Harris:And we
Sterling Burnett:wanna we wanna
Tom Harris:invite people.
Jim Lakely:See the upper right hand corner of the screen there?
Tom Harris:It says become a pathfinder. If you click on that button, you can join our team, actually, because I'm working on contract with them. And Canadians for Sensible Climate Policy have a very nice, strategy where people become pathfinders. They start to have access then to internal information in the website to help them speak out. And I'll be training more and more people across Canada, especially Ontario, to actually speak out at public events and how they can have significant impact and basically replicate what we did in Ottawa.
Tom Harris:Because in Ottawa, in the last election in 2022, the leading candidate was a climate alarmist, and everybody assumed that she was going to win. Although, she didn't wanna be called she, she wanted to be called they. But regardless, it looked like she was gonna just definitely win. Well, we were able to organize activists who especially from Action for Canada, they were actually a very prominent supporter of this. And what happened is meeting after meeting after meeting during the election, we swarmed the mic.
Tom Harris:In other words, we did what Saul Alinsky talked the left to do. And if you become a pathfinder, we'll work with you to help increase the effectiveness of your presentations to delegations or to public events. So I really do encourage people, click on in Canada, become a pathfinder. Yeah. That's important because we'll help you speak out and help change.
Tom Harris:And, by the way, the outcome of our activism was that just literally the week before the election, other people who were voting for 3rd and 4th candidates realized the only way we could defeat McKinney was if we voted for the person who was second. And so his support went through the roof. And in a field of about a dozen candidates, he ended up with more than 50% of the vote because people were scared silly that we would end up with a climate activist as our mayor. She wanted to spend a half a $1,000,000,000 improving our bicycle paths while we were turning away drug addicts from rehab centers because we didn't have enough money. So what happened is to her great shock, she lost.
Jim Lakely:Alright. We can, go ahead, Sterling.
Sterling Burnett:She's not the only one who lost recently, right? I mean, I believe in Alberta, there was a bit of a sea change in, party, control there. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Ron Davison:The well, Diane Daniel Smith has taken over, as the UCP leader, conservative party. And, yeah, they just recently came out with, they had their annual meeting a a few weeks ago, and, you guys actually made some notes on that. But they basically come back and said that, c o two is not a pollutant, and, they're looking at ways to deal with the net zero issue at our provincial level at least. So
Tom Harris:Yeah. We have to push our federal conservative government to start doing that because, unfortunately, while they're against the carbon tax, Pierre Poliyev, who's the leader of the official opposition and most likely to become the next prime minister of Canada, he is what you and the US would call a rhino, republican in name only, what we call him, sino. Conner conservative in name only when it comes to the climate issue because what he's saying is that we have to stop climate change, not with tax, but with technology. Okay? With carbon dioxide sequestration underground and electric vehicles and getting developing countries to not use their coal, instead go on to natural gas.
Tom Harris:So, sadly, he is promoting the climate scare. And I think Trump's election showed very clearly that that's not necessary. You can win even when you're a climate realist. So, Pierre, Poliat, wake up. You don't have to support this.
Ron Davison:And we had a very prominent politician out in BC just in the last election here, that ran on, CO 2 is not the control knob for for climate. And, BC is like your California where they're a little they take the left view quite, seriously.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And you do.
Ron Davison:And they went from 1.9% approval rating 2 years ago to getting over 40 about 44% of the approval in the actual election. And, they were just short, few seats to get a majority.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And they got just 1% less, I guess, than the other candidate. And he was a climate realist. More and more, you know, you look back to Stephen Harper, who was our conservative prime minister, before he got in as prime minister, and, of course, he won. He won the election.
Tom Harris:He said the Kyoto protocol was a money sucking socialist scheme, and he won. So the whole idea that you have to support the climate scare, Trump is proving it's you don't have to, and you can still win. So, you know, stop it.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Yep. Stop it indeed. Well, oops. I gotta fix this right.
Jim Lakely:Here we go. So now it is one of our favorite times of the certainly for our audience, for our program, today on the Climate Realism Show, and that is q and a time. Now I know that there are a ton of questions in here, and I know some of them are for Ron and Tom. So, Linea, take it away. Let's roll.
Linnea Lueken:Sure. Let's let's, let's start with this question from Chris Nisbett, who asks which country will officially cancel net zero first? What do you guys think?
Ron Davison:It it won't be Canada.
Tom Harris:Maybe it'd be Azerbaijan. Yeah. Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:It might be, yeah, Azerbaijan. It could be the it could be the US. It could be, of course, we don't have it as an official call.
Anthony Watts:Trump will make it a point to cancel
Tom Harris:it.
Sterling Burnett:It could be Argentina. Could be Argentina.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. They walked out. Good for them.
Tom Harris:Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:They walked out. Papua New Guinea didn't show up walked out before they never showed up. They said that it's a waste of our time. Leaders of all the g seven countries, except for the UK, as far as I can tell, didn't go to Baku. It's falling apart.
Sterling Burnett:It's falling apart.
Tom Harris:The Taliban the Taliban went. I mean, it's gotta be a good conference if they went.
Sterling Burnett:Well, to be fair, it's being held in Baku, and and, no one's ever accused Baku. They may be sensible in energy, but no one's ever accused them of being a bastion of human rights.
Tom Harris:Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Davison:We also have countries like China and India that are just paying lip service to it, Russia.
Sterling Burnett:Oh, yeah. I don't think China's ever said well, they've said we expect to peak our emissions sometime in the future and then eventually reach net 0. Well Yeah. You know, eventually, the sun will burn out and the the earth will die, and we'll all reach net 0.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Anyway, I I think it's gonna end up being the Russian version before it's all over with. Yeah. Is there a
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Here's a quick one from itisitoo who says, when will Canada vote?
Tom Harris:Oh, we have Well, the official a year.
Ron Davison:Is October next year, but they have a minority government, so it could come at any time.
Tom Harris:Yeah. There are a couple of parties that are climate realists. The, People's Party of Canada and the Christian Heritage Party. Sadly, they don't have any MPs at all. And so the likelihood that they will go, they may get a couple, the PPC, People's Party.
Tom Harris:But, yeah, they actually have very sensible climate plans, the 2 parties. In the last election, PPC had a mistake on their website, so I contacted them, and they corrected it. So it's great. So, you know, we do have some smaller parties who are saying the right thing. We've gotta push the conservatives, though.
Tom Harris:Pay attention to what happened in the US. Trump won, and he was a climate realist. You don't have to support this. So we're hoping that conservatives will come around.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. Okay. Here's a question from Slurder Bartfest, which I guess can go to any of us on the panel, which is, will the EPA get its wings clipped by Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency?
Anthony Watts:Well, I think more than that, they're gonna get their wing clipped by this recent ruling that a lot of these EPA decisions were made without authority.
Tom Harris:There
Anthony Watts:was an article the other day about CEQ, being struck down by the Supreme Court, and basically, a lot of these bureaucratic decisions that have been implemented as law without a vote are basically gonna go south and were several 1,000 of them, involved in that. So it looks like, they may beat Doug to the punch.
Sterling Burnett:Well, I'm I hope that that happens, but I'm not so sure that CEQ, the ruling was big because there was a particular regulation that CEQ wrote, but CEQ doesn't write a lot of rules. They do advisories. In fact, that's what the supreme court found is you have no regulatory authority. You aren't an agency, established to do regulations on energy or the environment, and so you can't pass rules. I don't know how many rules actually came from CEQ.
Sterling Burnett:Those are certainly gonna be gone or or or have to be revised and have to be done from a different, you know, a true regulatory agency. But the CEQ is an advisory body to the president.
Tom Harris:Well
Sterling Burnett:And it's and, so I maybe it'll impact thousands of rules, but I'm I'm not sure of that.
Jim Lakely:Vivek Ramaswami had a had a long Twitter post, yesterday or the day before yesterday, noting that, EPA versus West Virginia was decided against EPA and that he plans to, adhere to that decision unlike the way the Biden administration has done it. He said the decision that basically neutered, if not completely, you know, slayed the Chevron doctrine, That also actually happened, and he's going to apply that to, all federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA and all these other and all these other things. So, you know, we'll see. I think it's pretty exciting, but at least we have Vivek who is the cochair of the, of Doge, Department of of Government Efficiency, is recognizing the fact that, the Biden administration has been ignoring these important court rulings and that he intends to apply them. And then if you apply them, an entire set of rules and regulations and and justification for existence comes into being.
Jim Lakely:So we'll see.
Sterling Burnett:Yep.
Linnea Lueken:Yep.
Jim Lakely:Yep.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Here's a related question from our friend, Bob, who says, will Trump have a climate czar? Preferably one reporting facts? No. I don't think so.
Sterling Burnett:I don't think so either. I think that Trump will say climate is not an issue we need to be addressing at all. So we certainly don't need a czar for it.
Jim Lakely:As long as that czar is blad the impaler, I'm for it.
Linnea Lueken:Here's one from energy colonizer who asks, on the UK Met Office, inventing temperature data, does the UK have FOIA laws like we do in the United States? Laundering and confirming false information reminds me of 5 Eyes and Spygate.
Anthony Watts:Yes. Yes. They do. And in fact, Climategate was brought about by FOIA laws. The fact that they didn't wanna release the, emails that Steve McIntyre and other people had requested ended up basically being, the impetus for the, whole Climategate thing where someone who was privy to all those emails they'd gathered up in anticipation that they might release them.
Anthony Watts:They left them on a server somewhere. They got found and they got released anyway. And, I remember Phil Jones saying something to the effect of, if they ever find out we have an FOIA law here, we're in trouble.
Sterling Burnett:Well, you know, in fact, the the story that we led with on, the 30% that was discovered through their FOIA law. A citizen journalist, sent a FOIA request to the Met Office and finally got a reply, and then he went out and checked stations. And then he sent a letter to their new, I think their new labor minister, but I'm not sure if it's the labor minister or what what which minister, saying they need to answer these questions. And so, yeah, he used their FOIA law to discover the, the false readings from stations, from non existent stations.
Linnea Lueken:I'm going to do a couple of, kind of rapid fire science related questions. We have a few in here and I want to get back to more of the policy stuff, but I do want to address some of these because they're important to talk about. Matt G asks, they can measure the temperature of earth with satellites, apparently, but what degree of accuracy? Anthony?
Anthony Watts:Well, UAH has been doing this for a while. Doctor Roy Spencer and, John Christie. They've been doing this for a while, and I I I really don't know what the accuracy number is, because they don't put error bars on those graphs. But I would think that it's gotta be probably within a tenth of a degree, to be useful at all based on the the magnitude of the graphs are plotting. I don't think we can actually measure to the earth's temperature the accuracy of a 100th of a degree no matter what method you're using.
Sterling Burnett:Well, I think the satellites also don't measure surface temperatures. They measure, mid mid troposphere.
Anthony Watts:Lower troposphere. Lower troposphere. At about 11 to 14000 feet. Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:They can't do
Anthony Watts:the the surface because the surface is so noisy because there's all these heat sources of wind and everything else. You know? And clouds.
Ron Davison:Yeah. But they have been calibrated with the, radio sun.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. You got weather balloon data, and
Ron Davison:and that measures more than 1. Yeah. And last year, NOAA's star satellite, they've adjusted theirs back to, the UAH type numbers. They just won't lay over one another
Jim Lakely:now. Yeah.
Tom Harris:Anthony, the GISS record says that they're accurate to 0.05 degrees. Do you think it really is?
Linnea Lueken:Alright. This is a question from Kitemamuzic who asks, has the extraction of energy by wind turbines had effect on the weather? And I think the answer to that is actually yes. Very locally downstream from wind turbines, you do have a reduction in wind, which changes the average temperature.
Tom Harris:Yeah. It would rise it. It would rise it because you would have less convective cooling because you're slowing the wind down. So in the vicinity, it dries it out.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. It dries out the soil.
Tom Harris:Yeah. So you're actually causing global warming with your wind turbines.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce this username, but I'm gonna call it Samot. I'm not sure. To help prove UHI, has the data been sorted in low population versus high population areas?
Anthony Watts:Yes. Doctor Roy Spencer has been publishing this on his blog. He's come up with a dataset exactly putting this together, and it shows very clearly that UHI and population, coincide strongly. And so, that data exists, and he's working on a peer review paper that should be published any day now, probably faster now that we've got the Trump administration involved.
Jim Lakely:UHI Urban Heat Island. Correct? Yeah. Yes.
Tom Harris:And and
Sterling Burnett:what he what he found was the more dense the population, it's not just population numbers that they're spread out over, you know, Dallas is a pretty spread out city, but Phoenix is pretty compact. And the more dense the population, the greater the UHI.
Tom Harris:Yeah. And people can check it out at doctor.roy spencer.com.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. This is from Nathan. He says, can you clarify, they say methane has, is a 280 times more powerful greenhouse gas, but that is on a per molecule basis. Correct?
Sterling Burnett:It is, but I'm not even sure it's 280 because I've seen a lot of different claims about how much more powerful it is.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. But I will point out that methane has a methane has a very short residence time in the atmosphere. So, you know, we can have a burst of methane come out, you know, and then it'll be gone, in, you know, a few months. It doesn't have a long residence time. There's lots of things out there that like to eat methane, little bacteriums and things.
Sterling Burnett:I'm not even sure we have a really good measure of the residence time of a seat molecule of c o two. I've seen debates over that. Yeah. It's longer than our methane, but it's, you know, how long?
Anthony Watts:We've had estimates anywhere from, you know, a couple of years up to a 1,000 plus years.
Tom Harris:Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Okay. This is from our friend, Alan, who says, let's spare a thought for Mark Stein. Does anyone know how he's doing? Well, he's any update?
Tom Harris:Yeah. He's restricted to a wheelchair. He's had very serious health troubles. You know, the stress of all these court cases is incredible. I mean, Tim Ball, for example, he had these court cases, and he won, yet it ruined his health.
Tom Harris:So the key seems to be to avoid actual ad hominem attacks and to not try to attribute motive to people. That seems to be the key to keeping you out of court. You know? If you say somebody is not telling the truth or they're lying, then you're putting yourself up for, you're you you know, they have huge funding. In fact, well, I won't say anything about Michael Benn because I don't wanna be sued.
Tom Harris:But bottom line is that, yeah, you gotta be careful. You can say they're wrong. You can say you disagree with them. But if you start attributing motive, you're potentially in court.
Sterling Burnett:You can you can be sued in Canadian courts. Remember, he lost there.
Jim Lakely:Yep. It was only
Sterling Burnett:in the US courts that people were stupid enough not to understand free speech. In the Canadian courts, they said, no, you got to pay. And that's why he's not going to Canada because he's subject to payment if he shows up in Canada.
Tom Harris:Yeah. Exactly. Because he did lose to Kimball. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And I just looked on on Mark Stein on steinonline.com. You can you can check him out there. He actually just did a new, I guess, he has a Mark Stein club. He does an audio, club land q and a.
Jim Lakely:So he's apparently, well enough to do, to create media and to write and to think. And so hopefully that is the news that Mark Stein is on the men. So, we'll all pray keep praying for him.
Tom Harris:Because he's done so well at his talks at your events.
Jim Lakely:Oh, for sure. Yeah. Love Mark Stein.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. This question is from Mustang Pictures. Conservative outdoor political writer, Gabriela Hoffman, supports greenhouse gas reduction policies. This is according to a podcast you did, with one of Trump's former advisors. Any info on that?
Linnea Lueken:Do we are we familiar with Gabriela?
Sterling Burnett:I have, I've heard of her. I've read some of her stuff. I didn't see that, but I didn't do a podcast where I don't know who who which podcast that was.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I know Gabriela. I only know her as a very, a very vocal and, and vigorous climate realist and, pushback on climate alarmism on social media. So, not quite sure. Maybe that's true.
Jim Lakely:Maybe it isn't, but I'll look into it.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. What seems to be the future for nuclear energy?
Tom Harris:Very strong. You know? It's it's especially with the small modular reactors, I think these are these are things that you can actually plunk down anywhere. You don't need massive water supply nearby for cooling. So we're gonna see these small modular reactors over the next 10 years starting to pop up in even in remote locations.
Tom Harris:And this can be done even for countries that don't have fossil fuels, especially for those countries. You know, you can put them
Jim Lakely:out in the middle of
Tom Harris:the desert. So I think nuclear power has a huge future. And in Canada, that's one thing Trudeau is doing right. He's boosting nuclear power. Now, of course, the excuse is because it's gonna stop climate change, which, of course, it never will.
Tom Harris:But the fact is nuclear is has a bright future, especially with the small modular reactors. And we have a good,
Ron Davison:safe, already tested, nuclear form in the CANDU reactors.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. We're gonna see
Anthony Watts:a lot more of those, and they're gonna get smaller and smaller. In fact, when an SMR appears on Amazon, I'm gonna order one from my bunker here.
Sterling Burnett:Look. I hope you guys are all right, but I've seen the bureaucratic inertia here in the US, and, I don't know if we'll we'll have a small modular reactor operating here in the next decade. I'd like to say
Jim Lakely:we will.
Linnea Lueken:Maybe Doug will.
Sterling Burnett:Say we will, but I've seen the bureaucratic inertia take down project after project.
Tom Harris:You know,
Sterling Burnett:they they were they were developing 1 in Idaho. They had subscribers, and then the subscribers backed out. And
Tom Harris:Yeah. Believe it or not, the CANDU reactor, which is a uses heavy water as a moderator, it's been a very successful. It takes twice as long to certify a CANDU reactor in Canada than it does in China. So China might very well be the first to get up these small modular reactors.
Sterling Burnett:No. China's already getting some reactors up and some smaller reactors up. China's doing it. I was just thinking of the US and and in North America.
Tom Harris:But
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. With above us only Skye's question saying, will Trump reduce the regulatory stranglehold on setting up new nuclear? I would say he's the one that's more likely to do it. What I would like to see is, you know, if we have to have energy subsidies, I would like to see a flipping of the, the percentages from the wind and solar stuff going over towards nuclear instead, because that seems to me to be a much more worthy recipient. But right now, a very, very small pittance of our total energy subsidies go to nuclear, less than even just carbon capture by itself, I think.
Linnea Lueken:So it's, it's it's pretty crazy. I would love to see that reverse under Trump. Okay. We've got oh, here's a good question that we can fix right now. Can you put details where to find your guests in the show description?
Linnea Lueken:I think the answer to that is yes.
Tom Harris:Yeah. For sure. Climate sorry. Icscdashclimate.com is our American affiliate, but the Canadian one is icscdashcanada.com, and it talks about all of our board members. We have Patrick Moore, for example, on our board of directors.
Tom Harris:So, yeah, we're speaking out. You got your website too, Ron.
Ron Davison:Yep. Ours is, friends of science dot orgorg. And I have a personal one. It's, climate change and music dot com.
Tom Harris:Oh, yeah. You're a great singer, guitarist.
Ron Davison:That's still debatable. Alright. And
Tom Harris:and and sensible change dotca. That's important because we really, really want Canadians to sign up to be Pathfinders. So do go to sensiblechange.ca. Click that Pathfinder button, and I'll be helping teach you how to how to win because, of course, we're trying to replicate what we did in Ottawa across Canada.
Linnea Lueken:Awesome. Okay. This is from JP who says, greetings from Belgium. I have the feeling that there are more volcanoes than usual getting active. So do we know what the impact is going to be on climate?
Linnea Lueken:And we have another question that's kind of I'll tie to that a bit, which has to do with, this is a, auto auto spell error here, but this is the Hunga Tonga volcano eruption. Did that emit more methane than New Zealand cows? I don't know about methane. I think on that one, the water vapor was the major issue. Very, very large amounts of water vapor.
Sterling Burnett:And I wanna point out
Anthony Watts:there is no Hungarian Tonga volcano.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I said that it was a Seltec problem. Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:It ejected, It added 10% to the water vapor in the atmosphere in 1 in one fell swoop. And gosh, when did that happen? 2 years ago when it was the first time we breached 1.5, shortly after Hunga Tonga, but no, that can't have anything to do with anything.
Anthony Watts:Yes. And those respected climate scientists are all ignoring that extra water vapor. No, no, no, no. That can't be it.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. So, as far as more volcanic activity, I don't know. There are some scientists that I know who argue that their subsurface, underwater volcanic activity has picked up quite a bit. Whether and the extent to which that might affect ocean temperature measurements, I think are being debated. But I don't know if overall there's more volcanic activity.
Sterling Burnett:Certainly we can track it better, right? When when anything goes off in in Hawaii, we know about it. When anything goes off in Alaska, we know about it. And Greenland and Iceland and, and all those countries, we know about it.
Ron Davison:There has been an uptick in volcanic activity. How much it affects it is definitely still a question. Okay.
Tom Harris:Yeah. One of the things that people don't know is, apparently, it's not c o two just from the main cone and from the main, pit, you know, the, the crater. It's also from miles around, things called fumaroles, which are cracks in the ground where you have c o two emitted. So I've seen various reports that say that when you take into consideration the fumaroles around volcanoes, they put out a lot more c o two than what the IPCC are saying. So it it couldn't, in fact, be a very major contributor to c o two level, not global warming because c o two doesn't matter.
Sterling Burnett:And, of course, it's a localized source of direct heat. Right? So
Tom Harris:Right.
Sterling Burnett:If you have any if you have any temperature stations anywhere near active volcanoes, my suspicion is they're reading pretty high.
Linnea Lueken:Here, I think this is a good one to close out on, from Andrew who is asking for advice on how high school kids can approach a teacher that promotes false narratives, with regards to climate change. My first answer is
Anthony Watts:our climate realism book.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Climate Climate Yes.
Sterling Burnett:It says for teachers and students handedness, it's it's for you.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. It says
Sterling Burnett:so right on the cover.
Tom Harris:Well, also And that's one
Ron Davison:of the programs CSCP wants to start getting people involved. Yes. Take this book and give it to somebody that can do something with it.
Tom Harris:Yeah. Exactly. One thing that they can do very innocently is ask the teacher in front of the class, of course, how much has it worn since 18 80, mister so and so? And they'll say 1.2 degrees. 1.2 degrees in a 144 years.
Tom Harris:Would we feel that? So just ask them about data. How many extreme weather records were set in 1936? The answer is 27 statewide records across the US, if you look at the NOAA database. How many were set this year, mister teacher?
Jim Lakely:Well, I
Sterling Burnett:asked him ask him, what's the ideal temperature for the earth?
Tom Harris:Right. Right.
Ron Davison:One one of our directors actually is just going through that right now. His kid came home with some, climate, we'll call it propaganda.
Jim Lakely:I don't know, just a humble suggestion. They could also just start watching the Climate Realism Show every Friday at 1 pm Eastern, you know, just saying. We look stupid. Anyways, he he
Ron Davison:actually got
Sterling Burnett:on Fridays at noon.
Ron Davison:Our director got back to, the teacher and and, and laid out some of the thoughts he had. He wrote a wrote up a little message for them. And, and they were very receptive to it. And he's actually going to meet with the, the minister of education in in, in Alberta here right shortly too. So I have, I'm going to give him a book obviously to to drop off with him.
Ron Davison:So I think it's opening up. It's, the point I'm trying to get to.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Is that the last question we have? I know you I mean, may have jumped the gun by playing the music, but
Linnea Lueken:it Yeah. We're we're we're pretty well out of questions.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Alright. Well, thank you, very much, Linnea. Thank you to everybody, who was watching this show live on Rumble and on YouTube and on x and leaving questions, which is always, a really fun way in the show. We always learn a lot, and we hope that you always learn a lot as well.
Jim Lakely:On this edition of of the Climate Realism Show, I wanna thank, I wanna thank Ron Davison for being with us today. I wanna thank he's from the Friends of Science Coalition. I'm sorry. Friends of Science Society, pardon me. Tom Harris with the International Climate Science Coalition, out of Ottawa.
Jim Lakely:Ron, you're from you're you're in Calgary. I have never, really had any good reason to wear a Canadian tuxedo on the air, and I
Ron Davison:Come up to stampede. We'll show you around.
Jim Lakely:I have done it. I can't wait for my first visit to Calgary and to Ottawa for that matter. So thank you, 2 gentlemen for being on the show. Please be on the lookout for their new book, especially if you live in the great white north energy and climate at a glance, Canadian edition. Facts on 22 prominent climate topics.
Jim Lakely:They don't just apply to Canada. They apply to the United States, and frankly, they apply to the world as well. Thank you, Linnea, for for, being on the show. Anthony Watts and h Sterling Burnett from the Heartland Institute. My name is Jim Lakely.
Jim Lakely:Thank you for watching, and we will see you next week. Bye bye.
Ron Davison:Thanks.