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This week, Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts was a guest on the Shaun Thompson Show on AM 560 the Answer in Chicago. He was asked on the program to talk about Hurricane Milton approaching the Florida Gulf Coast and what Shaun calls the "climate grift." Anthony debunks a lot of climate myths in just a few minutes -- including how even The Washington Post had to admit that despite global warming alarmism, the Earth is experiencing the lowest global temperature in the last 450 million years. In short, and as always, Anthony points out that the actual data itself debunks the climate alarmist narrative.
For more information on Heartland's climate work, please visit:
Heartland.org
https://heartland.org/topics/environment-energy/
Climate Realism
https://climaterealism.com/
Climate at a Glance
https://climateataglance.com/
Heartland's The Climate Realism Show
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgnnPnL9OL7GMaxssP3-ScgN9PVOjl5sq
For more information on Heartland's climate work, please visit:
Heartland.org
https://heartland.org/topics/environment-energy/
Climate Realism
https://climaterealism.com/
Climate at a Glance
https://climateataglance.com/
Heartland's The Climate Realism Show
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgnnPnL9OL7GMaxssP3-ScgN9PVOjl5sq
Creators & Guests
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.
This is the Heartland daily podcast. This week, Heartland Institute senior fellow Anthony Watts was a guest on the Shawn Thompson show on AM 560 The Answer in Chicago. He was asked on the program to talk about hurricane Milton approaching the Florida Gulf Coast and what Shawn calls the climate grift. Anthony debunks a lot of climate myths in just a few minutes, including how even the Washington Post had to admit that despite global warming alarmism, the Earth is experiencing the lowest global temperatures in the last 450000000 years. In short, and as always, Anthony points out that the actual data itself debunks the climate alarmist narrative.
Speaker 1:Have a listen.
Speaker 2:When you look at the grand scheme in total of our government, financial crimes, and scams perpetrated on the people, it's hard to pick your favorite one. I keep flip flopping between Obamacare and this idea of health care versus the greatest scam of all. A grift of 1,000,000,000,000 upon 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars that has absolutely no evidence of either a problem, but more importantly, no evidence of a cure. It's called climate crisis now. Used to be called global warming.
Speaker 2:1st, when I started way back in the seventies when I was a kid, it was gonna freeze. There's gonna be ice caps all over New York. You couldn't get food. It was crazy. Now it's climate crisis.
Speaker 2:My next guest has been dealing with this since the seventies, since Spock told everybody we're in for a new ice age. He was on air in 1978. He's been in the weather business since then, focusing specifically on issues dealing with temperature measurements via his surface stations dot org. Also, he is the senior fellow for the environment and climate at Heartland Institute. He is Anthony Watts.
Speaker 2:Anthony, thank you for joining me. How are you?
Speaker 3:It's my pleasure, and and, I'm doing good to you today.
Speaker 2:It really is a grift, Anthony. And I'm wondering, do you ever think, boy, I could have made a lot more money on the other side of this nonsense? After all, you've had everybody in a tizzy on data that's been calculated since 18/80, don't you?
Speaker 3:Yeah. You know, here's the thing. The left always accuses us of being in the employ of big oil because we doubt all of the screaming claims that they make. But the fact is the left is is hugely, majorly funded for climate change. It's become big business.
Speaker 3:And, you know, the old adage follow the money really goes there because, you know, we're out here as climate skeptics. We're out here looking for scraps, and we never get them in that big oil money that supposedly we get. We're out for truth. That's what we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because what we are is hypothesis skeptics. I don't doubt that there's weather. I mean, after all, I believe it was, Elford. What how do you say his name?
Speaker 2:Wagner? Wagner? In 1912 that focused you know, it looks like there's a continental drift issue if you look at the air. Yeah. You look at the continents.
Speaker 2:Apparently, they were all together at one time, so there's been some catastrophic stuff. In fact, it makes you think how insignificant our life is when you're on a planet that could arguably be 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of years old. But there's been some new information lately, and it specifically contradicts the idea that we'll be walking around in space suits because it's gonna be so hot in the future due to our Buicks. Right?
Speaker 3:Oh, right. Yeah. You know, here's the thing. Just last week, the Washington Post ran an article about a story talking about how they had traced back temperature, reconstructed it using, you know, diatoms and all kinds of other things, you know, calcite crystals, all that kind of stuff, looking at what they call, temperature proxies all the way back to 450,000,000 years ago. And guess what?
Speaker 3:Our current period is the coldest in 450,000,000 years, and earth survived just fine for 450,000,000 years without needing a climate tax or Al Gore.
Speaker 2:One of my favorite books when I was a kid at the at the Mercantile Exchange, somebody a dear friend of mine introduced me to it. It's a book called Titan, and it's about, JD Rockefeller. Did you ever happen to stumble upon it? I think you'd love it if you haven't.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I have I know of the book. I have not read it, but, there are some parallels, I believe, between what happened with that and what we're seeing today. I mean, climate change has become almost the status quo for our the scientific hierarchy. Yeah.
Speaker 3:There's no questioning it. It's become a religion in that questioning it. It's become a religion in that respect because you can't really question it. If you question it, you're a nonbeliever. You're you're unclean.
Speaker 3:You know, that sort of thing. But we ask we go after the data time and again, and the data tells a different story compared to what you the narrative is in the media.
Speaker 2:In fact, your data, when you when you look at it, it it it it's amazing the way it appears, how the data we get from NOAA, the data we get from our government in general, and the data we get from these client, climate scientists, so called, is very cherry picked to get the result that they want. And I'm wondering what's the best way to counteract it. I mean, after all, it's really that they're shaving data. They're not analyzing all data. And even if they were, it's still a microcosm of the data out there.
Speaker 2:But, ultimately, what's the biggest offense in your opinion?
Speaker 3:Well, let me start with a story about Chicago O'Hare Airport. Now you know what the identifier is for Chicago O'Hare. Right? It's o r d. Yes.
Speaker 3:So everybody thinks that stands for O'Hare. It does not. It stands for Orchard Field, which is what it was back in the early days of aviation. Literally, a grass field with orchards on either side. But today, it is a giant megaplex of concrete terminals, runways, and all of that and jet exhaust.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So what has happened is that temperature measurements have been made there throughout its history all the way from way back when in the twenties thirties when aviation first started up to the present. And guess what? There's a huge amount of warming. And this is a bias that's created by the area around the thermometer. You know, concrete, asphalt, stuff like that retains heat overnight.
Speaker 3:I mean, anyone who stood next to a brick building after sunset can tell you that. They can feel the heat coming off it. So what's actually happened is all around the world, not just in America, but all around the world, there has been a building up of infrastructure, but the thermometer stayed in the same place because they want them to record, you know, the temperature at a specific location. So what's happened is is that the overnight temperature, the low, has steadily climbed because of this waste radiant heat that's being released at night by asphalt and concrete. And if you look at all of these stations, compare them to the few stations that are left that have not been biased by this effect, we find that the rate of climate change, AKA global warming, is about half of what Noah claims it to be if he used the good stations that have not been polluted.
Speaker 2:Half. So how did we get to a point where this information cannot be combat combated on what you just said? It's very reasonable. It's an explanation based in fact, based in science, based in the result of cement, based in reality, where if you just move that off-site, you put it in another field, you have a completely different reading, wouldn't you?
Speaker 3:Right. Exactly. If you, put a a weather station, you know, way out in the outskirts of Chicago and compare it to Chicago O'Hare, there's probably gonna be a 10 degree difference. And anybody can prove this themselves with their automobile thermometer. Drive in from the suburbs at night into downtown Chicago and watch the thermometer climb.
Speaker 1:Before we get to the rest of this podcast, I wanted to let you know about 2 fantastic live podcasts Heartland produces every week. We'd love for you to join us every Thursday at 1 PM EST, noon CST live for our flagship in the tank podcast. You can watch on the stopping socialism TV channel on YouTube, where you can participate in the show in the chat with other fans and also ask questions that we'll address on the air and put up on the screen. And every Friday, also at 1 PM EST and noon CST, you can go to Heartland's main YouTube channel. Just search for the Heartland Institute on YouTube for the new Climate Realism Show.
Speaker 1:Heartland's climate team of Anthony Watts, Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lukin cover the crazy climate news of the week, debunk mainstream media myths about the so called climate crisis, dig into energy policy, and much more. The show often features guests that include some of the leading climate scientists and energy policy experts anywhere in the world. There is no show like it, so become regular live viewers of both of these programs if you are interested in smart, lively, fun, and interactive conversations. We hope to see you there every Thursday Friday afternoons at 1 PM EST and noon CST at the stopping socialism TV and the Heartland Institute channels on YouTube. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:We're also on Rumble. See you there.
Speaker 2:My question is why aren't we celebrating the fact we've been able to combat something that our ancestors for 1,000, 100 of 1000, arguably 1,000,000, billions of years couldn't combat. We've managed to survive in all kinds of weather. I'm I'm in Southwest Florida right now, and I'm looking at this storm. And if you watch the news, it's the end of the world. It's the worst thing ever, and it's probably going to be very bad.
Speaker 2:However, due to engineering, due to advancements, the structures we have can handle it. We have glass that can sustain the winds. Why don't we celebrate the achievements of man rather than using an obscure, ridiculous weapon called c 02, which when I was a kid was called photosynthesis, and it was a building block of life and you loved it. Now we hate it because the reality is all that this leviathan, the governments around the world have tried to do is use weapons against the property rights of the individual. Because after all, if they're right and we take all their information, what the hell good is money gonna do at?
Speaker 3:Well, you're right. Science has been weaponized. It's been weaponized in order to be able to make a tool for control because literally, if you can control energy, you can control anything in today's society. I mean, today's society fails without electricity as we're soon to find out when the hurricane hits. You know, without electricity, you can't get anything done.
Speaker 3:And so, you know, now we have to pay extra taxes to combat climate change. We have to go to green utilities because, you know, the carbon dioxide produced by a coal fired power plant is bad. We can't have those things anymore because it's going to destroy the climate. Well, that's not a case at all. We are living in a golden age right now.
Speaker 3:It's it. You know, the climate is great. The weather is great. We have clean air. I mean, think about what Chicago was 40 years ago and small.
Speaker 3:It's not there anymore.
Speaker 2:But the government cleaned
Speaker 3:up the world.
Speaker 2:And the governments will not let us embrace and enjoy the success that we have created. And even again, they say one thing is wrong. Our true intellectuals, the doers, discover a new way. And one of my favorites is natural gas. And it's new way, and one of my favorites is natural gas.
Speaker 2:And it's amazing how our how our forefathers saw what the opportunity of that the the deal with Russia when we bought Alaska, what it could be. In fact, in just Alaska, just that $7,200,000 purchase that was made a 100 and something years ago was beautiful because we have all the oil, the natural gas, and the minerals that this country and arguably the world could use for a 1000 years, yet government restricts man from tapping into that and delivering a salve to their allegation of what's wrong with what I believe to be organic oil. And the idea is that, the somehow natural gas will be bad. By every schematic, natural gas is exactly the answer. They can deliver it safely.
Speaker 2:It can even in storms like we're about to face, it can supply energy for us so we won't have to be out of out of electricity. Why is it governments won't embrace the true answers to the problem?
Speaker 3:It's because of money, and that's simply that in my opinion. The green agenda, people have been throwing money at that for a couple of decades. It's huge in the amount of money that's been invested in green technology. And they've thrown this money at it even though the technology itself has not been proven. You know, wind and solar are not reliable.
Speaker 3:I mean, why should we switch over our energy system to something that 247, 365, like a coal or a nuclear plant to something that is dependent upon the weather? And that's exactly what wind and solar is. It's dependent upon the weather, whether the wind blows and whether the sun shines. If that doesn't happen, we get no power. It's crazy.
Speaker 3:It's counterproductive. It's anti American.
Speaker 2:Now what's funny is that I am a capitalist, but I am not a corporatist. I've watched something over the last 30 years that I find to be very, very interesting. And you said earlier about following the money, and I'm always reminded of the book Titan, the illusion of selling a finite idea that oil, which really just bubbles up in some places and is accessible in all places, is somehow finite. I mean, we remember Jimmy Carter. We only have 35 years.
Speaker 2:That's that's before you started as a weatherman in 1978. But the reality is big oil as it's called has kinda monopolized this this industry. And what they've done over the last 35 years from what I have discovered in just my casual investigations is they very much have diversified into the better scam than producing the oil in this country as they take the idea and what oil is and they go to third world countries all through Africa and South America, and they do the same thing they did here, and they pretend that they don't. But the reality is here, they diversify into wind. Wind to me is arguably the greatest fraud perpetrated on the American people.
Speaker 2:For instance, it doesn't even break even until you need a new one. The energy it produces can you transfer or store energy from a windmill?
Speaker 3:No. You cannot. Well, you can if you have the cabling. You have the infrastructure to get the power from point a to point b, but that's part of the problem. Where they need to build these wind turbines is often not accessible to the grid, so they have to build additional infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Right. But the idea they produce this this this moronic thing of of fiberglass, all oil, by the way, which makes me chuckle. But the idea that they produce this thing and it's the cheapest one is 3 and a half 1000000. The big ones that you see are about 4,800,000. And they hook them up, and they got the big thing, and it looks like it's doing everything.
Speaker 2:Do we know specifically how many of those windmills are actually producing energy to anybody who isn't directly a rural area?
Speaker 3:There's no way of knowing. A lot of these things will sit out their idle. Yes.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a great scam. It doesn't produce nearly the amount of money, of, in energy that it costs to build. By the time they only last 20 years, the data I've seen at the the earliest they broke even was 22 years. In the meantime, who pays for that is the government. Without the government, without subsidies, without this mission of burning up trillions in in acting busy producing nothing, none of it would really exist organically.
Speaker 2:I think it was t Boone prick, t Bone, what's his last name? He went bankrupt in the oil business. T Boone Pickens. Didn't he blow, like, $700,000,000? Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So who's gonna who's gonna stop the government?
Speaker 3:That's the problem. The government is so large now, so overbearing, so in everything, it's difficult to stop. And there's another crisis associated with this. You know, we started the environmental movement to clean up the planet and we've been successful at that. Air pollution is less, water pollution is less, Like Michigan's cleaner and so forth and so on.
Speaker 3:Well, now we've got another environmental disaster looming with the wind and solar. Just a couple of months ago, we had an environmental disaster up off of, Massachusetts where some wind turbines exploded, and all of its fiberglass washed up on the beaches. And it closed the beaches because you can't be walking around on a beach with fiberglass shards. And so, you know, it's an environmental disaster. It's the same thing with solar panels.
Speaker 3:Solar panels contain, you know, silicon, selenium, and other heavy metals. These have to be disposed of properly. So they're not gonna last forever. The typical solar panel has a useful life of 25 to 30 years. What then?
Speaker 3:What are we gonna do with those millions of things?
Speaker 2:Why do you think, scientists outside of yourself and a few group I mean, there's probably, what, maybe a 100000 scientists that have rebutted the step and fetch idea of the climate, the extremist, the climate profiteers. Why do you think they don't, educate the American people or the people around the world as we still you know, this this has bothered me since I was a kid. The idea that we don't take advantage of the true reusable renewable energy that the world gives us, whether you believe it to be a biotic or organic, that's that's up for an argument. But why do we still refer to oil as fossil?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that scientists have been corrupted by something called noble cause corruption. And this is something that started with police departments. You know, you have a perpetrator that they've been chasing for months, you know, and he's been doing some really bad things, planning drugs, killing people, so forth and so on. They arrest him, but they don't have enough to put him in jail. So one of the officers plants a piece on him or put some drugs on him so that they can nail him for this.
Speaker 3:That's noble cause corruption because it's noble to put this perp, which you know is a scumbag, in jail, you know, versus the the smaller crime supposedly of planting something on him. Well, it's the same thing with climate change. These folks believe they are saving the planet. They honestly believe that and that their cause is far more noble than anything else. And therefore, you should just shut up and listen to us.
Speaker 3:And that's what's happened with a lot of these scientists, they've become superstars. And they the ego has gone to their head. And they do not think clearly anymore. They do not think like scientists.
Speaker 2:You would you'd think they'd be offended by, the girl who I think she was in grade school. Thornburg, Greta Thornburg. She was what? 12 years old and she became a rock star in this entire industry. And yet very few of them point to to to what you do, surface stations dot org.
Speaker 2:That has been cited in I don't know how many different publications. And this something that everybody can go to. Correct? Surface, stations.org?
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you can go to the climate, you can go to heartland.org and look at our latest climate report that we did in 2022, which was the next level of that, where we traveled all around the nation looking at these weather stations that are used to record climate. And we found out how just how bad they are. We recorded over 90% of them are corrupted in some way that creates a heat bias, which biases the climate signal.
Speaker 2:Now Joe Biden himself, Barack Obama has 2. They all have his states on the water, which is how I know they're full of nonsense and the ice caps aren't melting. But is the data does it support my allegation that the ice caps in fact aren't melting, but they're actually growing? Did I read that somewhere properly?
Speaker 3:Well, the ice caps melt every summer. It's natural. And, yes, some summers, they melt 650,000,000,000,000 tons of ice. And someone takes that number and says, oh, it's terrible. It's inconceivable.
Speaker 3:It's gigantic. We can't ever think of this, you know, as being normal. But the fact of the matter is that ice refreezes every year, and maybe it doesn't refreeze as much. But the net loss of ice at the north and south polar ice caps is negligible compared to the gigantic amount of ice, which is in the quadrillions of tons. And it just it it it is just hype.
Speaker 3:If you look at graphs and data comparing what's actually lost to the total, it's a tiny blip. You can't even see it. But the media and these scientists will show you what they call anomaly graphs, which are highly exaggerated, highly magnified. And when you look at those, it looks like all hell is breaking loose, but that's not true. Not true at all.
Speaker 2:I wanna thank you on behalf of all of the people who instinctively and with their own research have proved the climate alarmist wrong, but more importantly, you having the courage to go out there and and speak about it. It reminds me of somebody Chicago and it's all loved and lost, and that was, Coleman, John Coleman. And it's nice to see somebody pick up that mantle and refute the fraud that is perpetrated on the people, really, not just in this country, but around the world. Anthony Watts, it has been an absolute pleasure. Where do you prefer people go and keep an eye on you?
Speaker 3:Well, I would go to heartland.org and also climate realism.com. Every day on climate realism dotcom, we debunk media stories where they're pushing hype that is impossible and we knock it down with facts and we do it, you know, in a sane factual manner. Climatematerealism.comandheartland.org.
Speaker 2:Now Milton is coming my way and I know whenever they name a hurricane after a a a Democrat voter, I'm in trouble. Ian caused us a lot of aggravation, but it's the 14th time that a hurricane has followed this path. Am I right? Is it 14 or 15?
Speaker 3:It's actually more than that. There have been, a 141 different gulf hurricanes that have formed in the gulf and then hit some portion of the gulf. They're saying that this particular storm was unprecedented. Well, that's not it at all. A very similar storm happened and hit Tampa and devastated what was a very small Tampa in 1848.
Speaker 3:It literally wiped it off the map. Only 5 houses were left. And so there's that. And then again in 1921, but the population was so much less in these areas then. So when they start talking about damages and losses from this storm, it's gonna be, you know, gigantic.
Speaker 3:But the fact of the matter is the hurricanes have not gotten stronger. Just more people have moved to the coast because that's the popular place to live.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And those people are like me running from democrat areas like Chicago. In the meantime, thank you for always keeping us sane. I've enjoyed this conversation.