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In this new episode #92 of "Climate Change Roundtable," host Anthony Watts leads a thought-provoking discussion with Heartland experts H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken.
This past year has been an unrelenting year of climate alarmism, yet when you look at what has actually happened compared to what was predicted, there's a wide gap between the hype and the reality. From wildfires to record temperatures, when you examine the data, it isn't alarming at all. Plus we'll touch on the failures of Net-Zero and wind power, both of which took big hits this year.
And, like always, we’ll have Crazy Climate News of the week.Join us at Noon Central Time (1PM ET) Whether you're a climate enthusiast, a policy expert, or just someone curious about the different facets of climate change discourse, this episode will enlighten you.
This past year has been an unrelenting year of climate alarmism, yet when you look at what has actually happened compared to what was predicted, there's a wide gap between the hype and the reality. From wildfires to record temperatures, when you examine the data, it isn't alarming at all. Plus we'll touch on the failures of Net-Zero and wind power, both of which took big hits this year.
And, like always, we’ll have Crazy Climate News of the week.Join us at Noon Central Time (1PM ET) Whether you're a climate enthusiast, a policy expert, or just someone curious about the different facets of climate change discourse, this episode will enlighten you.
In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there!
Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!
Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!
Creators and 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.
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.
The ability of CO2 to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.
The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.
That's not how you power a modern industrial system.
The ultimate goal of this renewable energy plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.
You know who's tried that?
Germany.
Seven straight days of no wind for Germany.
Their factories are shutting down.
They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910.
Today is Friday.
That's right, Greta.
It is Friday, and this is our own personal Friday protest.
Climate Change Roundtable episode number 92.
A year of climate alarmism sliced, diced, and factually impaled.
By the way, Greta turned 21 years old this week.
Now, we're going to refrain from singing happy birthday here, but I'm going to remind you that now that you're an adult, some of the stunts you like to pull now come with adult consequences.
This seems to be lost on the Orlando TV station WFLA, who tweeted out this image on January 3rd.
So anyway, we'll see how that goes now that she's no longer a kid.
So I'm your host, Anthony Watts, Senior Fellow for Environment and Climate at the Heartland Institute.
Joining us today, we have a regular panelist, Dr. H. Sterling Burnett, Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate, and Linnea Lucan, our Research Fellow, also with the Robinson Center.
Welcome, guys, and Happy New Year.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to everyone out there.
So let's hope that 2024 is climatically less difficult than 2023.
Let's say climatically less difficult reporting-wise because the climate hasn't changed.
It's just the reporting that gets ever more drastic.
Right.
Right.
You know, we've already gotten 2024 off to kind of a wild start with some of the stories we're going to talk about.
But, you know, it just they can't seem to help themselves.
Anyway, let's kick off the show with the first one.
Biden administration launched an aggressive campaign targeting home appliances with eco regulations in 2023.
That's right.
Not only are they coming after your stove, which was last year's story.
Now they're after your refrigerator, your washer and dryer, probably your blender and maybe even your hair curler.
I mean, nothing is safe from climate change these days.
You know, it's room fans.
It's your furnace.
It's anything that uses gas, anything that uses electricity.
You know, they're constantly ratcheting up stringency standards for the energy use or the water use.
And as a result, only the highest, most expensive energy
appliances on the market will still be on the market, which means if you want a gas stove, you have to buy the ones that the celebrity chefs can afford.
If you want an affordable vehicle, well, you're just going to have to keep buying used is what you're going to have to do if you want an internal combustion engine.
If you want, you better watch out.
They're coming for your air conditioner.
So if you want
a good air conditioner that has all the features you want, because when they ratchet up these standards, typically to meet them, they have to, they have to take out features.
So they don't do the things you want it.
You bought them to do your washing machine.
Now it takes three hours to, I mean, your, your dishwasher takes three hours when it used to take one.
You have to add extra water into your washing machines.
You have to, you have to cut it off, add extra water to get the water filled.
These are the things that these standards do, leaving the poor worse off because they either have to keep older models running, which means constantly calling the Maytag repairman who will no longer be lonely, or you have to shell out for more expensive products, often that don't do the job as well.
Come on, man.
Yeah.
People going after some of those old washers and dryers and refrigerators from the 70s, you know, and the avocado green color, because those things never break.
Yeah.
Well, look, I had I had an air conditioner until five years ago that was in my home.
So five years ago is what?
Twenty twenty seventeen.
Twenty eighteen now.
I mean, well, twenty seventeen is when I did it.
I replaced my air conditioner.
That air conditioner had been in the home since the original.
It was the original air conditioner.
It had been in the home since 1984.
The guy told me I could expect about a quarter of that time out of this brand new great air conditioner that was going to save me so much money.
They don't last as long.
They break more often, newer appliances.
They don't do what you want them to do.
They don't have all the features you want.
But all you're supposed to care about
Is energy and water.
And of course, often they don't even save you that much energy or water.
I mean, if you have a toilet, you have to flush three times rather than the old one.
Or if your lights break often, your new LED lights break, and you have to replace them at a higher cost than the old incandescents, then you're not saving money over the long term with all those great energy savings.
Yep.
Right.
What do you got to say?
Yeah.
And I want to point as someone who is currently looking at getting some new appliances, it's getting increasingly difficult to find appliances that don't have a wifi built into them, which, you know, it sounds convenient, you know, to be able to turn your oven up or down from your phone.
Although I think that might encourage some people to leave the house with their oven on more often because they think that they can monitor it safely, which I wouldn't do that.
And it sounds convenient, but the fact of the matter is this is giving access to...
potentially external individuals to your home devices, which gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Gives me the heebie-jeebies in Colorado when you sign up for that thermostat monitoring program where the government can turn and the utilities can turn your thermostat off.
remotely.
I think the same kind of thing is part of the reason why the smart tech is being pushed so hard in home appliances that really have no business having it.
I mean, why would a microwave connect to your phone?
That makes no sense.
The point of the microwave is you stand right in front of it and you turn it on for a minute to nuke something.
You don't need it to connect to your phone so you can remote monitor the microwave.
Well, the simple solution is if you get one of those appliances, because there's no better choice for you, you simply don't enable the Wi-Fi.
Just don't.
Yeah, that's what I have ended up having to do.
But it's, you know, most people aren't going to do it.
Most people love, you know, they're going to have fun with the technology.
They're not going to be worried about it.
And then what ends up happening is you get that metering control.
And instead of shutting down your whole house, they can shut down select appliances that are taking up too much energy, like your washing machine.
That's what I think this is going towards.
That they think, mind you, that they think is taking too much energy.
That somebody else has decided in their infinite wisdom, sorry, your microwave's using too much.
Yep.
And, well, look, I can't speak for you, but last week I had two algaes.
Really?
I wasn't working.
I didn't get television.
I didn't get computers.
I had to have text come out twice.
So how is that going to, you know, sorry, you can't turn on your microwave now because you hooked it up to the Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi, some hacker has taken over or the service itself has just failed.
It's, it's dangerous.
You know, it's, it's big, big brother's big back door.
Yeah, there's another solution you can do.
And that is if it demands a connection to Wi-Fi, put a separate router in your house, like buy an old junk one on eBay and make a Wi-Fi for that.
And then hook that up to the system so that it's got Wi-Fi and then pull the plug on it to the Internet.
Keep it separate from the rest of your Wi-Fi and let the thing be stupidly happy thinking it's connected to Wi-Fi when it really isn't connected to anything.
Anyway, let's go on to the next one.
Yeah, it sounds like a lot more work than just plugging in an appliance and starting to use it.
Yeah, so the next climate crazy thing, big oil, fully on the villain role in 2023.
the hottest year ever recorded of course this is the ever reliable ever alarmed guardian who comes up with some of the most inane climate stories on the planet on a regular basis and so they're a personal favorite to be able to just slice and dice but you know they haven't even paid attention to the fact that we had a el nino year they haven't paid attention to the fact that we had a massive eruption of a volcano that pushed
You know, millions of tons of water vapor into the atmosphere and water vapor into greenhouse gas.
No, it's all about big oil.
Just goes to show how deep these folks are.
Yeah, Hunga Tonga volcano pushed more than 10% increase in water vapor.
We have an El Nino.
We have, of course...
all the readings are compromised from the urban heat island effect.
If you, if you go to different places like Phoenix that we've highlighted before, none of those are factors.
There's only one factor, big oil.
Yeah.
And that volcano too.
I mean, it's,
It blasted the water vapor up into the upper stratosphere, I think.
I mean, it's not like it just put it into the lower atmosphere, the parts of the atmosphere that we normally, you know, they say that the reason why hydropower or hydro cars aren't going to cause global warming, despite the fact that they emit water vapor, is because it has such a low residence time in the atmosphere.
But that's not the case when it gets blasted up into the stratosphere.
That's a totally different animal.
Well, and, you know, they'll point to, we often cite satellites for temperature data.
And the satellites show this is the hottest year since satellites.
There's no question about that.
But how do satellites measure temperature?
Well, they measure, in part, how they calculate temperature is the reflectivity of clouds.
And you know what causes clouds to be reflective and creates more clouds?
Water vapor, because that's all they are.
And so this year you had more reflectivity than ever.
So is it surprising that the satellite temperature readings are hotter than ever?
Probably not.
Yeah.
It just goes to show how complex the climate is.
It really is.
Okay.
So the next one, climate change has forced millions to flee their home and Asia is not prepared.
Well, really?
Well, you know, we had a story a number of years ago, ran on WWT,
about the UN said there will be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.
And they put that up on their website.
And it was if they thought it was real, if it's going to be fact.
2010 comes around, there wasn't a single one, not one, zero, nada.
And guess what?
They disappeared it from their website.
They just got rid of it because their prediction was so totally bogus and wrong, they had to hide it to prevent themselves from looking like the idiots that they actually are.
Here we go again.
They're saying there's going to be more climate refugees, and there still isn't any.
Well, I think that story, I could be wrong, but I think it's about internal migration.
And the problem there is it's still tied to particular weather events in a particular year.
Have people had to move from the coast in some small countries that were affected by hurricanes when their houses were wiped out?
Yeah, guess what?
They had to move inland.
And as soon as the storm passes and they start getting the infrastructure there, my suspicion is they'll move right back to the coast.
Internal migration for a year because of bad weather in that year is not proof of climate change.
We have lots of people that are climate refugees in the United States that go coastal every year.
All right.
So, get this.
Climate change is a bigger concern.
Oh, wait.
No, no, no.
I thought we're dead already.
Most of us were going to die from the climate crisis.
I was wrong.
Now, this is also from The Guardian.
And on occasion, The Guardian does have moments of clarity and sanity.
But, you know, it's still...
This whole doom is just around the corner thing seems to be a regular feature of climate alarmism.
I mean, every week, if not every day, we see a news story that something's going to disappear by 2050, or something's going to die by 2050, or we're going to lose the ability to do something or whatever.
It's always about climate change in the context of the mass media is always about loss.
It's never about something positive.
And that's the real problem here.
I saw this story earlier in the week, and I thought – I want to be fair to The Guardian.
The Guardian has some of the most absurd –
climate claims of any mainstream media, but they also give sometimes the best climate coverage.
Every so often, as you say, it's not just a nugget.
They'll have a whole story that's sort of honest.
And I don't know, I don't see that kind of coverage in the New York Times or the Washington Post.
I never see one that's really honest.
Sometimes the Guardian has that.
I was going to say the Guardian, I think, actually does a little bit of a more balanced job by far compared to what, in my opinion, the worst mainstream outlet is The Washington Post by far.
I think they are probably the most odious outlet.
terrible propagandists I've ever seen.
It's unbelievable the kind of stuff that they get away with publishing.
Aren't they the ones owned by Bezos?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, there you go.
He's got products to sell.
And he sells them through hype and scare.
But anyway, that story, you know, it's refreshing when someone admits, as she did, I was wrong.
I thought the end was near.
I'd listened to Chicken Little.
And Chicken Little was wrong, and I'm going to admit it.
So she still goes on and gives you a lot of, oh, this is bad, and we still need to stop the temperature rise, and we need to do these things.
But she's admitting that the world is not coming to an end, and that's refreshing for an alarmist.
Right, right.
So, you know, we talked about climate refugees, and typically war or famine or something else causes them to move.
They're not really climate refugees.
They're political refugees.
But get this.
Climate change should be a bigger concern than Hamas, according to this article.
The Times of Israel says climate change is being neglected because we've got a war going on.
Oh, no, we need attention right now.
Stop paying attention to the war.
I mean, really?
Yeah, stop.
Ignore the bombs dropping about your head.
Worry about climate change.
Right, it's a bigger threat.
This is John Kerry two years ago when the outbreak of the Ukraine war, and he says, I'm afraid this war might take attention away from the need to reduce emissions to fight climate change in Russia and elsewhere.
It's like, get some real perspective here.
Right.
People are dying on the ground today, not 100 years from now.
Well, you know, John Kerry has his role, and he sticks to it.
Right.
Okay, so finally, the most tone-deaf story so far.
Climate change is hurting kids' mental health, reports find.
This is from Yale Climate Connections.
And Yale Climate Connections, much like the Washington Post, regularly runs climate alarmism stories, such as, you know, hurricanes are getting worse, tornadoes are going to come down more frequently,
They were going to see, you know, more hail, more fire and brimstone coming from the sky.
Literally, that's the kind of stuff they write.
And yet they are now saying, well, gosh, climate change itself is affecting kids' mental health.
But in fact, isn't it the stories that you as the mass media are writing are the cause of these concerns?
I mean, kids...
are being told they have no future because the world's going to end because of climate change or we're all going to roast or we're not going to have enough water or whatever.
That's the kind of thing that makes them need treatment.
This particular story
frame that we've seen several times now and we've talked about on Climate Realism and on this show before is my number one biggest problem with this, whatever, this propaganda.
It infuriates me that they would actively and on purpose knowingly try to generate alarm about it or a sense of urgency is what they like to call it.
And then they turn around and then they say, oh, all this stuff that we're telling people that the world is going to come to an end, it's actually scaring kids.
And we're going to keep doing it.
But we're concerned about the kids and climate change itself is what's actually damaging them.
No, you know full well, these journalists know full well that it's their coverage and the way that they cover climate issues that's scaring kids.
And they're making people actually mentally insane.
It's like the COVID stuff.
They're actually making people crazy.
It's like, to Anthony's point about Washington Post and Yale, look, the reason there's so much bad reporting and alarm is because they have centers devoted just to climate change, right?
They got to do something.
They got to justify those salaries.
Washington Post has a climate desk.
Yes, they do.
They do.
And, you know, but fortunately, some of the climate desks have closed.
For example, the New York Times climate desk closed, I believe it was last year.
But we still have a climate, not just a desk, but we have a climate regiment at the AP.
But that's another story.
And then, boy, I'm going to finish.
And then Yale, this is a climate project at Yale.
So they're going to keep doing these stories.
And Linnea is right.
It is exactly...
The reporting, if the reporting went away tomorrow, if they ceased, they don't have to say the climate is getting better.
They don't have to do that.
If they just stopped reporting it,
every day that's the drip drip drip of of climate alarm stories pretty soon kids would go back to paying attention to well to the extent that they pay attention to real news anyway real news they might still be alarmed about something but they wouldn't be thinking i can't have children because the world's coming to an end or it'll kill the world how do i know that well because of the reporting not because i see any evidence of it because they don't see evidence of it because they're
Right.
When I was when I was in middle school and the climate change stuff was really ramping up for us, it was the kind of positioning that they tended to have on it towards kids was this is an environmental issue.
it's gonna hurt different animals or it's gonna hurt whatever.
So we need to recycle more or whatever so that we can stop climate change.
We need to be more energy efficient so we can stop climate change.
And there's small ways that you can help.
Now the rhetoric is we need fundamental society-wide global change to happen immediately or else we are all going to die in the next couple of decades.
That's what they're telling kids now in order to make them scared enough so that they will, you know, push for more action or whatever.
But what's actually happening and what some of these news organizations are realizing is that instead of driving people to be inspired to do more protesting or, you know, have climate change as their number one voting priority, which it's not anyone's number one priority voting priority for voting, you
what it actually has done is it's made people totally check out kids are like well i'm gonna die anyway there's no way that these massive sweeping changes are going to happen in the time frame that we're being given so why should i do any of this stuff why should i care at all right why should i get out of my mom's basement and stop playing video games right all right so let's go on to our
Topics.
First of all, this was a really bad year for electric vehicles.
I mean, it seemed like every week we had a new story where some automobile was bursting into flames spontaneously, whether it was, you know, on a boat or in a parking garage or just on the road or whatever.
So Sterling's going to take this topic.
He's got the he's got the the
The scoop on EV disasters this year.
Go ahead, Sterling.
Well, I mean, it's just one after the other.
You talk about a drip, drip, drip.
This is more like a torrent.
It's almost every day there's a new story telling you that Biden's EV goals are fantasy.
I mean, it's... So Biden gets $6 billion to build...
Electric chargers, which they say are necessary, despite the fact there's already 30,000 more chargers in the U.S.
than there are gas stations.
There's already 30,000 more chargers in the U.S., but we need 1.2 million more.
And he got $6 billion for it.
How many chargers have been built?
Not one.
Isn't that model, the very popular model called the Iceplode?
Yeah, there you go.
Electric vehicle fires, scooters and cars have become the biggest fire hazard in New York, according to their fire department.
It caused more fires.
They caused deaths.
When I was in the 60s,
when I was very young, Ralph Nader wrote a book, Unsafe at Any Speed, about the Corvair.
And it had caused a couple of deaths.
It was a dangerous car, they said.
These vehicles, electric vehicles, have caused more deaths than the Corvair ever did.
Any other product that was as dangerous, inherently dangerous, to just catch fire for no good reason in an airplane, in your garage, sitting in the parking lot, to just catch fire would have been pulled for the market within the first 10 times that happened.
But it's happened hundreds of times.
He's probably promoting electric vehicles because he doesn't care about people's safety or health anymore.
He cares about pushing an alarmist narrative.
And progressives.
So the point is, no other product gets the pass that electric vehicles do.
But people are waking up.
Insurers are stopping insuring them in Europe.
Companies that ship these things, another ship caught fire this week, this time just carrying electric batteries.
This time just carrying batteries from overseas.
They've now got it anchored off the coast of Alaska because they don't want to bring it in because they can't put the fire out.
It's probably another ship that will sink.
Um, so the insurers won't insure the ships if they carry these things.
So how are they going to get over from, from China to here?
Um, the, the automakers here in the U S domestically, uh, Ford was going to put 15 billion.
They pulled back 12 billion of their investment GM, which sold a total of 18 electric trucks last year, not last quarter last year.
Uh, they are cutting back on their production.
they are having to buy out half their Buick dealers who say, we're not installing these electric chargers for these cars that won't sell.
It's too much.
It's too expensive.
They're sitting on the lots longer.
They still have to be charged.
What's going to happen if it sits on the lot for six months and someone comes, oh, I want that electric vehicle and you can't drive off with it.
Well, give us a couple of days while it charges.
The news is not getting better for electric vehicles.
It's getting worse.
And
Biden's the Biden administration is oblivious to this.
This just this week,
Kathleen, you know, KJP, Kathleen or Catherine Jean-Pierre, his media mogul, his media spokesperson, she's out there saying, oh, no, electric vehicles are taking off.
Sales are going down.
They're taking off because they have rocket-powered flames coming out of them.
That's why.
So she's sitting there doubting the successes of electric vehicles while every... I mean, even the mainstream media can't hide this.
Even they are reporting this.
And so...
they're completely oblivious in the white house.
They don't, they either don't know what's going on or they're, they're like whistling past the graveyard.
Yeah.
Hoping if they keep saying good things, hoping if they say things well enough, you know, positive things enough, long enough, it will be some, some kind of self fulfilling prophecy.
Sterling.
It reminds me a lot of people.
So I have the,
Gulag Archipelago.
And I've read the first section of it.
And a lot of people like to focus on the Soviet purges and stuff.
And it's talked about in there.
And that's interesting.
But what I found just haunting, and I read this while I was offshore, sitting in the, you know,
on the offshore oil rig.
And I was thinking, what would this be like if the Soviets were in charge of this industry?
And what you said about the Biden administration being oblivious to the problems of the electric vehicles not working the way that they want them to reminds me a lot of what would happen when the Soviet Union would send someone in to some kind of a factory or something.
They would get rid of the engineers that knew how to run the factory.
And the Soviets would come in and say, OK, we're going to do it this way instead, because this is the way that the government wants it done.
And when it couldn't produce the product anymore, they would blame the workers.
They would blame the product itself.
They would blame everyone.
And they never considered
out loud that it was their process or they're trying to force their ideals onto that industry that was causing it to fail.
It was everyone else's fault.
It was these secret records and they were always finding new records to throw in jail for not making this magic technology happen.
And it just, the electric vehicle thing reminds me of that.
The renewable energy thing reminds me of that.
It's just commie nonsense.
Well, it's Big Brother.
I mean, Jean-Pierre's up there saying, sales are going up.
And they're not.
They're going down.
It's up is down, down is up.
You know, we have control of the border.
As film crews are filming hundreds of thousands of people coming over the border, they just...
The story this week about the border, the crazy story this week, was about the Interior Secretary saying that climate change is causing people to stream across the border.
And Blinken this week says, you know, basically, oh, Biden has brought peace around the world.
What world is he looking at?
It's literally 1984. 1984.
War is peace.
Let's move on to our next topic.
Deadly battery fires in New York.
Yeah.
That's what I was saying earlier.
It's like, uh, it's the biggest, it's the largest source of fires in New York now that they're having to put out.
And of course they had a story just this week about one, a single fire took 36,000 gallons of water.
Well, you'd want to talk about water shortages when everyone's got these vehicles and they're catching on fire everywhere.
Pretty soon we'll drain, uh,
municipal water supplies, just putting out EV fires.
Exactly.
Exactly.
All righty, so our next major topic is food production.
Now, Linnea is our resident expert on this.
Food production has been under attack all year, whether it's don't eat beef or, you know, you're growing too much because you're using fertilizer or whatever it is.
It seems to be unrelenting attack on agriculture, which goes towards the whole depopulation thing that they like.
Anyway, Linnea, take it away.
What do we got this year for food production issues?
Right.
So first we have this.
So this year, Epoch Times came out with a really good documentary about what's been happening with these green activists pushing to end agriculture, particularly meat related agriculture like ranching and pig farming and chicken farming and such.
They say that they contribute too much methane in particular and nitrogen and also carbon dioxide emissions.
But so they're pushing to end that stuff.
And it's happening really.
It's really getting pushed pretty hard in Europe right now.
A little bit less so in Canada, but Canada is very close behind them.
They have come out with some just awful emissions.
awful, stupid, or evil, probably evil though, policies in Canada about not letting farmers and growers in general heat their greenhouses in the winter with natural gas or propane.
So basically in northern Canada, if you don't have a heated greenhouse, it's pretty hard to grow anything besides, you know, like deep, real deep winter crops.
The Europe is completely lost their mind.
Europe has completely lost their minds.
I was trying to think of how I wanted to start on this.
The main thing that I want to say is that despite global warming, despite what the news says, the last decades have seen unprecedented, just unbelievable increases in crop production across the world.
Every country, almost every crop in every country has seen increasing yields in production.
I am going to predict that if they stay the course in Europe, they are going to reverse that trend.
And then they're going to blame it on climate change.
So they are shutting down, huh?
That's a lot of crop.
Yeah, they are shutting down major farms in the Netherlands, which is Europe's largest meat producing region.
They are shutting down even regular like crop farms in the UK and they are paying farmers to convert their land to wild crops.
You know, like rewilding it.
There is a huge rewilding movement across Europe, which, you know, if the land isn't particularly productive, then why not?
But if you're...
populace is increasing and you want to feed them, you have to produce more food, not less.
And they are actively choosing to produce less.
They are pushing for organic farming, which has about a third of a yield of regular high production farming that uses synthetic fossil fuel related pesticides and fertilizers.
Worse, because they're also pushing at the same time for the end of livestock farming, they're not going to be able to get the organic fertilizer either, because that comes as a byproduct of cattle farming and chicken farming.
So they're just not going to have it.
So I guess they're just trying to not grow any crops at all.
It's bad in the Netherlands, it's bad in the UK.
We saw an example of how bad this was in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago, they banned synthetic fertilizers, they banned everything except for organic farming and their crop production declined by massive, massive, unbelievable margins to the point where they actually had riots in the streets, people were starving to death
They burned the president's house down.
He wasn't in it.
I mean, it was absolute chaos.
And at that same time that that was going on, the WEF, the United Nations, all of them were applauding them for how green they were.
And they were probably shoveling money into their government bank accounts because of how green they were.
This is coming for everyone unless we can stop it.
These folks never learned anything from Marie Antoinette back in the French days when there was no food, let them eat cake.
They haven't learned anything, these politicians.
Well, they just think or know they can get away with it now.
Now, of course, the Sri Lankan president certainly didn't get away with it.
His government fell and his house was burned.
It wasn't his house.
It's the presidential house.
Like burning the White House.
And their crops in a single year, in a single year, crop production dropped by half.
Rice prices and tea prices went up.
I think they tripled.
And
Unfortunately, the U.S.
is not immune to these kinds of stupidity.
California is leading on this, right?
Their farmers have to start capturing methane.
Well, that's going to add to the price of food.
Also, at the same time, they have to get out of factory farming.
So you've got to give more room to your animals.
At the same time as they're pushing policies to force people to live on top of each other,
No, you can't have big houses.
No, you can't have big lawns.
We got to compact.
Everyone needs to be in close quarters.
They want more room for chickens and pigs.
Less room for humans.
And they won't allow pork to come in from places that don't meet their standards.
So they're having an outsized impact.
Now, maybe they say, well, we don't have as many people to feed anymore because they're leaving.
So maybe maybe that they've got a point there.
But and it's happening not just in California, but of course, under the Biden administration, it's about to happen in the Pacific Northwest.
So they're going to take out four hydroelectric dams that produce, I think, a thousand or three thousand megawatts of electricity.
Because we're going to build new renewables.
They're going to tear down the most reliable renewable, get rid of it, and replace them with unreliable renewables.
But it's not as if those dams only provide one service.
They also are used, the water there is used for agriculture.
So what's going to happen to agriculture that uses that water?
Well, it's going to disappear.
So food production is going to fall there, too.
In the end, we all suffer when we allow climate alarmists run things.
Exactly.
Thank you so much, Walter, for the super chat.
We really appreciate it.
It's going to help us to advertise this show and other stuff.
So thank you very much.
Yeah, by the way, Walter, I did see your note on WUWT a couple of weeks ago.
I will respond to that at some point.
I do want to say it seems to me, having been in California myself, it seems to me that in addition to exporting people on a regular basis, their biggest export is stupidity.
And it seems to spread all around the world, unfortunately.
All right, so we're going to go to the next topic, and that is the hottest July 4th ever.
That was a big thing this past year.
The 4th of July was just unprecedented and terrifying temperature.
The problem is it wasn't a real temperature.
It was based on a model output.
And if you look further down here, you see this graph, this bogus labeled graph, all that because it is bogus.
This was coming from climate reanalyzer.
And the spike that it got
happened because there was a section in the southern hemisphere in Antarctica that became abnormally warm.
So these temperatures that they were recording and modeling didn't actually occur in any place anyone lived.
It occurred down in Antarctica.
And we can't even be sure it's real because
What happens in Antarctica is oftentimes misunderstood or not understood at all because there's ocean currents involved.
We've only got about 60 years or so of any good data for Antarctica.
And so we don't have a good handle on the patterns or whatever.
But the bottom line is because parts of Antarctica got abnormally warm, the entire world, when they average it out and present the number,
became abnormally warm.
And therefore, that's a crisis.
And the media went nuts over it.
They took one station, one part of station data across all of Antarctica as representative of an entire region, which skewed the data.
And of course, even there, when the temperature went up, it was well below freezing.
Exactly.
It went up.
It did go up considerably.
So it went up from, what, I don't know, 50 below zero to 10 below zero?
But that's a huge spike.
And it represented the entirety of Antarctica, despite the fact that you've got like 50 to 70 stations there on Antarctica.
Not that those stations produce any artificial warming themselves.
So not only, you know, that was bogus, but then they, you know, they take it to the hundred and twenty five thousand years.
for the year.
It's just one thing after the other.
And we just don't have data for a lot of that stuff.
And the data that we have is badly compromised.
Right.
And I want to point out something about Antarctica.
All of the temperatures measured in Antarctica used in this are coming from research stations.
such as a bird station or so forth and so on.
Now, where these research stations are, people live and people have to stay warm.
Otherwise, well, they're dead, right?
In Antarctica, when it gets down to minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever.
So you have to have all of this energy generating capacity.
And so one of the things is, and you can see this like in Barrow, Alaska, one of the coldest cities in the United States, it has its own urban heat island.
You can drive through Barrow with a thermometer on your car and watch the temperature go up and then go down as you go out of town.
And it's the same thing with these research stations down in Antarctica.
The waste heat from just simply staying alive is influencing the thermometers because the thermometers have to be near where people can measure them.
There are some remote thermometers that are out in the middle of absolute nowhere in Antarctica, but these are not recording a warming.
And most of the warming that we've seen in Antarctica has happened on the periphery and on the peninsula.
But the center of Antarctica is not warming at all.
And they're not powering those stations in Antarctica.
They don't have huge wind turbines surrounding them because, well, they'd freeze up and get ice, you know, cover with ice.
My suspicion is they have a few places that actually have solar panels running small appliances or small temperature, you know, the isolated temperature stations are probably run with some solar.
But most of them around there, they don't have power plants either.
So they run on diesel.
diesel generators constantly operating right that produces no heat whatsoever i've never stood next to a diesel generator and felt any heat exactly exactly if it wasn't for fossil fuels we wouldn't have research stations in an article and we wouldn't know what the temperature is down there all right so sterling this is your bailiwick here wind farm impacts on whale habitat go
Well, it's almost as bad as the EV story.
So a few weeks ago, I was interviewed by the AP, by a reporter of the AP, and their story came out.
And I was quoted in it.
The quote was accurate.
But the story itself was ill-researched.
What they said is, here it says wind farm impact on whale habitat is still a mystery, scientists say.
The more recent story says no proof.
that wind farms are harming whales and they and who they ask well they ask the people who uh work for the government who are approving these wind farms willy-nilly and the problem is they're granting all these wind farms waivers to uh take whales well why do they have to apply for a waiver to take whales if they don't affect whales why are whales washing up now when they never washed up in the numbers that they're washing up now now
It is true that the two necropsies they did on the North Atlantic rag whale did not show that their eardrums had ruptured, and that's what killed them.
But you don't have to kill whales directly with the sound to say, whales communicate by sound, they hunt by sound, they navigate by sound, and suddenly you're introducing this huge sound there where
year round, not seasonally, not when they're not around because they're not waiting for the whales to migrate through.
And there's some whales that are permanent.
They are this ear shattering.
And so what's happening is the whales prey is leaving the area and the whales are leaving the area.
And where are they going there?
Well, they're going into shipping lanes where they get hit by ships.
Ships collisions are the number one cause of death.
Well, why have ship collisions increased?
Well, why did they suddenly get into the shipping lanes as much as they have?
You know, look, can we prove causation?
No, but it's not my job to prove this.
Who it is, is the government's job to say, until we know enough, we can't allow these things to go forward.
Why?
The North Atlantic right whale has been a listed species on the endangered species list since the 1970s.
Right, but save the whales is not as important as save the wind turbines, apparently.
It seems to be something of a trend with the green at any cost type of people is that you can show them physical evidence or you can kind of drag them along down the logic trail and say, listen, I don't need to have a PhD in earth science to understand what's going on here.
It's like with the doomsday drought stones in Europe.
they're like oh these drought stones are revealed that means that this is unprecedented drought no it means that that drought happened before because it's revealed the stones that's a really obvious like immediate duh moment but they just do not it does not compute at all and i think it's it's a willing non-compution nobody how dare you
Look, they are being willfully ignorant about the damage and dangers to the North Atlantic right whale.
And they are waiving environmental laws and regulations that they wouldn't waive for any other industry to get these things built in a rapid fashion.
And even then.
So many of them are being canceled because not because it's killing whales, which should be the full stop.
If you really believe the Endangered Species Act should be enforced until they can prove, until they can show that they're not harming whales, until they stop applying for whale take permits.
It's the economics that's killing it because, you know, Bidenomics has worked so well, even in the offshore wind industry, their costs are just ballooning.
And so they keep canceling projects and saying, oh, we're going to rebid.
But of course, they're going to rebuild at 50% higher cost.
So that's just going to stick it more to the consumers.
And of course, Al Gore and his friends can afford that increase, but it's the average folks that can't.
Right.
So it's just unfortunate, the whole thing.
Now the other topic this year that's been a big, big thing is net zero.
Of course, there's this idea that we're going to be able to achieve net zero in 20 years or 30 years or 40 years or whatever.
And it's a pipe dream.
Even Exxon says it's not going to happen.
Well, that's highly unlikely, which is essentially the same.
But you know,
As Linnea pointed out, the logic trail doesn't compute with a lot of these folks.
What do you think about this net zero goal, Linnea?
Well, it's the same as everything else.
It's pretty unbelievable that we have engineers and professionals who are pushing this as if it can actually happen.
It's very much pie in the sky, in part because...
They have proposed no sort of plan as to how the energy grid is going to go net zero, other than just adding more and more wind and solar to it with absolutely no currently available backup.
The battery technology for long-term industrial scale storage that will react and is adaptive to consumer demand does not exist.
Just it does not exist.
And even if it did exist, it would probably be way more expensive than the types of batteries that they use now.
There was an analysis done by someone at the Manhattan Contrarian where they talked about how you can substitute in just as a rough estimate, a Tesla battery, one of the more expensive, you know, higher capacity ones, which is about $100 per kilowatt hour.
And a study came out that said that in order to change just the Northeast up to a net zero or all renewables grid, they would need about 25% of the annual storage or of the annual energy use required.
in battery storage.
I probably just butchered how I explained that, but oh well.
I'm thinking about two different things at once.
And what it ends up coming out to is it would cost something like $100 trillion just to do storage for a segment of the country, or maybe it was extrapolated to the whole country.
But the United States' entire gross national product is only like
I want to say, what is it?
The 25 trillion, 24, 25 trillion, 24, 25 trillion.
So that's literally four times the worth of the entire country's economy is what it would cost.
That's never going to happen to do to do one small part of one country, not not net zero for everybody.
But I want to say I think you're unfair to the engineers and professionals because it's not clear to me that the engineers are the ones pushing this.
It's academics.
It's woolly-headed academics.
To me, it is clear.
On engineering blogs, what they are continuously talking about is that we are going to do this anyway.
We are going to do the transition anyway.
And what needs to happen is that people need to get used to not having electricity anymore.
Ah, well, that's what the engineers are saying.
There's the thing.
I see these academics who put out these like, oh, we can do all this in wedges.
Oh, 18 wedges.
And none of them are engineers.
They're all climate folks.
Oh, we know how the technology works.
No, you don't.
And so that at least the engineers are now admitting, no, it's not as if we're going to have as much energy as we had before.
And it's not as if it's going to be as steady as we had before.
We're just going to have to live with less.
If engineers are saying that, at least they're being honest about what it will take.
But that should get publicized more.
That's what should get publicized more.
The engineers, when they look at it, say, you're going to be worse off.
Your children and grandchildren will be worse off.
Why?
Because they will have to live with less.
Less power, less reliable power, because that's what it takes to get net zero.
Right.
But they're still on board with it.
They're still saying this is something that we want to happen.
They're just saying that, you know, what we want is for people to use less energy because we want to have this all renewable grid, regardless of the cost, regardless of what it does to people's standard of living.
They don't care.
But I don't care what they care about.
I care about whether they tell the truth about what it implies.
Then we can make our decisions about what we care about.
Well, what we care about apparently doesn't matter to these folks, right?
That's true enough.
Not at all.
Right.
All right.
So one of the big things that's going around in the news right now, hottest year ever.
It's the hottest year in 125,000 years.
Oh, no.
Well, I did have an op-ed yesterday on climate realism where CNN says the hottest year on record caused more extreme weather.
And I tell you, it's like shooting fish in a barrel with these journalists.
They just simply don't pay any attention to any facts whatsoever.
I urge you to go to Climate Realism and read this article, because every point we look at where they're talking about severe weather, no matter what it is, whether it's wildfires or anything else, doesn't hold up when you look at the data.
This story cited nothing but other news stories.
No data, no peer-reviewed publications, nothing.
And so it's just nothing but hype.
And it's this kind of reporting that scares kids and makes people think that they have no future.
But here's the thing.
When you look at the data, it doesn't show up in the US data as the hottest year ever.
Look at this graph that shows the last 30 years of data going all the way back to about 1998 or so.
This is a combination of the US CRN and the existing climate division data from NOAA.
Look at the very far right.
Where's the hottest year ever?
We had hotter years in the past, according to this data.
So in terms of the hottest year ever, it certainly didn't happen in the United States.
And the data shows it.
But that doesn't stop the media from telling you it's the hottest year ever and things are terrible.
And when you look at it globally with other sources, other than something like NASA GIST, which is the worst, alarmist thing on the planet, you see that we've only had just a little bit above normal.
0.58 degrees centigrade.
Where's the crisis?
Where's the hottest year ever?
This is also data from NOAA, but this data never sees the light of day in the media ever.
They won't report this because it doesn't support the narrative that things are getting worse and we must act now because they're all being driven by these NGOs and the money that they're throwing at them, especially the Associated Press.
So
You know, the hottest year in 125,000 years doesn't hold up either when you look at data.
And this is all peer-reviewed science right here.
These graphs show that the Holocene climate optimum from about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green was warmer than the modern warm period we live in today.
That never gets reported in the media.
They would rather say it's the hottest in 125,000 years and just believe it.
That's what they want you to do.
Don't check facts.
Just believe it.
That's their whole mission in the world these days.
Anthony, what you said brings to mind two things.
I mean, probably a lot of things, but two things primarily to me.
First off, let's say they're right.
It's the hottest in 125,000 years.
I mean, let's say they're right.
Well, that means 125,000 years ago, when there wasn't a single power plant or a single internal combustion engine, was as hot or hotter than today.
What caused the warming then?
And why can't that be a factor in the warming today during the now interglacial, like there was an interglacial then, right?
So where's the proof that it's human caused as opposed to natural cycles, which happens in interglacials?
Secondly, the...
The fact that, let's say, once again, granting them it's the hottest year in 125,000 years, I was told these hottest years are supposed to bring all sorts of climate catastrophes in their train.
And yet we don't see more extreme weather.
We didn't see a worse hurricane season than we've ever seen before.
We didn't see worse droughts.
Wildfires are down this year, the hottest year ever.
It's one thing after the other.
Warming is supposed to cause bad things.
If they're right, it's warmed.
Bad things aren't happening.
Right.
So we have a news story here that says someone finally reported this.
So this was national news, U.S.
news.
2023 wildfire season is the quietest in decades.
Yeah.
And they put that up there and said, hey, look, it's not so bad.
So what happens here?
We keep being told that global warming, climate change, whatever, is driving wildfires.
And yet in the hottest year ever, we had the least amount of wildfires since 1998.
I've got a graph here that shows the data from the International or rather the Interagency Fire Center, the IFC, NIFC.
Look, 1998, look at the level there in yellow.
And then look at 2023.
We've had the lowest fire season in the United States since 1998, 25 years.
Where's the crisis?
Where's the crisis?
And it just goes to show that the media will tell you anything if it supports the narrative.
They're not interested in facts.
They're not interested in data.
They're not interested in trends.
They're only talking about the here and now and how it feels.
All right, that's enough for all of our topics.
Now let's go to some of our questions and hopefully some answers.
We've had a number of people pose some questions, so let's see the first one.
Tim Lakely, oh, well, is it possible for Americans to vote their way out of this climate policy madness, or is that option completely gone because it's global movement with too much momentum?
That's what Kerry says.
Well, I think it's probably...
It's got momentum for sure.
But whether or not that momentum can be sustained, Sterling points out, I think it was earlier in the broadcast, that it's a lot like some of these causes that were popular in the 70s and then disappeared, aren't there anymore.
It may be the same with this, let's hope.
I, you know, I'd say I'm unconvinced that it has that much momentum based on real world on the ground data.
What we know is coal use went up last year.
Oil and gas use went up last year.
That doesn't sound like a lot of momentum to get to net zero.
I hear a lot of governments talking.
I see people go to COP 28 conferences and say, we're doing the, you know, we're saving the world.
But the data indicates that we're going merrily along our way using fossil fuels and producing CO2.
So I'm not clear that there's that much momentum that we need to vote ourselves out of.
Now, can we vote ourselves out?
Well, of course we can.
Look, we voted Trump in in 2016.
He took us out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
I don't know who the next president is going to be, but if they take Trump's line and once again take us out of the Paris Climate Agreement, at least if we're out, the momentum ends here.
And if we're out, how many other groups are going to say, oh, well, we're still going to cut our throats, even though the U.S.
has decided not to cut his throat.
We know China's not doing it already.
We know India's not doing it already.
Thank you, Winchester.
You have a dog named Winchester?
I do.
Do you also have a dog named Remington?
No, but I used to have a dog named Magnum.
Exactly.
So we can vote ourselves out of it if we get the right people in office.
Now, of course, that's got to get through a Congress.
Withdrawing from from Paris doesn't have to get through Congress because it was never submitted to Congress as a treaty.
But I keep hearing about this momentum.
I keep seeing people talk about it and I keep looking at the data saying, well, gosh, cult use was up.
Yeah, Europe's cutting its throat, but India's not and China's not.
And Australia is producing more coal than ever.
And I say, it's not clear to me that there's that much momentum.
All right.
So let's go on to our next question if we have one.
Walter Hogle asks, Anthony and team, what are your thoughts on possible Hanga Tonga influence on record warmth in 2023?
Well, I'll take that question.
We did in fact get a lot of water vapor injected into the troposphere and end up into the stratosphere as well.
And that event, as far as modern measurements go, was unprecedented.
We've never seen it before.
And then a couple of months later, we started seeing a spike in temperature.
And the spike, like if you look at the satellite record, UAH, was also unprecedented.
We didn't have a spike like that going all the way back to 1979, although that's not a very long record in terms of climate.
But there was that spike in that record and also a spike in the surface temperature record.
So what caused it?
I think there's a correlation there.
I believe that because water vapor is, in fact, the most...
potent greenhouse gas that we have regularly in our atmosphere, that that extra water vapor did in fact have an effect.
Interestingly enough, we have some anecdotal information like from some of my friends like Charles Rotter who lives in Florida.
He's saying that the humidity down there was
just thicker than he'd ever felt it, even when we had clear skies in Florida.
And so it seems to be that we've had more water vapor in the atmosphere and it spiked up.
And now, interestingly, it's starting to come down.
That spike is starting to drop.
And so I suspect that we will see these temperatures come back to levels that they were before 2023, within about six months to eight months ahead of now.
And then what are they gonna use for an excuse, right?
There it is.
Honga Tonga.
Boom.
Honga Tonga.
And like we said earlier, El Nino, increased urban heat island.
All of these things have been contributing to the measured temperature.
And if you ignore those and focus solely on CO2, you miss the point because you can't explain current temperatures just with CO2.
All right, next question.
JJ asks, why do most people believe the claim is hottest?
Believe the claim of hottest year in history year after year.
It has been extremely cold in China and now Nordic.
I think maybe Nordic is what he was trying to say.
And next week we'll be in the North America.
Yeah, we're going to get a tremendous cold wave come throughout the United States and Canada.
And of course, you know what's going to happen?
As soon as that cold wave hits, they will blame it on climate change.
That's right.
The polar vortex is swooping down because climate change caused by man has altered the jet stream and so forth and so on.
You're going to see those stories happen because everything is caused by climate change, right?
Right.
It's utterly unfalsifiable.
They can generate a model with an attribution model for any scenario that they want, and the media will pick it up and report on it as if it is proven observations-based science, which it's not.
Well, I mean, look, the New York Times just got egg on its face this week, as far as I'm concerned.
You know, unless something radically changes, they're about to get hit with a whopper of a winter storm in the Northeast.
And the New York Times just ran its second story, the end of snow story, right?
They did it, I think in 2008, they ran the original story, but it may have been 2012.
2001.
Yeah.
Children won't know what snow is.
You see, it's weather whiplash.
There you go.
I mean, well, that's why that is that this is a paradigm example of why the climate change narrative is not science.
it's a religion.
And why?
Because it doesn't matter what the weather event is, whether it's more warming or less warming, more hurricanes or fewer hurricanes, more snow or less snow.
The answer is always climate change.
But a single thing can't cause two diametrically opposed types of weather at the same place at the same time.
It's impossible.
You know, God may have stopped the world from turning.
He may have opened the oceans, but climate change can't open the oceans and close them at the same time.
Impossible.
That's physics.
And so that's why they started talking climate change rather than global warming, right?
Well, everything's climate change.
Everything.
In the future, journalists just won't know what facts are.
That's what's coming.
I'm not convinced that future is that far off.
All right, next question.
We have another question.
There it is.
What prediction did the climatist alarmist ever get right?
Well, it's warmer.
Not by as much as they said, but it is warmer.
Of all the different myriad predictions that they've made, the one they've come closest to getting right, besides just it's warmer, is in the Arctic.
So the sea ice.
They predicted the sea ice would decline radically.
And then in about 2012...
it did drop off radically to levels that they were predicting wouldn't happen until 2050.
And then they pointed to that as proof.
The problem is they've gone back up since then.
They said it would be a permanent state of affairs.
But that was the thing, as far as I can tell, the closest they've come to being right about anything.
Right, and sea level rise, I mean, but it's not anywhere near as extreme as they say that it is, but sea levels will rise, just inevitably.
As you come out of a glacial period, it's going to happen.
There's no way around it.
You have to do your city planning and stuff based on that.
It's going to happen.
Until the next last age comes.
Yeah, every civilization in history has had to deal with if they were perched on a cliff edge or a beach or something.
It's just something that you have to be aware of.
Joe Hunter asks, what is the carbon footprint of an erupting volcano?
Oh, my.
I don't know that I can quantify that.
Let me just paraphrase President Trump.
It's huge.
That's all I can say.
Let's go on to the next one.
Let's see the next question here.
Dan Goldberg, Anthony G, why do you bother confusing the wacko green leftist with the facts?
Some days I ask myself that question.
You know, I just, there are days when,
I try to argue logically, rationally, sensibly, and calmly.
And it all gets thrown back in my face.
It gets thrown back in my face as, well, you're not a degreed climatologist, so therefore you're an idiot.
Or you're in the pay of big oil.
You're being paid to have an opinion.
All these things that come back at me, they don't really have any retorts to any of this.
All they have is raw emotions and denigration to spew back.
And that makes me work harder because I'm not going to put up with that crap.
Simply that.
Hippie.
Yes, we've all been waiting for a question from a hippie.
Explain how the ocean water temperature from winter to summer, which is about 10 degrees difference, I'm guessing, causes more condensation into the air.
It can't be from steam and heat.
No, it's not from steam and heat, but there's a couple of things going on with the ocean.
There's more sunlight.
Of course, sunlight creates evaporation because it warms the very top layer of the ocean.
And so warmer water evaporates quicker.
But there's also albedo changes, which also is a positive feedback cycle.
For example, more sunlight causes more algae.
Algae is darker, a lower albedo.
And so with a lower albedo, more heating happens from sunlight.
And so it's a vicious cycle that goes on until sunlight starts depleting.
So it's a combination of things that causes more water vapor to happen when we have summer.
Next question.
And pressure plays into that too, air pressure.
Well, do we have time for another question?
We're already 10 minutes over here.
Five gorawatts.
It's good to keep going.
All right, I'm going to use that metric someday.
Ezoro asks, but don't you understand the cold weather is all due to climate change according to climate alarmists?
Well, yeah, we talk about that all the time.
I mean, literally anything that's abnormal, anything that's even slightly abnormal, immediately they rush to blame it on climate change because what else could it be?
That's another thing that kind of drives me nuts when, you know, non-scientist journalists are, frankly, a lot of the scientists that are feeding this information to them know that the journalist is not going to understand what they're saying and be a little bit critical about it.
But when people say, like, it was hotter than average today, it was colder than average today, what do you think an average is made up of?
It's never the average.
The average temperature is not the temperature that it's going to be.
That drives me nuts when they over exaggerate the amount of influence that anomalies have versus understanding that it takes a trend of them to show that there is any kind of a change happening.
That drives me nuts.
Anthony, you should explain albedo.
All right.
Let's see.
I need a prop.
Yes.
Okay.
I have two props here.
We have a piece of white paper and a piece of black paper.
All right.
Thank goodness I have props handy.
I'm the only guy with albedo props on the planet, right?
So black paper, when sunlight hits it, absorbs more solar radiation.
It warms up quicker.
Asphalt, for example, is black, and it warms up quicker.
And so this has a low albedo.
This white piece of paper, like snow or clouds, has a high albedo.
It reflects most of the light that hits it.
It pushes the light back, it reflects.
And so when we have more clouds and the albedo of the Earth is higher, more sunlight is reflected into space and it doesn't reach the ground.
And so that's the whole thing behind albedo.
I hope I explained that well enough.
Yeah, and it's the same thing with snow on the ground and all that.
Sterling and I covered a story a couple of years ago, I think, maybe last year, from there was an organization that was complaining, I think, that their parks or that the forest is warmer than prairie.
So we need more prairie.
And it turns out that the way that they figured this out was they measured like during the winter, they took IR reflectance readings or something.
And in the winter, the prairie has all this snow on it, or the prairie is just lighter in color in general.
And so it's not as warm at ground level out in the open like that.
In areas that have a little bit of a more absorption, like in a pine forest or something in the winter, you're going to have a little bit higher temperatures.
And when the ground is bare because the trees are keeping the snow from hitting the ground, you'll also have a little bit of a warmer temperature.
And they were blaming that on global warming, of course.
So that was kind of fun.
And on that note, I think it's time to go.
We've talked about a lot of different topics, and I want to remind everyone to visit our different websites, climaterealism.com, climateataglance.com, and energyataglance.com.
And of course, my website, what's up with that?
Thanks for joining us here on this first broadcast of the year.
We'll have another one next week.
I want to have...
Have a good time then, too.
We had a great time today.
Thanks, guys, for joining us.
And just another reminder, stay strong in that fight against climate.
You all have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend.
Bye-bye.
He's a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.